Quick and to the Pointless

I'm not really sure what I ought to blog about these days. In the past, the blog was there mostly to inform friends who live far away about my comings and goings in California. For a while after I started the program here at the UC to the SC, a good-sized group of my fellow grads were also blogging regularly, and it was a fun kind of intellectual collective to participate in as we bitched about classes and professors and the absence of hope or justice in the universe. Everything is quite a bit more diffuse now, with fewer friends updating their blogs and fewer comments on posts, leaving me with the feeling of spitting words out into the ether.

There's also the circumstantial changes, most importantly the imminent end, or at least hiatus, of my academic career. The famously awful job market for historians hit the KFR household pretty hard this year; one of the jobs I applied to, in a backwater in Wisconsin, had over 160 applicants. That's over 160 people with PhDs, many with published articles or books, many with post-doctoral positions, many with bigger names on their letters of recommendation than I have. Even if the situation improves in the next few years, I have absolutely no interest in going through this meat grinder over and over.

There's also the fact that I'm going to be a dad in about three months. At that point, I will have way bigger fish to fry than worrying about whether or not anyone cares about the intellectual legacy of Andre Gorz.

Anyway, I think I'll just keep plugging away with this thing, probably just a little less frequently.

P.S. I had a nice trip to Oregon recently and saw lots of lovely, wonderful people.
P.P.S. The pregnancy is going really well.
P.P.P.S. I am totally going to finish my dissertation on time.