I’m still alive. Truly! The last three months have been whirlwind. I finished a draft of my thesis in January. Then I took off to San Francisco for six weeks to see loved ones and friends and somewhere in there made it across to the other coast for Lavender Languages. The trip was also to test the waters a little about opportunities in the US for post-PhD life. Nowhere has ever quite felt so much like a cultural home as San Francisco, and I’m having a hard time missing it now I’m back.

At any rate, post-PhD. In the belly of the beast. I know exactly what I want — to keep working, writing, thinking — and an idea of where I might do that, maybe. Or how. But it’s fascinating to learn how to negotiate a whole new academic labour market (not that my knowledge of the Australian one is really so extensive, more spectatorial.) I’ve re-written my CV a few times and am working on a “statement of teaching philosophy”, etc. The latter especially is pretty odd. Well, the cultural disjuncture is odd. My dear friend S. likens the standard Australian teaching philosophy to this pithy sentence: “I try not to turn up to class grumpy and I don’t drink too much when I’m marking essays.” Whereas those I’ve read, American style, take it seriously, or rather one must perform an earnest interest in pedagogy — and why bother to perform that earnestness when maybe you could actually teach better if the philosophy framing your work were on paper?

Anyhow. I have a thesis submission date. And the feedback on my work so far is that it needs some minor revisions, a very little restructuring, footnotes all formatted correctly and a conclusion. So if nothing goes wrong between now and then, I will hand in on May 10. And by June I’ll be back in the US for their summer, having a real and actual “proper holiday” with roadtrips, adventures in the South and gay Christmas. In the meantime I have three part-time jobs and two article deadlines to meet. Working working working. Probably not much time for blogging. But I feel the space in my head opening up to blog again…

Maybe about this: an ad for an Argentinian bank. In it, a bank’s “acceptance” of a transwomen client helps others around her become more accepting. A lot of people are apparently thrilled at it. I’m really not so sure. Capitalism and rather cliched tolerance discourse, all in one neat package. Ugh.