Strange twists of fate: post-MLA update

I had started writing a blog post a couple weeks ago about the post-MLA blues, detailing my anxiety about getting campus visits. I had three successful interviews at MLA in January, and one promising Skype interview with a fourth school a couple weeks ago. Then, one of the MLA interview schools, a SLAU in NJ, invited me to visit campus. The post-MLA blues lifted, somewhat.

I was supposed to be there today. I withdrew my candidacy.

I had several reasons for doing so. For one thing, the interview committee expressed a racial preference (a desire to interview "candidates of color" as they put it) during our interview. I was outraged at this, but when the school invited me to campus in spite of my obvious whiteness, my valued colleagues pressed me to check out the school anyway to see if the entire department shared this tendency to racialize the ever-present identity politics of faculty hiring. I had other misgivings about this visit which I shall not detail here. Because the most important reason I withdrew my candidacy for this job has to do with some unforeseen circumstances: I was hospitalized last weekend for pre-term labor. That's right, dear readers! I Am My Own Wife is soon (but hopefully not too soon) to become Someone Else's Mother. Our scary episode caused me to reassess my priorities. Traveling to NJ dropped to the bottom of the list, soon followed by teaching for the remainder of this term.

Being on bed rest myself, I am now, of course, researching historical sources and literary representations of "confinement" in the Victorian Era.