Epistemographer

One of the many things preying on my mind these days is housing – which neighborhood in DC to live in, how much to pay in rent, and the big question on everyone’s minds these days, to rent or to buy?

Looks like I’m not the only one – several of my favorite post-academics have been blogging about real estate. Laura over at Apartment 11D just bought herself a fine home outside the city, while Erika at Apartment 401 (different blog, different building, different city) has been mulling the same question.

Right now, renting seems the way to go – we’re only planning to be in DC for 2-3 years, and the rental market is soft right now while the real estate market…well…isn’t. Not even close.

A few weeks ago, I found out that my cousin Josh had been diagnosed with a brain tumor. He had a seizure one day at dinner and was rushed to a hospital, where the ER docs found nothing visibly wrong. A followup visit with his primary care physician led to an MRI, however, which turned up a 2 cm mass on the left side of his brain.

A little backstory: Josh is a fixture at my parents’ annual Passover Seders, and he’s infamous for a particular seder several years back when he knocked back too much wine and picked up my parents’ camcorder – the video he shot (among with his running commentary) is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. Thus, it comes as no suprise that he’s decided to tackle this challenge with a sense of humor, naming the tumor “Earl” and starting up a Brain Blog to keep friends and family up to date on events. He’s a hell of a guy, and this is now one of the first blogs I check when I start up my computer in the morning…

So, I returned most of my checked-out books to the Cornell library last week.

For those of you who haven’t written a dissertation, I can’t really explain how big a deal this is: some of these books have sat on my shelves for upwards of three years, thanks to Cornell’s six-month checkout term for graduate students and online renewal system, and I’d really grown to think of them as mine in a certain sense. There was a definite sense of saying goodbye as I lugged 110 books in milk crates to the library, but as I emptied the last one I didn’t have the feeling of closure that I expected.

See, up until a few months ago I thought that I’d defend my dissertation, go to graduation, then spend a few days in a flurry of activity as I packed up my Ithaca life and headed for the horizon. Recently, however, it’s begun to dawn on me that my transition from graduate school to “what comes next” isn’t going to happen in anything remotely resembling a clean break. Instead, I’m looking forward to a several-month-long smear from one life into another, marked by a series of transitory steps and a whole lot of miscellaneous debris.

Initially, I’d hoped to get my defense out of the way by Cornell’s May commencement, so that the ceremony would mark the official end of my time there. Instead, my defense is set for July 26th, and while I’ll still put on the gown and walk at the May ceremony, it won’t quite be the same. Originally, the hope was that I’d have defended by the end of May so that the trip to Eduador and the Galapagos would give me a feeling of distance from my dissertation and graduate student life in general, but now I’m in a position where I’ll have to come back and spend another few weeks working on dissertation revisions.

There’s also the matter of where I’m living. When I drove down to DC last week I realized that I would only be in Ithaca three more times: once for commencement, once in June to discuss the final dissertation draft with Ron, and once for the actual defense at the end of July. I’ll spend most of the rest of the time at Jenny’s place in Brooklyn, until we move down to DC sometime in mid-July (provided we find a place by then, which is a whole other topic). Again, no real moment of closure, just a series of transitions.

As for what I’ll be doing, I’ve got a bunch of freelance work lined up from when I didn’t know if I’d have a job or need to start building a freelance career – now I won’t need the work as badly, but I’ve already committed to the projects (plus I know I’ll enjoy the programming and design work). It’s strange – I’ll probably have the final dissertation draft in by the time I move down to DC, but I’ll still be doing freelance stuff after the move. Even more, I’ll move to DC only to then have to return to Ithaca for my defense and last-minute fixes, then rushing right back to DC to start at George Mason on August 1.

I’m really not complaining, honest – I’m incredibly lucky to be in the situation in which I find myself, and I know it. I’ve got a job lined up, I’ve got freelance work to tide me over until then, the end of graduate school is within reach, I’ve got an amazing girlfriend who loves me enough to move to a different city and start a new life with me.

It all just feels strangely anticlimactic.

As I’ve written before, I’ve been rather deliberately avoiding writing about many of the biggest things occupying my mind over the past few months. Finally, however, I’m at a point where I can start thinking out loud again: the semester’s drawing to a close, my travel plans for the summer are set, and my dissertation is no longer crowding out all other urges to write from my being.

Also, I’ve accepted a job.

For the next few years, I’ll be a Research Assistant Professor at George Mason University‘s Center for History and New Media. The job sounds fantastic: I’ll get to do history and develop/evangelize new tools for historians to use. I’ll miss being in the classroom (there’s no teaching involved, though I might have the option of doing so should I want to), but this seems to be the best possible thing for my career right now…there’ll be plenty more time for teaching down the road, I suspect. In the meantime – DC, here I come!

Not much to report here – drove to Ithaca last night, managed class this morning (can’t say that I taught really, since peer review of my students’ research papers was on the agenda), and spent the afternoon just chatting with students and faculty around the department. Still no job news yet to report, and the dissertation is out of my hands for another week and a half yet.

