At any rate, it’s been an eventful few months for us. For quite a while now I’d been planning on applying to PhD programs in linguistics (and would hopefully be accepted to at least one). As I was applying, though, something changed. I’m not quite sure what happened, but suddenly I was losing my enthusiasm for more schooling and was growing increasingly doubtful that I actually wanted to be a professor.

I mean, I love the subject and love learning about and talking about it, but teaching is something else altogether. It means lesson plans and grading and standing in front of a class of students who may or may not like me or the subject. It means doing research and lots of writing and trying to get tenure—and this is assuming I could get a decent teaching job in the first place instead of just bouncing around from one adjunct position to another.

And more school? I don’t know. Suddenly I was feeling very burned out with school and just wanted to be done. I don’t want to drag my whole family through a few more years of this, moving across the country and living in cramped apartments, racking up who knows how much debt. Lego’s going to start kindergarten this fall. I remember how hard it was for me to move out of state and then move again and change schools and then move again, all between the ages of 7 and 9. It’s hard to make friends and adjust to new places. I don’t want to put my kids through that if I can avoid it.

So I finished applying to schools, and I was only accepted to one—Northern Arizona University. It sounded like a solid program and a really great fit for my interests, but I just couldn’t see myself going anymore. And while I was deliberating what to tell them and leaning towards telling them no, I came across a job listing here in Utah that would be perfect for me. I’m very well qualified, and from all I’ve heard it’s a great place to work. I realized that even if I don’t get this particular job, it’s what I really want. I sent back the form to NAU telling them I wouldn’t be attending.

I’ve applied and have gone through the first two rounds of testing but haven’t interviewed yet. My current boss wished me luck and says they’d be crazy not to hire me, which means a lot because I know he’d love to keep me here if he could. I’m hoping and praying it works out, even though it would probably mean moving very quickly, and we’d have to figure out whether or not to buy a house or keep renting for the time being.

Who knows? Maybe someday I’ll decide to go back for that PhD and will end up teaching after all. But right now I feel like I want to put down roots somewhere and actually begin a real career in earnest while enjoying my time with my family. Which reminds me, if you haven’t heard, we’re expecting boy #3 mid-July.

One way or another, this summer is going to bring a lot of changes. I’m not sure yet where everything will end up, but I feel like it’ll end up where it should.

It’s frustrating at the moment because I need to work on my car, and the only place I have to work is the gravel driveway (read: mud pit) on the side of the house. I fixed Brinestone’s broken car in the snow because it was a necessity; I generally don’t prefer to lie on my back in the gravelly mud with rain spotting my glasses while trying to dismantle the front end of my car.

And meanwhile, at work, I’m in the middle of the interminable project of posting all of our past publications to our web site. This involves taking dozens upon dozens of Word documents (most of which look fine on the surface but are a formatting mess), converting them to HTML, cleaning up the nightmarish code, and posting them via our content management system. It’s making me realize once again how helpful it would be to know how to program. I could put together some Visual Basic or Javascript that would automate a lot of the steps.

Thankfully I discovered that one of our PCs at work has Dreamweaver CS3 on it (it used to have Adobe Creative Suite Design Standard on it, but recently the computer guys wiped it and then—accidentally, I think—reinstalled Design Premium), which speeds up the HTML clean-up considerably. Still, it takes a long time to clean up and post all those files. Blah.

I’m ready for some real work again.

School’s going pretty well. I’m three semesters into my master’s, and I should have two more semesters after this one. (It’s supposed to be a two-year program, but with foreign language prerequisites it takes a little longer.) The end is rapidly approaching, and I still don’t really know what my plans are afterwards. I’m still not sure if I want to make a career out of academia or if I’d rather stay in the publishing world. Unfortunately, my previous experiences in the real world of editing jobs was pretty depressing, so I’m not exactly eager to give it a second go. But on the other hand, I feel rather ambivalent about the prospect of making lesson plans, grading papers, and publishing or perishing—assuming I can land a tenure-track position in the first place.

The decision is complicated by the fact that I’m enjoying both school and work at the moment. I’m editing and designing books (or at least book guts—I haven’t really done covers yet), which is a lot of fun. Plus, everyone there seems to think I’m nearly omniscient, which is great for stroking my already-too-large ego. And as for school, what’s not to love about learning cool stuff and putting off making big decisions about one’s career?

Angst about my future aside, life is pretty good. I have a wonderful wife and two awesome little boys. And I’m sure that in the end, everything will work out alright.

