if you've seen people mourning over a break up you will probably understand this. often the predominant emotion is that of rejection, sometimes it is that of having failed especially when they had known for a while that something was wrong and they were giving it their best, trying to fix it but couldn't. anger yes of course, but usually lower down, beneath disappointment, rejection, failure, a sense of loss, of not knowing how to start to live afresh; unless it was a case of unfaithfulness and abrupt breaking up. what i have been surprised with is how many people just broken up are afraid and insecure, their predominant worry being left alone, single, for the rest of their lives. in fact, once a friend of mine who was then married also voiced these concerns wondering aloud about other people who broke up but talking about how she was so scared of being left alone. the older the person concerned, somehow the sadder and scarier this sense of abandonment.

i've been getting that lately about my professional self. its three years now I have been without a job. and this birthday i noticed a lot many white hairs down the sides of my head, those that get exposed when i tie my hair up. ive crossed that age when i saw my parents start to get wide around their waists, my aunts start to color their hair. and i am starting to get the feeling that a professional marriage (aka tenure) might not be possible for me in this life. in fact, that's not even the scariest bit. i'm starting to feel complacent in this city, in this situation, with the people of my own country all around me, with family members close and far flung peppered through the geographical space (even though i still avoid many of them). i am beginning to feel that i'm getting too old to start afresh, again and again. i look around this flat, the kitchen with its windows lacking curtain rods on which we have pasted craft squares of various colors to block out the sun (we do this every year for some months), our yellow sofa that has collected a myriad of shapes of grey spots on its body in our years here, even our kitchen dish rack neatly placed on our green absorbent mat collecting our washed stuff: two plates (carefully picked by me from fabindia someday after i had broken another plate at home), spoons hanging upside down from a lil spoon stand that had come free with the dish rack, a bowl or two, a small glass he likes to drink in that remains the only one left from a pack of six we began with (5 others shattered by us, one by one), the hand vacuum sitting quietly in one corner of the living room waiting to be used to suck up miniscule glass pieces or the dust of drilling after a handyman finished his job and left the place in a mess. our plants, or rather my plants that remind of our first year here when i'd keep going to the nursery getting lil pots of flowers, i got some bigger ones for his office too, they died one by one. how many times can i pick myself up again and start afresh, throwing away the familiar crockery and buying new ones, looking at an empty place and imagining it as home. this has in fact been the longest he and i have lived together at a stretch. but this marriage needs two others - a professional marriage for each one of us to a place that is both encouraging and supportive of the work that each of us thinks we want to do. i'm getting too old and the longer i stay unaffiliated the bigger a problem it might be for me to find a match.

houseplants sketch #3

potted plants in the balcony below my window. the camouflaged crotons I've tried to raise myself but that died on me.

there are many names for God. but I like to think of it as probability. there are also many words for that - call it luck, chance, odds. God is probability. also people have a hard time understanding probability. It can work in your favor despite the low prior sometimes, and sometimes it could go against you despite its prior assurance of being on your side. sometimes the former coincides with your prayers, giving you the perception of them having been answered; in the latter case you feel abandoned and cheated or worse punished. 

been almost a year I've been jobhunting. I started my first application sometime in end of July 2019, but really I started out much earlier because around now last year I sent my job market paper to my erstwhile advisor and asked him if he would still write a letter of recommendation for me. he took about a month to read it and write back etc. etc. And then I needed two more ppl like him. In a way I'd been ashamed to ask my professors from 4 yrs ago (last year) to write letters for me, still, for an entry level academic job. but they are all I had, cos I wasn't going to ask my last boss for a letter, not after all that had happened at that place. 

and here I am, still jobless, now wondering if I will have letter writers for another season of the market. 

funny world academia, you could spend a lifetime hopping from one entry level job to another, and if you're lucky you will not land one that will further cripple you from moving to better jobs by sucking all your time. there are some jobs I interviewed for 5 years ago where they wanted me to give up research and simply teach. is that why I did a PhD???! do those ppl forget what it takes, what it involves, both in terms of time effort perseverance, and loans of money, in my case possibly forgiven by now but not forgotten by me (and years of your best alternative salaries being given up). aaahhh. sunk cost! move on. 

but I can't. my savings lasted for about two years and a lil more, and now I'm living on borrowed money from k. I still can't believe these are the choices I made in my life. but I still can't make a U-turn. I am not even asking for a recouping of the financial costs, just compensation for research that I have continued to do, and want to do till I tire of it. huh. who am I fooling, the fables of Harvard grads and young academics with godfathers can fir bhi sell, who's going to buy mine, unless I sell it off with author rights; maybe the buyer will succeed at publishing my work better than I ever seem to.