Freelancing sucks, but is ok sometimes

As previously mentioned, the job that J had just after moving to Snowy State dried up just in time for the holidays.  He's still technically on staff there, but they have no hours for him since the theater has no shows starting until February.  But this is why we moved back to Snowy State instead of jumping with both feet into some place totally new and distant--a couple of weeks pounding the arts/humanities pavement in Snowy City landed him an awesome short-term contract building exhibits at Large Regional Museum, with just the right timing to let him go back to First Theater if LRMuseum decides not to renew his contract.  I'm hoping they do renew, because staff gets free tickets and it's one of my favorite museums in Snowy State.

I don't think either J or I really realized how tenuous either of our employment situations would be when we started dating.  Our parents are in fairly stable fields--they all experienced the shadow of layoffs, but they all found jobs before leaving college and were able to buy houses within a few years of graduating.  Partly it's a factor of the fields we've entered (J and his sister, me and my brother are all in arts or non-profit fields vs the medical and science fields our parents and grandparents are in), but talking to everyone this Christmas, I think we all thought the model of "land a job senior year of college or last year of grad school, buy a house two years later" was the model that we were going to follow also.  

We've none of us (that is, me, J, and our siblings) had a hard time finding work so far, but it's not the kind of work that's familiar to our parents--we work contract to contract, seasonally, sometimes having to move around the country for work or partners' work.  And I don't think it's going to change, at least for us, for the foreseeable future.  From talking to our parents, their periods of tenuous employment were in their teens and college years, but ours are probably going to go into our thirties or at least late twenties, part of the unfortunate extension of adolescence in this country.

The move to Snowy State and the craziness of dealing with J being a freelancer has been stressful, but at least we're in a large regional center, with family support and lots of job opportunities.  I'm planning on going on the academic market next year, and while I'm not looking forward to it, at least it won't be our first time at the rodeo with the horrible application and interview and disappointment process.

Where have I been?

Out of the stockpot, into the fire?

It's been since July since I posted!  It got so easy to push off posting until next week, then the week after, then the week after.  Mostly this has been because of anxiety over two big issues that came up over the summer.

J has done lots and lots of applications, and even got a job offer, but the place that offered him the job stopped responding to phone calls or emails before he had a chance to start.  He's currently in limbo at another place where he got to the final round of interviews (as in, he was one of three candidates), but the hiring committee has pushed off notifying for two weeks running now.  Both of these would have meant major interstate moves for us, as would all the other applications he's put out without hearing back about.  Right now we're contemplating a move back to Snowy State, where our parents live and J has a network for finding freelance work because we went to school there.

The other big issue has been a threatening-to-become-major medical issue for me, some joint pain which has started to impair my mobility and ability to do things like type, knit, and sew for long periods.  I thankfully have insurance coverage for it, despite J's work situation, because I'm still insured through my family due to my student status, so that at least has not contributed to the anxiety.  The good of it has been that my doctor hasn't found indications of rheumatoid arthritis or anything else which would cause long term damage, but not having a diagnosis means also not having a treatment plan.

So while nothing actively bad has happened to us, the lack of forward motion, the looming certainty of our January get-out-of-town deadline, the uncertainty of where we would go, and the possibility of losing my ability to do both my job and my favorite hobbies for an undiagnosable medical reason has made for a lot of anxiety and fear here at chez Construct.  That the joint pain may be itself a symptom of anxiety over the whole situation hasn't helped.

I'll be trying to get back into the swing of blogging again.  AB's posts over at Secret Confessions of a Trailing Spouse have always been encouraging, so I know this too shall pass.

Gardening and Rain

We live on the second story of a house which has been split into two apartments, and we share the backyard with the neighbors, and this is the view from our kitchen window of the yard.  We also share the garden and the picnic table, which you see here being supervised by the neighbor's dog.  Why is the garden diamond shaped?  I don't know.  Why does the neighbor's dog sit on the picnic table all the time?  I don't know.

Everything is looking pretty tough right now because we had just enough sun and warmth for the weeds to shoot up, but then the temp dropped again and it started raining so it's been too yucky to go out and put anything besides peas, lettuce and kale in.

My last few years of gardening have been in containers on the porches of apartments, and they have been dismal years.  Part of that was heavy rain and not enough sun at the apartment, but I'm kind of worried I have a black thumb.  We've also joined a CSA, so we'll be sure to have enough veggies.  Joining the CSA was also sort of a protest against the powers that be trying to push me out of Overcast with their draconian funding rules.  If things don't go according to plan and we have to move before Fall semester starts, the CSA share will go on after we have to move, but really, planting the garden is just as risky.  This is the first summer in three years that both J and I will be in Overcast all summer--we've both had exciting and career-building things which have taken one of us out of Overcast for at least a few weeks at a time the past few summers, but not this year, so I'm bound and determined to plant the garden.

