Fireside chats

When I was a grad student, I TA'd for a professor, now a friend, who liked to say, "The best thing about semesters is that they end." He had the right demeanor to pretend he meant it cynically, but I heard him weave it unto an undergrad lecture once and know he had a whole Benjaminian kind of thing going on (that and he is more earnest than he let on). Semesters are great like stories are great like novels are great like movies are great: they have a beginning, a middle, and an end and in giving us a narrative to inhabit from start to finish, they give us the sense of experiencing the only thing we all really want to know about but can't: how the/our story ends. "What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about."


So you can see where I'm going with this: closing down Bitch PhD is like dying.

Not that. But it is something I'm trying to feel satisfied about, something I want to let be an ending in the best narrative sense of the world. This blog was an important part of a narrative for me. It was the first blog I ever paid real serious attention to. It informed so very many of my opinions while I was a grad student. On things like this and this and this, just to name a few. It was through this blog that I met my first ever internet people in real life. And hey, remember when we did this? Ah, the times.

This blog was important to me long before I wrote on it and B's voice was probably the first feminist voice in my adult life that really resonated with my concerns, my glibness, my anxieties, my ambitions. I am sure the story is the same for a lot of you. And a lot of you!! You've been so great to me since I have been writing here, making me feel so sure that my stories were interesting, funny, and really worth all the space they get in my head. And that my recipes are sometimes good. And the lovely fellow bloggers, with their complicated lives and fierce commitments and sharp brains and short short tempers with trolls.

It's a love fest, the whole thing.

And now everyone gets a chance to put, if not a period, perhaps a semicolon or maybe even a comma on the story [Confidential to my students: the latter two of which continue to NOT be able to be used interchangeably]. Which is a comforting luxury, in its own way.

I doubt I will blog again somewhere else. Clearly, my momentum of late has petered. Moving, new job, family back together, 5 yr old, 30 Rock, it all takes a lot out of me. I got to do the thing I never imagined would happen: I found a tenure track job in my field in the town where I have the most friends and where my husband's career is solidly planted, where we can afford a house and like the school district and the weather and the restaurants. I am not sure that the academic blog world needs my story, that anyone is really served by having this story told. It's happy making, which is a service, but you know what I mean.

It would, in some ways, be good for me to be writing about the job. There are a lot - and y'all, I mean a lot - of things about this institution and the the way the place works that make for SERIOUS blog content. But for a variety of reasons I feel that it's likely I would be un-anonymized by someone there, sooner or later, if I blogged regularly, and for a variety of reasons I feel like I would likely get fired if I were found out while doing a lot of unsavory blogging. It's just not a good idea. And neither is glib happy blogging.

So for now, my blog story ends with what is probably a period. The Vane family is back under one roof, LV is happily-ish ensconced in a new school where she is not being secretly taught about Jesus. Instead she is mixing up other traditions and came home a few weeks ago announcing that on Eid, a person gets to stay home and eat apples and honey all day. She is planning a vampire faerie costume for Halloween. I am reading wikipedia articles on chemotherapy (seriously) and visualizing clumps of hair on my beautiful wood floors in an attempt to psych myself up for the Next Great Smoking Cessation, to begin when the weather gets genuinely cold. I am comfortably in the midterm mode of my teaching performance and my students seem so far to respond in the ways I expect them to; they like me, for the most part. Mr. V and I are remembering how to share parenting during the weekdays; the inevitable quibbling that results is nothing in comparison to the luxury of having someone else to pack lunch and do end of day pick up. The CAT has settled on her favorite sun spots on the back porch and the front porch. She never kills songbirds, despite all that you readers gave me to look forward to. I miss football this season, but I can't root for Ben. I made amazing manicotti last weekend. And sweet potato pie with vanilla whipped cream. And the bakery down the street sells amazing baguettes.

You can imagine the tedium that kind of material would produce, as far as posts go.

Thanks so much for talking so much with me. Thanks to Delia, to Silvana, to Taddy, for being allies and for being so goddamned smart. Thanks to B for hosting for such a long time. If I make my way back somewhere, you'll be the first to know (so I should get your numbers. So we can text. Or something).

ETA: Also, I forgot to note that I do wonder if B is really shutting down the place because I did that fucked up thing where I made the comments go backwards-wise and I never figured out how to fix it and everyone just hella hates it still. My bad, y'all. I broke the place.