Tuesday, January 12, 2010

on the road, perhaps, sometime

Job prospects are starting to begin to think about considering sorting themselves out. And we're contemplating what it would mean to move out of state.

It's bringing the reality of the situation into sharper focus.

I mean, I am likely to be making a decision soon to leave the university I have worked for and loved to teeny tiny pieces. I've been here almost 12 years, which is a year shy of the longest time I've lived anywhere. I know there's a certain degree of trauma involved in moves like this, no matter the circumstances. But I also know it's worse when it's coerced.

I've lived rough quarters of my life in four states: Ohio, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and California. About half of that was in suburbia (as a kid in Maumee, Ohio and in Greensboro, North Carolina, then Charlotte). In Pennsylvania, it was in the old, beautifully broken city of Pittsburgh. And now Central Valley overgrown small town California.

The two coerced moves (to NC and CA) were much more traumatic than the one move by choice (to Pittsburgh). Here we go again.

This time, it'll be with Lauren, who has never lived anywhere but California.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm sorry that you might have to be moving soon. That's rough.

It's an interesting perspective for me... Growing up we moved every couple of years, so the prospect of just picking everything up and moving one day is something I fantasize about - I get the itchy feet.

We stay in one place because Bobo has a "home town"

Doc Nagel said...

I had a hometown - Maumee. Then I didn't. Then I made a new one - Pittsburgh. (You can, in fact, make a town a hometown.) Turlock isn't, and Modesto wasn't, home. I don't identify as Californian - or anything-ian, really.