I'm of a mixed mind about canning this year, though.  Whether it's August or January, we're moving sometime soon, and a bunch of glass jars won't help that.  (Although I guess we really wouldn't be canning if we moved in August).  I suppose worst case scenario is that all of our friends end up with a bunch of free home canning, or we'd try to only can a little and make room for some of it, but it seems like a lot of hassle.  I'm sort of inclined to do small batches regardless, since J and I have had good luck with small batch pickles, but I'm not sure right now.  Really, this funding uncertainty isn't so bad except when you try to plan more than two months ahead.

A Self-Stitched Easter

Just a quick note about the weekend.  The RTW muslin is in a place I'm happy with, the fashion fabric is partially cut out, and I had a productive research weekend.  You all have seen the outfit I'm wearing above; the shirt J is wearing is a shirt I finished literally Easter morning.  The construction turned out well, and J loves it, but I HATE the fabric.  It's some kind of poly blend (mystery thrift store fabric) that's got a weird silky hand, but J loves it.  And although I didn't do the MPB Negroni shirt sewalong, I definitely learned the value varying stitch lengths for different areas--I don't love this shirt because of the fabric, but I feel good about my work on it.

I didn't get the editing/writing done that I wanted to, because I ended up chasing about 140 years of footnotes, but I found the source of an annoying scholarly myth that's been bugging me for several years.  It's the sort of thing that doesn't even get cited anymore because everyone accepts it as true--everyone in the 19th century cited primary documents, so we'll cite the 19th century writers, and not examine their evidence.  

However, when you chase down the 19th century citations, all these writers are basing their arguments about both the 17th and 18th centuries on a single document written in 1689.  It's used as the sole source for the price of retail goods sold to Native people in French Canada and New York, and A. it was written in Paris by someone who had never been to North America, and B. the prices it quotes are way off base from the account books I've found for both French Canada and New York for the same period.  

It boggles my mind that no one has examined these numbers, because entire books rely on the assumption that this document is accurate.  I'm rolling around in my head how to write about the problem of relying on this document and why it's wrong without it being horribly boring, but I'm excited about the find.  And with the magic of the interwebs, I can find pretty much everyone who has either cited this document or someone who relies on other scholars who do.  

Have you had an exciting breakthrough lately, in work, sewing or something else?  I didn't accomplish my stated goal for the weekend, but I did accomplish something, and that made the weekend feel pretty productive.

On empathy, politics and feminism

Anyone who has been reading for any length of time knows that I've been struggling this semester with teaching a 20th century political history course far outside my background or training.  I just got done teaching The Conservative Ascendancy by Donald Critchlow and Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory by Randall Balmer.  Critchlow writes about the social/political changes propelling the far right wing of the GOP into power since the defeat of Goldwater in 1964, and Balmer focuses on the social and emotional pull of evangelical Christianity in America.  What it's gotten me thinking about is the place of empathy in both politics and feminism.  Both Historiann and Echidne are relevant background readings for today's class.

The current narrative in politics seems to me to be about excising empathy from politics.  Barney Frank has called government "the name we give to those things we choose to do together."  The National Review, a right-wing publication, has called this "meaningless and stupid."  That, to me, sums up the problem we (in the US, and possibly Canada and the UK, with their right-leaning governments) are currently facing in the Right's rush to defund what social insurance the Progressive era won for the poor and middle class.  Government, even that which is not based on a Christian framework, should be about serving the least among us.

When your framework is selfishness (or some mythical context-free individual liberty), as Flint Knits recently posted about, government action and even individual charitable action becomes unnecessary and even an impediment to those at the bottom of the economy.  The free market and voluntary regulation which this philosophy seeks to "reinstate" not only never existed, as any thinking historian of either Adam Smith or the late 19th century will tell you, but it also does not work. It assumes the privilege of the upper middle class applies to everyone, even as the middle and lower middle class erodes into simply a gap between the working and upper middle class, because the upper middle class perceive themselves to be the norm.  As the NYTimes and Dean Dad have pointed out, markers of a well rounded, upper middle class liberal arts education like unpaid internships exacerbate the income gap by shutting out middle and lower middle class college student from the credentials race.

So what does that mean about government?

On Funding, Waiting and Nesting

Is it wet yet?  When will it be wet?  Will I like it when it's wet?

A non-update (and a cat picture, because when in doubt, cats illustrate many things).  I have had meetings, meetings, meetings the past week or so about my "funding situation," which is to say, various people want to know whether someone else has given me funding for next year so that I can be checked off as a problem to be taken care of.  For funding which various people are in charge of, though, the answer is: we'll know next month.  Wait and see.  We don't know yet.  

