Academia sucks
(And if you can’t handle the post title, you are kindly invited to Just Go Away now.)
Well, so. Last night David and I had what for us serves as a screaming fight. (It wasn’t, because we don’t, but voices were raised and hair was metaphorically torn out. You know. These things are never pleasant, even when they’re necessary.) It’s settled now, and my head is moving toward the groove it needs to be in… but nonetheless, I’d be a happier person if academia worked differently from how it does.
Because the way this is going to work is that I call off the nationwide job-hunt and concentrate on finding something local that puts dinner on the table while David finishes his dissertation. At which point he goes on the job market, which (being what it is) will require us to move, and me to (yet again) scrabble up something local, no matter how unwelcoming the library job market wherever we end up.
This is, of course, deeply unfair to me, that after years of clawing my way back from academia-fostered self-destruction, academia now gets to rule my life by proxy. I am damned good at what I do. Organizations exist that need what I do, plenty of them. My chances of being able to find a job doing what I do locally, however, basically suck, for politico-economic reasons entirely outside my control. But because academia’s job-lottery places me at his whim rather than him at mine, I’m just SOL.
What sent me over the edge last night was that whenever I asked the “what will you do afterwards?” question (and I have asked it, repeatedly), David never once suggested entering the rat-race. I took that (largely justifiably, I think) as leave to let my own career come first. I didn’t appreciate having my plans violently derailed by five short words uttered with zero evidence that he’d actually thought about what they meant.
But, you know, now he’s thought, and now I’ve accepted. That’s what I do, I guess: be flexible and adapt, because David’s terrible at it and academia is worse. It’s still deeply unfair. I still hate it. Just this week I saw two beautiful jobs I could have landed and loved and now don’t even get to try for. And finding something locally is ever so not going to be a cakewalk, if it’s even possible.
I have options, though, limited though they are, and I’m going to exercise them. Plans will be planned this weekend, and executed forthwith. I’ll make this work, because making things work is what I do. And because I really haven’t much choice.
Academia, however? Sucks.