Anyway, maybe the A/C can wait a bit. I'm going down to see George Washington Boyfriend for five days, starting Thursday, so maybe I can at least hold out until I get back.*

Yes! On Thursday! Five days!

It's funny how normal the long-distance relationship thing seems to academics, and how odd to most everyone else. I mean, yes: a reasonable number of non-academic couples DO wind up spending a year or so apart, due to job transfers or new careers or one person finishing law or business school before the other, but the sustained long-distance thing? Not normal. GWBoyfriend and I have been together for just over four years, fully three of them long-distance. And the fact that we're now about three-and-a-half hours apart (as opposed to the five-and-a-half for that year when I was still living in the same location as INRU), in cities easily accessible by train, bus, plane, and car, is actually considered a pretty plum set-up--by the two of us as much as anyone else.

I was explaining this to a friend's roommate a couple of years ago, after I'd just moved back to MEC, saying that, really, if I could get a tenure-track job in this area, or at any rate no more than about four hours from GW Boyfriend, that would be pretty sweet. And she was like, "FOUR HOURS? Are you kidding? For the long term?" And I said, uh, yeah . . . I mean, we have weekends and summers, right?

This is not to say that it's easy, or that I wouldn't much rather that we were in the same place--but, right now we're not. And the fact that I need my part-time office job to stay afloat financially means that we haven't been able to spend full summers together, though we spent two weeks together over spring break (one week there, while he was still teaching, and one week here, while I was). What our separation does, mostly, is make the job market more stressful: what if I got a great job (or, hell: just a job) in a hard-to-reach location? Or what if I wind up staying on as a lecturer a second year? Should he think about going back out on the market, selectively, in locations where I'm applying? Or is it better to wait two or three years and see if he gets tenure?

So yeah. As I said: things aren't bad now, comparatively speaking, and it's really better not to make those possible comparisons.


*I realize I never explained GWBoyfriend's pseudonym. Well, he's an early Americanist. And has done work on George Washington. And . . . you know . . . George Washington Carver? George Washington Irving? George Washington Boyfriend.