Your Love's Got Me Lookin' So Crazy Right Now

Remember Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre? You know, Rochester's crazy wife, who he secretly keeps locked up in his attic? Well, I am Bertha Mason.

The Future Dr. Mrs Dr. PGS has had some fly-outs, which is awesome. (In fact, she's had an all around better year on the market than I have. She works on the language and literature of a part of the world that's salient to a lot of Americans these days, owing to events of the past few years. It seems a lot of schools are looking to beef up their course offerings in the sorts of things she can teach.) Anyway, one of the things she's been dealing with in conversations with faculty in the departments she's visiting is the need to keep my existence on the down-low. All the advice she's got from her people, and all the advice I've got from mine, is to keep the two-body problem out of the picture until she's got an offer in hand. Especially in cases where there might be different factions in a department pulling for different candidates, she doesn't want to give anyone any reason to think she's going to be complicating their lives.

This puts the Future Dr. Mrs Dr. in a totally different position on campus visits than another friend of ours. Unlike us, this friend had the good sense to find an SO who wanted be a lawyer. So now that he's got his law degree, he's all portable and she's an academic with no two-body problem. Nice. But she's also cunning, this friend of ours. So on her campus visits, she made sure to drop enough information to let department members know her SO was a lawyer and could follow her. (When I've got the chance, I'll come back to why it seems like this is information women need to convey a lot more than men do.)

But the Future Dr. Mrs Dr.? Not so much. She's been bobbing and weaving like the sixth-grade dodge-ball champ she never was. She's had conversations where, frankly, it was just weird not to mention me. Like, she just moved to the city I live in last year, so why does she have such a first-hand feel for how it's changed over the past n years? Hm. But in any case, so far she's managed to keep hidden the dark secret of her BF, the loser philosopher.

And me? Up I trundle into my attic, to wail and gnash and be generally insane.