Money And Family

I know a lot of families are weird in their own way about money, and mine is no exception. I’ve always thought we all fixated too much on it - talked about it even casually when maybe other things might have been better to talk about. In the generations prior to mine, money has caused a lot of resentment and ruined various relationships. My dad, for instance, was always complaining when I was growing up that my grandpa did not give out (or even loan) money to his kids equitably. Grandpa seemed to have a communist streak: it struck me as very much “from each according to his ability; to each according to his need”. So my one uncle who never married or had kids or worked very hard and who made many very poor financial decisions got bail out after bail out, whereas my grandpa was very tight-fisted with my dad (who was responsible and did everything “right”) and wouldn’t even loan him money temporarily at times he really could have used it. This is what my dad says, anyway. I have no reason to disbelieve the facts on the ground, though I will venture to guess there is more in the way of context that I never heard. So this was one (of very many) reasons for the sourness my dad felt towards my grandfather, and I think it extended into his relationships with his siblings.

To my dad’s credit, he strives scrupulously to be fair and transparent in the way he handles money with my brothers and me. The problem is that we are different people than he and his brothers, and money from above is not going to come between us. He contributed fairly generously to YB’s existence for several years after YB had his problems. He also loaned MB substantial amounts of money, though these are loans and there is even a legal agreement between them about how it gets paid back.

My own take on things has been quite different from both of theirs. I don’t care how much money they take from him, because I never want to take even a dollar from my dad. Now, this hasn’t always worked out, but for the most part it has. The exceptions are that they gave me a generous gift when I finished my doctorate that allowed me to live during the months between then and the start of my postdoc. In fact, I even had some left over and invested it. I also took a small loan (several thousand dollars) to tide me over during my move from my postdoc to D.C. Let me be clear that I could have handled it on my own, but I had to front a lot of money for moving expenses (I would be reimbursed later), I went about six weeks without a paycheck, and of course with my postdoctoral salary being what it was I had no cushion. So I would have had to carry a credit card balance for a few months (something I have assiduously tried to avoid). So at the time things between my parents and I were somewhat better than they are now, and I borrowed a couple of thousand dollars for a few months. I borrowed it in July and by Thanksgiving I paid it all back. These are the only two instances I can think of where substantial (as in, over a few hundred dollars) money was loaned or given to me.

My general philosophy has always been to live within my means, and the only things that might force me to deviate from this are if some kind of emergency (medical, legal) arises, or if the cost-benefit for buying real estate were to work a certain way. But real estate can wait. Even the obvious third – having children – can wait until we have the means (if at all, but that’s another story).

I don’t like taking money from them. Even a small gift for my birthday or Christmas makes me uncomfortable. When I was growing up, my dad was great at finding a bargain, at making a little seem like a lot. (So good was he that, as I think I may have mentioned before, I sometimes got static from other kids who perceived our family as “rich”.) That aside, he was a huge penny-pincher. I’ve grown into one myself. But he would talk endlessly about money. When my mom had to go into the hospital for a hysterectomy, he complained how much it cost. He complained how much my brother’s hospitalization cost. He complained about how much everything cost. Again and again and again and again. And again for good measure. As though in a perfect world no expenses would ever come up that weren't terrific bargains for things he absolutely wanted. (And this is why I used to wonder with some frequency why he had even decided to have kids, since we evidently brought him no pleasure but resulted in lots of expenses.) So, in this context, a dynamic began to develop where I stopped asking for anything, and hoped that then maybe he wouldn’t complain if something unforeseen (or foreseen, like the effect of my turning 16 on his auto insurance rates or my going to college, just things people can’t control that are part of life) came up. How many teenagers do you know who really would have preferred if their parents didn't get them a birthday gift?

The other part was that money was an element of control. Both because he could (and would) harp on the spending and make you feel terrible and because options became limited. For example, my dad paid for my college, which was great, and I appreciate it. But do you have any idea how many times I heard about it, until I would have happily taken a loan just to get him to shut the fuck up. But taking a loan was not an option, and part of it was so he could control things. If he held the pursestrings, he could threaten things (and I was threatened with being taken out of college several times my first semester if I didn’t do well). First of all, there was no precedent for this threat since I’d always been a great student and graduated in the top 10 of my 250 person high school class. Second, I got a 4.0 that semester and even then it didn’t turn off completely. I felt like the avenues open to me after college were very restricted. I’m not sure if I would have been “allowed” to take out a loan for a professional degree, or would that be held over my head too? I didn’t even really consider it. My dad was so thrilled that I got what he called “a full scholarship” to grad school, but of course what he didn’t know was that no one pays for grad school in the sciences. And, not to be too cynical, but you get what you pay for. I do recall that when I graduated college and had gotten that “full scholarship” to a top grad school, plus honors and awards (totaling several thousand dollars) heaped on my head, he actually said he thought he got his money’s worth from the college. I remember this as one of the nicest things he’s ever said to me.

All that background brings us to the situation of a few weeks ago. I was talking to my parents on the phone right around the time I was offered my job and my dad suggested I call my grandma. I hadn’t in awhile…in fact, since my trip to Florida to see her in October – which was very bad – I’d only sent a couple of e-mails. So I have her a call that week, and it was actually a nice conversation. She was easy to talk to on the phone and of course I was bursting with good news. At the end of the call she told me she had just sent me a letter, and it had something in it, and she wanted me to let her know as soon as I got it. I said OK. I hoped – honestly, this is what I hoped – that she’d sat down and written up some family reminiscences. It had always been harder to get her interested in that stuff than my grandpa, and the things I found suffered as a result.

Her letter arrived a few days later and it was very short – said something about the difficulties young people face, which I interpreted to mean my unemployment (even though obviously I’d already found a job, and since then several other interested places have contacted me). It also had a check for $5,000. Now, grandma has always scrupulously sent grandkids fifty dollar checks for birthdays and Christmas – I’d just gotten one a few weeks before (and what a pain in the ass to have to go to the bank with a $50 check and nothing else) – so this was obviously highly unusual. My fiancee and I discussed briefly whether to keep it, and we decided to. I wrote my grandmother the next day to thank her.

Let me share some of my reasoning for the quick decision to keep it: First, $5,000 is a very nice gift, but I just got a six figure job and I have fairly substantial savings – this comes from living within my means as much as I possibly can. $5,000 is nice but certainly not life-altering. (So, to make the implicit question explicit, what do I have to sacrifice by taking it?) My grandma has more money than she will ever need and will not miss this money. Also, I am worried that when she finally dies, there will not be any explicit instructions for how much of their money goes to their grandkids. All money will be given to my dad and uncles and it will be at their discretion. I am not going to accept money under these circumstances. If grandma and grandpa, during their 30+ years of retirement, never sat down and specified how much we all get, then it clearly wasn’t a priority. And I do not want to accept what in essence is a gift from my dad, given at his whim and with all the control strings that go along with it.