The exciting bit, though, is that I currently have all sorts of weird things running through my bloodstream – today, I got vaccine shots for Hepatitis A, Yellow Fever and Tetanus/Diptheria, as well as the beginning of an 8-day oral course of Typhoid vaccine. All this so that I can safely spend a few weeks in Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands, where I also have to be careful about mosquitos (to avoid malaria and other nasties) as well as unpeeled fruit and drinking water (cholera, among others).

In general, I’m all for pushing one’s boundaries through travel, but there’s something deeply unsettling about the extent to which my body needs to be prepared for this trip. Thankfully, the only side effects of all these foreign substances coursing through my veins are a growing soreness in my arms and a sleepiness that seems to be setting in far earlier than my usual 3-4am bedtime…

So, I’m back in Brooklyn, where the sky is blue and the air is crisp – this was always my favorite time of the year weather-wise, though the specter of seasonal allergies cast a long shadow of my enjoyment of Spring until recently (thanks, Claritin/Sudafed/allergy shots!).

For the first time in at least a year and a half, I left Ithaca on Thursday taking no dissertation research whatsoever with me. A several-hundred page stack of paper is sitting in each of my advisor’s mailboxes, and though it’s far from perfect (or complete, really), I feel satisfied enough to take a few days off and actually relax. The thing I need most right now is distance from my writing so that I can engage with its flaws without knowing what I meant to say, so I’m doing a little freelance programming for the next week.

Even more, I’m going to read something. I grabbed Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude from the Cornell Library, though I haven’t started it yet. Also, volume 2 of Neal Stephensen’s Baroque Cycle, Confusion, just hit stores, but I don’t think I can justify taking on that sort of reading project just yet (I’ll save it for the summer).

I was fortunate to have a great-grandmother through my late 20’s. Eva was a kind, sweet woman who lived a long and full life, and she’ll be missed by many…

Outstanding post by Kevin over on Where There’s Smoke :

Your readers— past, present and future—are busy people with families, careers and lives. They have a zillion forms of entertainment to choose from other than your book. You wanna get to the top of their reading pile? Why not put a little godamn effort into getting out there and promoting yourself? Musicians go on tour. Actors do junkets for their shows, artists drink crappy wine and make small talk at galleries. It is hight of arrogance that writers think they somehow get a bye from all of this because it either makes them uncomfortable or because their art is practiced in solitude.

Read the whole thing – on one hand, it’s a great reaction to a Salon article that criticizes the state of modern publishing without offering any constructive ideas on how an author can improve his or her situation.

On a deeper level, however, many of Kevin’s suggestions point to a concept I was flogging a while back (and which I’m meaning, once I have time to write something not about the video industry between 1975 and 1990, to start flogging once again): the shift in media consumption from buying a product to paying an artist (see my posts on Buying vs. Tipping). Many of these suggestions, from a mailing list to public speaking, aren’t just about marketing a given book, but are fundamentally about marketing yourself as a writer. Kev gets this on a deep level, and his Virtual Book Tour is an example of such promotion in practice, leveraging new technology to introduce the writer to a broader audience of readers.

Quite literally, in fact. It’s not so much that I have no time to blog, it’s more that my brain simply can’t take the thought of spending more time typing words on a screen when I’ve just spent hours upon hours wrestling with my dissertation.

I’m eagerly looking forward about three weeks to when I can write smart things here again – in the meantime, please just watch the magic numbers on the right-hand sidebar roll steadily upwards…

So, I find it interesting that I’ve felt like I’ve had almost nothing to write about here for the past few weeks (give or take a sporadic post or two here and there).

When I used to keep a journal, I found that I could chart how generally content I was as an inverse relationship with how much I was writing. That doesn’t seem to be what’s at play here, however (though I am relatively content these days, with the exception of a gnawing panic about how I’ll be paying rent come June)…I actually have an urge to write here, and even have a sense of the kinds of things I’d like to write about, but I simply haven’t had the time.

Instead, a whole lot of other things are crowding out my free-thinking “blogging time”:

• 1) My dissertation, which I’m not blogging about because I already spend a big chunk of my day writing the damn thing to begin with. Plus, you can just check the sidebar to see how that’s going, anyways.

• 2) My class, which I’m not blogging about because my students might read what I write, and no real good can come of that. There’s all sorts of fun stuff going on on the course blog, but I won’t link to it from here (though Google seems to have already found the course website anyways).

• 3) Books I’m reviewing for Publishers’ Weekly, which I’m not blogging about because they’re paying me for my reviews, and I’ve never quite figured out how to negotiate the anonymity of those reviews.

• 4) Job search progress/angst, which I’m not blogging about because verious potential employers might be reading, and the market is bad enough without me whining about it in public (or showing my hand to anybody who might still be deciding on my application).

• 5) Thoughts about potential travel plans with Jenny once we both graduate, which I’m not blogging about simply because we haven’t made firm plans.

The five things above seem to take up virtually all of my time that I’m not spending sleeping, and since it doesn’t seem wise/worth it to write about any of them, my blog lies fallow.

On the bright side, I’m very much looking forward to reinventing this space once I finish the dissertation (argh – I’ve become one of those people who says “the” dissertation” rather than “my” dissertation!)…I found that hearing Jay Rosen talk about blogs inspired me to think of what I could do, that I haven’t been, and I look forward to having the time to explore again.