Monday, February 23, 2009

Win Some, Lose Some?

I thought I was doing pretty well today: I met with most of my Czech Modernism students about their papers and the results were encouraging, and during lunch I made all the arrangements for going to AAH (the major British art history conference), where I'm giving a paper in April.
Then at the end of the day's gamelan rehearsal, I found out that our concerts will be earlier than usual this year. Precisely when I'll be in England giving my conference paper, in fact. I had been going on the assumption that the concerts would be at least a week later, as they normally are.
I am pretty unhappy about this. It is hard to say whether this or the beyond-bad job market is more annoying. Probably this, since despite the bad job market, I think it is likely I will have some sort of job next year. After all, if there are no teaching jobs, I can always go back to feeding photocopiers or being a factory worker or guarding a parking lot or doing some other thing out of my checkered past. Or even something I've never done before, like becoming a sewer inspector or performing artificial insemination on cattle. Yep, maybe I'm discounting the opportunities that lie before me. Settling into a comfy teaching position could be very bad for my fiction writing.

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5 Comments:

Blogger Julia said...

Sorry to hear about the concert, that is annoying! Where will you be going in England and might you fly to Prague for research reasons ;-)?

February 25, 2009 11:51 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

My out-of-work carpenter son is apply for a kind of job that will be unusually common next year, census taker.

February 28, 2009 9:27 PM  
Blogger Karla said...

Unfortunately I'll have to head back to Pittsburgh right away and teach, not dawdle in Prague or even London.

It is entirely possible that I will embark on a second stint of census taking, although last time the parking brake on my car gave way and allowed the vehicle to roll downhill into a lamppost while I was interviewing a large family.

March 02, 2009 7:59 PM  
Blogger Dr. Zaius said...

Don't feed the photocopiers! You'll just encourage them.

March 20, 2009 6:46 PM  
Blogger Karla said...

I do generally prefer to scan than photocopy.

March 20, 2009 8:56 PM  

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