I continued to feel pretty miserable for the next few days, with killer body aches and congestion bad enough to make me want to drill holes in my forehead to relieve the pressure. I was popping Mucinex and Ibuprofen like they were candy to try to get some relief.

I went home early from work on Monday, skipped all my afternoon classes on Tuesday, and went home early again on Wednesday after missing my morning class. I’m finally feeling almost kind of sort of back to normal today, even though I’d still rather be home taking a nap.

I hate being sick for long periods of time. After a few days I start to feel like a worthless lump of flesh, and I can’t stop thinking about how far behind I’m falling. And all the while, of course, I’m getting emails from the university and seeing flyers around campus urging everyone who’s sick to stay home so they don’t give it to everyone else.

Of course, everyone knows that this is the right thing to do, but it seems to be an awfully hard thing to do. Granted, the university has encouraged instructors to be flexible with those students who are ill, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s very difficult to catch up after missing a week of school. The last thing you want to do when recovering from the flu is push yourself extra hard to make up for the last week.

And work is even worse. I’m essentially the sole income for a family of four, and I work part-time earning student wages. I have no paid time off when I’m sick, so if I stay home for an entire week to rest and recuperate, my paycheck is going to suck. I’m already broke enough as it is; getting the flu is a minor financial disaster.

So here I am, caught between a rock and a hard place. Do I drag myself to work, where my productivity will suffer and I may very well infect the entire office, but at least I’ll still get paid, or do I lie on the couch for a week straight while homework and midterms pile up and my bank account runs dry?

Well, unfortunately, money is a powerful motivator. I just hope that anyone I infected will forgive me.

Updates on the Kids

I’m frequently surprised at the things that come out of Lego’s mouth. Today when I got home from work, he informed me, “I got my sleeping bag out, in fact.” In fact? Seriously, where did we get this kid? He’s a veritable verbal sponge. It makes both the linguist and the editor in me proud. And I can’t believe how big he’s getting. It’s weird to think that in just a couple years he’s going to be in school.

Duplo is learning to talk, but he still isn’t saying much yet, and it’s hard to get him to perform on cue. Also, for some reason he thinks “Dad” and “Daddy” refer to him, not me. Whenever I ask him, “Where’s Daddy?” he points to his own chest. It’s okay, though. I forgive him ’cause he’s so stinking cute. And to illustrate his cuteness, here are a couple of pictures.

Here he is learning the fine art of automotive repair. No, son, that’s not how you remove the brake caliper! Use the 18 mm socket!

Aww. What a sweet boy he is.

Updates on Me

I haven’t really been up to a whole lot lately. I’m just working for the summer and will be starting classes again in a few weeks. However, I’ve been pretty busy at work, and I figure here’s a good opportunity for some shameless self-promotion. Two of the books I’ve worked on lately have just been published. I typeset this one and did a fair amount of editing and proofreading on it as well. On this one I designed and typeset the insides and did some revisions on the cover. Check them out.

Quitting my job was kind of strange. My last few employment experiences have been so unpleasant and ended so abruptly and painfully that this time came as quite a surprise. I never really loved this job, but it was certainly the best job I’d had since graduating. Of course, that sounds like it’s damning with faint praise, but I don’t mean it that way. I had three job offers at the same time, and I feel like I picked the right one. And even though the job could be pretty boring, working with Cicada again was a lot of fun.

It’s weird to think that I’m finally doing it. I’ve wanted to go to grad school for three years now, and I never thought it would happen because the timing was always wrong. But then I looked back and saw in retrospect that it would’ve worked out, except that I kept chickening out, and I realized that now was as good a time as any. Of course, maybe right now wasn’t the best time—I kind of wish I’d waited for fall semester just to reduce the level of stress in my life a little.

I don’t know where I’m going with all of this. I’ve got a lot on my mind, but I’m kind of exhausted, so this probably isn’t the most coherent post I’ve ever written. But on a final note, the title of this post is the title of a book I read several months ago, and it’s one of the most enjoyable books I’ve read in a while.

I didn’t think it was as funny as the reviews said, but that’s alright, because I don’t think it was really supposed to be the same kind of office spoof as The Office or Dilbert. It’s just about work and life and changes and why we hate our jobs even though we need them so badly, emotionally speaking. Anyway, as LeVar Burton always used to say on Reading Rainbow, “But you don’t have to take my word for it.”

Unfortunately, that didn’t seem to help anything. It hung on the grey screen (where it usually displays the Apple logo) while making loud clicking noises—the kind that are sometimes produced by broken hard drives. Eventually it displayed an icon of a file folder with a question mark on it.

