invisible (not even adjunct)

Hello, me! As no one else will be reading this long-defunct site. Or perhaps not so long. I switched employment days after the last post, from the hell of temp-ing to the hell of a permanent full time position in a technical field at a rather dodgy company. C'est la vie. But today's episode, brought to you by the letter 'V' and the number '1', is a question of what happens when you strand an academic outside the academy.

I'm at work now, even, having just said goodbye to a good friend who is flying home this morning. She's starting her second year at a Big Research U, having already done a masters at a UK institution. Which is where our friendship formed. But even though we somehow mysteriously didn't 'talk shop' until the third day of her visit, when it arrived it arrived with much enthusiasm and pulling out of books and gesticulating and volume and smiles and excitement.

I didn't use to find this remarkable. Because, even in the very different academic community/ies that constituted my experiences in the UK, there was still a community. Whereas this past weekend I took my friend to see the public library - which is a beautiful building, as she agreed. But I insisted on showing her the reading room as if it were something of note, and she was rather nonplussed. Because it's just another reading room, and such things remain a part of her life, even while they seem impossibly distant from mine.

I'm an academic without an academy. Not living in the city (or country) of my degree-granting institution, my academic community here is rather non-existent. I have one friend, a tenured professor at a top school in town, who is in the process of becoming a friend. But we don't talk shop, and seem precisely to enjoy each other's company for that very reason. Which for her is fab, but leaves me with _nobody_ on a day to day basis who truly understands where I'm coming from or where I'm trying to go.

I've sort of lost my way as far as my work goes, though I'm working on working, and preparing for the re-commencement of a job cycle that ended with a final rejection in late July and begins with the first deadlines in late September. But it all feels so out of context. My friends here have no 'great cause' that occupies their after-work-hours existence, no secret identity requiring phone booths to change modes and minds and priorities.

OK, I've been horribly interrupted by the obligations of my job job here whilst trying to write this. A follow up, planned, as I try to return to the habit of writing, of producing prose both personal, professional, and something in between. But I miss my friend already.