Mentor and I had an interesting talk today. First, he offered me a co-authorship on a very visible project. The people who get offered this sort of thing are typically people who are much more senior and famous than even Mentor is. I'm psyched to have a chance to be involved through him, which is the only way I'd ever get a chance at doing something like this. So that is exciting.
The thing is, though, it's really been a bad couple of weeks work wise. There are structural problems in our department that, it is clear to me, are not going to go away. We are both too ambitious and both too frustrated to be content with this situation. So that means looking around at other possibilities. Today we talked about whether it'd be possible to engineer some sort of dual hire situation so that we could go to the same place and continue collaborating. There are spousal hires, but we're not spouses, we're academic collaborators. I wonder if you can make a case for an academic spouse, so to speak. Hard to say. Especially hard for me because if I did that, I'd also want to try to engineer some sort of real spousal hire for Jake as well. I don't have anywhere near enough seniority or cache to try to pull something like that off, despite the nature of our small field. Who knows...just brainstorming.
The truth is that there are only a small number of institutions I'd want to go to that would also work for Jake and our family. There is one fairly close to my current location geographically. There is another in the bay area. Just food for thought, I suppose.
For the moment I need to just let go of work-related frustration and enjoy the fact that next week will be quieter, fewer meetings, more chances to write and do the things I really enjoy when it comes to work.
Edited to add: This doesn't really convey how depressed and trapped I feel; how betrayed I feel by my department's insanity and my dean's lack of support. This has never been just a job for me. It has been, in a sense, a love affair with the place and the university and the job and the history of my field here. I want to love it here and stay forever. I don't want to start over somewhere. But I don't want to feel trapped in a dwindling, dying area due to crazy politics while our area is being explicitly supported and aggressively grown at other universities across the country. I don't want to leave. But it's starting to feel like I can't stay without it ultimately becoming a slow career death.
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