Of Pilgrims and Patch-Kits

So I had something of a misadventure today.

Remember my bicycle? Whose praises I have been singing (or, at least, sang that one time)? Well, I went out for another ride today. I got kind of a late start, because the weather was iffy until mid-afternoon, so shortly after I hit mile 7 I decided to turn back. And not two minutes after I did so, I began to feel that something was...off...too bouncy, or something.... Lo and behold, I had a flat.

I was pretty sure that I didn't have a patch-kit.

I looked through my little under-the-seat pouch, and hey! I did have a patch-kit. Look at that! I took it out and rummaged through its contents for the directions. Okay, I'll need to take off the tube, and find the hole, and rough up the rubber with this piece of metal, and then use this glue.... Hm. The glue seems kind of empty. I tested it and, yes, it was all dried up (or the tube was empty; not sure which). So the patch-kit wasn't going to help me.

In fact, nothing was going to help me. I walked the seven miles home. In bike shorts.

Lest you fail to understand the impact of that last sentence, let me spell it out for you here: Bike shorts are meant for biking. They have a large padded area that, well, protects one's nethers from the hard, uncomfortable bike seat. I wouldn't bike without them. But somehow when you walk--well, the best I can figure it is that the legs-to-pelvis relationship changes in such a way that those helpful pads become abrasive. It's the backs of the thighs that suffer most. I was also wearing these spandex leggings things which you're supposed to wear over the bike shorts, to keep your legs warm (it was a chilly day), and I'm quite sure that the extra constriction didn't help. I fully expected to be bleeding by the time I got home (I wasn't. In fact, I'm pretty much fine now. But don't let that stop your pity!).

Anyway, it was a 2-hour-plus walk, and so for a while, to pass the time, I pretended that I was a pilgrim leading my faithful yet slightly injured donkey and wearing some kind of haircloth undergarment. This made the trip more exciting, because I could imagine that I had to look out for thieves, and pretend that my suffering had some meaning or intention or whatever behind it, instead of just being a bit of bad luck. And this reminded me of the fifth book of the Codex Calixtinus, a twelfth-century guide for (French) pilgrims on the road to Santiago de Compostella. This isn't a terribly easy book to come by, I don't think, but if you do stumble upon a copy (I have the Confratenity of St. James translation), it's a lot of fun. Pilgrims had a lot to worry about in the old days. Take this, for example:

The Gascons are loud-mouthed, talkative, given to mockery, libidinous, drunken, greedy eaters, clad in rags and poverty-stricken; but they are skilled fighters and notable for their hospitality to the poor.

Okay, so the Gascons aren't so bad. But just when you're getting comortable, watch out! For here come the Basque toll-collectors:

They come out to meet pilgrims with two or three cudgels to exact tribute by improper use of their force; and if any traveller refuses to give the money they demand they strike him with their cudgels and take the money, abusing him and rummaging in his very breeches.

In his very breeches! But the toll-collectors are nothing to the Navarrese:

Watching them eat, you are reminded of dogs or pigs greedily gulping down their food; and when you hear them speaking it is like the barking of dogs.... This is a barbarous people...ugly of face, debauched, perverse, faithless, dishonourable, corrupt, lustful, drunken, skilled in all forms of violence, fierce and savage, dishonest and false, impious and coarse, cruel and quarrelsome, incapable of any good impulses, past masters of all vices and iniquities.... In some parts of the region...when the Navarrese are warming themselves [becoming aroused?], men show their private parts to women and women to men. The Navarrese fornicate shamelessly with their beasts, and it is said that a Navarrese will put a padlock on his she-mule and his mare lest another man should get at them. He also libidinously kisses the vulva of a woman or a she-mule.

So, okay, such colorful characters don't actually populate the bike path. I did, however, see a rabbit.

Things to be somewhat cheerful about (or, Things about which to be somewhat cheerful, if you prefer)

As the weather sort of refuses to warm up, various other misfortunes (well, inconveniences) seem to be accruing, as well. For instance, the woman with whom I need to make an appointment to file my dissertation is out of town until like exactly when I go out of town for my conference, and I won't be back until the day before the last possible day to file. And the job stuff trudges on. And...oh, well, I guess that's it. Oh and my cell phone battery is aggravating me, again.

So here are some of the positives:

• An hour and a half of vigorous yoga can do miraculous things when one is in a self-pitying state of mind.
  
• My landlords left me an Easter basket, complete with candy and fake plastic grass.
• My amaryllis is growing with absurd rapidity. Maybe it'll even flower before I go away!
  
• My dad and stepmom got me flowers. Which I find very touching, for some reason. And my mom just said that she's sending me a present; her presents are always strange and cool.
  
• I have a fun knitting project going on.
• I have no real deadlines at the moment. (This one is huge. I should repeat it to myself nine times a day.)
  
• I'm going to an exciting conference and then doing a very small bit of exciting post-conference travel in the near future.
• Making lists of nice things is a remarkable way of feeling better about one's life.

Psychology sure is easy, eh?

But Anyway

After this morning's long plaint, I've been forcing some perspective upon myself. I mean, at the end of the day, this particular stage in my life will pass, right? So in the very worst case, I don't go into academia. I'll adjust. People adjust to things.

More likely, I will eventually find some kind of academic work for next year. Adjuncting is a perfectly reasonable option, if I can swing it.

But my point is just that this period of anxiety and fretting will come to an end, things will get settled one way or another, and nothing is ever permanent anyway.

There. I feel better.

