S didn't get the coveted job. She's still trying to find shit so we don't have to take out a loan this summer (on account of me having no grants anymore and higher education paying no one during the summer).

We're also trying to find a new apartment during a pandemic and move, which considering if S gets COVID at best she gets hospitalized and at 30% worst she dies...well...I'm not sure what the fuck. I hate our neighbors. She hates our neighbors. They are all obnoxious fucks who let their dogs out at 3 in the morning and wake our dog and us up. I get to play "everyone is a zombie who can infect you at 50 feet" every time I take the dog out. But she never leaves the house. Oh well, I guess we can save money this way.

I've been balancing my normal job alongside trying to find jobs, and negotiating hours-long arguments between my mother-in-law and wife about living together. Which. Yes. Makes no sense alongside finding a new place to live, but we need an isolation zone to retreat to when the mother-in-law has to go to the hospital, conjure abstract chickens back from the dead, or do what in fuck all else compels her to not isolate.

We left her mom's yesterday in a haze of exhaustion but without the fetid rancor of fear that accompanied us out there. We hate where we live, but it's home and it's quiet.

I keep finding and applying to private sector and faculty gigs. Neuroscience director this. Epidemiology faculty that. I've had some near hits, like at USC. But so far no offers. To say I hate my current job is doing hate a disservice. I feel bitter disappointment. I cannot move on from a now 7-year mistake, courtesy of my ex-wife and a walkway of broken promises. I am cutting my feet and shambling in some vague direction that I can hope is forward.

There's grading I haven't done in over a week. There's a grant revision I need to start working on that's due on March 16th. There's a wind-chime of floppy thin dildos that chime on in the breeze of every day bullshit. My only consolation is that upper administration has decided to actively stop fucking with me and Birdie's old students. It only took me throwing down an Americans with Disabilities Act request and demanding a stop.

Probably why JM, one of the deans, decided to roast my tenure case for the dean dean, who is the least pleasant figurehead I've come across at this toxic institution. Which makes for even more fodder on top of the dung heap of evidence when Mr. Lawsuit comes to town for discrimination and a whole host of awful shit.

I want to press the reset button.

But some fucker.

Gave me instructions written in Mandarin.

And no actual button.

It's a carrot. Or another deflated fake dick to put up in my aviary of failures.

I guess it could be a fake dick made out of a carrot.

That too.

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