Letter to My Partner on the Day I Forgot to Reset the Wireless

I know you live in stress because you’re applying for jobs amidst huge competition. And trying to finish a diss.

But imagine, if you will, my scenario. I am faced with stringing together the money to keep us going, or at least to keep me going and to cover “our” expenses that you can’t, like car and insurance. I have to make sure always that there will be enough money in the bank now, and to do that I have to defer my “real work” (a PhD project, OR a creative writing project) somewhat to make sure that in the event that your job search doesn’t pan out that I won’t have to give up my car. Or groceries.

Imagine the other pressures. I want to be two things, but I’m not sure I can be both. It seems too risky for me to give up the PhD and try to work on writing in the event of maybe learning to make money that way – because of the aforementioned having-to-cover-the-bank-account.

I am not entirely sure I want a PhD, because I’m not entirely sure that I want my career to PRIMARLY be the drudgery of the college professor. That is, I would like a chance, if I can, to establish myself enough as a writer or even scholar that I will be able (if it proves that I have the talent, which while I might not I also might) to earn fellowships, grants and so forth, so that maybe I could alternate teaching with grant semesters spent working in depth on things.

There’s also the two-body problem. I have to acknowledge that with you as my partner, it makes a certain amount of sense for me not to be reliant on a Discipline department for a job. Because you will (we hope) already be there. And two hires in the same department doesn’t always happen. In that way, it makes purely practical sense for me to think about other kinds of money earning – creative writing jobs, possibly even magazine freelance if I can figure out how to break into that.

In the meantime, since I can’t financially drop out of the PhD program right now nor can I financially devote myself to sailing through the exams and PhD, I’m in this position of trying not to drop any balls. I have to do at least enough on the PhD to keep that going so that should time and passion become available I can pursue that. I have to nurture the part of me that loves to write but that has not had time for so long that she had started to believe she couldn’t do it. If I’m going to nurture that part of me, I need to figure out a way to give myself time and room to try and fail at writing for awhile, so that hopefully I can get around to succeeding. And I have to do enough grading to keep my car payment and to make sure we’ll have what I think we need as you pursue your job search.

I also have to find ways to keep myself from going insane. Anxiety is not so much a problem for me anymore but learning not to think myself into immobility is still a skill that I’ve not always mastered. Second guessing my choices is sometimes still a problem. Focusing on moving quickly through large piles of drudge work is as difficult for me as it is for anyone though I give it my best. I have to find ways to let myself have some time off from teaching, just to allow some deeper cycles in my brain to kick in.

I like what I’m doing but it’s still hard. On top of this, I’m trying to figure out how to identify the best director for my cause given that I have what I think is a fairly specific and non-canonical focus. [Description deleted.]


In spite of having these “innovative” interests, the best “problem” I’ve come up with to explore has to do with food. And writing about food. And figuring out how to marry these – to give the necessary historical, feminist, and sociological breadth to the food thing, while also participating in and conversing with the (to me) fascinating arguments about narrative, technology, innovation, genre, what have you – is at this point a tricky thing for me. Trying to figure out who can direct me if I hold on till after Director leaves, while also acknowledging that Prospective Director does not feel qualified to be my full-on director through both exam and diss because of her lack of familiarity with period texts, is tricky. There may be others, but in the meantime I have to figure out the audience and slant for my exam proposal because to some extent this is part of what slowed down my progress. And that means figuring out who I’m working with, who I’m writing to.

In the long run the inability to commit will probably make my work stronger, since it means I’ll have to find ways to write to all the audiences that have informed my project, but in the short term its hard; my wrist hurts if I grade all day leaving me with little incentive to spend evenings pursuing the proposal, and I’m also committed to honoring and preserving the things that make our household fun for me – the pets, cooking too elaborately, hanging out with you watching videos or playing Scrabble.

What I was writing to Prospective Director about this morning had to do with trying to discover the proper way to articulate her role in my committee. I was thinking as I went so the e-mail was growing as I wrote.

It’s not that I meant to take too long, forgetting to reset the wireless while you were in the shower and thereby causing you to discover that the wireless was not reset which meant that your computer would still not print and meanwhile you were running late for class.

It’s that I was absorbed in trying to figure out what my approach is to the PhD, which is another way of saying what kind of job I want to have in the future, possibly even what kind of person I want to be.

So now, it’s like four years ago, when you said I was too young for you because you were “stable” and “in flux.” I am in flux.

But this flux has to do with accommodating all my aspirations, literary and creative, rather than jettisoning one part in order to streamline. And another part has to do with accommodating you and the path of your career and in the meantime making sure I can spend $100 on Thanksgiving groceries to cook for my parents if that seems indicated and can continue to own and operate my cute car, for my benefit as well as for yours.

There’s a lot going on in here, my head, in other words. And I rebel sometimes against having to work so hard, esp. on grading or teaching which sometimes seem merely to delay the work I really want to do but can’t because my mind is so jumpy that I can’t (and, given my love of enjoying what I can about each day, wouldn’t want to anyway) devote 8 or 10 hrs a day to working so as to have time both to grade for 4 hours and 4 hours to writing.

And I feel bad that I can’t be more efficient or committed to projects so that I would keep them going while I’m grading.

And that feeling bad causes anxiety which itself takes time and energy to overcome (by exercising, cooking, spending time with you…). And I feel a little sad that instead of next semester consisting of babysitting, distance grading, and possibly taking an online class designed to hopefully help me learn about how to freelance – a semester devoted to work I chose and wanted to do – it’ll probably be a semester of teaching a class if I’m lucky, having far too much distance grading which I sort of enjoy and have to do to pay my car payment but which takes so much time, Required Foreign Language if I in fact do get teaching, and maybe also doing babysitting TOO.

And feeling guilty about being behind on grading, and guilty about not getting enough done on my exam proposal and studying. And worrying about what I’ll do during the summer that will both allow me to pay my bills but also letting me make up the necessary studying ground so that I can make up for the work I didn’t get done in Spring 2005. And mad because once again I find myself doing all these things that are okay but that further reinforce the message that I’m not a writer and can’t write a novel because wouldn’t a real writer do that stuff at 4 a.m. while also taking care of all the other business?

I wanted nice, open time doing work I want to do. And of not composing my identify of the guilt caused by not working enough. Not living up to my job description. My potential.

So that’s me. And writing to Prospective Director about one component of this, trying to un-knot just a bit of what I think I am doing, is what I was doing when I failed to realize that you needed to print right now but couldn’t because I was online writing a message about the important things in my life. Okay? Okay.


I have so much to say about so many things, as you can tell. I want to type all the time. I want to type essays and ideas and interesting observations which could themselves be seeds for scholarly study. The limitations of my body and the needs of the physical parts of my schedule make this not possible. But I’m brimming over with words and it’s hard for me to choose: suppress this brimming by smoking a joint and buckling down to spend my words on grading, like I did all last weekend? Blow off grading to spend my words on my exam proposal, tricky because an ingrained “Protestant work ethic” tells me my value is in earning the money that keeps (pricey organic) food on the table and the car in the garage? *


Instead I spend them accidentally, like this.


*(Of course, we don’t actually have a garage, but rather a parking spot off the alley.)