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2010

Waiting

I’ve spent a good part of the past six years waiting. Waiting to move out of San Francisco, waiting to fond a new job once we moved, waiting for the day that Mark and I could start living together full time, waiting to graduate…

It’s stressful living your life in anticipation of how great everything will be once the next major life change happens, because (a) it keeps you from looking for things to enjoy about the way things currently are, and (b) things often aren’t perfect once you cross that next hurdle, either. And that’s sort of where I am right now. Things are looking pretty good for me: Mark has given notice in San Francisco, I’ve graduated, and career prospects are looking really good. Even so, I’m still feeling incredibly stressed because I still have so many major changes facing me in the next few months.

To start, I’m in the middle of  interviewing and (for lack of a better term) career development right now. I was never completely explicit about it here, but last fall, a couple of months before graduating, I landed what was essentially my dream job, through a combination of luck, good timing, and, frankly,  being pretty good at what I do. The problem is that this was a fixed-term job, ending in June 2010. There’s a very good chance I can keep it (actually, an even better version of it) long term, but I have to reapply and go through the whole academic hiring process, which is much more than I had to do last fall. I’ve made the first cut, and I think I have a better than average shot, but it’s not a sure thing.

I’m simultaneously in the application process for another, similar job at a different university in another city. I’ve made the second cut there and am one of probably two or three finalists. I’ll be interviewing in person for that one soon. Yes, this sounds like an enviable position in the current economic climate. And it is. I frankly can’t believe my good fortune. But there are a lot of decisions to be made, based on whether I get one or both offers (and in what sequence). And there are even more decisions to be made if I don’t get one of the two. So everything is on hold now. Again.

And then there’s the matter of where to live. It’s very likely we’ll soon be selling this Winston-Salem house that I very much love. There are too many rational arguments against keeping it: it’s too big, it’s a little too expensive, and it’s thirty miles from my current job (and much farther from my prospective alternate). It’s not really justifiable. That said, I’m having a really hard time letting go of it emotionally. This house is the first place that’s seemed like a long-term home to me since I left my parents’ house more than twenty years ago. I’ve spent four years here looking forward to the time Mark and I could live here together full-time. And now, just as we are going to be living together full-time again, I realize that we probably aren’t going to be doing it here. Even though I’m incredibly excited at the prospect of our being anywhere as long as we can do it together, I’ve invested a lot of time and emotional energy in the little fantasy surrounding this house, and it makes me kind of sad to let it go.

And there may be more geographical issues on the horizon. I’m not entirely certain our future involves North Carolina at all. In fact, if I don’t land one of these two jobs, I’m almost certain that it doesn’t. And I’m still not completely certain how I feel about that. I’m not averse to leaving the area, and there are many days when the prospect even excites me. I don’t hate it here, but I realize that don’t especially love it, either. My aging parents are a big factor, although I can’t really let their lives dictate how I’ll live mine (and I think they would understand that). I can’t let them create one more “on hold” factor.

Allow me a little self-absorption here. In the past six years, it’s been a pretty steady diet of almost all the major life stressors: geographic change, career change/unemployment, relationship changes, and major health issues (my own and my family’s). And Mark has experienced them simultaneously. He faced a similar dilemma a year or two back–realizing that he was wasting his life by waiting for some magic moment where life might “begin” again–and I think he did a better job of dealing with it than I’m doing now. In fact, his situation was even more bleak, because it was playing out in a little hovel of a room in San Francisco rather than a nice big house in Winston-Salem.

I know it was much, much worse for him, and I can’t begin to express how much I love him and appreciate everything he’s gone through in these past few years.

I also know that people all over the world would kill to have my current set of “problems”.

Unfortunately, knowing all this has, I think, caused me minimize the way I’ve been feeling and to convince myself that I somehow didn’t deserve to feel apprehensive or stressed. But I do feel apprehensive and I do feel stressed, so much so that I find it really hard lately to think about much of anything else. It’s becoming an obsession that’s keeping me from enjoying my life. And the fact that other people have it much worse than I do doesn’t really make it any better, thanks. When you have a toothache, that fact that someone else is having a heart attack doesn’t mean that your tooth still doesn’t hurt like hell. Granted, it may give you a little more perspective, but the tooth still keeps right on hurting.

I’ve been restless all my life, and have always been one to keep moving and enjoy the passing scenery through the car window. I’m not sure why that’s becoming so much harder for me lately. Myabe there has just been too damned much “scenery” the past few years. I don’t think it’s so much that I want to stop moving forward, but that I want to feel like I can stop and enjoy where I am once in a while without constantly agonizing over the next leg of the trip.

Traveling

It’s a traveling sort of week.