So, so far this seems pretty simple, huh? But of course it is my family, and this nice gift must somehow be ruined. A few days later I am talking with my parents, and I do not mention the gift because as I see it it was a gift from my grandma to me and does not involve them. And of course I figure my grandma, who is notoriously loose-lipped about everything (and this is part of why our relationship has suffered – I cannot trust her at all) will tell them. Finally, my dad mentions it and I say yes, that was very nice, she must have given it to me because she figured I might be unemployed for a while.

Well, no. That’s not how it is at all. Evidently some CD came due and she divided up the money among the grandkids. That’s fine – of all the grandkids, I need money the least (by far). But then my dad decides to share that my grandma asked both him and my uncle if it was OK to give us money, or whether she should give it to them for “safekeeping”. My dad heroically tells me that he decided “of course” we were responsible enough to have the money now, but my uncle decided to keep the money for now and not let the kids have it. There’s a pause, as though I am supposed to thank him.

Instead, I’m immediately annoyed. I’m annoyed at my grandma, and I’m annoyed at my uncle (his kids are 19-24 or so, but two of them are older than 21 and probably really need the money, unlike me) but mostly I’m annoyed at my dad. Why did he have to tell me that, and why does he think he’s some kind of a hero for telling my grandma that his 34 year old son who has been financially independent for more than a decade and who makes more than $5,000 every month can handle that whopping sum. Even when I was a postdoc and $5,000 would have been life-altering I still would have been pissed. I have been nothing but responsible with my money – if anything, I’m too responsible. This is just another symptom of what I’m coming to think of as my dad’s inherited sense of narcissism (inherited from my grandpa, the man he despised). Most grownups would tell their 86 year old mother that yes, my late 20s/early 30s kids can handle it, and then roll their eyes and stay the fuck out of it. But not my dad.

So I was somewhat proud of how I handled it. I said, “I’ve never needed $5,000 less in my life.” And he said, “Well, it’s a nice gift. You can put it towards the wedding.” And I said, “Yes, it’s very nice of grandma. Very nice.” But no fucking way was I going to thank him. The conversation ended soon after because I was steamed and didn’t have much else to say.

This bugged me but was not too much of a big deal. Then I was talking to MB on the phone a few nights ago and he said my dad brought it up with him. My dad was evidently surprised I hadn’t decided on my own to contact them and ask them about the money. Then he said something vague about how he’s realized each of his kids have their personalities (!) – yes, we’re actually fully-functional human beings dad, and not your little toys – and were raised at different times when they had different levels of parenting skills. This statement at least shows a little promise, but then he reverted back to typical dad by telling MB that for the past two years they’d sent me birthday gifts and I hadn’t thanked them. I can’t remember last year (of course what does it say he’s been storing this up in his mind for so long?) but this year it’s true – it got lost in the shuffle of the end of my old job and beginning of the new. However, part of the problem is that when I spoke with them on my birthday I hadn’t yet received their card…and it bears pointing out that if I acted like my dad then I would have sulked and moped and been short with them because it was late. By the time I talked to them next other events had taken priority over their check for a couple of hundred bucks. And again, even with a gift, there’s some sense of obligation on his part. He is quite welcome never to give me another birthday gift, but then he can’t complain. And of course it’s well worth it to him to be able to complain.

So now I’m several thousand dollars richer and would happily give it back if I hadn’t had to deal with any of this. I thought about taking certain other steps – actually having it out with my dad over this (it’s money, so we can talk about it) or even calling my grandma again and asking her whether there is some question about how I handle my finances, knowing full well it’d get back to my dad. I am inclined not escalate. In fact, this situation didn’t burn me all too much until I talked to MB. Though part of me thinks escalation is the only language they understand – that if I did go on the warpath about this it might actually get me somewhere. But maybe not, maybe they’re just that clueless. I was hashing this out with my fiancee after getting off the phone with MB and I just cannot figure out what he can possibly be thinking. Is he trying to be undermining or is he just so self-focused that he doesn’t see that the “good” thing he thinks he did brings everyone (including him) down?

And this is so quintessentially my dad, a man over sixty years old who seems sometimes to lack any discretion or common decency. Any reasonable person would know that not every situation has to revolve around them and keep their goddamned mouth shut. Instead, my dad has to insert himself and in the process my grandma looks weak and he subtly insults me...and expects I will be grateful! And he is surprised I don’t call up and ask HIM when my grandma sends me a monetary gift. Well, as I told my fiancee, there’s definitely no trust there. I have to be very careful what I say and always have had to; meanwhile, he seems to think the sub-human beasts who are his children still have no right to privacy.

I tell you this: I’d happily send my grandma’s money back, and send another $5,000 down to him on top of it, if he would use some of it to wake the fuck up already.

An Update, Blaze by Richard Bachman, and The Oak and the Calf by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

I’ve now had my first week at my new job, and so far things seem pretty good. At the beginning of this blog I made a rule about not blogging about work...I didn’t always follow it with my last job, but now maybe it’s time to try again. Ideally this blog is for exploring ideas of a personal nature, not rehashing work issues, which I spend enough time on. So let’s just say my new job seems pretty good so far and leave it there.

I would actually have preferred a little more time at home between jobs than I got. It would have given me more time for writing, and also the chance to go visit my brothers. But what can you do? My new employer is in a rush for the project I’m on to get started, and given how good the offer was all-around, I wasn’t going to begrudge them that.

I did pretty well with the time I had, especially with respect to writing and going to the gym. I know I’ve been using words written as the benchmark for my progress on the novel since I started, but at this point a better benchmark might actually be where I am in the scenes I sketched out. I probably mentioned that in late June I sat down and actually outlined, scene-by-scene, how I saw the plot moving from where I was at that time straight through to the end. I counted up 24 scenes. Now, some of them may actually not be necessary...on the other hand, some extra scenes that I do not anticipate now may be required. So 24 is a good estimate. Obviously, not all of them are equal in the amount of effort they require, but since the beginning of this month I’ve managed to work through five of them. I think that’s pretty good.

