Afterwards

Wedding planning is a funny thing.  You focus all of your energy on preparing for this wonderful weekend of events—the Friday picnic for out-of-town friends, the wedding and reception on Saturday, the Sunday chance to talk with friends at Strawberry Festival.  I bet that on Monday, we're going to feel as though we've been shot out of a cannon.  Where will we land?

The organization that Nora worked for, and that I still do, is going through extensive turmoil right now.  We've either hired or are about to hire a new head for all three of our professional schools; we're developing a fully revised set of all of our curricula for Fall 2012; we're going through two critical accreditation processes at once; we're coming to terms with being a professional school in a profession that has lost 25% of its employment nationwide in the past three years.  I love my colleagues and my students, but as an organization, it's a deeply stressful place to be (and has been for several years).

I talk with my students about stress, and use the term simultaneously in the emotional and the structural sense.  Applied forces create stress in the building components that resist them; the formula for stress in a linear member (a floor joist, a wall stud, etc.) is [force * beam length] / [beam width * beam depth squared].

You needed to know that, right?

So I analogize that for our emotional health as [stressors * their expected duration] / [width of social network * your sense of purpose squared].  Don't try to calculate your personal stress; it's an analogy, okay?  And right now, my numerator is really high—lots of stressors with no end in sight—and my denominator is low, because I question my effectiveness and because so many of my best friends (and my sense of home) are in Vermont.

Vermont, though, is hardly a stress-free proposition either.  Our friends Nelson and Betti gave us the best description of Vermont economics I've heard thus far.  "We're just piecing things together, doing a little of this and a little of that.  That's what everybody does up here."  I think back on my Uncle Bob and Aunt Helen, who raised four sons and ran an extensive and successful orchard (peaches, plums, apples and cherries) while Bob also had his mail delivery route and Helen worked as an administrative assistant at Caterpillar heavy machine manufacturing.  Lots of people piecing things together.  It's not an unusual way of life, but those of us who only have one job at a time rarely think about it.

Academia is full of people piecing things together.  "Road Scholars," they're often called, picking up a course here and a course there, working for colleges that have no obligations to them other than a stipend that averages out (if you really do your teaching work) to about the same hourly rate as the kid who takes your order in the Dunkin Donuts drive-through.  About half of all faculty in American colleges are adjunct, and they teach about a quarter of all courses.

Consulting is another form of piecing things together, as is writing.  Forever on the hunt for the next gig, one eye on the craft and the other on the marketing and networking.

I've always been an employee.  I like the stability that comes with a job; steady pay, benefits, relative lack of risk.  Nora's family is far more entrepreneurial; her parents started and ran a successful professional business for decades.

Independence and stability.  High and low risk.  Coming and going.

Nora and I are going to be charting a new course with our marriage, taking care of each other and learning new things and relying on one another's strengths.  And that course may have economic implications as well.  That cannonball has to land somewhere.

This song's been on my mind a lot lately.  Even before I saw the video with the wedding dress...