Time to Go: specimen #2: Portfolios for Jobs I Didn't Get

In my last year of graduate school (the first of three stints in graduate school), during the recession in the late 1980s, I applied for every available assistant professor position in the United States in my field, all ten of them. Each school required examples of my work, so I put together eleven portfolios, one to keep and ten to send out. To do this, I needed to get PMTs made of all my design presentation sheets. I can't remember what PMT stands for, so I googled it and the acronym dictionary has 59 options for me to choose from, including Post Marital Tension, Pearl Milk Tea,  Percutaneous Mechanical Thrombectomy,  Police Mentor Team, and  Photo Mechanical Transfer. I'm going with that last one. Well, they were too expensive to do multiple times, so I had to find a place that could produce color copies. Two buses and a subway later, I arrived at the professional photocopying establishment, the closest one I could find that had the special equipment and expertise to make color copies. I had to reject the first batch, because the color was off, too much blue. They toiled away for another day and finally created acceptable color copies. The cost: about a hundred bucks ($180.00 today).

I sent away these documents and waited.


Turns out that lots of people in my field apply to be assistant professors when the economy is tanking, people with loads more professional experience than I had. I got nine rejection letters and one, from Texas Tech in Lubbock, telling me I had been short-listed.  They would be bringing me out to interview soon, the letter went on to say, and to look forward to hearing the details in the near future. In the mean time, I dashed off to the library to find out as much as I could about Lubbock, Texas. I found three notable facts about Lubbock.

1. Buddy Holly (of That'll be the Day fame) was born there
2. In 1930 the first authenticated death by hail occurred there
3. The first line of the chorus in a Mac Davis song is "I thought happiness was Lubbock Texas in my rear view mirror."

As interesting as Lubbock sounded, I had mixed feelings about the prospect of moving to Lubbock. My new boyfriend, despite his cowboy charm,  had no interest in relocating to Lubbock and I had never lived so from from the beach. Thankfully, the economy continued to decline and Texas Tech issued a hiring freeze and the job evaporated.


In the end, I had a stack of returned portfolios and my keeper set, that I packed up and toted off to my second stint in graduate school, my solution to living through the dismal economy. The portfolios have sat in my closet gathering dust ever since. So Time to Go.


P.S. I am keeping the one keeper portfolio, since it is the only record I have left of my design school days. Other than that old boyfriend, who also turned out to be a keeper. Our 15 year wedding anniversary is next spring and we may be celebrating in Lubbock. That'll be the day!

Time to Go: specimen #1

When I was growing up, Pack Rat was the term people used to describe those of us who struggle with throwing things away. "Oh, yeah, Mrs. Noodlebaum is a Pack Rat," my dad might say with neither disdain nor admiration. It was just what some people were. Like being blond or tall. I'm an animal lover, so I liked this term. Pack rats are intriguing critters who build their houses from their collected debris and instead of holding it all together with nails, they use their own pee. Truly a model of sustainability, what with the recycling of found objects and repurposing of bodily waste. So being a Pack Rat seemed a fair thing to be, especially for me since I didn't grow up in abundance. What could be wrong with hanging on to a few old treasures?

The new word for our kind is, of course, hoarders. Hoarders are not cute little rodents that live in snuggly dens made of pee junk. No, something more pathological, more in need of treatment. I am fortunate in that, like all my neurotic tendencies, my hoarding is a mild condition, slight bibliomania with a good dose of waste-not-want-not sensibility. My dad always fixed things instead of throwing them away. We ate dinner off an old spool for giant electrical coils that he had refinished. We recycled everything, composted, patched our clothes. Without a steady income to rely on, we had to be thrifty, another nice word to describe people who reject the throw-away mindset of American society.

All good. Fix before you pitch. Makes sound ecological sense. So I'm a thrifty Pack Rat. I can hold my head high and walk with proud intention, until I trip over all the crap in my house. I've been trying to battle my clutter for years and have made little progress, other than to keep it in the corners, most of the time. Today I thought of something less military than battle. What if I photograph something I need to let go of and make a brief record of why I might have hung onto it for 5, 10, 20, 30, or 40 years. And then throw it away.

So here is my first specimen: stack of flash cards I made for my geology class in freshman year (1979). I had a big crush on my teacher and because he thought I was really interested in rocks, he encouraged me to major in geology. So I studied compulsively, creating this heap of flash cards in the process. This tale is a tragedy though, because when I handed in my final exam, a blue book full of geological genius, I overheard him make a reference about his wife. I looked at his fingers and sure enough he was wearing a gold band. (Gold, Au for aurum, meaning shining dawn in Latin, number 79 on the Periodic Table of Elements). I got an A+ and a harsh reminder of my nerdiness. At first I hung onto the cards because I might use them for another class. Then I graduated, taught high school for eight years, went back to college, graduated, moved away, went back to college, became a professor, got married and had my first child in 1997. I was glad I hung onto the cards, because I knew my child would eventually grow up, go to school and have geology lessons. Finally junior high rolled around and I pulled out the cards. When I found the card called U.S.S.R. Oil that explained that the Soviet Union was the largest oil-producing country in the world, I just set them on my dresser where they have been for about a year. Time to Go.

In the picture I chose to pull out the card for the Velocity of a Glacier, because it reflects the pace at which I let things go.

P.S. I did hang onto one card, the one on the Rock Cycle to give to my second child, because he has a vial full of dirt he wants to turn into a rock. "Just hang onto that vial for, oh, a million years," I said as I handed him the card.

Happiness in the Fall

Maybe it's the change in weather, but when Autumn roles around the world begins to feel as if it's moving through syrup, slow and sticky. But not a sweet syrup, like maple oozing down the sides of a hot stack of pancakes, more like motor oil. Get a taste of that and you can't help but grimace. That's how Autumn feels.

Thank goodness for kitties. Several times each day I get to peek at the litter. They move with a wobbly walk, like people trying to stay steady on a trampoline. Yesterday, one looked at me for the first time.

Maybe that's how life is sometimes. No big blasts of joy, just glimpses of kittens on my way to the car.