Leaving My City

One of these days,
I will learn that everything ends.
I will learn it before I begin,
tentative and shy,
hesitant and unsure of my place and role
in this new endeavor,
my next grand adventure.

I will learn my lesson before I begin
and save myself trepidation and heart ache
because I will know that this too will end.

Every life that is born,
every flower that that blooms,
every summer that blossoms and burgeons
green and lush around me,
every friendship I form,
every city that spreads herself out before me,
calling me to explore her details,
beckoning me to call her home,
will fade and fall from my grasp.
I cannot be constant.

My job will change,
as certainly as the seasons will.
I will take every tantalizing secret
I have teased out of my new home away with me,
only to forget her,
never to revisit,
never to know when she has changed her ways.

No matter the promises I make
or what I say,
no matter how much I declare and demand that this time,
this one time,
this will be a working relationship only,
I will love her.

Then, with the certainty of the oceans
that the tide will recede,
the day will come,
when I walk away,
when I do not turn back for one last glance,
but linger, lovingly in her alleys,
–even in the by ways that once caused me pain–
one last languid look of a lovers eyes
pass over the paving stones
and plaster facades
that took me so long to appreciate.

I step off the platform.
I wait for the train to depart.

Rejection

Do you know that general feeling of tension and malaise you get when you are in the middle of a job hunt? The reluctance to check your e-mail because there may not be any news of the job hunt, or worse, that there is a letter. The pit in the bottom of your stomach when an e-mails pops into your mailbox with a job title in the subject line. The unease with which you open it, bracing yourself for rejection. After all, you applied to dozens of positions, and realistically only expect to get a few offers. The inevitable feeling of worthlessness that washes over you, however briefly, when you see yet another rejection. The process of trying to talk yourself out of the conviction that the rejection is a judgement of you as a person, even though rationally you know it is nothing of the sort.

Yeah, that feeling. The one that comes from repeated rejection.

I've been looking for housing in Small City. I have been sending out dozens of e-mails to ads for rooms. Since I am still spending most of my time in His Town, I do not contact at housing agent in Small City. I am mostly working off with people who have listed places independently. And I get .... nothing. Or at least very little.

Most people do not respond to my e-mails at all. Those that do, respond with a polite but curt statement of non-interest. I have almost always gotten housing from newspaper ads (before Craig's List), word or mouth or Craig's List in my many houses in my undergrad, grad and post doc years. I have never been in a situation where my e-mails have gone almost completely unanswered. I have always managed to find several people interested in showing me their properties.

Perhaps I am transplanting my American reliance on Craig's List for all my housing and second hand needs into a culture that is not used to working outside housing agents. Perhaps I am giving off some sort of odd but subtle negative signal in the way I am approaching prospective landlords. Perhaps my situation is a bit out of the ordinary, and that makes people hesitant to answer. Whatever the reason, I start feeling the way about housing that I feel about rejection letters for jobs. I start wondering if there is something wrong with my mail server.

Then my partner points out my name. I have visions of potential housemates not wishing to live with a fresh off the boat academic from a third world country who speaks English with a heavy accent and has who knows what strange habits. They are not very nice visions. They focus an ugly side of my countrymen that a part of me likes to believe does not exist. They remind me of how poorly some of my fellow fresh off the boat graduate students were treated in my country. They remind me of how rudely a black friend of mine was treated at a diner I normally loved, the time I sent her in to pick up the order while I sat in the car.

We dipped into the bags for hot salty fries on the drive home, talking about how the worst part about experiences like these are the seeds of doubt they plant in one's head. Was the waitress just having a bad day? And the cook? On the same day? It could happen. It is not impossible.

Am I just doing something subtly culturally wrong? I am a gregarious American living in a staid European society. It is not impossible to believe.

The problem with cases of discrimination like this is that it is impossible to tell. But the seeds have been planted. The damage has been done.

Indecision

We went to Large City last weekend. It was nice. It reminded me of other large cities I've lived in in the US. We dreamed of having brunch at the out door cafes, and ordering food in from a myriad of restaurants with decent takeaway on most blocks. We walked down streets where a quarter of the people looked like me, and less than half the people looked like my partner. I did not hear as many different languages as I did in New York City, but not every place can be NYC. All the same, it made me homesick in a pleasant way.

Everyone tells me that it is too expensive to live in Large City. People have many suggestions for nice neighborhoods that are further out, where I could afford a house with a lawn. I have a hard time believing the economical hardship argument, given the traditional economic class of the neighborhood that I have my heart set on, but I find myself unable to respond truthfully. Instead, I offer excuses about not wanting to add time to either of our 90 minute commutes, or being willing to pay a premium for putting Epsilon in a neighborhood where our minority language is spoken. I do anything to avoid stating that I want to live someplace in the world where people look like me, and speak my language. I am ashamed of appearing to want to ghettoize myself in front of my friends. I have spent too much effort in my life trying to appear white. And I am ashamed of my shame.

