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.