1/4 Through - March
We gotta face facts that about a quarter to a third of the year kind of sucks based on weather and whether you can handle December. January and February are not good months, and you know this. I hear people tell me they love winter and I know that ain't true because what they love is December and Christmas, and a distant memory of snow. We don't got snow anymore, here. We haven't for years. In my childhood, there would be several years it'd snow heavily and it wouldn't all melt until some time in late March to mid-April depending on how much piled up. You'd have a thick blanket of white in yards from late December until February and a thick, watery gray slush in the road. (Guess what your boots would pick up, though!) The cold snap exceptions feeling exceptional proves the rule, really - we're shocked when it's cold now - you can forget about winter.
At the end of March, we are instead deep into Mud Season. It gets that way. It rains for about a month - that's called Spring but it's cool, clammy, and often ugly. When it warms up and it's raining, I love it - there's a dynamism to warm, windy, rainy weather that makes it my favorite, but for the most part if feels like we imported the least interesting elements of the Puget Sound and left behind trees, hills, or progressive politics. Our BBQ is better. I think you have to take whatever you can get, in these regards.
The other fact to face, I think, but which I can't guarantee, is just that sometimes it's okay for things to kind of suck. I woke up with a headache today - it was like, day three of this dumb shit and it made me really glad that we picked up some generic Excedrin last night on a grocery run because this is the time of year I have to carefully determine how much of this stuff is in my system before I have to worry about what the children call "liver failure." The weather is what it is. Everyone's run aground on how much work they have to do. You don't gotta pretend to be happy about that. Accepting that shit is kind of miserable for a while and acknowledging something of a dip in 'productivity' should be fine. We're not machines. I think there's a certain amount of feeling bad that's a part of our emotional calibration. Anyhow, it's okay to feel shitty sometimes - don't try to pretend you feel good, or you're 100% or anything like that.
Lean in to it. "That's how it is on this bitch of an Earth," as Beckett writes in Waiting for Godot.
So anyway, that's March. I've got one resume sent in, I'm probably just going to send in one a day like before. Sometimes I get a call back and most times I don't. I've had a few recruiters call while I've been teaching and I think the way that looks is that I could end up writing on some contract that goes for so long. I'm just trying to hedge my bets, cover my bases... etc. People still sometimes ask me, what's your ideal job? I just want to write stuff and teach people about reading sci fi, but I'll do whatever, you know? They say, a little less often, isn't that cynical? Man, who wants to really do any of this stuff the way we do it? It's a mercenary outlook but, fuck, you know? Are we not being paid for our time, in theory? It is, in fact, a mercenary outlook - I am selling services and time to the best bidder I can find. That's what this system is, this is what it does.