I was doing great with the gym, too. Even my first week back at work I managed to do three complete work-outs. Yesterday, though, I went and managed to strain my back. I am very careful about using correct form while lifting and listening to my body. There’s definitely a difference between good pain and bad pain, and as I joke with my fiancee, I have a two-step process if an exercise starts causing me the bad kind of pain: 1) I check my form, and if my form is good then 2) I find another exercise. I don’t mess around.

So yesterday I was doing shrugs. Sometimes I use a bar and sometimes dumbbells. Yesterday it was dumbbells, and I shrug a lot of weight. So I went to grab 100 lb. dumbbells for the first set and somehow I didn’t balance correctly...or maybe, because I was doing my exercises in a slightly different order, my back was already fatigued. Or maybe I just lifted them with my back rather than with my legs. But however it happened I felt the strain. I finished the set and subsequent sets with lighter weight (as planned – I go down to 90s for the second set and then do a third set with 80s just to ensure my traps are totally fatigued), but my lower back hurt. Last night when I went to bed I was afraid I’d wake up this morning in pain, but instead it feels better. Not great, but better. I’m not sure if I’m going to go to the gym today. The plan today would be triceps, which doesn’t really tax my back...but then again, it’s hard to keep your back totally out of anything and maybe it just needs a few days to rest. I’m inclined to want to rest it.

My fiancee is in the Midwest (where she grew up and where I went to grad school) checking out places for the wedding. She comes back later today. It seems that what we thought was our last choice may wind up being our venue. I went to the grocery store last night (the back thing was unusual, but certainly didn’t knock me out of commission) and then this morning did some cooking. I really enjoy cooking on the weekends – it’s relaxing and peaceful. I brought my iPod into the kitchen thinking I’d listen while I cooked, but then just forgot about it. Cooking is one of the only activities where I can actually pour myself a beer at the beginning and then forget about it until I’m done. (House-cleaning is another matter, and while I don’t usually drink while cleaning, I do appreciate some music. I don’t mind house-cleaning either, though.)

I have been meaning for a while now to write a family update post. I never wrote about that dinner with my cousin, or my trip to see my aunt or uncle, or numerous phone calls with my brother. I really ought to be more diligent about that. It’d be hard to knock it all off with one post or one piece of a post. Not that so much has “happened”, just that there’s new information and as time goes on my perspective changes. But I think I will make some effort to try to set some of that stuff down over the next few weeks.

I’ve been reading The Oak and the Calf by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and just finished it the other day. I also picked up Blaze by Richard Bachman (aka Stephen King) last night, and finished it this morning.

Blaze was, obviously, a quick read. (I finished it in a 12-hour timeframe, which includes the time I spent sleeping last night.) It was a page-turner, and kept me engaged. The ending was pretty lousy (though, in fairness, it was a Bachman book, and “his” style is a little different than King’s, and the ending was not uncharacteristic for Bachman). And maybe it’s because I read quickly, but there didn’t seem to be any depth to the story. Things happened (both in the present and the past), but what they meant – if anything – remained obscure. I’d say it’s worth picking up if you get can it cheap or you’re a huge Stephen King fan; it’ll keep you occupied on a cross-country flight. But I wouldn’t say much more than that about it.

Solzhenitsyn’s book surprised me. First because I assumed it was fiction, and it was not. It’s his chronicle of his writing, how he managed to get One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich published in the Soviet Union, and his subsequent struggles with Soviet authorities and others. It ends with his expulsion from the country.

Solzhenitsyn and I have a bit of a history. Not that I ever met the man, just that as someone who has often felt crushed by institutions (especially the kinds of institutions essentially set up for warehousing people), I felt like I could really relate to his work. High school is obviously not the Gulag, but I empathized greatly with Ivan Denisovich as he tries to make meaning in a pointless existence. I even wrote about the book for an essay I wrote as part of the application to a unique college I applied to (Deep Springs College in CA); they did not let me in, which in retrospect I am sure was for the best.

I read most of the Gulag Archipelago in grad school. Now, grad school was certainly not the Gulag; in fact, I mostly enjoyed myself. But I loved his tone; the righteous and yet sarcastic way he would point out the absurdities of Soviet institutions. Justifiably angry, while not allowing any personal bitterness (and I am not sure how much personal bitterness he had, though who could blame him if he did?) to creep into the writing.

It was as a postdoc where I read August 1914, Cancer Ward, and (especially) The First Circle. And there, I most certainly could relate to his pointing out the ludicrous nature of the institutions...especially the sharashka, which was a prison for scientists and engineers. Nowhere near as bad as some Siberian labor camp, but a prison nonetheless. As I read through the book I would fold over pages and mark especially absurd snippets of dialogue and think: yes! just like my postdoc! my PI could have said this! our department chair could have said that!

The big fear hanging over all the inmates at the sharashka was that they could be shipped off to some starvation labor camp on the White Sea, and there too I saw a parallel: the great unknown world outside the university! Where you had to wear a suit and punch a clock and suffer the indignity of doing non-intellectual work! But the protagonist in The First Circle does not allow himself to be cowed by this possibility, and he is not servile to the sharashka authorities, because he feels he has nothing to lose. And the fat decadent authorities have no idea, because they are so full of self-interest. And there again, as an unbowed captive, I saw myself.

Of course at a certain level I immediately realized that the comparison between myself as a postdoc at a U.S. university and some Stalinist zek was ridiculous. But then, if that was so, why was it that I could relate so well? And the answer – once I figured it out (though it seems totally obvious) - was quite helpful. The protagonist of The First Circle was stuck in the absurd system by the system; only death would get him out. I was stuck in an absurd system by...myself! Only I could get me out. The world outside the university might be the White Sea labor camp, or it might be heaven (or it might be both, and if I were the master of my own destiny I could choose). And the rest is history, some of which I wrote about a few posts ago.

All this being said, I got sucked into The Oak and the Calf right away. Here again is Solzhenitsyn’s distinctive voice, and instead of telling stories through fictional characters, he is talking about himself. I find it hard enough to find time to write in my life, but here is Solzhenitsyn (as an “internal exile”) working as a teacher, and finding the time to write, but having to keep everything secret. (In prison, he could not write at all, of course, so he composed in his mind and then memorized long sections.) All his papers, his drafts, have to be hidden. He cannot show his work to anyone or even mention that he writes. Why, he even puts off having any serious relationships in part because he doesn’t know if he can even trust a wife. (And in fact his concern is justified as his first wife, after their divorce, winds up working for the KGB.) Most of the literature he gets to see is propagandized Soviet drek. And yet he writes – his dedication is inspiring, in fact - and eventually gets the nerve to send one of his works to a Soviet literary magazine. The reason Ivan Denisovich got published has everything to do with timing: Khrushchev was trying to separate from Stalinism and that meant – for a short period of time, at least – it was OK to talk about the worst abuses of Stalin’s regime (never mind that the Gulag continued under Khrushchev). But of course the political winds changed, and Solzhenitsyn’s life got difficult again.

