transformations

it seems that many friends have been undergoing transformations of late, whether that means promotion, getting tenure, quitting one's job, changing professions, having a baby, or merely choosing the appropriate siding for one's house. transformations--metamorphoses--where one sheds one skin and grows or nurtures another, are of course the stuff of literature, art, and well, of course life.

and as is often the case with these things, it's the minutiae that are the toughest. that is, it's not spending tons of money to buy a new house and moving and getting your stuff from California to Wales and buying a car and starting a new job and and and that are fundamentally disturbing. because they're too big, too mammoth, too huge to even be encompassed by three words that mean the same thing.

one of the most cathartic things I've done since getting the job in the Politics department was to trash my bookmarks folder marked 'jobs' and click the button that alerted me I would lose all those bookmarks: was I sure I wanted to delete them? Yes. I also unsubscribed from all of the academic job e-mail listing services I'd subscribed to: College Art, jobs.ac.uk, chronicle.com, guardian.co.uk, and I started auto-deleting the job listings from my other listservs. very cathartic. and now, I've changed my signature on my professional e-mail.

it's the small things, I think, that make you realise how different your life was, and how different it will be very soon. because we can't understand the big things, really. hence the power of symbolism and metaphor in the world.

next: should I do my signature in Welsh and English? cool? or geeky?