moving and writing

This past week was an interesting one job-wise. I was at the state capital one afternoon with my boss, talking to some folks at a state agency who we'd like to collaborate with and potentially get funding from. The next day I went to a workshop about corporate, foundation, and donor relations that was conducted by our university's foundation. I've heard many academics talk about how the world outside of the Ivory Tower is full of money grubbing misers. It took about 10 minutes for me to realize that the money grubbers are in the tower as well, and that's actually a good thing for the university.

Anyway, both of these experiences deserve their own posts since each was interesting and noteworthy. But my mind is on different, semi-job related things:

1. National Novel Writing Month, aka NaNoWriMo. The goal of NaNoWriMo is to write a novel (175 pages) in one month: November. Unlike most Americans, I don't have any grand ideas for a novel...yet. But NaNoWriMo appeals to me in my gut. I first learned about it last year, on October 30. Though the concept struck a chord with me, I gave myself an out because 2 days to come up with an idea and start writing seemed, well, crazy. But I vowed that I would come up with some ideas and participate this year. I'm under no illusions that anything I could slap together in a month (or two months or two decades) would be any good, but I want to go through the process and to spend a month writing intensely. Academia seems like a potentially good setting for a novel, which is why I referred to NaNoWriMo as semi-job related. The personalities, the incestuousness, and the nomadic lifestyle lend themselves to strong characters and interesting situations. It's also a world I know fairly well, which makes it a safer bet for coming up with a realistic plot. Kind of lame, but it's a starting point.

2. We're trying to figure out where to live. University towns usually have some sort of appeal -- Ann Arbor, Madison, Northampton, and Austin all have it. My university town does not. In the not too distant past, the town was somewhat dangerous, which led most of the university faculty to seek housing outside the town. The town has cleaned up quite a bit and is undergoing massive McGentrification, but still doesn't draw much of the university crowd.

This summer, we're living in a sublet that's in town and walking distance to my office. Being a short walk away from work is fantastic, but the town makes me sad. Come September we have to move, and we're trying to figure out where to go. We've been scoping out this area and the nearest big city, where my boyfriend will be working. There's no absolutely ideal situation, so we're choosing from a few acceptable options, knowing that there are up and down sides to each one.

In my head, these two topics -- housing and NaNoWriMo -- have become linked, as if our decisions about where to live are part of a larger story I could write that says something meaningful about relationships and modern life. Realistically, I think I'm just trying to create a story about moving and transitions that will help me to figure out what to do. But if that story can fuel a month of writing in November, so much the better.