I guess just a few other random observations before I wrap this up: first, it’s amazing to me as a contemporary American to think of how much importance the Soviet regime placed on literature, and how much time and effort they devoted to monitoring and sanitizing it. After he left the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn became known in some western circles as a bit of a cranky old man, criticizing the west for its decadence and laziness. He was also not a fan of atheism. (Of course, there’s a difference between atheism and state-enforced atheism, the latter of which I wouldn’t support any more than state-enforced Islam or Christianity.) But the truth is that our government hardly has to worry about what is out there in literature. Of course, we are free people and can write what we want. But the effectiveness of our contemporary literature aside (and we write plenty of books about the absurdities of our personal lives, but what about our political lives?), most Americans don’t read much...and I’m sure the government, if it were inclined to go that way, would get a lot more bang for its buck cracking down on TV, the internet, and pop music. Books? Why waste time?

There was also an interesting relationship between Solzhenitsyn and the west as this whole thing played out. It was attention by western governments, and especially western journalists, that helped protect him from disappearing or having some kind of “accident”. On the other hand, he didn’t want to leave Russia. Now, partly he wanted to stay for political reasons – as his works were smuggled to the west and published, he felt he was more effective still living in the Soviet Union. But after he won the Nobel Prize, he had money and fame waiting for him in the west, and the Soviet authorities would have been happy to see him go. Part of his staying, as I mentioned, was political. But I get the strong sense from The Oak and the Calf that part of it was that he didn’t want to leave. Leaving was giving up. Plus he was Russian to his core and didn’t want to live anywhere else. He left only when they forced him onto a plane to Frankfurt.

It’d be helpful for readers of this book to have some understanding of Soviet history, and especially to already be familiar with Solzhenitsyn’s work. Nonetheless, I’d recommend this book to anyone.

Seven Years

It amazes me to think that a baby unfortunate enough to have been born on September 11, 2001 would now be entering the second grade. No longer an infant or a toddler or even a kindergartener, this child would be reading, writing, learning multiplication, running around with friends, and probably mouthing off at mom and dad on occasion. Seven years is a long time, and people are resilient. They move on. And grow up.

I said a lot of what I wanted to say about September 11 in a post a few months ago. I never would have believed it in the wake of that day seven years ago if you told me that when I thought about September 11 now, the temptation to go on a diatribe about how badly our country has screwed up since then would be nearly irresistible. My anger at the perpetrators has slowly diluted over time. Not that I’m not still angry, and don’t think they should pay...only why make it all about them? Shouldn’t it be about us, and our response instead?

If you asked me what I was doing on September 10 or September 12 of 2001, I honestly couldn’t tell you. But I remember the 11th. I was a grad student, living more than 500 miles from NYC and DC, but it was just as beautiful and flawless a day where I was. My schedule was skewed to later in the day at the time. So I would go into work around 10 or 10:30 but then stay into the evening, sometimes until 9 p.m. or later. On that Tuesday, I woke up just short of nine and flipped on the radio; the first plane had already hit and they were carrying a serious news broadcast and not the music I expected. I listened for a few minutes almost in disbelief.

At the time I was sharing a house with six other housemates. I went downstairs and one of them was sitting on the couch (where she spent the bulk of her time at home) watching live coverage. “What happened?” I asked.

“A plane blew up the World Trade Center,” she answered, almost cheerily. I remember quite distinctly wanting to punch her right in the face, and realizing that to her this was just Oklahoma City Part Deux. But I was from New York and this was terrifying.

I sat down and watched the rest of it. I don’t remember the exact order of everything but I do remember watching the second tower collapse. It was incredible.

I was taking one class that semester – Multivariate Statistics – and late in the morning (once all the planes were down and the coverage started getting repetitive) I actually walked into campus for the class. At the time I would go into campus everyday, without fail, and even on that day intertia took hold. But needless to say, all classes were cancelled. I kind of wandered around in a daze for an hour or two and then came back home. I wasn’t doing any work that day.

Everything was subdued. It was like everyone had just heard of a death in the family.

The rest of the day is a bit of a blur. I don’t know what I did. I have vague recollections of ordering pizza and eating it with most of my housemates: a rare occurrence for us to eat together. I tried to call my parents, who were still in NY. When I finally got them – after several tries, the phone lines were jammed – I asked (ridiculously) if everyone was OK. I say ridiculous because they wouldn’t have been within 30 miles of the WTC. Of course I did have family living in Manhattan, and then there were friends, and friends of friends, and neighbors, and people I’d gone to college with – I could worry about all of them, too.

I guess after it was over I expected the world to stop and was angry when it didn’t. Departmental seminars went on, with nary a word said. I started receiving political e-mails a few days afterward essentially blaming the U.S. for the attacks. I flipped my lid at that. I just didn’t think it was constructive at the time they were still searching for victims and families were still waiting to hear. Football-related festivities in my university’s town continued unabated that weekend, and some people even tried to steal the grill on our back deck (they were unsuccessful, but the grill was destroyed). I had a lot of pent-up hostility around that time, and wanted to believe that some kind of national unity was going on. But although I heard about such unity on the news, I didn’t really feel it in my day-to-day life, which seemed unaffected.

It was a weird time. First, I was amazed to find not a single person I knew had died that day, though several friends of friends had. Second, I’d had an ambivalent, love-hate type relationship with NY my whole life. Now here it was under siege and I was surprised at how defensive I felt. (D.C. and Shanksville were minor side-shows with little consequence in my estimation, though I knew of course how much worse things might have been in D.C. Now, living here, I appreciate that even more and can only imagine the chaos that must have ensued that day in government buildings and all around town.) All of a sudden New York meant something, and I had a strong desire to leave school for a while to go back there, just to be there. That was a silly idea. I was also furious with the university where I was, for entirely unrealistic reasons. But I definitely started to feel estranged from the so-called “academic community”. I wanted to be able to scream out my fantasies of Osama bin Laden’s head being paraded on a pike through Central Park, but no one was around (well, few people) who would understand them or not think me a savage beast for merely having them. 

Why I chose a national tragedy as an excuse to beat up on myself is a mystery, but I think it is because I felt so impotent. All of my education and knowledge and I was utterly useless. I really wanted to do something.

