life is coming apart at the seams these days. I can't believe the things I'm having to do. I flit between hopelessness and anger at the world. In fact, if not for the anger, it would be hard to wake up every day and continue on from where I left the night before. 

Apparently I am too old for entry level AP positions in govt funded universities. In the US, I had gotten used to people telling me that discrimination based on age (or anything else) was illegal. Here, they close the door for you at 35. Plus, a school got back to me saying I wasn't eligible because I didn't have first class in my Masters degree; regardless of my PhD. They asked me if I had a second masters in which I could show first class. The irony is that an American PhD contains a masters in it but most of us don't bother to get a degree for that lesser milestone cos we have bigger things on our minds. So guess what, now I have enrolled as a masters student again, at my alma mater, to use my past coursework to get a new degree. So I am doing another masters now, five years after finishing my PhD.

Going through setting up and activating my student account, communicating with admin and academic advisors, is driving me nuts. Plus because the degree will only now come at the end of fall 2020 semester, I am requesting an official letter certifying that I finished the course requirements in the past and stating my GPA that can be translated by Indian authorities into a class/division. And guess what, after repeatedly asking the academic advisor to include my GPA in this said letter, I received it without it. I already have a masters degree, so a letter stating that I completed requirements for another is useless to me without also certifying a first class equivalent.

Arrgh. 

On top of that since June the interviews have started again after 3-4 months of coronavirus shocks. But nothing has so far translated into an offer. People just keep talking with me, and talking again and again. 

Oh yeah also mother in law keeps going on about the "beauty of Hinduism" and ranting against minority religions. Forget how I deal with it, more important is how hubby loses his shit on the phone with her and then roams around with chronic sullenness. If it goes on, I will have to ask her to stop calling. I have anyway stopped talking to her, maybe once in a fortnight I show her my face on his videocall or sound out a hello. I've stopped bothering any more than that. There's too much shit in this world anyway, to allow polite nodding in response to more.

we are watching The Handmaid's Tale on top of that. Quite a mirror for our world these days, maybe not literally in every sense, but you can always recall or find some event/context in this world we live in that matches the horror in the show. 

I keep wondering, how do people bring kids into this world? 

Oh yeah I forgot a more interesting detail to the whole first class masters eligibility requirement. A couple years ago someone had forwarded a news piece about automatic future eligibility for PhDs from well ranked universities from abroad. So when above school said the requirement was from MHRD, I dug up the facts. Found a UGC requirement for 55percent (not even first class) in masters that had been scrapped in 2018 to allow automatic eligibility for PhDs from universities ranked globally in top 500 according to some rankings. Dug up the rankings, forwarded all of it together to the communicating person. No acknowledgement, no reply. So I don't know if they threw my application in the waste bin or not.

How can one go through this life without anger??

Update: so I now know that I was wrong, UGC rules apply to universities, not to institutes of national importance like IITs and IIMs, that are the bulk of where my CV has gone. Apparently, AICTE regulates those and most rules are based on engineering and physical science timelines; most of those ppl probably don't work before going for a PhD. Anyway. 35 is the age cap both for entry level school teachers and assistant professors in this country even though eligibilty between those two differs by a 5-6 yrs PhD!!