Though who knows how long it will last. School starts tomorrow here in the more collegiate areas of northeast georgia, in a town where the local university so dominates our town that even the public K-12 system adheres to the same Aug-May schedule. Nothing quite like kids playing outside in 90-plus temps to get that education flowing, I guess. Anyway, the schedules have been cleared for a more-or-less daily writing routine. Though that's subject to change b/c the other income-producing member of our household just saw her planned income stream dry up when the UGA professor she was going to be working for starting next week asked her to forego another month of pay while continuing to work on the project. The nature of this project involved our cohabitant securing funding through grants and donation for the professor's annual conference to promote STEM learning among young women. Turns out the conference is basically a neoliberal grift masquerading as a charity (please secure us over $20,000 in very small, barely detectable donations in order to send 10 lucky high school girls to attend my conference). In return for my cohabitant's participation--the location and securing of said money--my cohabitant would be paid somewhere from $2,000 to $2,500 for six, or maybe five months. It was all quite vague. And so after the meeting where the cohabitant was told she wouldn't be getting paid until next month, but in the meantime keep working on the project, and also please sign this NDA for me, my cohabitant--being no fool, and having recently completed her PhD--bailed on the project and alerted university officials. Ah messy life. So out plan of scraping by for a few months on a couple grand a month while she worked 20 hrs, and we completed our legitimate contracted work on our book about a prominent music group--manuscript due Nov. 1st--was uh...what's the word...totally fucked.
We have options. We are planning. One of us will probably be working full-time. The other will be working full-time on the book (the research is all completed, and most chapters exist in a sort of vomitous rough draft state). Or we'll both be working part-time, and juggling the writing. But that manuscript will be delivered, and it will be great. And until I'm hired, I'll be occasionally typing here to get my writing skills and speed more up to, uh, speed.
Oh yeah. This blog supports Elizabeth Warren for president, but it would vote for a semi-sentient ferret at this point provided it wasn't a white-supremacist swill merchant huckster.
The only optimism I can muster about anything is that this government--its policies, its laws, the way it conducts itself--in no way represents the will or the desire of the people who live here. Maybe one day that will change. The only solution is voting out republicans, voting in democrats, and then holding their feet to the fire and forcing them to do the right thing.
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