And that’s why the lack of any call to action was so frustrating. The only time I ever felt a surge of adrenaline (of the enthusiastic kind) from anything George W. Bush ever said was when he went to NYC and said, “I hear you, America hears you...and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear from all of us soon!” When I watched that, I roared.

But it didn’t come to be. The U.S. not only bumbled its international response in almost every way, but here at home we squandered an amazing opportunity. Barack Obama has been talking about this over the past few days, and it’s what I’ve thought for years. Americans like me were desperate to do something, for someone to tell us how. But all George Bush said was go shopping. And so people who wanted to try to contribute had to find their own way.

Now here we are seven years later. Today is a commemoration of a tragedy, but it could also be a time to look at how much we have achieved since then. I don’t agree that September 11 was the fault of U.S. policy (in any “chickens coming home to roost” sense), but I do think it was a time when the whole country paused and took a deep breath. It was a decision point. And almost everything we decided was wrong. No one asked anyone to sacrifice. After a short pause, our celebrity-obsessed media culture came back full force (was the substance of the 2004 elections any greater than 2000 as a result of September 11? and my God, look what passes for campaign news in 2008! what's the difference between the Monica Lewinsky fascination pre-9/11 and Britney and Paris forcing out news of Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur, and the homeless in all of our towns after that somber day??). We quickly shifted away from the proper focus on Afghanistan to the expensive sideshow of Iraq. Now the U.S. is hated worldwide. TSA is a total farce. We torture people. We detain people, including some innocents, indefinitely. Students can’t get visas to come here and study. We ignore places like Darfur that really need our help. We've done nothing on global warming and energy independence - issues that help keep the Middle East so unstable. And so on.

 And the 2008 election is one where people have to decide between an inspiring, positive force for change and a horrifying force of the status quo with theocratic tendencies...and the country is closely split! (What, if anything, are people thinking?) And September 11 is a bogeyman used to scare the “small town people with the small town values”. But how many of those small town people died on September 11? It was the “decadent, eastern urban elite” who were targeted! If the small town people with the small town values want to know who is killing their kids, they should look to the people who are sending those kids to Iraq!

I hope that one year from now, on the eighth anniversary of this tragedy, it is President Obama who will address the American people and help us begin true healing. Because the way things have been going, even as the individual wounds from that day heal, the national wound just gets more and more infected. And we are poised to rub even more salt in our own wounds in the form of McCain and Palin. We get the democracy we deserve. But seven years after the fact, contra the chatter on unity, all our response to September 11 ever accomplished was making me feel more alone. 

Successful Transition (A Victory Lap Post)

Graduate training in the sciences, especially at elite research universities, is focused almost entirely on one goal only: tenure-track positions at other elite research universities. But, for a variety of reasons, there is a huge glut of quality Ph.D.s relative to the number of tenure-track positions. So what happens to everyone who doesn’t make it through? Where do they go?

Go to any scientific society newsletter, many journals, and (especially) the blogosphere, and high levels of angst and hopelessness are not difficult to find. The most insidious part of it, though, is that academia is not an “up or out” kind of system. It is quite possible to hang on, year after year. But the positions have low pay, low respect, and low security.

I attended grad school at a top 5 institution for my field (at least, according to U.S. News): most certainly an elite research institution. Looking back on it from my perspective now, I had both a feast and a famine in grad school. I had a feast of intellectual stimulation, and that by itself is enough to make the experience a good one. I also had a feast of independence: my advisor was a full-time administrator counting down his last years to retirement. We met weekly; otherwise, I was basically allowed to run wild. I had time to delve deeply into the literature and chase all the rabbits I wanted. My research was extremely inexpensive, which was both a blessing and a curse. One thing is for sure: I was 100% committed to pursuing an academic career. Or, well, maybe 95% committed. I always envisioned making a transition at some point to something more applied, but thought I would do it from the security of tenure.

The famine I faced was in terms of getting good advice. I got fellowships that allowed me to focus full-time on research; no one ever pulled me aside and told me teaching experience is important to getting tenure-track jobs. To the contrary, I was told this extra time to focus on research was an unmitigated blessing. I was led to believe that I would go immediately into a tenure-track job after graduation, which led me to waste a lot of time applying for jobs when what I should have been doing is devoting effort to finding just the right postdoctoral experience. One other major way I was misled was in being encouraged to undertake multidisciplinary research. Despite all the lip service, search committees are confused by multidisciplinary candidates, and especially anyone who smacks of being a generalist. My work, as I mentioned, was also very low budget. Even in grad school I would mock workers in my field for whom every question they got interested in just happened to be able to get answered by using the same piece of expensive fancy-schmancy equipment. “Have they ever been interested in answering any question that doesn’t require the use of a mass spectrometer?” I would say. But of course in today’s (grant) money-driven academic world, this approach does make some sense. It’s just, to me, less intellectually honest (I still feel this way).

Of course I bear some responsibility here, but without mentoring it is hard to navigate the idiosyncratic world of academia. Surely my family was by no means an academic family (unlike a fair number of my fellow grad students).

I flirted a bit with science policy at the end of my graduate career. Policy had been a long-standing interest of mine, and I’d been heavily involved in student governments and university policy committees both as an undergraduate and a grad student. Partly this was an interest in policy; partly this was a way to understand how institutions worked. When I first started grad school I was a little depressed: here was this huge vibrant university all around me, but each day I walked into one quiet research building, toiled away all day interacting with few people (and most of them just like me), and then went home at night. It’s always been important to me to think of my home institution as home, and getting involved was the best way I could think of to facilitate that.

As any reader of this blog will know, things really hit the rocks when I began my postdoc. It was a confluence of many reasons that made things so rocky. Part of it was that I made a transition from a physical sciences department to a life sciences department. The culture was quite different. People would introduce me as “a postdoc in the X lab” instead of just as my own guy. People would sometimes even say I had been “a graduate student in the [dissertation advisor’s name] at [my graduate institution]”. But we were not organized into labs, we did not follow the PI model, and I didn’t want to be anyone’s bitch.

Part of it was that they advertised a job right up my alley during my first semester there and then treated me extraordinarily badly in the search.

Part of it was that my postdoctoral supervisor was a meek assistant professor who didn’t stand up for his people; at the same time, he was a notorious penny-pincher and somewhat arbitrary and capricious in his decision-making.

