Greetings

Well, I’ve finally decided to start this, convinced by a variety of happenings. Who knows how well I’ll continue to keep this updated, given my track record with any kind of diary, blog, or journal previously, but I’ll try it.

I have entitled this journal The Wanderer, which seems a very fit title to and for me. The title comes from the Anglo-Saxon poem which is at: http://www.georgetown.edu/labyrinth/library/oe/texts/a3.6.html in Old English or at http://faculty.uca.edu/~jona/texts/wanderer.htm in Modern English.

I do find myself adrift right now, a fact which has little to do with the many miles I have driven this year, over 24k thus far. No, it has much more to do with my uncertainty and frustration with myself and my life right at this point. I find myself not knowing what it is I’ll be doing after 22 August. I have no job lined up and no current academic prospects for the 2004-2005 year. This is extremely frustrating to me, as I felt, perhaps arrogantly, that the transition from the MA level to PhD opportunities would not be as troublesome as they have turned out to be.

While I am certain I’ll find a job teaching at some level, I worry that this will be a setback in my academic career. While a setback in and of itself is unimportant, they’ve happened before, I worry about the loss of momentum. I have never truly completed anything previously, and I worry that this is the start of the incompletion of my current goal, that being the attainment of a PhD and the career of a professor. I truly feel that I am supposed to be a professor, it fits me in so many ways that I was not able to realize earlier in my life. It is also a career that is a fitting tribute to my parents and grandparents, to whom I owe the opportunity to pursue this. Dad feels that I’m resilient and perhaps I am, but I do not know if I could bear to fail in this.

This would be less troublesome if there were any stability in my life in other ways, but that is not the case either. Recently divorced from a fine woman who I wish in many ways I could have stayed with, I am unable to commit to another fine woman who deserves so much more than I can give. I have thus excluded myself from the comfort and stability of a partner, which is troublesome not only to me in the short term but frightening in long term as I wonder if I can ever truly be a partner myself.

Thus I begin this journal on a somber note. The optimist that I am will I’m sure show it’s head soon but this is a cold rainy day following a very discouraging weekend with no place to call home in sight.

“Hwær cwom mearg? Hwær cwom mago? Hwær cwom maþþumgyfa?
Hwær cwom symbla gesetu? Hwær sindon seledreamas?
Eala beorht bune! Eala byrnwiga!
Eala þeodnes þrym!

Where is the horse? Where the young warrior? Where now the gift-giver?
Where are the feast-seats? Where all the hall-joys?
Alas for the bright cup! Alas byrnied warrior!
Alas the lord’s glory!