On Saturday, I flew up to Pittsburgh to meet Mark. I usually drive, but the weather was iffy, and I found a really cheap flight. All went well until the second half of my trip home on Tuesday. That was the part where my plane left LaGuardia but came back a half hour later due to mechanical issues. I got home very late after spending way too long in Queens. Which sucked because I needed those few hours to get ready for this morning’s trip.

Plus it snowed. In Pittsburgh. And in North Carolina. I’m tired of snow.

But now I’m in Pinehurst for the SNCA meeting. Which is nice, except for the fact that (a) it’s in Pinehurst and (b) I’m half asleep from last night’s sleep deficit. At least there’s a Smithfield’s here, though. And the trip’s a work freebie.

But I kind of miss home. I only got to spend about nine hours there between trips, and I was asleep for a lot (but not nearly enough) of those hours.

I don’t think I’ll go anywhere this weekend.

Sunday Afternoon in Winston-Salem

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Just thinking aloud. If you’d suggested to me five years ago that terms like “search committee” and “tenure track” would loom so large for me right now, I’d have laughed you out of the room. I’m sometimes a little freaked out at the way the past couple of years have played out for me.

Completely unrelated: If this had been introduced by Apple in the past decade or so, would it have been called “iPod” or “iPad”? Think about it; either one is somewhat appropriate. Whatever you call it, I want one.

Trees

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As much as I dislike sparkling new subdivisions built on cleared land denuded of trees or any other natural vegetation, this then and now set is a reminder that even many of the older, tree-lined neighborhoods we love so much today didn’t always look that way. So maybe there’s hope for those far-flung McMansion districts too, assuming their tight-assed HOAs ever allow anything to be planted. Or maybe not…

Twentysomething (a/k/a Delayed Queer Puberty Syndrome)

6 Comments

Inspired by a project at work, I’ve been re-reading some of my old journals for the past couple of nights. It’s the first time I’ve really dragged them out in ten or twelve years, and so far I’ve gone through 1980 and 1985. Strangely enough, I like 1980 a little better. Of course, I was a sixteen-year-old idiot in 1980, and I said and did incredibly stupid things (that was the single year of my “drug phase”), but at least it reads as relatively genuine in retrospect.

The 1985 stuff, though, is excruciating. It reads like the ramblings of a boy-crazed teenage girl, but with an alcohol kicker to make it ten times as annoying. What a miserable, self-absorbed little wanker of a barfly I must have seemed to anyone who got near me. It’s really quite painful stuff to read; I go for months and months without writing a single sentence about anything of lasting significance (not that this site is much better lately). And now, I can’t even dredge up the faintest memory of many of those boys and places and events that seemed so incredibly fucking important at the time–although I imagine I remember more of them than many of my peers do, maybe because of the journals.

That said, I don’t think my experience was all that unusual among homos. Since many of us don’t get to experience a proper puberty at the appropriate time, much of my generation, at least, had a tendency to make up for lost time as soon as we hit that whole bar-infested social scene: the “fashion” thing, the “can you find out if he likes me?” thing, etc. Maybe it’s a necessary stage for some of us. But it’s annoying as hell to watch (or to read about and remember).

I sometimes think that a lot of my later life, from my misanthropy to my still occasionally raging homophobia was in many ways a big reaction to this period in my life. Either way, I’m more glad than ever that I’m no longer twenty-one.

16 February 2004

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Six years ago today, at about this time of night (9:00 PST), Mark and I were in the back of a very long line outside San Francisco’s City Hall in order to spend the night outside in the rain. Why? So that we could be married the next morning, along with several thousand other couples who did so that weekend in San Francisco.

We suspected even then that our “guerrilla wedding” would be overturned (and it was) but it was important for us to participate anyway. First and foremost, it was a way of demonstrating our commitment to each other. We also wanted to express the fact that we were no longer willing to be denied ANY basic human and civil right, including the right to the same level of legal protection afforded without question to any opposite-sex pair who could produce twenty bucks for a marriage license.

This assertion may make some of you uncomfortable for religious or other reasons. Frankly, I don’t much care. Your temporary discomfort pales in comparison to the very real financial and social issues we face on a regular basis. In fact, I suggest that if you are unable to see me as a fellow human being and as your equal, you are not my “friend” by any definition of the term, and that it is hypocritical of you to pretend otherwise. This is not some minor political issue on which we can agree to disagree.

I love my husband more than anything or anyone in the world, and I will forever remember that cold, rainy night in San Francisco. I’d marry him again without a thought. And unfortunately, I will probably have to do it again. Maybe several more times. It’s OK, though. We have the rest of our lives…