Part of it was that there was no way to make my postdoctoral institution home. All my regular outlets were closed off to me because, even though the phenomenon of a postdoc isn’t a new thing, universities still seem confused by the concept. At the library I was faculty; in my department I was dirt. The department was quite hierarchical and the assistant professors wanted nothing to do with the postdocs – they were too good to hang out with us. There weren’t a lot of other postdocs in the department and it was pretty freaking lonely. From the money perspective, I was dying. Bringing home less than the grad student in my lab on an NSF predoc. One false move and I was financial toast. This didn’t exactly help bolster my status.

Part of it was the culture of the school itself – very “west coast”. And even though, growing up in a place that defines "east coast" personalities, I always felt like I never really fit in, I certainly was a lot more blunt and direct than many people at my postdoctoral institution, and it rubbed some of them the wrong way. I also saw lots of shameless nepotism. No resources were spared to protect certain people, but others of us could just rot.

And let me not neglect that part of it was the work I was doing. My idea had been to fuse my skills as a grad student with new skills I’d pick up in my postdoc lab. But my supervisor didn’t really seem to want to change anything about the way the lab operated to accommodate me (and it was a relatively new and small lab). I found endless lab work to be tedious, difficult, and non-intellectual. (I showed up at my postdoc with thousands of photocopied papers and many books - books and papers I shipped most of the way across the country with money I didn't really have - only to find I was given barely enough space for them all and the other postdoc looked on in wonder. But this was par for the course where I had come from!) I found us much more focused on methods than on ideas. And I found work on the scale that I was used to treated disdainfully by department members, most of whom were quite reductionistic. My favorite part of science had been getting outside and seeing things; by choosing this postdoc, I’d cut myself off from that.

I also did not utilize the network I had at my disposal; instead, I struck out on my own when choosing where to go. My dissertation advisor was supportive; in fact, he thought it was great. But staying close to home might have paid greater dividends.

So for these reasons and probably others, I found myself desperately looking to leave my postdoc. It made for some awkward situations, as prospective supervisors wanted to talk to my current supervisor, who spoke highly of me and seemed to want to keep me around (for what purpose?) even as he treated me so badly I was desperate to leave. We never communicated honestly about the situation. I started branching out in my job search. I was offered a position at a patent law firm and, had they offered me $10,000 more, I’d probably be there today (they were super-nice people). But I wasn’t willing to give up the dream.

Finally I was offered another postdoc in a place that would have been better for me with a supervisor who would have been more a mentor and colleague. But it was the same crappy low salary. Once again it would have been an ordeal to get some minor perks like a key to the department office so I could make copies (at my own expense, happily! Just give me access!!) or regular access to a decent printer or a phone. It would have created financial difficulties to break my lease and make yet another move of hundreds and hundreds of miles to yet another state. And, right about that time, I was offered the opportunity to come to D.C.

One thing I had started to realize more and more as my postdoc wore on was this: I was the only one responsible for my continued exploitation. And I did feel like I was being exploited. Shamelessly so. But realizing it was my responsibility to fix it wasn't confining: it was liberating. For one thing, I could face facts. And one important fact was that the tenure-track job, the light at the end of the tunnel, was seeming less and less ideal. First, a frank assessment led me to believe that I was not making progress toward getting one, anyway. More publications? Yes. But grant-writing experience? Minimal. Understanding how a lab works? Nada - my supervisor kept the money and other administrative aspects as total black boxes. Teaching experience? Minimal, and how was I supposed to get more when I was owned full-time by my postdoc lab? Multidisciplinarity? Just confusing. I am sure search committees thought I was too A for B Departments, and too B for A Departments. (And this ridiculous pigeonholing is another reason I was happy to get away.) My dissertation advisor remained a cheerleader, but when was he going to pick up the phone and make some calls for me, or at least wake up and smell the roses?

Second, my postdoctoral supervisor was miserable in his job; that much was obvious. The other postdoc in my lab wound up being there for seven years before being offered a position at a lackluster institution in a cold part of the country thousands of miles from where he wanted to be, and with nothing for his wife (also a Ph.D.). The postdoc I met at the institution where I might have gone next wound up being offered a job in a hot, humid, conservative region of the country at a school famous nationwide for its dysfunctionality. Was this the great payoff I was postponing everything else in my life for? And then for another seven years of stress and grant-writing and STFU’ing at pointless faculty meetings and teaching apathetic undergrads who had no idea how to write or think critically? All so I could get tenure and then do what? Nothing??

I couldn’t give up the dream, though. Not entirely. So I took a baby-step. The D.C. position was for one year, after which – if I wanted – I could crawl back to academia. But the year went well, I wasn’t sure I wanted to (certainly not into another postdoc, and I'd again gotten no tenure-track bites), and I cakewalked my way into another temporary position. But these temporary positions were nothing like postdocs. I was front-and-center, doing important work, and while I was might have been underpaid (sometimes I thought yes, sometimes no) I was still hugely better compensated than as a postdoc (I was living modestly, but I was also no longer living paycheck-to-paycheck - I daresay they paid me enough to live comfortably, and how can you complain about that?). And my status was mostly what I made it. I didn’t need to posture or preen (though some of my colleagues did); I felt like I was making a small contribution, and that was enough. Meanwhile, applying for academic jobs started to seem not just like an exercise in futility, but a complete waste of my weekends (which I have off here in D.C.! Weekends off! Take that, postdocs and assistant professors!).

The second temporary position was my last position. As I said, the process of obtaining it was a cakewalk. But it was a prestigious and difficult position to get, and a year before, I wouldn’t have had a prayer.

Now here I am with a permanent job. I make more than three times what I made as a postdoc just a few years ago (and twice what I made in my first D.C. position)! I will have a great title, work on interesting problems, interact with important people...and sometimes I will even get to be a little scholarly. I don’t have to sweat over access to basic resources. I actually have a better work-life balance (even when I worked on the Hill - well, sort of - but it was only for a year). I am overall much happier. There are a few parts of academia I miss, but many other parts I am quite happy to have left behind forever.

There is a stigma associated with leaving academia. Hanging around in visiting positions or postdocs forever is OK; going and doing something else is failure. I bought into that stigma for quite a while. But it is terribly small-minded, and utterly wrong. There are smart people all over the place, meaningful work everywhere. Look, there is petty bullshit everywhere, nepotism everywhere, lizard brain behavior everywhere. But it’s no worse outside academia than inside it. If any of my former academic colleagues acted sympathetic towards me, I would laugh in their face.

