Press Pause
The little good things:
- hanging with various friends (and even spotting hometown favorite VIP John Grisham one night at what I think has become one of my favorite restaurants)
- springtime and longer daylight and all that blooms; time with family
- starting this year's gardening projects
- saturday mornings at the city farmers market
- my upcoming doctoral hooding ceremony (although it's been 9 months since I graduated, it will still be special and it will also bring closure to that chapter of my life)
- hearing my rheumatologist say i can *eventually* try a lower dose on one my meds AND giving the green light to discontinue another drug i'd been on since 2002
- I love what I'm doing at work as a post-doc researcher
The no-good things:
- rejection hurts, even when you were one of 200-300 applicants for a job in a tight economy
- rejection also hurts when it's "rejection" but instead news that a position search you applied for has been suspended because due to lack of funding/budget cuts
- the economy
- the job market (see above). only three people i know who are currently finishing their Ph.D.'s (or who finished last year) have found positions for next year (though in different specialty fields than mine); the rest hold their breaths and wait and then maybe wonder why they didn't go into medicine/allied health careers (i.e., nursing) b/c unlike any other industry, healthcare is more immune
- rejection also hurts when your application for individual health insurance has been rejected, forcing you to have to look at the more expensive guarantee-issue or HIPAA-eligible plans which you only hope you'll need for a handful of months after your post-doc ends, assuming you land on a job with full health benefits reasonably soon. (That particular rejection also angers you because of the ridiculousness of it all when you realize that indeed, despite how you are pretty healthy, all things considered, (despite a couple of mild, non-life-threatening glitches/inconveniences), they rejected you the way they would for someone with something serious like cancer or heart disease or diabetes....and it also is outrageous in the rejection letter that not only do they outline your rheumatologic woes. even w/o the arthritic issues, they counted inconsequential, non-chronic things against you like seasonal allergies or something that resolved with a one-week round of antibiotics
- it sucks holding your breath as you wait to learn more about the resulting decisions from budget talks among invisible people who are higher up at your university, which will decide whether you will be hired on for another year as a post-doc, or if your position will become long-term/"permanent" or if the funding has dried up
- (the above uncertainty) is even harder when your immediate boss (post-doc mentor/supervisor) has stated a definite desire to keep you and yet she is powerless in that decision which rests with some unknown administrative budget gods who want to "trim the economic fat" off of pretty much any program
- not knowing where I'll be and being able to plan ahead about lease renewal even though it is May and housing lease goes through July
- worrying about other every day, personal things in life.
I had a mini meltdown a few days ago, worrying about the job market and all the uncertainty and all of the above. Two straws tipped me over into the mini meltdown: 1) watching the movie "Inside Job", which you should see if you haven't, even if you're disgusted with the economy and basically know why the economy is as bad as it is. Just be prepared to be angry about all of the greedy people in the financial sector. You will never look at an Ivy League economics professor the same way again (if you didn't already know the dirty secrets about how the financial sector and its greed has corrupted academia). You will be disgusted at those greedy mortgage companies and all of the subprime lending that went on prior to the economy going South. 2) The rejection letter from a certain health insurance company that starts with the letter "A", and ends with an "A", and who also happens to be my current group policy provider (the policy which will expire as my post-doc ends). I thought to myself that given how mild my health imperfections are compared to all of the awful things that exist in the medical world (even if inconvenient and sometimes uncomfortable), it's possible that in a better economy I wouldn't have been so handily rejected but in this economic climate, the insurance money basically views anyone who has seen a doctor for more than a well-check physical or for the common cold, as a customer who will cost the company money.
Repeat after me: "2014".
I do feel more even-keeled than this update might have one think, on a day-to-day level. It's just hard to hold one's breath and wait and wait and wait on many different fronts, and not be able to even make long-term plans, like a beach trip to, say, the NC Outer Banks this summer, or any other summer trips....all because of questions about jobs and whether or not I have to move this summer.
Meanwhile, I suppose if no academic/research jobs work out, maybe you'll see me later this year working at your local Barnes & Noble (book/coffee discount and it pays the bills), a clothing shop (up-to-date clothing and it pays the bills), or the new huge Whole Foods opening near me in June (discounts on food that otherwise costs well, "whole paychecks" ha!).
