The View From Kalamazoo

Great piece on the Invisible Adjunct at The Chronicle. Between reading it, thinking back on my year reading IA, and yesterday’s post on the piece in the Village Voice I can’t help but feel resigned to failure.

I have to request deferment from the fine folks at KY in the hopes that funding might be available next year, but worse than the prospect of waiting another year (or waiting that year, finding there is still no funding, and then having to figure out what miracles, always in short supply, I can produce on my own) is the thought of all of this waiting (and debt. oh Lord the debt) and time and work – and following it with 5-7 years of hell blissful academic exercises to find there is no place for me and I must go back to the same sort of clerical gig I have here. Only it will likely be worse, since this is about as close to working within the field as one can get as a mere file jockey and I can enjoy, at least, the vague ambience of academia…write papers, all that jazz.

Or maybe it’s the stress and lack of sleep due to my impending doom the upcoming Congress talking.

Honestly, I suppose I should hang up the very notion were I not so physically pained that friends I have got into schools with funding and are off…and I’m not. Is the visceral response to my situation in the face of their well-earned successes a sign that I should heed? Is there more dignity in failure to be told ‘You’re able, there’s just no place for you here’ than ‘You’re not able’? I know the employment situation is bleak, but I still have to wonder if these sorts of warnings I’ve spoken of before of the former aren’t the polite way to communicate the latter. Maybe I see myself in the plight of the Invisible Adjunct…

But on to snails, as promised. Attack of the giant snails! Really! EW!