The problem seems to me to be a lack of planning.  I am not in the situation of needing a job or not having an income next year--I have two years of guaranteed funding left, so for at least two years I won't be kicked out into the cold.  But exactly what kind of funding I have, and whether it depends on my teaching in Overcast or not (and therefore, how much travel I will be able to do for research) is partially dependent on how many graduate students are admitted to the program for next year, and whether applications which my advisor has put in for me are accepted.

On the Possibility of Being a Trailing Spouse

What you mean I got to move, two-legs?

All those fellowship rejection letters are rolling in (with a few yes-letters), and they've thrown my comfortable grad school routine of enroll-TA-complain out of order.  I didn't get the big fellowships I applied for, but I have gotten enough small ones to patch together a year of funding not dependant on being a TA.  Which would mean a year of research and writing as my full-time job (which is a thought terrifying by itself).

But Snooty U also requires that if you don't TA, you have to be at least 100 miles away from Overcast during your non-TAing semesters, and now requires a lease or some other proof of this (they didn't used to be so strict about it).  It's like an academic restraining order.  (Not to diminish the importance of real restraining orders).  But what it means is that the one place I cannot be is Overcast.

And since J has had a year of not working in his chosen field (theater) since there is no theater in Overcast, we've decided to look at moving some place that has both a large university and/or archives for me, and a large theater scene for J.  Those places have been narrowed down to Chicago and Brooklyn, but for a while we were looking at basically the entirety of the northern Midwest and the Northeast.  Terrifying.  My advisor Dr. Asiago has voted for Brooklyn, since my dissertation is New York centered and there are more archives there, but somehow the thought of moving out of Overcast not for a tenure-track job didn't occur to me.  Like I knew it was a possibility that I would go somewhere exciting for research like London or Paris (still in the list of possibilities) but the reality of moving somewhere kind of random half way through grad school didn't really sink in for me until all of these funding sources started to fall into place recently.  (I know, what a problem to have, right?)

The lovely Ethel Louise had a post up a while back about frogging graduate school--in a knitting metaphor, to rip out all the foolish things you did and redo it with knowledge of those foolish things.  It's not directly related to the possibility of temporarily being a trailing spouse, but it's been rolling around in my head thinking about where my life is going and whether I'd have made the choices I've made over again.  This moving thing has really given me pause, but I think it's more about the moving than about graduate school causing me to move.  I grew up living outside a town of less than 500, and went to school in a town of less than 5000, so the thought of living in Brooklyn or Chicago gave me a little panic attack when it went from "wouldn't it be cool if" to "the university says you have to be out of town by January 1."

And in a lot of ways, I'm fortunate in ways some trailing spouses aren't: our decision to move is going to be largely shaped by where I can work in archives, and the impetus to move is coming from my job and not J's.  So I guess this is all a long way of saying that the change in my situation has made me appreciate the uncertainty traveling spouses like AB deal with.

I've been kind of sitting on this post for a while because it's been hard to write.  And some of my funding is still uncertain, but as of now, it looks like we'll be in Overcast for the summer and fall, and moving (somewhere) in January.  I can't really bear the thought of deciding what of our stuff to sell and what to move right now, which is silly, but like I said in my post about gardening, this apartment feels like the closest to home right now because of the marks J and I have put on it together, and of course another apartment would have that eventually, but it's hard to think about right now.  Hopefully there will be a post soon about some happily finished knitting and sewing projects to make up for this downer.

On Feminism, Clothing, and the Politics of Vintage

Does this dress make my feminism look too big?

I guess this last series of posts has started to look like me-made-March, but this post isn't exactly about this outfit.  This weekend was busy-busy-busy with hosting students admitted to the graduate program, and some comments made by the prospective student who stayed with J and I got me thinking about the politics of vintage and vintage-look.  Normally I wouldn't gender-identify someone, but I think it's important for the story to know that the guy who stayed with us was, in fact, a guy (although I've had the same reaction I got from him from women occasionally as well).

Our program doesn't have a lot of money, so to save prospective students from having to pay for their own hotel rooms, we arrange for them to stay with other graduate students, usually in their areas of study.  I didn't have anyone coming in this year in my area of study, but we do have a guest bedroom, so we got a prospective.  Our areas of study and methodological/theoretical approaches didn't overlap at all, but we had a lot of "you love that TV show?  I love that TV show!" type commonalities.

[Trigger warning]

What we did not have in common was our fondness for rape jokes: specifically, our guest's fondness for them, J and my lack thereof.  Who tells a rape joke to someone they've just met, especially someone whose house you're a guest in?