wordinista | (no subject)

Fnarr.

Why am I in such a bad mood today?

Okay, headache aside...
And ignoring the fact that Bronte vomited four times during the round-trip to the vet's office...
Add to that a whole lot of internal frustration and self-directed anger... (Wangsty stuff, trust me -- desire for tea-shop means having to live in this area longer than I want, but given my lack of success in getting into a PhD program, professional choices feel like they're getting further and further away from me.)
Skipping over the revelation that, thanks to recent gas prices, we may not be able to go to DC at the end of September...
Our automatic once-every-three-months domain payment hit us at the worst possible moment...
And I'm cleaning the house.

*sigh*

...I suspect, also, that there's PMS'ness going on here, too.

But at least I haven't been getting any angry emails. Most everyone who's written me has said they understand my reasons, and while they're sad to see it go, they agree it's not the same site it used to be. I do suspect that I'm not getting any letters full of righteous indignation because (a) hardly anyone read the admin email I sent, and (b) a majority of people who visit the site skip over the front page entirely, going straight to the forums. So... yeah. October 27 is going to be an interesting day.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Yeah -- it really was meant to be one thing, and sort of turned into another, and for a while it was really cool, but then I realized that few of the conversations interested me, and the forum that got the most action was "Plagiarism Watchtower," and, you know, that's just not cool. It had turned into... just about every other forum out there.

That said, I do like having something to tend to, so there may well be "something else" in the future. Teh boi has a few ideas, and I daresay they're not bad ideas. And we'll have a dedicated server, so that nixes the cost of having a host.

As for the PhD thing... the sad thing is, I don't even know WHY I want one anymore. Just that I want one. Once I realized the heavy emphasis on publishing in the university world, I got turned off of university teaching. I prefer to interact with the students and exchange ideas that way. The push for scholarship and research... kind of annoys me, because it's like the universities are losing sight of why they're there in the first place. I could probably get a pretty sweet position at a high-end prep school with a PhD, but ... I don't know.

Speaking of high-end prep schools, I'm sending out another huge batch of CV's to a slew of schools in the Mid-Atlantic area. So we'll see if anything comes of that. Most schools don't even think about hiring until Feb or March, but at least this way I'll feel like I'm DOING something. I may even look for non-academic jobs in the DC area. (I was in DC for grad school and have been looking for opportunities to go back.)

Yeah, in general I say that if you want to go through with a PhD, it should be for you (on a personal level) or because you have a real plan to use it, and never because it's the thing to do or the thing to have to make you look smart or better. I know a few folks who wanted to get an MA for the latter reason, and it bugged me to no end.

I enjoyed teaching for 3 years at the college I work for, which was a junior/vo-tech college at the time (and we still are given the mindset of this place). You're right though; at a real college or university, it's sadly the case that there's more importance place on publishing and notoriety than anything else. To that end, I said "No thanks." But, that's just me. I don't want to end up hating the study of religion, if you know what I mean.