So here it is: it is a common refrain that academia is a meritocracy and the “cream rises to the top”. And for scientists, who are trained to analyze data objectively, to buy into this bullshit is especially sad. Noplace is a true meritocracy, and there is always an element of luck to career transitions (including in my own case, at every step of the way). But here I worked hard to earn the opportunity to come to D.C. I came here, worked hard, learned the culture, did my best, and – unlike academia – I am being recognized and rewarded. I am moving up, not stagnating. I am making a difference. Had I stuck around my postdoctoral institution, I’d now be in year five of my postdoc. So hey, just two more years of slaving away and then maybe I too could get a crappy tenure-track job offer at some lousy school for half my current salary. No, thanks!

The lesson is: it can be done. I did it. And more people should. I leave you with a link to a song (that I listened to a lot when I was a postdoc, and looked forward to the day when it would be true) that really says it all.

I Did It!

Ladies and Gentlemen: I have a new job! And a great job it is. Important, interesting work with important, interesting people...and a chance to make a difference. Amazing benefits and – I shit you not – a six-figure salary. I start work on Monday, which is less time here at home than I’d hoped to have, but I’m not going to sweat the small stuff. It was a long and sometimes stressful process, but in the end, it was a success. Two people deserve special thanks for their help and understanding throughout: one my former boss (and mentor), and the other my fiancee.

I may have mentioned that I had three decent possibilities hanging around, so let me document how it all played out:

I was quite anxious last week, as I sat around waiting for the phone to ring. On Wednesday morning an HR person from Distant Third Choice called to inform me that the position I’d interview for had been put on ice pending some internal reorganization. Honestly, I was not surprised at this news. There seemed to be several competing views of what niche this position would fill in the organization, and a fair amount of turmoil at the top. I’d had my fill of organizational dysfunction at my last job, and wasn’t too upset by this news except that it narrowed my field down to two jobs.

The offer from My New Employer (MNE) came with a phone call at around 2:30 that same afternoon. Needless to say, I was overjoyed to finally have some positive news. But with no salary figure or good explanation of benefits, I was also concerned, especially when they told me they “thought” they could match my current salary (they must have been intending to be snarky, but at the time it was lost on me). I spent Thursday waiting tensely for an offer letter I’d been promised, but it didn’t come. Around 4 p.m. I called over to MNE to see what was up, and was told it’d be the next day before the offer letter came.

I had plans to meet one of my new co-workers for lunch that Friday, and when I arrived it turned out several others would be joining us. Before we left, I was pulled into an office and given a salary figure. It knocked my socks off and, combined with all else, made saying yes a no-brainer. I had an enjoyable lunch with several of my new colleagues, who appear smart and down-to-earth. Then I gave my fiancee a call and we exulted in the successful completion of this process and the unexpectedly amazing package they were offering me.

The offer letter arrived Monday morning and was as advertised. I wrote back to say yes.

This left me with the third place I’d interviewed: Nearly Tied For First. NTF2 seemed like an amazing place and would have allowed me to capitalize on the expertise I developed in my last job. But I had not heard a peep from them in four weeks, and they had never even asked me for references. I e-mailed them to let them know I was no longer looking.

Right before the end of the day they called and e-mailed wanting to talk to me. I called back shortly after 5 pm. I was a little unhappy with our conversation, because they seemed almost to be accusing me of not being straightforward with them and not keeping them in the loop as my search progressed. But from my perspective, I was desperate for information from them but several e-mails had gone unanswered (one the guy on the phone admitted he hadn’t even read). They had exceeded their stated timeframe for choosing someone (but on the phone, the guy claimed they were still within it). I mentioned the references issue, and they said they weren’t even going to check. It seems they had already decided to make me an offer, and then had just sat on the information, not even bothering to communicate with me. When they were actually going to extend the offer I do not know. Well, it wasn’t too unpleasant, but I was unhappy because I felt like I’d operated at my comfort level and it was them who had been uncommunicative. Telling me post hoc that phone calls would have been better than e-mails is unhelpful. It really does make me think maybe having that person as a colleague wouldn’t be the best.

The truth is, of course, that I was fully prepared to call NTF2 to see what they could do if MNE made a weak offer, and vice versa. But as I said above, the MNE offer was a no-brainer for me. I was not going to play these organizations against each other just for the heck of it.

And all the agonizing I would have then subjected myself (and my fiancee, and possibly others) to would still have resulted in choosing one and rejecting the other. Maybe I would have ended up at NTF2, but I am not sweating it either way. It’s really flattering that both organizations wanted me, though. I mean, that really makes this a success, even if the timing maybe could have been better (or not?). It’s a credit to my old boss, for sure, but it’s a credit to me, too.

On Chesapeake by James A. Michener

If I were an immigrant to the United States from some far-off land, and if I settled on the Eastern Shore of Maryland as my new home, and if I knew nothing whatsoever of history, then Chesapeake might be a worthwhile book for me to read. But the fewer of these things that apply to a person, the less worthwhile this book becomes.

My grandma was a big fan of James Michener, and she always seemed to be in the middle of one of his great tomes (I’m not sure what the shortest Michener book is, but all those I’ve ever seen appear monstrous). Chesapeake was the first I’ve ever read, and I picked it up (more than a year ago) largely because of the title. Previous posts of mine have indicated my complete and utter ignorance of the mid-Atlantic region. It does seem to have its own distinctive cultures, and is intimately tied in with the history of this country, and yet I find myself somewhat turned off. It’s so crowded, so hot, so polluted. I thought Chesapeake might teach me a little something in an entertaining way. (Though one reviewer on Amazon who grew up on the Eastern Shore said he recognized nothing in Michener’s book.)

First off, this book isn’t really about the Chesapeake Bay region as a whole. Michener is essentially trying to look at the last 500 years or so of world history through the lens of one small area of the Eastern Shore (and I admit, I’d never even heard of the Eastern Shore until about a year ago, and I’ve never once been there) and especially through the history of a small number of families. So there are cameos by George Washington, Blackbeard, John C. Calhoun, Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, Adolf Hitler, and Richard Nixon (just to name a few).

The book is extremely ambitious, and for what it attempts it doesn’t do a bad job. The core of the book are three Eastern Shore families: the Steeds (Catholics, wealthy plantation owners and merchants), the Paxmores (pious Quakers and shipbuilders), and the Turlocks (marsh dwelling “white trash”). Immigrant Irish and German families enter in minor roles at the end. And the Native Americans give way to the blacks about a third of the way through.

Michener clearly subscribes to the idea that good storytelling requires conflict, because that’s what the whole book is about. Religious conflict dominates the opening parts of the book (Catholics vs. Protestants, Quakers vs. everyone), as does conflict between Europeans and Native Americans. Later the main conflict shifts to that between the races (and, somewhat by proxy, to pro- and anti-slavery groups). Political conflicts play a lesser role, but they are there: every war from the American Revolution to Vietnam. And while all these are playing out on the world or national stage, interpersonal conflicts (quite often of an economic nature) keep us closer to home.

