Jojo dancer, your life is calling...
Feb. 9th, 2002 10:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sanpaku_backupWent to Greek Corner for dinner tonight and then to the Cambridge mall in search of a good MST3K for Valentine's Day. (Yes, we are weirdos.) Wanted to find The Sidehackers, but had to settle for The Wild World of Batwoman, which I only saw once and didn't think was one of their best... but there are so many great ones that are not out on video for some reason.
To cap it off, saw The Girl in Gold Boots, the non-MST3K version, out on DVD for 20 bucks! With "commentary by director Ted V. Mikels." Whoa. There's a line between bad taste as irony and bad taste as, well, your taste. But Mrs. Sanpaku was tempted just because you always wonder how such films really get made. You wonder, how did Ted hit on that pro-Vietnam message in the middle of this movie about oily people? And how did he manage the transition to snuff films? Actually, you don't really wonder that.
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So, yah, the future. Tomorrow I take the Acela Express (yay! never been on before) to Jersey where this high school is interviewing me for a 2-year fellowship dealie, teaching AP classes for a couple of years or something... I have very mixed feelings. On the one hand, it might look like a good place, and I would finally have some stability in my life, and it could be a great way to become a better teacher and feel like I was doing something of worth in the world yada yada yada.
On the other, it is very difficult to be hired back to teach at the college level once you have done the high school thing. It's this taint that goes back to the days when all the profs wore tweed and all the grad students actually found jobs, and it sucks, but I can't change that. And I still do not think I want to do high school for the rest of my life, though by now it almost seems like it's my fate or something. I still like my research too much, at least in the milliseconds I get to work on it. And this feels bad to say, but yeah, the pay is relatively bad, exactly half of what I'm making now, and we have been broke for so long and now we are finally in a position where maybe in my current situation we could climb out of the hole...
But I have this terrible feeling that I will like the place and it will seem really nice and I'll remember how teaching HS has given me just about my only feeling of satisfaction as a teacher... jeez.
Also had a phone interview with a Penn State campus not far from Pittsburgh. It was weird and forced -- they had like 8 people there, none of whom knew anything about history, and after I would give this long megillah of an answer they would say "thank you," with no followup. So it was hard to know if I came off as a prick. You need to toot your own horn while not sounding like Dr. Research University Bigshot or something. But I would really like to be offered that job, so it was not hard to be pretty enthusiastic for it, which they (supposedly) like. It would be nice to be close to home. However I feel like this is one of those things that I want so much that I will not get it.
Well, 2 interviews out of 40-odd applications this year... is not so great, but it is better than nothin'. At any rate, one bonus of being so busy right now is that I have very little time to mope about direction in life and being 30 and all that pointless stuff. And I am really, really looking forward to the train.
To cap it off, saw The Girl in Gold Boots, the non-MST3K version, out on DVD for 20 bucks! With "commentary by director Ted V. Mikels." Whoa. There's a line between bad taste as irony and bad taste as, well, your taste. But Mrs. Sanpaku was tempted just because you always wonder how such films really get made. You wonder, how did Ted hit on that pro-Vietnam message in the middle of this movie about oily people? And how did he manage the transition to snuff films? Actually, you don't really wonder that.
***************************************************
So, yah, the future. Tomorrow I take the Acela Express (yay! never been on before) to Jersey where this high school is interviewing me for a 2-year fellowship dealie, teaching AP classes for a couple of years or something... I have very mixed feelings. On the one hand, it might look like a good place, and I would finally have some stability in my life, and it could be a great way to become a better teacher and feel like I was doing something of worth in the world yada yada yada.
On the other, it is very difficult to be hired back to teach at the college level once you have done the high school thing. It's this taint that goes back to the days when all the profs wore tweed and all the grad students actually found jobs, and it sucks, but I can't change that. And I still do not think I want to do high school for the rest of my life, though by now it almost seems like it's my fate or something. I still like my research too much, at least in the milliseconds I get to work on it. And this feels bad to say, but yeah, the pay is relatively bad, exactly half of what I'm making now, and we have been broke for so long and now we are finally in a position where maybe in my current situation we could climb out of the hole...
But I have this terrible feeling that I will like the place and it will seem really nice and I'll remember how teaching HS has given me just about my only feeling of satisfaction as a teacher... jeez.
Also had a phone interview with a Penn State campus not far from Pittsburgh. It was weird and forced -- they had like 8 people there, none of whom knew anything about history, and after I would give this long megillah of an answer they would say "thank you," with no followup. So it was hard to know if I came off as a prick. You need to toot your own horn while not sounding like Dr. Research University Bigshot or something. But I would really like to be offered that job, so it was not hard to be pretty enthusiastic for it, which they (supposedly) like. It would be nice to be close to home. However I feel like this is one of those things that I want so much that I will not get it.
Well, 2 interviews out of 40-odd applications this year... is not so great, but it is better than nothin'. At any rate, one bonus of being so busy right now is that I have very little time to mope about direction in life and being 30 and all that pointless stuff. And I am really, really looking forward to the train.
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no subject
Date: 2002-02-09 09:25 pm (UTC)Re:
Date: 2002-02-09 09:31 pm (UTC)Looking around at your site, actually. I can appreciate the feeling of being prevented from enjoying life by noticing errors in newspapers and magazines. (What I used to refer to in my old job as "QCing" everything.)
Also liked your piece on surly Mr. Searle (though it has been about 10 years since I read his book). In theory a lot of my academic work is about metaphor etc. So sometime when I am not writing on six hours of sleep I think I will look around a bit more.
no subject
Date: 2002-02-09 09:39 pm (UTC)What kind of work have you done on metaphor? Interesting.
I've added you as a friend, which means you are now privy to all my recent whining. Lucky you! I'm not usually that whiny, though.
Re:
Date: 2002-02-09 09:49 pm (UTC)On metaphor, hm, well... it's nothing theoretical, though I worked for a while under a historian (JoAnne Brown) who wrote about disease and race as linked metaphors at the turn of the century. My diss. did a lot of stuff with language and the depiction of Jews in turn-of-the-century America as modern representatives of the ancient past by their link to the Hebrew language and the Bible. So there were some nifty metaphorical shifts there as well as comparisons to contemporary "others." But my brain is not functioning well enough to make sense about it right now.
I'll put you on as a friend too. I whine plenty, so don't worry about it!
uh-oh (Did I use that right?)
Date: 2002-02-12 05:29 am (UTC)I, for my part, am a grammatical descriptivist, and will use words and phrases such as "well-whuddayewno". I think it is different from "Well, what do you know?". I believe there is a place for mind-numbing conformity to specific rules. I believe there should be two separate languages or something. What to do?
Re: uh-oh (Did I use that right?)
Date: 2002-02-12 10:29 am (UTC)You know that I write in conversational language all the time. It's just that sloppy writing often gets in the way of what you mean to say. Maybe it is kind of a fence for the cognoscenti to select themselves. Whatever. The point is, once you get used to seeing it, you can't stop. And now it is my job, after all.
Em-dash: Often used to set off a parenthetical remark or a piece of evidence. "You were going downtown -- to see that movie."
En-dash: Slightly longer than a hyphen, used between numbers (1945-1965) or compound adjectives (pre-Civil War America). You would not think that this existed if you didn't look pretty carefully at book type -- it's so easy to confuse with a hyphen.
Both em- and en-dashes are standard on computer word processing programs. The Mac makes it particularly easy. As a copyeditor, I can say that the en-dash is usually added by the printer, so I don't have to worry about them. On the other hand, putting the right amount of space before and after an em-dash, and making sure it is correctly format, is one of the banes of my existence.