Surrogate

In my newfound free time I have been scouring the KC Metro for jobs. I have applied to several in the past two days, all of them office jobs. In the current stage of life, I am qualified to do office work, primarily in the legal and clerical fields. Funny because according to my Federal Student Loan debt, I should be qualified to do a lot of things. Problem is that there are not too many jobs out there which look for experience translating 13th-century Latin documents. The fact that I received several grants to study in the Archivio Generale Dei Carmelitani in Rome makes not one bit of difference in the RW. Sometimes that life seems as if it didn't exist. There are times when the Kansas City phase seems like I embarked on a weird foray into the Witness Protection Program. I pretty much just stopped my life as it was and picked up and moved here and started life completely over. Of course I carried some weight with me, but that too has now been shed. The only thing holding me to the academic world is now a huge student loan debt and some very subdued longings for the academy. To be perfectly honest, I don't miss academia. I miss the lifestyle and the intellectual atmosphere in which one is necessarily immersed. But academics are the whiniest, most pretentious, and self-involved bitches on the planet. That's not to say they're not nice people... but not very many people in this world actually care whether you're a social, economic, or intellectual historian; or whether you attribute the rise in the power of the Franciscans to the Papacy or the masses and whether or not this can be directly correlated to the popularity of the Cathars. (If you know what I'm talking about, you'll know the correct answer to that query.) The minutia in which Historians involve themselves borders on insanity, each of them looking to be that one footnote in that one great book, usually that someone else will eventually write.

So, what now comes? I don't know. I know that one cannot look backwards for too long, or one will get a crimp in one's neck. Much better to glance back and make sure the traffic's clear and fix your eyes back on the road ahead. And if you're skills are decent, you won't press the brake once while passing the minivan full of Mexicans who for some reason are driving 35mph on the Interstate.

I know that up until very recently I would be handling this whole thing very differently. And I know that there is someone in my life who has made it possible to do so with some sense of dignity and hope. So....we carry on.