I’ve got no problem with this emphasis on conflict, but it seems to undercut the point Michener seems always to be driving home about how the Eastern Shore is a paradise. If it’s such a paradise, why can’t anyone ever get along? Also, a lot of the conflicts are phrased in very moralistic terms. I don’t think many of Michener’s readers long to return to the days of slavery, so harping on the evils of slavery endlessly (and I mean endlessly) eventually begins to wear the reader down.

The book is constructed not as a continuous narrative, but as a series of “voyages” beginning before the European arrival in the New World and ending in the late 1970s. Given the length of the novel (just over 1,000 pages), the time and effort necessary to read it, and the obvious interest of the author in some issues over others, I was surprised at some of the time intervals left out. For example, book glosses over the Civil War and Reconstruction, spends hundreds of pages on racial tension but never even mentions women’s rights (though strong female characters appear throughout the book), and only talks about World War II through the lens of one Paxmore’s quixotic and doomed quest to save the Jews from Hitler.

The characters overall are fairly well-done – certainly far better than those in People of the Book. But there is some one-dimensionality to many of them: one never encounters a character who lives well and loves his family but beats his slaves, or a slave who is also a criminal. People tend to be either good or bad all around. And with so much time covered and so many pages, the string of Paxmores and Steeds and Turlocks (and even, by the end, Caters: the token black family) gets so long that some of them become indistinguishable from their ancestors.

Reviews on Amazon have pointed out that Michener manages to build a fair amount of irony into this book. Certainly he shows us that throughout history the only constant is change, and everything changes. But, while the irony is a nice touch, those are fairly elementary propositions.

As I said at the beginning, anyone wanting to brush up (at a very coarse scale) on their American history, or intensely interested in the Eastern Shore may find this book a worthwhile read. For everyone else, I would say give it a pass: it requires too large an investment for too small a payoff.

Plans For This Week, This Month, The Rest Of My Life….

Thursday was my last day of work. That means I am home this week, not working, and without a job until such time as I find one. Any day, any second the phone may ring with a job offer. Or a rejection. Or nothing. So far it’s been a whole lot of nothing. Nonetheless, it’s better to be here at home waiting than at the office in all ways except one – I’m not getting paid. Lucky for me, I have savings. I can go on like this for many months if I really have to. Well, I will keep this blog updated as career developments occur, but with the 600 pound gorilla in the room now dispensed with, it is time to turn to other matters.

Basically, I’m on vacation but I don’t yet know how long. That’s how I’m looking at it right now. The whole job thing is mostly outside my control. I do what I can do and that’s it. But the opportunity for some time off is not one to squandered, and I don’t plan to squander it.

So, at a bare minimum, I’ll be here all this week. I took Friday to give our apartment a thorough cleaning (the only thing that still needs cleaning is the bathroom, and I will tackle that tomorrow). I have been reading. I’ve gone to the gym four of the last five days, and my plan is to hit the gym almost all the days I am here. I don’t have to kill myself each day, but just do a little something.

There are two larger endeavors I have also embarked upon. One is that I am on another “detox” of sorts. My fiancee and I made our first trip to the liquor store in 2008 two weekends ago. I was doing OK with our stash until Tuesday night; I overindulged on the phone with my brother, when what I really needed was a night off. So I called a weeklong alcohol detox, and tonight is the last night of that. I can resume drinking tomorrow (if I want), though I’ve actually been craving beer a lot more than liquor. Wouldn’t kill me to extend it beyond the week, either.

Beyond the alcohol detox, I’ve been thinking more and more lately that I have been taking in too many artificial sweeteners, and perhaps too much caffeine. With the gum I chew and all the Diet Coke and (more recently) diet iced tea that I drink, I was feeling intermittently headachy and I feel like my vision is occasionally a little blurry. Now, of course these symptoms could be related to a myriad of other things: too much time staring at computer screens, alcohol, stress. But anyone who knows me knows that I have two big vices when it comes to consumption: alcohol (though I’ve certainly been doing a better job with that over the past few years) and Diet Coke.

My fiancee had been having stomach problems and when she cut out Diet Coke they went away. I haven’t been having stomach problems (besides the GI problem resulting from the bad sushi I had in Hawaii, though that’s over with now), but went along with her to try to cut down on my soda consumption. We switched to diet Arizona iced tea, which is great stuff, but we go through 3+ gallons of it a week and I wonder if all that Splenda was having ill effects on me.

So I decided a week at home was as good a time as any to stop drinking soda and stop drinking anything with artificial sweeteners (I’m not going to cut out my gum, though I certainly drink a lot less of it here at home than I do at work). I’m not totally hellbent on cutting out caffeine, though I’m trying to minimize it. So what am I drinking? Lots and lots of water, much of it flavored with Propel flavored powders. 20 calories per packet, which is enough to make a liter, and the sweetener is good old sucrose. Do I feel better yet? Well, I think so, a little. I’m waiting to see if my vision improves or if that’s just a myth. But anyway, when I go to my next job, assuming they have an easy source of clean water, I can hopefully sustain these healthier habits.

Looking on the internet, it seems that artificial sweeteners are responsible for everything and nothing, and all the sources are anecdotal. But I figure it’s worth a try.

The second thing I am doing is that, after an uneasy hiatus of two months, I am returning to my novel. Over the past few days I have been reading all 200 pages that I wrote earlier this year with both a critical eye and to provide me with momentum to continue. One of the last things I did before I took a break from the novel was to outline out the scenes between where I was and where I saw the end. That was a very smart thing to do. It is making my life now much easier. Anyway, I am mostly through my reread and mostly liking what I’m seeing, though there are some weak spots and it’s hard to judge until the entire draft is complete.

So what I would like to do is set myself some goals for September, even though the future is unclear I’ve got to get on with it. The goals are obviously contingent on how much time I wind up having here at home and how much extra work I have to do on looking for jobs. But, at a minimum, I would like to add another 10,000 words to my novel (that would bring me to around 70,000 words) and work out (weights and cardio) 12 times. The more time I have at home, the more I should be able to do.

This blog has also been neglected and I’d like to get back to it, but there are only so many hours in the day and the novel comes first. Still, if I could write a half dozen posts or so, that would be great. I have a huge backlog of things to write about. And even more shorter posts would be good.

Well, here’s hoping for the best of all possible outcomes: a phone call tomorrow with an offer, and a start date several weeks down the road!