Dialogue from the delagar Household: Travails of the Job Search

(Dr. Skull has a job here in the Fort now, finally, after being unemployed for two years -- but it's a job outside his field.  He's still looking for a university position.)

Me (to Dr. Skull): Here's a job for a poet. But it's in Houston.

Dr. Skull: Send me the link.

Me: It's in Houston. You don't want to live in HOUSTON.

Dr. Skull: It's a job teaching poetry. Send me the link.

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

It's a good year for fiction writers on the market this year. Or maybe just a good year for me!

In any case I am finding many jobs I want to apply and am actually qualified for in places I actually want to live. This is splendid, as you can imagine. I am kept busy applying for jobs, and spend probably too much time researching various universities and university towns, considering which I would chose to live in, if two of them decided to make me offers at once (oh, happy problem! and very unlikely, I admit).

Dr. Skull is also applying for jobs, and there are also many jobs for his two various specialities, film and poetry. We spend a bit of time tormenting ourselves with that possibility, too -- what if he gets a job offer and I get a job offer and both are good job offers and then what?

Yes, I know. We should have these problems

Meanwhile, due the fact that we teach at a university that does not recognize the existence of any religion except far-right Christians, we are celebrating Rosh Hashanah tonight. There will be a nice chicken, challah, apples and honey, and we will go down to the Arkansas river to throw bread in the water and repent our sins.

Happy New Year, y'all.

Off the List

Bardiac, over here, asks an interesting question: is there anywhere you'd refuse to teach for moral or political reasons?

This is a question close to my heart just now, as mr. delagar is ABD, and I have always sworn to him that when he gets his Ph.D. I will (scout's honor) become the trailing spouse and follow him to his job. (He has, for the past 15 years, followed me around the country, after all.)

So we're looking at places he might apply, and taking places off the list. Both of us can do this, it turns out.

We take places off the list for moral and political reasons -- I won't consider taking jobs in South Carolina, for instance, or Texas, and Mississippi is right out -- as well as environmental and financial reasons: mr. delagar won't consider jobs in Alaska or Idaho or Wyoming, and I hold that jobs in the East would be impossible, we'd never make a living. (He argues otherwise, so those aren't off the list yet.)

My students frequently won't consider any place that isn't Arkansas -- even any place that isn't within fifty miles of Fort Smith. If it's not here, it's off the list.

So I'm wondering -- when people say they can't get jobs in the Academy, do they mean they can't get jobs on their list?