Two days later, I visit University G. The Georgian architecture, and old Gothic arches call to me. As I leave for home, I stop by a lettings office to see price ranges of houses in Small City, near the university. I can get more house for my money there. And the location is nicer. Small City has its own set of undeniable charms. Not commuting 90 minutes into work several days a week has its own advantages. Small City is dominated by the university. There are churches, and cafes and book groups and everything I could want if I wanted to pretend I was back in the states, living in a college dominated city, with people whose lives looked enough like mine, that society says I belong there. I could fall in love with the trappings of that city. I could spend days exploring its tourist attractions, and drink the cultural offerings it lays before my feet. I could lose myself in the aura, the myth of the place, wandering the halls of the original ivory tower, entranced by the glitter in a way I have not been since I first came to college.

And I would learn nothing of life. Then I would uproot my family after my position ended.

At the end of the day, to continue the parallel between cities and lovers, I must admit that I have a crush on both Large City and Small City. One is good for me, but a harder relationship to stomach. She offers me a chance at building the life I have always dreamed of, even if it is not the life that some peers or my parents would want me to have. She offers me a chance of making friendships that will not be torn apart next time I change jobs. The other is full glamour. Delicious, enticing, scintillating, but temporary. She would make a good mistress. In my younger days, she would make for a delightful affair. I have a family and a child. At some point, I must admit that my time for flings is over.

Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?

I disappeared several months ago, it would seem. The stress of living apart for most of the spring term got to be too much on myself and my family, and I stopped writing, at least publicly. So what have I done these last few months?

Hide it in a hiding place where no one ever goes
Put it in the pantry with your cupcakes.

I started writing privately, my partner and I took a series of steps that felt logical at the time, but have had deep repercussions on our relationship now, we both became a little lonelier, I finished my term in University F, Epsilon is supremely happy to have me living at home with him.

It's a little secret, just the Robinson's affair
Most of all you hide it from the kids.

One of the problem with four year olds is that they are very good at reading their parents. They have little else to do. So when one or both of us start acting strangely, he notices. Not that we believe in hiding anything from our child, that feels too much like lying. Just pointing out that it is not as easy to do as our parents possibly made it seem. Perhaps it becomes easier when the child is older, and less of his life revolves around our facial expressions.

Look around you, all you see are sympathetic eyes

Moving back to His Town, my partner and I have both realized how isolated we are. Living apart for extended periods has always had a toll on our relationship. It is hard to recalibrate with each other, especially when one or both of us are suffering from a bout of depression induced by the associated stresses.

It is not that we do not have friends. We have friends scattered across three continents. Some of them even respond to e-mails. Most of them, we manage to keep in touch with.  I know at one point, I had developed a community at this blog.  And then the D word got in the way, and I fell silent. I have no idea how much of that community I still have. If you have followed me for a while and are still reading this, let me know. I am curious.

I still find the community building aspect of blogs mystifying. A blog is a very intense view on one or two aspects of a writer's life, more personal, sometimes, than the casual reader has any right to know; personal enough that many posts that have generated encouraging comments from readers, when sent to certain friends, dumbfound with the intense nature of the communication. Perhaps I need better friends. Perhaps, like Aadam Aziz, in Midnight's Children, it is easier to deal with a person piecemeal, through a round hole cut in a white sheet.

Whatever the case may be, I think I need to stop writing without an audience. So I return to this forum. What will be different? The visual format is, for a start. At least at first, the next few entries will be a bit raw. A lot has happened these past few months that needs airing. Some of it academic. Some of it not. Nothing salacious. I will still attempt to keep this from being a diary. In the short term, there will be more poetry. I may eventually introduce a few pieces of prose fiction, though with a clear warning. I suspect this space will become less about academia, and more about gender and emmigration, but that is pure speculation at this point.

Decisions

Last week we made a sad decisions.

We are not moving to Large City this summer. Our original hope was that we would move to Large City, and both my partner and I would have a long commute to work, and that we would alternate days of going into work, while finding a daycare near the new house so that Epsilon did not have to undertake a long commute every day. For scheduling reasons, this does not seem possible. So we'll continue our two household existence. Which is too bad.

But there's a silver lining. Thanks to Epsilon's obsession with Rapunzel, we now need a new cast iron pot.

Thank you Tangled.

Actually, there's a few other things we could buy as well, but it didn't seem worth buying if we are just going to have to wrap and haul the heavy metal objects across town in 6 months. So now I get to drool over kitchen accessories.

