365: HOLY SHIT

That's all I can say! Earlier this year I was reading my HRC magazine and I saw an article about the practice of "Grossing Up" by (so far) private companies to offset the tax penalties for domestic partners imposed by the Federal Government. As I've mentioned before this practice is obviously unfair and bothers the shit out of me (e.g. if Ange were a man I wouldn't pay taxes, but because we are same sex partners we're taxed--at 40% no less!) and of course being the sassy person I am I decided to do something about it.

Being new I didn't really know where to go so I reached out to my friend Jill who is the student rep to the CSU Board of Trustees and I figured would know where to go. She had some ideas and we both spent time meeting individually with people and together with some people. We were told there wasn't going to be much luck at changing things but we still thought it was important to put on the table. I worked mainly with people on campus and Jill worked mainly with the unions (student and faculty) and various trustees.

I hadn't heard much about it lately and as it's the end of the semester and I'm going to Africa in 2 weeks I haven't thought much about it. Today the Chancellor's Office released a statement related to the break down in negotiations between the CFA and the CSU and had a whole bunch of links to various things. One was a link to a "a handwritten list of items" to discuss. ONE OF THE ITEMS (of 9!) WAS GROSSING UP! OMG!!! My heart literally skipped a beat! [link here to the full list: http://www.calstate.edu/LaborRel/Contracts_HTML/bargaining-proposals/2012/04062012-CFA-05032012-Notes.pdf]

Now I'm not claiming this was solely because of the work that Jill and I did, but that's a pretty big coincidence! So whoever has been carrying this torch all the way to the negotiating table on behalf of the 23,000 faculty members in CA I say AWESOME JOB & THANK YOU!

365: Recruit, Recruit, Recruit!

Today kicks off the first official day of recruiting for the Gambia trip. I was going to give a 5 minute pitch to my Community Health class...but they were so pumped about it that it turned into 30! Whoops! I already have 5 students who are "totally going." I just need to get them the application and have them turn in the deposit and we're already halfway to our minimum! Can't wait til we have the all the students signed up so we can start having meetings and getting to know each other!

365: People are Funny

I don't know what is funnier: the original note or the fact that campus police actually took the time to write out a ticket for the illegally placed funny lock.

How I Looked for a Job

As I mentioned previously, I often make decisions in random spastic ways, and this pattern has usually served me well and I alluded to the fact that my new job search was somewhat similar to the way I had chosen my undergraduate university.

All is ready to be revealed because I got a job offer and I accepted! Yay, yay, yay!

So one would think that with higher and higher levels of education you would you have more choices in the world available to you. That's kind of true in some ways, but not so much in others.

You see, there's only so many places that a person with a PhD can work. And the job openings for those people don't open up often. So when you go out to look for a job your choices are somewhat limited. You go where there are job offers and that often means you have to do a nationwide search. And that's what most PhD students do.

That's mostly what I did...but with some limits. I know that the economy is bad right now and just getting A job anywhere I can should be my goal. But in the words of one wise person, homie don't play that. I really cannot be expected to move just anywhere. Besides the fact that I am generally picky about my surroundings, I have actual real-life concerns like is my family going to be discriminated against or worse, hate crimed? Why in the world would I choose to move somewhere more backwards and conservative than Indiana? And while we're at it, why do I want to live anywhere uglier than Indiana and farther away from civilization?

So I needed a plan. And here it is:

Oh how I love MS Paint

Anywhere in the "Not Even" zone would be immediately passed over for consideration. Generally speaking, these are very conservative states where my family would be in danger and/or highly undesirable places to live anyway for a multitude of reasons (ratio of city to farmland, distance from the beach, plethora of Southern twang, etc.). Now I'm sure some cities in the zone are "just lovely," but frankly no amount of convincing on the part of a native is going to convince me I would want to live anywhere in the zone. So I didn't apply anywhere where jobs were listed in this area.

I heard from a lot of people that this was a fool-hardy decision; I shouldn't limit myself so much. Well guess what? I applied for 52 jobs outside of that zone. FIFTY TWO. That's a lot. I was sure I'd get SOMETHING.

And guess what?

I did. Suck it naysayers.

And not only did I get A job in the desirable zone, I got one of my top choices in my very top zone of ideal living.

I accepted a job at California State University-Chico on Monday. My heart is singing on the highest mountain-tops. Starting this fall I will be a tenure-track Assistant Professor at Chico State. I've never been so happy in my entire life. Once again, random strategies for world domination have worked in my favor. Go me!