Oh, the humanities!

Awwww. Idnit cute? It’s her first Modern Language Association Conference. You can tell by the self-important grey suit, the modestly-heeled couture shoes and the faint whiff of vomit about her. She must be on her way to an interview, poor thing.

So I know that there are all these amazing scholars giving presentations all over my hotel right now, but I’m too giddy to possibly listen to what they have to say. In fact, I am here for one reason and one reason only: the MLA happens once a year, and it’s where hundreds of universities interview for tenure-track faculty. Me needs a job!

The interviews are a bit like speed-dating. Each university has a little table in a huge room, and you check in at the front and proceed to your school’s numbered table, then interview right in front of Gayatri Spivak and everybody. The interviews are scheduled in advance, last about half an hour and seem to be largely about the universities communicating to you whether or not you’re about to become a colleague of a bunch of pompous windbags. While it’s far from the end-all be-all of finding a job in Academia, it’s probably the A-number-one most important schlep-fest in the biz.

De rigeur for interviewees this year was the Important-looking Black Bag. I guess I missed the memo on this crucial aspect of interviewing, and found myself wondering what I would put in an Important-looking Black Bag if I had one. My travel companion’s oh-so-savvy boyfriend had supplied her with one in anticipation. Just between you and me, she used it to store her dress shoes so she could trudge through the snowy Chicago streets without dirtying them. I suspect the other folks I saw probably did the same, or else had the good sense to leave in the paper stuffing from the manufacturer so that their Important-looking Black Bags appeared to be overflowing with evidences of their professional and academic superiority, the better to psych out the other candidates.

I’m happy to say I leave my one (modest) interview feeling chuffed. If I got this job it appears I would not be surrounded by douchebags, but instead by young, dynamic people, of whom one at least bears a striking resemblance to Matthew McConaughey {sic}. Except with corduroy patches on his elbows. I’d have to really eff up my campus visit in January to take myself out of the running for this one.

And even if I don’t get that job, the search continues, and meanwhile I got to catch up with some old friends from “el Máster”. Last night I successfully navigated us to my favorite Chicago restaurant, Café Ibérico, where we reconnected over authentic (cheap!) Spanish food and wine. Nothing like old friends and a toothsome dinner to diffuse the unfamiliar, competitive feel of vying for a lousy gig with 1500 colleagues, all of whom you know to be qualified and any one of whom could be your best friend under other circumstances.

kringle-krieg 2007!

So after much rending of hair and gnashing of teeth I submitted a bare-bones version of Chapter 3 last Friday. During the week that has elapsed since, the neighbs and I have been remarkably productive. We cooked and fed ourselves and used up all the groceries before they went bad (which may not sound like a big deal, but think about it), did tons of laundry, assembled a printer desk, shoveled snow, cleaned the apartment, shopped for Christmas, took out ALL the recycling, procured uniforms and worked a catering event, applied for jobs, landed an interview apiece, fixed my car, walked the dog lots, hung curtains, saw I am Legend, then came home and plasticked all the windows to secure the apartment from cold air and/or zombie attack, whichever seemed more imminent, and danced tango.

In addition, I made nine luggage tags (to great effect; I think they liked them, and if they didn't, tough, they STILL got a home-made present), burned a CD and compiled a fakebook, created some ridiculous fuzzy cat magnets and a homemade coupon, finished knitting a scarf, learned a top-secret technique I can't tell you about right now at the risk of Ruining Christmas, started quilting again, picked up my repaired sewing machine and fell in love with it all over again and took on any number of additional projects I will never finish until after Chapter 4.

Meanwhile the neighbs picked up several extra job applications, watched his niece and nephew, pow-wowed extensively with his family, packed for Spain, packed for Spain again, and left me. My tiny apartment feels like the goddamn Silverdome without him in it.

If the luggage tags survive their trip to Spain, I will take a picture of one. Other projects I will likewise photograph and post, but it's back to work for now.

the rooms

Back when he lived across the street, when we sometimes woke up together, the neighbs had the habit of waking up and immediately, before yawning, before stretching or saying good morning or scratching himself or anything, in this very I've-been-awake-for-twelve-plus-hours-already voice, telling me something like "so I had this dream that there were these three bratty teenage girls, and they were being really disobedient, so their dad tied them to the staircase and brought in this motivational speaker in a leotard to give them a talking-to..." First thing in the morning he will remember his dreams with an incredible degree of clarity. It's like nothing I've ever seen before. It doesn't happen every time, but definitely enough for it to be an identifiable trait.

But that's not all. He's also really excellent at my dreams, especially the bad ones. I'll wake up after a bad dream in the middle of the night, and I'll reach for him and say something like, "I dreamt I was being chased by an army of pink gorillas who were trying to pelt me with tiny teacups" and he'll throw a warm, hairy leg over me and, without fully waking up, he'll say "It's okay. It was just a dream. Your mother loves you very much and she isn't upset with you about what you said to her the other day." The uncanny thing is he's almost always spot on.

I was walking down Park Street the other day, past a house I almost moved into right before I found my current place, and I thought about everything that's happened that never would have happened if I had lived there instead of here. My apartment would have been at the back of the house on the third floor. I never would have met a boy dragging a wiggly black puppy down the sidewalk. I never would have met his friends, who would never have become my friends. My life would be radically different as a consequence.

I thought all these things, and this huge black hole started opening up inside me at the notion of how much I owe to the snap decision to take a crappy, mouse-ridden apartment over a different crappy, mouse-ridden apartment. I tried to console myself thinking that what mattered is that I did take this apartment, I did meet that boy and that puppy on that day, I do know his friends, who are in fact now my friends, but nothing seemed to mitigate the gnawing knowledge that but for happenstance, I might currently be living in that sad third floor apartment living out some simulacrum of my current happiness, trying to convince myself it's as good as the real thing that I'd never have known was going on just up the street. Logical fallacies aside, it's a vertiginous line of thinking.

Then I remembered that, the day I met him, I never expected to see him again, and I still did. Maybe not the night that it happened, but eventually, one or the other of us would have mustered the gumption to ask the other to dance. And the world that had started to close in on itself regained its contours. Somehow, knowing that there was a failsafe mechanism in this particular lucky streak was incredibly reassuring.

And now he's here, telling me more of those nutty dreams I love to hear.