6 months to the day now since the election.

Almost a year since I first came to visit New York, with Blake, to look into moving here. Up until that point, I doubted if I’d ever come to live in NYC; now I’ve already moved away and returned. On that first visit, each of us had interviews for separate jobs. Blake had a job opportunity, and I had Blake, and that was reason enough to move there.

I thought maybe I could teach. Inner-city kids…it would be tough, but I needed something, anything, as long as it was tough, to snap me out of the graduate murk. If I was of a radically different moral disposition, I would have joined the army. A classroom of 40 scornful brats…that warzone’ll do.

My interview for the Teaching Fellows didn’t go well, I knew it walking out. Blake and I were both stressed out by the trip, in so many ways, that we had our first Big Fight. It had been building since the trip began, but it really kicked into high gear at the end of our stay, when I said something cruel. On the train out of Grand Central, on our way to go pick up my car, I announced apropos of seemingly nothing:

Well, if I don’t get this job, I’ll probably just go down to Florida this summer to work on the election.

She didn’t even say anything in reply. I took it back a few minutes later. She still didn’t say anything.