Still Can’t Quite Believe It
For the past two years I’ve been living here in Honolulu, Hawaii, where I have had a largely excellent time. I have learned a lot, despite some rough spots, and both Herself and I have flourished here, initial misgivings notwithstanding. I think I could legitimately describe the two years here as the best in my life so far.
Thus, if asked about my plans a month ago, I would (with some effort, it bears saying) distanced myself from late-semester panic enough to say that I was in fact quite looking forward to Hawai’i Year Three, wherein I expected to write my MA thesis on the poetics of consumption in Tawara Machi’s Sarada Kinenbi, which I planned to translate as an appendix to the thesis proper. It was going to be grand.
But there has been a twist. A monumental, shocking twist.
That same late-semester panic, inspired largely by a certain graduate class on Edo-era Literature1, spurred me to spend a couple of evenings doctoring up my resume and sending it into Newtype USA. I have engaged in similar folly before2, but this time I had a couple of honest-to-god gonna-be-published notches on my freelancing pistol, so I wondered if my inquiry might have credibility it previously lacked.
Turns out it did. To compress the long and frequently agonizing process of interviews and indecision down to a few words: I got the job.
On Sunday I am flying to my ancestral home of Albuquerque, New Mexico, and a week later I am driving to Houston, Texas. A week after that, hopefully after finding an apartment, I start my new job as a staff translator for Newtype USA.
At this point, all I can really think to say is: Holy Fucking Shit.
1 It turned out that I received an (extremely generous) A-, and ultimately wrote a paper of which I am actually quite proud—in any case, my panic was unfounded. (“Like it always is,” Herself long-sufferingly points out.)
2 Amusingly, last year I sent my resume to ADV Films, Newtype USA’s parent company, in response to their job posting for a translator. They never replied, and the posting remains up even now, a year later. Maybe they forgot about it.
June 1st, 2007 at 6:28 pm
Congratulations! Normally I’d say that finishing a master’s degree would be a better course of action, but normally I’d be talking to a computer scientist for whom a MS is more likely to be worth something in the job market.
June 2nd, 2007 at 11:36 am
Well, having completed all the coursework requirements for my MA, I don’t want to just abandon it—I’m going to study for comps over the next year (well, a bit less than that) and come back to UH in april to take the exams and (hopefully) finish the degree. So my time here won’t be a total wash.
October 16th, 2007 at 11:57 pm
Dude Paul, Congrats, though I imagine it is quite late for that. Anyway, I have been wondering what has happened to you since I haven’t seen you on campus at all. I was thinking about who I’d like to invite to my graduation party, that is if my defense goes well next week, which I was also thinking of who to invite to, and I decided to try and get in touch with you. I guess it’ll be hard to attend either from Houston or where ever you’re located now. In any case, great to hear you’ve got a job! Hopefully my job search will land me something.