In my last post, I mentioned that I had a job interview. It turned out not to be an interview so much as a discussion of what I'd like to teach and when I'd be available to do so, given what was offered in the schedule. Thus, I decided to take a (part-time) adjunct teaching position at the University of Southern Indiana in Evansville. It's about 1.5-2 hours from Marion, but I'll be teaching my three classes on a Tuesday/Thursday schedule. I decided spending about eight hours per week in the car was worth getting some actual teaching experience, since all I really have are my years as a graduate assistant, which requires all the work of a real job but offers little of the prestige on the resume. Like I used to tell my students: they were real students receiving real grades, but I wasn't a real teacher.
What initially complicated but ultimately solidified my decision to accept the USI job was that Aaron was called for an interview at the NBC affiliate in Green Bay, Wisconsin the day we had my interview in Evansville. They seemed impressed with his resume and cover letter, and wanted to arrange to fly him up for an in-person interview after an hour-long phone conversation.
All signs, initially, pointed to YES. We would be further north, slightly closer to home, and in a cooler climate. The station was an up-market move and had just become the official station of the Green Bay Packers. It was corportate-owned, which could possibly mean higher pay. I think I may have been more excited than Aaron was about the whole thing. I started daydreaming about wearing sweaters and driving through blizzards. And eating a lot more cheese.
They flew him up to Green Bay (by way of Marion, St. Louis and Chicago) to tour the station, meet everyone, and get interviewed. Aaron's flight from Chicago to Green Bay was cancelled due to storms in Detroit, and while that caused a minor inconvenience on the way there, it was nothing to also having all of his return flights cancelled. But he got there, and met everyone. He toured. He saw Green Bay. He ate at Lambeau Field.
And when he came back home, he had about two days to make a decision. Ultimately, after talking to his coworkers here and discussing it with me, we decided to stick around southern Illinois for awhile longer because it wasn't a good fit. It may have looked great on paper, but the timing wasn't right and Aaron wasn't quite ready to say goodbye to what he's built up here.
Making decisions as a married couple is complicated. He may have been willing to take a job that wasn't quite what he wanted had I said that it was what I really wanted for us. We were willing to consider having him move to Wisconsin while I stayed behind in Marion until my semester of teaching at USI was over in December. Basically, married-couple-decisions are fraught with the notion that you're simultaneously one person and two people, and you have to somehow get your interests/wants/needs to align in such a way that if both people can't be happy, at least one or both won't be miserable, either.
So, we'll be sticking around here awhile longer. Aaron gets to keep the job he loves, and I get to try out being a "real" teacher. We don't know where we'll be a year from now, but up until a few weeks ago, we didn't know where we'd be by the end of July. I'll take this as progress.
