Change is in the Air.

It's April.

I did not get the job at my undergrad alma mater; this was expected. The rejection email was fairly impersonal and totally stock. Eh, whatever.

Emory University, however, sends the best rejection letters in the business, and even better than that, they process their searches QUICKLY. Applications due March 1? I had a rejection letter in my hand on the 29th! Legendary!

About a week ago, my favorite uncle died in Florida, from lung cancer. This has, perhaps oddly, really quickly settled into a deep soak in all of the marvelous stories we created back in the early nineties. I used to work with him on his house, and in his big garden, summers when I was in college. Many many good times were had; he's the reason I know how to make pesto and how to make top-notch steamed mussels in basil-tomato broth, and good nuggets like that. The world won't be as much fun without him in it, but I passed through the "sadness" phase of this adjustment in about ten minutes; the stories are too juicy, too fantastic and fun, to bother being depressed about the present.

The hard drive on this computer went belly-up three days ago. "Unmountable boot error." While I had numerous files in email, and on thumb drives, I've lost some stuff, and none of it is recoverable. This, again, is suprisingly not full of angst and sadness. I find that I ENJOY the sort of "fresh new" appearance of this machine. All those applications for schools that didn't accept me: gone. All of those old files for teaching and such: gone. Vanished, never to return. Sure, I have all of that in my email, but right now, I don't have a thing. Just firefox, some virus-scanning programs, a few other things. I don't even have a background. It's kind of hilarious. Spring cleaning indeed.

Around the time that I was sweating attendance on my yoga weekend, my hips turned to stone. I mean, aching pain from when I get up from bed, to when I get back in, non-stop. For four days, approximately. The one workshop had three attendees, the other one had two. The Anti-Gravity class was still great fun (of course), but I'd have liked more students. My hip tightness (stress, money, blah, the usual) made Primary virtually impossible and the wheel out of the question. Whatever. That happens. It's better now but not one hundred percent yet.

Something is afoot in my asana practice, and I think I see how it'll play out, but that's not for public sharing; too much pulling back of the curtain could scare it off.

The city remains typical toward Ashtanga: there is a workshop now emphatically titled "Ashtanga-INSPIRED" on some website. Hah, I wonder why that is: is Primary too scary? There is a summer teacher training coming here, from YogaWorks. They have the schedule posted in PDF from that studio's home page, and it's a jumble of standing poses, twists, backbends, Sutras, and an anatomy weekend. Ought to be fine, and to further saturate an over-saturated market of yoga teachers. Notably, the YogaWorks blurb says that it has produced "some of the most successful yoga studios in the United States." Oh, so THAT's what it's all about. THANKS!! It costs, if you get in early, over $2900 to do a month workshop in Indianapolis. San Francisco, complete with training, plane, rent and food, and Mysore classes, cost me about $4500; maybe $5000. I'm biased, of course, but if you want a Yoga Alliance certification in Ashtanga yoga, you can't beat the training I did, for it. Well, as long as you've got substantial home experience with Ashtanga; no training can bring you something you don't have.

I continue to teach sparse classes out west (3-5 students) and up north (1-2 students and not infrequently none).

Recently I feel as if all of this is changing, as if the earth is sort of metaphysically cracking open; going to seed, maybe. I like this sensation; it requires greater responsibility from me, and that's where I have power. I manage a certain level of chaos quite well, and it actually ENHANCES my personal power to do so. Stability above a certain minimal requirement is DEADLY stultifying, and the combination of daily stability and total uncertainty, but a CONCRETE uncertainty, a sort of untouchable DEAD uncertainty, is COMPLETE anathema (that's what the academic job market has so far been; total stability mixed with utter uncertainty, but with no action permitted).

There is a juicy, so juicy, tenure-track position due soon. It doesn't pay brilliantly, but if I remember right, it doesn't cost a lot to live where it is, so maybe in cost-of-living terms it's ok.

Tomorrow I'm judging (on a panel) artwork by students, in order to be part of the process of awarding a graduate school scholarship. This will be fun. Unversity service--page, fetch me my CV!

Tax refunds (because I made just under $10,000 this year; how laughable is that? See what a PhD and a fellowship will get you?) are paying my student loans this month. April will be fine; May will still be random chaos.