The Search

I spent eight hours on the 19th floor of a fancy Chicago hotel yesterday, interviewing possible colleagues--creative writers--in the company of three of my current colleagues. Dear god, what a long day, and an unpleasant one at many points. I have lots of tired, mean comments I could make about doing academic job interviews, but I'm really trying to recover from yesterday, so my fingers will not touch those keys.

Instead: I brought two old copies of Threads with me to read on the train. On the way downtown, I enjoyed re-reading articles that I hadn't paid close attention to when they first arrived in my mailbox. But on the way home, at 8 p.m. on a very, very cold Chicago night, that copy of Threads was the thing that kept me awake and kept me from crying/screaming/falling asleep, especially while some weird guy sat across from me, staring and smiling at me *the whole way home*. I did not think I could be more fried than I was, but I paid close attention to the most technical details in an article about drafting a pants pattern from scratch. Learning how to switch gears *completely* is really hard for me, but last night, I felt like I did it.