I'm gonna nail you for picking your feet in Poughkeepsie

This post is not going to be political, at least overtly so (what, after all, isn't political?) nor is it going to be sweeping social commentary.  It is not going to be a rant about whiteness or soapboxing about some queer shit.  It's going to be… personal.  Which, frankly, is terrifying. 

Most of you out there in the interwebs likely know, if you know me, that I have recently finished graduate school.  I have always found endings more bitter than sweet; while moments like graduations are celebratory and markers of important milestones, they are also goodbyes.  When I graduated from college, I felt the personal goodbyes very dearly.  It was as though, in one day, I had to say goodbye to most of the important people in my life.  With graduate school, it felt like saying goodbye to a life/lifestyle.  I wasn't leaving New York and my peoples there.  Rather, it was a moving on, a growing up.  I would not longer be able to call myself, technically, a student.  And being a grad student at Rockefeller shields one from a lot of fairly horrific things about adult life.  For example: I lived in New York for 6 years and had never had to look for an apartment.  Or pay market price for one.  I lived in a building with my colleagues and friends.  I had no commute.  Literally, none.  

Those of you who know me likely also know that I, shortly after I defended my thesis, took a visiting assistant professor job at Vassar College.  I had, through the fall and winter, been applying for every job under the sun, from the traditional post-docs* through to tenure track teaching positions.  While the post-doc job search went well, clearly tenure track jobs weren't willing to take a chance on a 28-year old without a PhD or any papers out in the last 5 years.  

One school did take a chance on me, and that was Vassar College.  I have a fond place in my heart for Vassar both because I also went to a small liberal-arts college (about which I actually have quite mixed feelings) and because Vassar is incredibly 1) gay and 2) present in NYC.  I can't tell you how many Vassar alums I've met at sex parties and in bathroom stalls (just kidding mom).  And Vassar is located close enough to New York that many of the professors actually do the commute daily.  

The commute.  It's a 90 minute train ride from 125th street in Harlem to downtown Poughkeepsie, roughly 3 miles from Vassar.  This is coming from some one who's previous commute was exactly 0.5 city blocks.  Also, not being a morning person, the notion of being on a train at something like 6:19am in order to be in class by 9am was simply not an option.  I decided that I would only take a job at Vassar if keeping a small apartment in Poughkeepsie (to minimize commute horrors) and Harlem (to ensure that I wouldn't want to jump off a cliff for the lack of an engaging and not undergrad-centered social life) would be financially feasible.  Happily, Vassar keeps apartments on and near campus at below-market rates for professors.  

I took one.  I'm sitting in it now.  

Those of you out there who know me (I'm going to assume that most of you do, because, you know, why else would you have waded this deep into some random millings arounds and personal reflections of someone you didn't know or care about) also know that the last few months have brought all sorts of changes, both for the good and bad.  I will spare the details here, and I am going to try to avoid the all-to-tpyical blog-post self-aggrandization that I find so very infuriating**.  However, I have kind of needed one in the win column for some time now.

Today was a beautiful, late-summer-early-fall feeling day in New York.  I bought some new digs for my teaching.  On the train ride up I had my work spinning in front of me, Frank Ocean (!!!) in my ears.  I've always found trains calming, and the metro north may appear to be my own personal productivity bubble.  There just aren't any distractions.  There is just a nose and a grindstone.

The bike ride from the train was a beautiful summer night and filled with darkness (which I grew up with, and don't see in the city) and country noises (crickets like a mother fucker).  

And now I'm sitting here in my second home.  My country house.  I'm going to take you all on a tour and show you around.  Suffice it to say that I feel at home here, in this place I barely know.  Turns out that a friend of a friend who is a faculty member at Vassar lived in this apartment before me.  I had coffee with him the other day and my time with him made me feel like I would actually be able to build some really meaningful (and political) relationships on campus.  Maybe its this spirit that is permeating the space for me.  Maybe it's all the weird little quirks so typical of houses that were built half a century ago and haven't been generically renovated.  Perhaps it's the ability to have space, and quite.  Perhaps it's the notion that I've been trying to cultivate in my mind that it might just be possible, if only for the year that I am here, to be both a city and country boy, both an academic and a ratchet hot mess, an educator AND a scientist (a rarer combination than you might think), a scientists and a radical; to find spaces, geographical, rhetorical, spiritual and intellectual, for all of my various identities.  

A photographical journey of my new (second) home:

The MetroNorth branch of the Osmundson Lab

The MetroNorth branch of the Osmundson Desk

My Front door 

Yoshi's new home 

The empty kitchen.  My table won't make it in the door with it's legs.  I'll be performing surgery on her tomorrow (with any luck) and will be able to cook and eat soon thereafter.

Living room! 

"Bed room" (view from the living room)

Kitchen (with boxes) 

These lighting fixtures clearly date to the 1950s.  And I wouldn't change a thing about them. 

 Ceiling fan!  It's all happening!!

FOOTNOTES

*Please excuse this political interlude, after I explicitly promised an apolitical blog entry.  I just cannot resist.  For those of you who are not scientists or academics, first, good job.  You've made some solid life decisions at some point.  Second, turns out that, in the sciences, a PhD is no longer sufficient training for a tenure track position.  After completing a PhD, one must enter yet another apprenticeship, working long (really) hours for incredibly little compensation (the national minimum, which is actually paid by many institutions INCLUDING universities in large cities such as New York and San Francisco with v high costs of living, is around 38,000 this year.  People do it, but being a single parent or HOH on 38,000 a year is, well, tough).  Turns out there is a labor market in science (who would have guessed).  And that market is flooded.  While we constantly hear talking points about how our students are being undereducated in STEM subjects, such as biology, we are consistently turning out more scientists than there are long-term, well-paying research positions.  This means that 10 PhDs are educated for every 3 tenure-track professor jobs (all this has been well documented in a series of articles in Time and the Washington Post, amongst others).  Also, turns out research is expensive to do and takes a long time and a lot of labor.  And having a low-cost labor base is an incredibly cost effective way to get that labor done.  Having some one toil away for 5 to 10 years AFTER completing their PhD with absolutely no job security (post-doc contracts are typically renewed yearly) may be a good way to get a lot of science done for not a terrible amount of money.  But it turns out that it doesn't lead to a great morale in a lot of research labs; it's not an exaggeration to say that hopelessness and despair are both fairly common in academic research settings.  

**"SIPPING A COCKTAIL ON THE PORCH, LIFE IS GOOD!" 

   "I LOVE MY BOYFRIEND, IM THE LUCKIEST GURL IN THE WORLD"

   "SEE, THINGS ALWAYS WORK OUT IN THE END!!"

   pukes on self