Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Um, hello?

So, I have never written a blog.  I write a lot of emails, I sometimes write in a journal.  I have toyed with the idea of writing a blog, but then thought it was fairly presumptuous of me to think that other people would actually want to read what I had to write.  Especially considering I can be long-winded. 

But here I am, writing a blog.  Maybe.  I might not tell anyone I know about it, so who knows if anyone will read it?

I guess I can start by telling a little about myself.  I'm an academic postdoc at a Big U studying biology.  I've been here for about 1 3/4 years.  I had a nice, successful, and relatively painless stint as a grad student with a fantastic advisor (I had no idea how great she was until I experienced something different).  I moved back to my home state after grad school, rekindled an old romance, found a postdoc position, and got married.  In that order. 

The postdoc started off great, went sour, and is now neutral.  I suppose.  But more (probably MUCH more) on that later.  The marriage is great, but also a challenge because it's not just a regular marriage, it's a military marriage.  And I sort of knew, but now really understand, how much control the military has over my life.  I might as well have signed up myself, I would be getting paid more than I am as a postdoc! 

So, I guess the point of all this is trying to figure out: 1) what I want to do when I grow up, 2) how I'm supposed to do that when the military will be telling us where to live for the next 12 years, 3) how to be supportive of my husband's career while it's possibly destroying mine, and 4) how to find a job that I love as much as I love science in general.  If anyone has any ideas now, let me know.

I guess that's all for now.