Right now I am feeling very glad that this space exists. I don’t have to pray for the rain. I have stuff I want to tell you.

It’s very early on the 12th. I thought for sure I’d be asleep now readying myself for the unwelcome return to wage slavery. Instead … well, I didn’t find myself a way out of that slavery yet, but I have found a powerful antidote to some of the fearhate. Maybe two antidotes.

In the previous edition of the Spill, one of the most important posts was about a sort of epiphanic moment I had in my driveway up north. It came during the worst of the hell I was getting from my employer there, when things were beginning to look untenable.

I stood in the middle of the concrete slab and I whispered to myself that I wasn’t the Professor any more, but only just the mannish boy I’d always been, free of the constraints and bereft of the advantages; that this academic part of my life was over.

In the end though, when it all fell apart and I needed something fast, what I found was another prof job. It was just as bad really, and so after a year of it I found a third prof job, in this prettier place. Which I have now performed for yet another year, and am poised this very day to move forward with for another still.

I should have listened better to myself, sooner, but there will be no self-beating about that tonight.

The problem with Professing is two-fold. First, no one gives a shit about a real education anymore, least of all the people who administer colleges. I could go on and on about it, but I won’t. The entire point of college now, almost everyone on the inside agrees, is getting those kids nice safe white-collar jobs that pay a lot. Whether they have the ability to think rationally or feel genuinely has no place in the discourse. Thus, the pride I once felt in the mission has eroded away to nothing.

Second, the pay is a joke. With two Master’s degrees under my belt, I make what a cop makes. I make less than a similarly qualified K-12 teacher makes (because they organized politically and got a fat raise to a living wage–god bless them for it). I can’t afford to do this charity work any more in the last few years running up to my retirement, and I especially can’t afford it for a charity whose mission isn’t aligned with my own values anymore.

(Big edit, cutting to the chase)

I finally started looking into real practical alternatives instead of sleeping tonight and I immediately stumbled over a ‘governmentjobs’ site that piles up a great big chunk of the possibilities in one place. I looked a bunch of them over.

I learned that I could make the same money doing ‘desktop support’ (a very low level job) for a suburb. I learned that an ‘Educational Specialist’ for the elections board of a county would be a big step up in pay. Among five or six interesting examples drawn from a selection of preferred zip codes, and for which I’d easily qualify.

There wasn’t anything that made me leap with delight and throw down an application this minute. But there were a whole lot of maybes that were nothing near the kinds of things I’ve been considering–and we are at the very beginning of the year.

I am cautiously but genuinely stoked by the options, and made happy by the prospect of digging deeper (the practice of it, like I did tonight) and settling into a rhythm of regular applying. It’s been a very long time since I’ve felt that, or anything like it really.