I'm a bit of a traditionalist when it comes to cast iron pans, so though Le Creuset has lots of colors and shapes, this is still my favorite, though a bit small. 

The pan that has served as our wok for the last 9 years is finally begging for retirement. It was a wonderful find from a second hand store during our first years in grad school. My mother has a large round bottomed brass pot that I still would love to inherit some day, but a cast iron wok would serve the same purpose. It would also have the additional advantage of being non-stick without the annoyance of the Teflon flaking off.

William and Sonoma have a nice set of traditional, seasoned, non-enameled pots, but the skillets are small. 

Lodge Logic, on the other hand, has a 17 inch skillet which is well worth my drool.

Decisions, decisions.

Things that make me happy: Science for pre-schoolers

One of my neighbors from First Postdoc City, who I've been trying to keep in touch with, started talking to me about her difficulties answering her daughter's sciency "why" questions. I felt like door
opened in our relationship. Epsilon loves this 4 year old, he still talks about her. But living on different continents, it is hard to keep a strong connection with adults. It is manyfold harder with
children.

Along with the explanations to the family's questions, I've sent links to sciency projects that might be interesting to young children, like Radio Lab (which has its own problems if you are a scientist, but does a decent job of popularizing it), and NASA's photo of the day arxiv (Thanks Alyssa). Dear readers, do you have favorite popular science sites that you love, and would like to share?

Little things: Techincal difficulties

I was having a conversation about my brother earlier this week. My commute schedule, where I'm in My City from Tuesday to Friday, and in His Town Saturday-Monday came up.

"Oh, a four day week. Nice."

Well not really, I almost said. But my brother is in a lab science, so it is really hard for him to take work with him while travelling regularly. Then I almost said, actually, it's been more like a 1 day week: Monday. The paperwork involved to get things set up here has been overwhelming, as it is whenever changing countries. It was late Thursday morning when I finally got my computer set up enough, and all the governmental/HR bureaucratic duties out of the way enough to sit down to work. Except....

I find out Thursday afternoon about more paperwork I need to wait in line for an hour to fill out, and that I probably want to change my bank account. I still can't get my laptop to interface with the campus network properly, which isn't necessary for work, just useful. Then I find out this afternoon that for some reason, my webcam won't work on the office computer - which runs the same build of Ubuntu that my laptop does, where it works. I try fiddling around, crash Ubuntu (talented, aren't I?), restart the computer, and now it won't let me log in.

Yes, I retreat to my apartment where I have working internet and a working webcam so I can skype with Epsilon tonight (and write this post), and add a long list of things that need to happen next week, which is going to be a short week in My City due to conference schedules. GRAH!

Falling in love

University F feels like a real city, or at least the area around University F does. Walking down the streets to various meetings with HR and banks and IT and whatnot, I pass small boutique shops, bars and restaurants with outdoor seating, used bookstores at the "garden" level with bikeshops and musical instrument shops above them. There's a group of women walking in front of me exchanging stories and laughing as they return from their lunch break. Its been a long time since I've been able to wander streets like this freely. I've missed it. I think I've developed a crush on this city.

Getting 12 hours of sleep last night, along with blackout curtains and a beautiful sunny morning hasn't hurt, of course. Nor has the fact that my office has floor to ceiling east facing windows. It's clouded over now, but I still find a part of me wishing that I could stay and explore this city, language barrier be damned, and get to know it.

Then again, I fall in love with cities with the same bad habits of a chain monogamist. I have a completely irrational need to love where I live, to feel like I belong there. Up until arriving here, I was determined not to love where I live, not to learn the language, not to enjoy any aspect of my stay here except my work. Now, I find myself looking for running trails near campus, and making note places that look interesting to go for dinner, and checking out book stores to see if they have an interesting English language collection, wondering if I should invest in language learning tools.

I shouldn't I know. These are bad habits that will only lead to heartbreak when it is time to leave. It seems these are bad habits I cannot be happy without. I can always hope that my city crush will keep the misery of leaving my partner and Epsilon every week at bay for a while.

Mover's basket

How do you tell, as a cashier, that someone is moving into a new house?

Okay, unfair question. But the probability that a person checking out from a drug store is stepping off a plane and moving into a new house increases with the number of these items found in their cart:

Soap
Toothpaste
Shampoo
Dishwashing solution
Toilet Cleaner
Toilet Brush
Laundry Detergent
Sponges
Garbage bags
Toilet paper
Paper towels


Bonus points if a) the customer doesn't speak the local language well b) is putting things away in a university tote bag.

I've gone through this routine so many times now that I seem to walk through drug stores with this checklist in mind. But at least I'm moved in.

