The First (of Hopefully More) Adventure(s)

I'm sitting at the window of a small-town local coffee shop with hubs during a Sunday inter-service afternoon work session...what ends up going down when you're PhD students who go to a Pentecostal church which still does the two-service thing.  It's rainy and gray, but nothing a toasted marshmallow s'mores latte can't brighten up.  My husband is adorably hunched over his laptop, doing what he calls "coding."  Linguistics stuff.  We know enough about each others' stuff to understand it, but our fields are different enough for us not to be all up in each others' academic space.  This is fabulous relationship-wise, but also positive when it comes to both of us having to find jobs in the same (geographic) area.  Speaking of which...

This is how the academic job search works:

1. Apply (duh)
2. If they like your application, the institution will conduct a preliminary interview with you, usually a video conference.
3. If you make the second cut, the institution will fly you out for a campus visit.  The campus visit includes you having a ton of meetings with faculty and students, you'll teach a class, present a "job talk," have a campus tour and have another formal interview.  It's like a date.  They're trying to see if you're a good fit for them, but also trying to "show off" so that they will present themselves as desirable to you. At this point, you're usually competing with 3 other candidates who have also been offered campus visits.
4. If you make the final cut, they will make you an offer, at which point negotiations usually come into play.
5. If you accept the offer, pending your graduation, at which point you'll have a PhD in hand, you'll sign on the dotted line and have an official, bona fide job!  Whoo-hoo!

So far, I have made the first two cuts with a particular institution I mention here.  So, a week from today they're flying me out to participate in round two of the Academic Dating Game.

I'm excited...my first call-back has now become my first campus visit.  This place had the earliest application deadline, and I suspect they're trying snatch people up before the Academic Dating Game commences in full force in the spring.  However, I must admit that there's a part of me trying not to feel overwhelmed.  I feel the weight of things.  I feel the unpredictability of things.  I'm confronted, once again, with the fact that, try as I might, I can't control my life.

I naively thought that once I got married, the variables of life would be settled.  Or, at least, more settled than they were when I was single.  What I see now is that each point of "settling" actually opens up an entirely new set of variables.