Missed first-night seder to sing at Good Friday services, stayed out late tonight getting drunk at second-night seder, have to get up early tomorrow to sing at Easter services. Isn’t being a Jew in chapel choir delightful?

iscariotsss replied to your post “Basically the only person I’ve been sexually attracted to in the last…”

Ugh like it sounds like he’s not worth your time then?? Join me in finding satisfaction in Lots of Hugging

@iscariotsss, well, it’s possible that the younger woman is such a wonderful, fascinating human being that she’s a better option than me anyway. She’s almost certainly less cynical and misanthropic. Also, I wasn’t really looking for a relationship… or I thought I wasn’t? I’m having trouble parsing my own feelings of jealousy.

I think it’ll be fine. My cat satisfies most of my needs for affection and cuddles.

A professor who taught me when I was an undergrad and who is now at another university and running the search for a postdoc there (let’s call him W) e-mailed me this afternoon to tell me that he’d given the postdoc to another candidate, whom we’ll call B. I actually already knew that, because B (who is my age) is dating a professor in my department, H, and he told me when I saw him at the department on Tuesday and he asked about my job situation. Incidentally, W was dissertation advisor both to H and to B’s dissertation advisor, C; H and C were in grad school at the same time (and are kind of frenemies… or rather, H is jealous of C’s professional success). So H is kind of dating his intellectual niece. And they work in the same subject area. Which just kinda strikes me as a little off… but whatever. Academia is full of incest.

Anyway, the point was that W sent me the following e-mail:

This message is to deliver the news that the [name of fellowship] Postdoctoral Fellow for next year will be [B].

This was a very difficult decision for me to make, and in no aspect was it more difficult than that I won’t be able to offer the postdoc to you. I have several other highly deserving finalists to whom to deliver this same news, but I am telling you first in order to get over with the message that will be the most painful one for me to write.

Whenever I do these searches, and become aware of the highly qualified people who don’t yet have jobs, it makes me sad and angry and makes me wish I had more of these postdocs than just the one. If by any chance you do get a job, please tell me. And if you can think of any way I can help, please get in touch right away.

Which is very nice and all, but… if it was that hard for you, you could have just given me the fucking job.

I just turned in an application I’d been procrastinating on (because I’ve been depressed as fuck) right under the wire – it was due at midnight EDT.

I feel like these days I’m just scraping through life by the skin of my teeth. Like, I manage to get things done, but not easily or with good time management or even particularly well.

The academic job market is a truck and it has run over my spirit.

I finally vacuumed. It was awful.

Well, I didn’t get the job I had the fly-out for, and I probably won’t get the postdoc I wanted at my undergrad university, so I’m drowning my sorrows in ice cream, Scotch, and season 2 of “Jessica Jones.”

I’ve been invited for an on-campus visit (or a “fly-out,” as we call it in the biz) next Thursday and Friday, which means that I have to quickly reacquaint myself with my job talk, which I haven’t practiced since November of last year (as in 2016), and prepare a teaching demo. So I’m not going to be really active on here in the near future – it’s just a “post a chapter and run” – and I’ll probably be scaling back in general.

Now that I’ve defended my dissertation and my parents are no longer staying with me and I actually have some free time again, I should arrange playdates – er, I mean, visits with all the people I haven’t seen in a while.

More specifically, I should invite people over so that I’m motivated to clean up my act… I mean, my apartment.

You can now call me Dr. Phil

because I defended my dissertation on Tuesday. I don’t officially become a PhD until the university bigwigs put their stamp on it sometime in April, but I’ve now done everything *I* need to do.

The defense itself was a bit challenging because one of my official readers needed to Skype in and his microphone wasn’t working. So in order to ask questions he had to call my phone, and when I put it on speaker for everyone in the room to hear him we had to turn off the sound from the Skype connection to avoid godawful feedback noises. I swore a few times during the defense, which might have been a first, but I only swore about the technical problems, and I kept it to “shit” and “crap.”

Sorry I haven’t been answering asks or doing, like, anything for the past couple of days… my parents are here for my dissertation defense, which is on Tuesday, and I’ve had very little time to myself. Expect more nothing for the next 3 days, too…