How to have a clean kitchen upon moving in: 5 easy steps

1. Open the first box in the kitchen to find a glass Pepsi bottle you have never before seen in your life.
2. Look a the bottle with confusion and put on the counter.
3. Continue unpacking.
4. Reach over to put something else away, knocking the bottle onto the stone floor, where it shatters, including into glass dust in the grout at the point of impact.
5. Mop. Repeat as necessary.

All of the boxes are unpacked and it only remains to find homes for those occaisionally used small objects where it is unclear whether they are really important, or trash.

Moving Day 1

The truck with our stuff is supposed to arrive today. We have the front door keys. I sent my proofs of last night. I'm getting the lease agreement for my place near University F on Monday. (More expensive than I'd like, but through the university, so I don't have to deal with outside landlords, which will be nice.)

Things are looking a lot better today than they did at the beginning of the week.

Keyless

A friend of mine once said that he hated having too many keys on his keyring. Each key represented a responsibility to him. He couldn't drop them and go travelling whenever the urge took him.

I was 19 and the idea of travelling was appealing. Three years later, when I graduated from college and changed continents for the first time, I found myself keyless for several month. I flipped out. For me, it would seem, a house key represents stability and community.


I am currently in the middle of my fourth transcontinental move, and my unease at not having house keys has only diminished a little. This is not an unusual situation for academics, and PLS and Dr. Becca have talked about their feelings on this recently.

I'm trying to put a positive spin on things right now, so I won't focus on the fact that I miss hanging out with Epsilon's friends' parents, or the problem of being science lonely, or the difficulty meeting people without a cohort of gradstudents.

Our last major move (to First Postdoc Town) was when Epsilon was -.25 years old. As my partner pointed out, it is a lot easier to meet neighbors with a 2.75 year old than with a -.25 year old.

My partner's department has a lot more people with kids Epsilon's age than my postdoc department did. This means there is a real chance of making friends with people with whom we share more in common than our kids.

One of my partner's colleagues is a friend of his from grad school. He has been in this department for longer, and is a very social person. He's taken it upon himself to drag my partner out to meet people. As a result, we have a bit of a social network set up near University E already.

When I move to University F, while I'll have linguistic difficulties in meeting people outside the department, I've heard rumors that it is a very friendly and social department. This means that there is some hope that I can knock on office neighbors' doors and grab people for lunch. If the main social activity for the department is drinks/dinner after speakers, Epsilon's sunrise wakeups won't keep me from attending.

Its a plan. Not a great one, but a plan. A friend of mine wrote me when I was complaining about this move

Moving only sucks for a few weeks! You've had an amazing adventure with your family that most people in the world would never be able to have!!

She dreams of picking up her family and going backpacking through Europe. I dream of PTA meetings and watching Epsilon's friends grow up. She's right of course, about the adventure and the privileged position we are in. I'll feel better once I have two sets of house keys in my hand.

Glitches

Lesson 1: Never make a job decision based on which routes low fare airlines fly.

When my partner had a job in Chicago, I commuted back and forth during fall and spring term. Fall term, there was an direct flight from a near by airport at a good time. By spring term, that had disappeared, and I had to go a bit further to a larger airport to make the commute work. This is part of the reason why it was a 10+ hours door to door commute twice a week for me. You'd think I'd learn. When I accepted my post doc at University F, there were several direct flights a day from the local airport to an airport an hour away from University E. All told, it would take me 4.5 hours each way. Not great, but it could be worse. Those flights don't exist any more. Now I can either fly at odd times from a different small airport an hour away by train, or I can land at a major airport 2.5 hours and a couple transit changes away. Not cool.

Lesson 2: Craigslist is better than a rental agency.

We spent the last several days looking for rental properties. We saw 13 houses in 2 days. We found a house that we really like, with a very friendly and helpful landlord in a good location. The landlord would love for us to have moved in last
weekend. We would love to have moved in last weekend. The rental agency
couldn't possibly have us moving in until Wednesday. Some of the delay is
understandable. These agencies exist to take the risk off of the renter and the
landlord by providing credit checks and other screenings. Some of the delays involve steps that could have happened before we saw the house in the first place. At least it's almost Wednesday.

Lesson 3: International moves always take more time than you expect.

The movers have been bugging us about where to send our stuff for the
last few weeks. It's been sitting in port accruing fees for a while
now. However, we haven't had an address to send our furniture to until
Saturday. Calling them on Monday with an address, we find that they
need 2 weeks notice. Lovely. We begged and cajoled and just heard that they will try to have our furniture to us by Friday. Every time I visit the country of my parent's origin, I think about buying a mat for sleeping on the floor. Every time, the hassle of transporting it overrules and aesthetic or practical desire to own one. Too bad really. It would have come in handy for Wednesday and Thursday nights.