I could be playing SWTOR.

Instead, I'm updating blogs.  It's what I do when I drop out of grad school--in this sense, emotionally/intellectually.  Officially, it's been over a year since I did so.  I continued to embrace that resolve up through... sometime in my husband's job search process.  Somewhere along the line, nascent resentment at letting my life choices be contingent upon someone else's career moves blossomed into full-on romanticizing of graduate literary studies, partially due to the sting of having left Such a Great Opportunity Behind (a good opportunity for someone else, as I obviously forgot), and partially due to the possibility-turned-fact that we remain in the same area.

Once my husband accepted a tenure-track position in his field at a local liberal arts college, I contacted my advisor about the possibilities of returning.  She told me I could make a case for it, but not to get my hopes up.  That's when I remembered where I'd been until I let the Bad Decision Dinosaur hang out in my head:  I don't want to teach writing for the rest of my life.  I don't know what I want to do (or, should it be true that I have either a 27-hour circadian rhythm or a delayed sleep phase, what I can do), but I should do something to help us fund our retirement at a reasonable age.  But it's not graduate/professional-academic literary studies.  Maybe it's social science, or physical science, or practicing as a therapist, or going into public health, but it's not literary studies.  As alluring as it sometimes sounds, it's low-paying, undervalued work in a glutted market, work that seems to have decreasing scope, as the proliferation of humanities graduate students occupy intellectual spaces the way tract housing and commercial agriculture have consumed open land, leaving only the least arable scrub or contorted lots.  Instead of real, original research that has any relevance to our understanding of culture and/or history, most produce iterations and tweaks of previous explorations, or exploit narrow niches relying on academic work across multiple disparate disciplines (biology, or economics, or engineering), or focus on minor works by minor authors, attempting to posit them as some kind of profound-yet-obscure influence on a slightly-later, greater poet or novelist or dramatist.  At best, there are applications of contemporary critical theory, as derived from the social sciences, to major works or authors, but these are either risky or run the risk of becoming trite as everyone tries for a slice of that pie.  It's the academic equivalent of unchecked economic expansion, the end result of managing the ivory tower on free market principles of growth as a perennial good.

It feels like a lot of life has felt for me for a couple decades now:  All the fun shit happened 10, 20, 30 years ago, and everyone coming to the party now is left with sloppy seconds and table scraps.  I got that sense about goth, about publishing, about gaming, about everything.  Some of it is based on fallacies of a prior golden age, but, again, some of it is the result of widespread growth for growth's sake.  Whatever the field, whatever the enterprise, the market will reach a saturation point.  Since the romantic allure of literary studies--leather elbows on a tweed coat, languorous discussions of poetry and philosophy over coffee, wine or whiskey, college greens dotted with bright fall leaves--is far greater than puzzling over game theory, rural economies, international trade, or finance, and far more accessible than disciplines demanding the use of complex statistics, calculus, chemistry, microbiology or physics, it's not surprising that the field is at (or possibly past) its saturation point.

I know all this.  And even as I walk away all over again, I hear that siren song.  I'm stuffing the wax in my ears now.

How did I get here?

I don't know when "reader" became a key part of my self-image, but it was well-established by the time that I started first grade the greater part of three decades ago.  I readily evolved into one of those girls who reads lots of science fiction, fantasy and horror; it might have been A Wrinkle in Time, or The Chronicles of Prydain, or simply seeing Star Trek in re-runs and translating that general inclination to textual media.

I would still define myself partially by reading; the amount of books we have in this apartment, even after a culling or two, easily tops 2000.  There might even be another 500... I haven't documented all the books on my LibraryThing; my GoodReads account is an inaccurate assessment, since it includes books that I've never owned, and there's many books I do own that remain unaccounted for on that site.

When I call myself "a reader," I do mean "a reader of books."  But I'm barely that these days.  I creep through books on Kindle.  I felt quite satisfied with myself last night for having read a book in one sitting, which I rarely do any more.  Only 3-4 years ago, I could tackle a trilogy in 24 hours or, more often, less than that.  And as I got older, my tastes grew more catholic, taking on history of various stripes, science, sociological works, feminist texts, literary theory and criticism, and, most recently, economics (anyone know a good text on Post-Keynesian theory?).

Most of my reading is online, or task-oriented, consulting a cookbook for the appropriate technique, timing, flavor profile, etc.  I'm lucky if I can have the freedom to revisit a knitting pattern or two.  I should watch less TV, I'm sure.  I can't tell if it's the fact that I often watch my son for a good portion of the day, use his nap for dishes, eating, and/or personal hygiene, then watch him further through most of most evenings, or that once he's down is when my husband and I finally sit down to watch one episode each of Fringe and Archer, usually sometime between 11pm and 1am.  Is this how women turn into those caricature mothers, stripped of self, of prior identity?  Will this change if we live in a home with washing appliances and an enclosed yard?  Will I last the 3.5 months until we have this, should my husband get a tenure-track position?  Will I last if that doesn't happen, and we move into a smaller place, putting so many things into storage, having no yard, but maybe a dishwasher?

It's not just the books, of course.  It's the music I don't barely listen to (putting it on a computer isn't the same as having it on a stereo), the knitting I'm not doing, the everything that's simply waiting for a place that offers more than a now-tree-obscured view of the San Gabriel Mountains.