SO. I haven’t really updated on my life in awhile.
Paul and I were planning to move in together when his lease is up in the fall. Unfortunately, owing to the insane work schedule he has at Temple and Settlement, his dissertation has been delayed by another eight months. He teaches violin, viola, and theory at five of the six branches of Settlement, to which he commutes by public transit (which, personally, I don’t think is very good in Philadelphia. He disagrees, but he hasn’t also lived in NYC and Chicago). So he spends about three hours a day on public transportation, which, if you noted my post a couple of weeks ago, has gotten mighty dangerous. My boss’s daughter was chased by an entire gang of teenagers about a week ago. I remember all these various Monty Python episodes where they had random entities attacking people and it was funny (old ladies, giant house cats, etc.) but this is actually happening: where gangs of teenagers randomly attack people just to beat them up.
Paul is also teaching two college courses at Temple and they are asking him back for the fall.
In the meantime he feels like he can’t deal with moving and I have to renew my lease. Owing to that, and the fact that I have to work more than one job to make ends meet with my rent, I have to get a summer job. I’m looking at retail. I’m going to try to get a job at a bookstore or Ann Taylor or The Container Store (even though it’s in Cherry Hill, there is a bus that goes directly there) on the weekends or weekday nights. I spent the last two summers completely broke and going into more debt and I just can’t do that again. The reason it’s so bad in the summer is that the church doesn’t have the choir for the summer, so we all lose our income from that, and the library isn’t open on Sunday afternoons in the summer, which means that I lose additional income from that.
I am trying to get more freelance work but it’s really dried up right now, owing to the fact that the publishing industry is doing exactly what I predicted it would do: farming everything out and disintegrating the “publishing house” that was. This is why I left the industry. In order to remain in the industry, you need to be married to someone with great benefits and work from home, unless you want to live in NYC (and even then it’s no guarantee to have an in-house job). Also, thanks to my freelance work, I naturally owe the Fed. I am glad, however, that I paid the money to H and R Block to help me with my taxes. I would have owed a lot more otherwise.
I keep trying to figure out how to keep expenses down, but unfortunately, apartment rental costs have gone through the roof in Philly (comparatively speaking, of course) in the past few years. I could pay less in rent but then I would have to pay for a transit card and I would spend a lot more money on the carshare and probably (let’s be honest) on cabs, so it would probably wind up costing the same overall. I might as well live close to work. Plus I’m also close to my church job.
I am waiting to hear from Temple about whether I got into the master’s program in musicology. Paul is great friends with a musicology faculty member who has dropped some hints, but we don’t know anything yet. My application wasn’t as strong as it could have been, mostly because I haven’t had to write an academic paper in many, many years. But also because the week it was due, I broke my ankle, so all the time I’d meant to spend working on the remainder of my application, I spent in the ER and doctor’s offices and trying to get around on crutches without putting my left foot down. So we’ll see what happens I guess. Two major factors in my favor: I went to Smith College and majored in English, so I can write (which doesn’t always happen with musicology-interested people: you’d be surprised!), and I am not looking for funding from the school. If I did I would have to quit my job and take out probably twice as much in loans (if not more) to fund the operation. I figured that I would continue to work full-time and go to school part-time and pay for tuition with loans. If that’s possible, anyway.
Time to get off to work now.