Medievalist for Hire

Well, I didn't get that one-year I interviewed for. The committee chair sent me a really nice note, though, offering some (very helpful) advice about strategies for marketing myself. In the end, however, the deciding factor may have been my ABD status: none of their finalists were ABD. So apparently even one-year replacement positions are hard(er) to get without the Ph.D. in hand. Yes, I am looking forward to going on the market next year. Simply removing the word "expected" from that first line on my CV will evidently have gigantic repercussions on my marketability. I hope.

I mean it: I can't wait to start the whole job search over again. One of my strategies for staving off the how-will-I-pay-the-rent-and-where-will-I-live-next-year panic is to think about how to trick out my CV for next year. Like, okay. If I can get another publication under my belt, and teach a useful class or two, I should be in much better shape, right?

(The other panic-avoiding strategy is less successful: it's to assure myself that I can move to my mom's house and find local adjuncting work. Not an ideal solution, and not even something that I'm sure I can pull off, given where my mom lives, but at least it's something that I could look into. Unfortunately living with my partner won't be an option, since the rent where he lives would be prohibitive, and anyway he's probably going to be abroad for four months next spring, so he wouldn't even be around for most of the time.)

God. Academia is brutal, isn't it? The frustrating thing for people in my position--and I'm aware that there are many, many, many of us--is that we can't go get some other kind of job. Not unless we're willing to give up the profession altogether. And I'm lucky, really, that I don't have kids (or even pets) to support (though I'm a little worried about my plants), and that I can potentially put everything into storage and go live on nothing in some remote village, if I have to.

But enough of all that. I have other work to do. For example:

• finish up my abstract, acknowledgments, and other supplementary dissertation materials
• revise my conference paper for what will hopefully be the last time
• put together a handout for the conference
• clean up a short story to send out for publication (I might as well pursue my other dream career, right?)
• on a related note, revise my novel
• revise my accepted article (due June 1)
• start thinking about my very exciting next project!!!!

Emerging from the Fog

Slowly. Very slowly.

..........still pretty foggy.

And absolutely exhausted. Good God. I'm so tired.

But I need to get organized, at least gradually, because even though preparing for the defense didn't take up all that much time, it seems to have sapped a lot of what they call "psychic energy" over the last month. For example, I've only just realized that I missed the deadlines for a bunch of (rather crummy) jobs that I meant to apply for. See, in my imagination, it's still early March. Anyway, I think that this afternoon will have to be dedicated to applying for said jobs, on the grounds that their deadlines didn't seem to be of the hard-and-fast variety, and really, what's another application more or less.

What I mostly need to do, though--and this might be a nice soothing activity--is come up with some kind of to-do list. I need to sync myself up with calendrical time again. When's that conference I'm going to? What else do I need to do for it? What do I need to do to my dissertation before I turn it in, and when? That kind of thing. Coming up with something concrete along those lines should give me an inner sense of order. Or so I tell myself. Perhaps I just want to avoid the job apps?

(Really, it's silly. I have so many cover letters at this point that I can throw together a new one in about 15 seconds, plus two minutes to read over it. I don't know why I put this particular activity off so much these days.)

I was thinking about going to yoga tonight, but I'm not sure that I can muster the strength. Seriously. I'm so tired. I'm kind of dying for a nap but I've got laundry in the dryer, so I'm holding off.

--And then occasionally it hits me that I don't need to worry about my dissertation anymore, and it's just so fucking weird. Isn't it?

La Defense

--is over!

(Seriously, how do you do accents in blogger?)

So yeah, it's done, and it was fine. My committee had questions and whatnot, but for the most part the questions weren't particularly difficult, and they were also pretty complimentary. So uh...I'm finished! No more grad school for this girl!

(And therefore: No more fretting about my upcoming defense on this blog!)

Thanks to everyone who wished me good luck! Now--to enjoy my free bottle of champagne at the grad bar. Hooray!

Could it be I'm...nervous?

So I couldn't sleep last night. Almost literally. I slept from about 1 to 2, then my chumpy downstairs neighbors (ha ha--I wrote "neighboors," entirely by accident) came tromping home with a bunch of their chumpy friends, and started living it up on the 2nd floor. At 2:30, I decided that the pumping reggae was really too much, and went down there to complain. I didn't have to complain, actually; the guy opened the door, saw me, said "Oh, too loud? Sorry, sorry, no problem, we'll turn it down." Still, I finally got to reveal my grumpy-old-lady colors, and that was satisfying: I've been dreaming of that moment since they moved in last fall.

Anyway. I went back to bed, but still couldn't sleep. The hours ticked by. At 4:30, I was bored and cross and got up to go knit for a while, thinking that that would soothe me. After a bit, I thought that I might as well do something productive, and worked on my defense until the sun came up. I went back to bed at 6:30, slept from about 7:30-9, and then managed to sleep again from maybe 10:45-12:15. So that's, what, 4 hours total?

I mean what the hell? I haven't been insomniac in a long time. My first year of grad school was peppered with nights like this, and they were a lot more dangerous back then, when I had so very much work and actual classes to get to. And you know the thing where the harder it is to fall asleep, the higher the stakes get? So when I'd go to bed after 2 consecutive insomniac nights, I'd be so afraid of not getting enough sleep that I'd find myself incapable of sleep. It was awful.

I feel a little bit nervous about the defense tomorrow, obviously. But not terribly worried--certainly not consciously so. Evidently, however, all is not peace and sunshine in my psyche.

--But how worried can I be, really, when it's 1pm, I've been up for 45 minutes, and I haven't started working yet? Okay. Time to get down to business. 24 hours until The Spectacle begins (and I'm hoping to get to yoga this afternoon, so time is short!).

ETA: Okay, I'm obviously nervous. I just practiced my spiel and found my body engaging in its Relatively Benign Manifestation of Anxiety (i.e. I'll need to wear my stronger deodorant). Funny how the body knows what the mind ignores, isn't it?