College days

The students are definitely back in town and the fall semester under way.  I am so clearly not teaching, but I do have a meeting today for those on the job market this year.  We meet, talk strategy, get a big packet of examples (job letter, writing sample, etc.), and most of us won't even get a job come next spring.  I've put this process off long enough, but I'm still not looking forward to it.  Shifting gears seems harder to do these days, for some reason.  From housework, to childcare, to sitting at the computer in the basement, to meetings filled with a stress vibe.  It's no different from working a day-to-day job in a cubicle, which has its own harsh shifts in pace and context.  But there is an unpredictability to the whole mess, like working for a company that keeps getting sold. It feels like there is a new management team coming in every three months or so promising to "turn things around."  How different it must feel to have tenure, where one accumulates 20 years worth of dust in the same dingy office and faces the same 18-year-old faces in the same painted-block classroom year after year.