Moving

I'd like to take a moment to remind everyone out there that academia is one of the worst ways to try to make a living. An unemployed ordinary person who wants to move will do one of the following:

(a) Stay where he is until he finds a job, and then move to wherever that is;
(b) Move to where he wants to be, and then look for a job there.

An unemployed professor has neither of these options. We're not like accountants and programmers and salesmen and what have you; we don't have the option of looking for a job in May, and if we fail we look in June, and if we fail we look in July, and so forth. There is no searching until you find a job. There's the tenure track search around January, and there's the one-year positions around June (give or take a month in both cases), and that's it. So if a professor hasn't found a job by, say, July, he's not going to have a job for another year. And there's very little point in going to your favorite city and looking for a job there. No matter what city you're in, if it's of sufficient size, someone will be looking for an accountaint or a programmer or a salesman, but academia just doesn't work like that.

The upshot, for me and my wife, is that we don't really like Philadelphia at all and have no desire to stay now that my time at the University of Pennsylvania is over. Which means that right now we're packing so that we can move to...well. Boston unless I get a job elsewhere, in which case elsewhere. And that makes it really hard to plan, which is why we don't have a place to live in Boston (what were we going to do if we signed a lease and then I got a job in California?), or for that matter anything lined up there workwise. All we have is three weeks in which to pack up this apartment and drive the stuff, well, somewhere, and we'll kind of see what happens from there.

All things considered, this is far and away the worst year I've had since around 1995.