In an email with the subject line “craziness,” my brother asked:
“so.. how long will this be for? When are you leaving? What will you do for work? Will you buy another house? What will you do with this house? Will you come back to baltimore? Will you buy cowboy boots? How are you guys gonna move there? What is the job like that [A. is] taking? Are you scared?”
And I answered:
“1. 2-3 years, assuming A. likes/does well at the job.
2. A. leaves late Feb., I leave early August.
3. I don’t know: I have a decently varied writing portfolio at this
point, plus I’ll have… 4+ years’ experience doing
“policy” writing, with one year’s experience at the management [supervisory] level.
Not bad. On the other hand, it will be very nice to be able to take
advantage of the travel opps out there (3 hours from Y-stone, 3 hours
from Glacier, able to stay indefinite periods of time in a tent at
A.’s base camp during the summer, you in SF, old old friends in
Seattle/Portland, etc.), plus I am in the mood to do some serious,
more-than-one-hour-every-morning writing, plus when we analyze our
expenses I don’t “need” to make anywhere near the $[redacted] I’m pulling now
(if we cut out a lot of frivolities, which I think we could manage),
so I am open to forming a mix of freelancing… temping, waiting
tables, whatever, for max flexibility.
4/5. We’re not sure about the house. We are thinking of putting it on
the market in spring to see if we get a decent offer; if not, then
renting it, although I would enter into that with extreme reluctance,
as I feel pretty fiercely that landlording is not for dabblers (we
would hire a management company, I think).
6. I have a feeling that Baltimore will exert a certain allure from a
distance that it has, frankly, mostly lost for me up close at this
point. We’ll see. [College Town] is an interesting-sounding place, though, a
college town, etc., so it won’t be too sterile, I think…
7. I doubt it. I’ve never really seen how they are practical footwear.
I may adopt an eastern dandy mode of dress.
8. Movers, I hope. We are exploring.
9. A. will be the year-round supervisor of [a university field research project studying songbirds].
10. Obviously. But I am happily excited, too. This is a chance to move
back toward a lifestyle I once assumed I would have but which faded
away over the last half decade, i.e., a little unstable, more
exploratory, more travel, more catch-as-catch-can, see the world, less
worry about conventional markers of middle class success.”