I tried booting from the OS installation DVD, but it refused to reinstall the OS (probably because of the aforementioned suspected drive failure). It froze when I tried to do a disk repair. Strangely, the hardware diagnostic program said everything was okay. And now it won’t even let me boot from the disc anymore.

So I have no computer, and the IT guy (who admitted that he is not familiar with Macs) who was trying to help me yesterday is gone today. Luckily Cicada is also gone today, and she said I could use her computer. So here I am, trying to be productive and not worry about the possibility that I lost most of a week’s work.

Tell me again how Macs are so superior.

Turns out it was more of a good way to ensure that my coworkers will never play Scrabble with me again. Except Cicada, perhaps, but she’s a glutton for punishment. I maintain that it’s their own fault for playing me, of course. They should’ve known better when they saw me walk in with my deluxe edition board and official Scrabble dictionary.

I will admit that sometimes I forget that not everyone takes the game as seriously as I do. It’s not like I read the dictionary every day for fun (well, maybe once or twice a week), but I have memorized most of the two-letter-words list, which comes in quite handy. Yes, I know the definitions of jo, ka, ki, qi, xi, xu, and za.

Some would call me a cheater. Some would also scribble out my score at the end of the game and declare themselves the winner instead, even though they had only half as many points. Well, some are welcome to a rematch whenever they want. I’ll even let them borrow my dictionary and study.

When we were about halfway there, the car suddenly stalled, even though it had apparently been running just fine. I pulled over onto the shoulder and tried to get it to start up again, but to no avail. It just cranked and cranked and never kicked over. I got out and waved at the cars driving by, but of course no one stopped. And we have no cell phone, so we couldn’t call anyone. So we got out Lego’s fold-up stroller and started walking back the other way. Luckily, someone then pulled over when we were only about fifty feet from our car.

We piled in the guy’s car (a beautiful 1955 Chevy Bel Air) and headed off. He said he needed to run a quick errand, and then he could drop us off somewhere. Meanwhile we borrowed his phone and called my brother Dave-o to ask him to pick us up. Quite serendipitously, our ride was headed to the retail store at my work, so he dropped us off there. I went to work, and Brinestone and Lego waited for my brother.

After our weekly team meeting, I got to work on my current project. It’s complicated, poorly defined, and almost certainly doomed to fail, but last I checked no one exactly gave me a say in these things. I’d been working on the darn thing for about two hours, and then poof! QuarkXPress, that most abominable pile of software, quit unexpectedly. And of course there are no program-wide settings for autosave, and I hadn’t saved it since I’d opened it, so that two hours of tedious work was lost and had to be repeated.

I really wasn’t in the mood to dive into that at the moment, so I went to chat with Cicada for a bit. That only delayed the inevitable, though, and eventually I had to get back to work. Meanwhile, Brinestone called a tow truck company and had the car towed back to our place. I figured that even if we couldn’t get it running, we could push it across the street to a little repair shop.

Lunchtime rolled around, but I had left my lunch in the car, so I headed over to the cafeteria, where I burned up a good fifteen minutes waiting in line (the registers were down). I usually just clock out for a half hour for lunch, but today I decided I needed a full hour. I’d make up the time another day. The rest of the afternoon was mostly uneventful, but it did seem to drag on far longer than it should have. And thankfully, Cicada offered to give me a ride home, so I didn’t have to bother my brother to come pick me up again.

It wasn’t the worst day ever, but it certainly wasn’t a great start to the week. And it could have been much worse—it could have all happened tomorrow, on my birthday.

And boy, what a new computer! It’s a 20-inch iMac with 2 gigabytes of RAM. I’m a little sad that they didn’t spring for the gigantic 24-inch model, but it’s probably for the best, since Cicada surely would have killed me for it. As it is I’m not sure if she’ll ever quite forgive me. At least she still gets to tell me to get out of her office and shut the door behind me. I never do, of course, just to spite her.

I still have issues with Macs, but I will say this: they build some beautiful computers. And they’ve finally joined the modern world in offering a multi-button scroll mouse. I just wonder when the rest of the PC world is going to stop making huge ugly boxes and start focusing on making computers smaller and more aesthetically pleasing. I mean, as much as I love my Shuttle, it’s always been a little wonky.

Forget a 24-inch screen. Give me a small, good-looking computer that’s customizable, upgradeable, affordable, and most of all reliable, and then I’ll be happy. But until that day comes, I’ll be in my cube, with my feet up on the desk, using the remote control to watch movies on my beautiful new iMac.