The End Of An Ear*

Hey guess what? It's another post that's not about Phish! That's two in a row!**

Hey, I got a real job (is the slightly less important announcement I came in here originally to make)!

Yeah, the impossible has happened.*** I got a tenure-track job as an Assistant Professor of the Humanities at the Oregon Institute of Technology in Klamath Falls. Like, they met me in person and afterward had me sign a piece of paper and everything, so I know for sure that they don't just accidentally think that I'm someone else cooler and better looking and then will be surprised/disappointed/less attracted to me than they expected when I show up in September and start teaching the hell out of students.

This is the part in the blog post where I feel this weird, public-blog-y obligation to now go back and explain everything that's happened in the last four or so months, and so much has actually happened that my natural response to said urge is to just brain-lock and shove the post under the virtual bed with the virtual toe of my virtual sock until next week, when I'll try to write The Post To End All Posts again. This time, though, I'm just going to push through that whole tangle of mind-shit and keep writing.

Blah, blah, blah, blahdy, blahdy, blog.

It's just like old times in here all of a sudden, ain't it?

Speaking of old times, I actually spent a bit of time today in between sessions of working on an essay I'm trying to get published reading through lots of my old posts from 2008. And oh shit, are there lots of old posts from 2008. In August of that year alone, I had 114 posts. Just to remind you, there are only 31 days in August.

It was a fascinating little aside, though; sort of like one of those weird info-benders where you click on one link in a Wikipedia article you opened out of purely professional interest and suddenly three hours, two bags of tortilla chips and one cigar later you realize you've somehow gone from "post-structuralism" to the page for Van Halen's album "For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge" and there's nothing in-between in your memory except for the cerebral equivalent of those ghostly fire-tire-tracks the DeLorean leaves behind when it travels through time. Except this wasn't Wikipedia. It was my actual past life.****

It was actually a really fascinating trip. Often, when Lindsey and I talk about life (That's what couples do, right? That and the sexy-thing?), I realize I'm saying a lot of things about my mid-20s that characterize them as this difficult but heroic struggle to find out who I was so I could grow to be more calm and more content and Go Out And Get What I Really Wanted. Sometimes this makes me self-conscious because that's exactly how I remember things, but talking about it makes me sound (in my mind) like I'm making a spirit quest out of a life that's really been more like a walk to the grocery. Rereading some of the blog entries I wrote during the summer and fall of 2008, a period of time that would have been very harrowing and challenging because of the number of big changes I was experiencing even if I hadn't been batshit crazy at the time, I realized that this actually was what had happened. 2008 and early 2009 were really the tail end of about 4-5 years of at times aimless, at times purposeful soul-searching (and job-searching) and reading through the entries I made in this blog over the course of those four months or so, I could actually see myself changing from someone whose perspective I barely recognize now to someone who would clearly become me, now, five or so years later. It was a little haunting, actually, but also fascinating in the sense that my words from the time did such a better job of explaining what it was like for me then than my words now explaining my now-memories of then could ever do.

In fact, it struck me in the process of reading how sort-of amazing it is that I blogged so frequently during the five years of what I like to think of as my "second album" or "sophomore slump" phase. At the time, I did it to keep my sanity in a delicate balance; looking back, though, I also seem to have made an enormously detailed nearly day-to-day chronicle of surviving my mid-twenties. And at this point in my life, that's a really cool artifact to have. In fact, I'd love for Lindsey and any interested friends I've made since that time who didn't know me then to go back through and read what I wrote back then (of course no one would ever do this because it would be hideous boring to them, I'm sure). It's often self-indulgent, but it's also sometimes really insightful and interesting in a way that I'm sad to say I might be too self-conscious to be today, and it shows where I've come from and how far I've come since then while still being, clearly, me. I like the idea of there being a record of that part of my life recorded in the medium that I feel most comfortable expressing myself in. Even as an avid and sometimes even rabid blog user over the years, I've still always been a bit self-deprecating about my blogging and frequently poo-poo'd the idea of blogging in general; however, after this afternoon it strikes me now that if someone happened to be looking back fifty years from now, wondering (for whatever reason) who I was and what I was about, this blog would honestly not be a terrible place to start.

So maybe I'll start blogging more again. Maybe for no other reason than to be able to pull this page up five years into my life in Klamath Falls and laugh at how stupid I sound, not expecting at all to live in a ranch house with three dogs and five kids, or be homeless and half-frozen to death after it turned out that Lindsey was a fucking FemBot all along and was only waiting until I was at my highest before razing the house and all my clothes and my The Captain and Tennille records around me with her eye-lasers.

Or maybe I'll start working on my academic website again tomorrow morning and forget about the blog for another three months. Who knows?

Either way, it's been a fun trip, and still is.

Now, enjoy some footnotes!



*Or "era," if you prefer. I don't.

**This part of the post no longer makes sense, as I've moved all my Phish-posts over to Skyballs and Saxscraper, but I'm leaving it in because typing all this was obviously way easier than using the backspace key.

***Yes, despite constantly applying for long-term jobs in academia for the last two years, I was always just sort of living on the assumption that it would never work out and eventually I'd be forced to give up and embark on a career building beans or slashing pylons or something.

****For some damn reason, Wikipedia lists this album as "hard rock." If any Van Halen album is "hard rock," then let's just all agree to start referring to Katy Perry's second album as "glockenspiel-driven proto-roots-rap," okay?