Chicago, Chicago, Take 1

I find myself beginning yet another post with profuse apologies for my acute neglect. If there was a blog reader protective services, they would be knocking on my door right now to haul you all away. I take gross advantage of the fact that most of you know me personally and love me dearly. It is a fact that I also take comfort in, and I am working on being a more consistent blogger. I try not to make new years resolutions (too much pressure), but I made one this year and only time will tell how well it will go. What’s this one exceptional new years resolution? To write a food blog entry at least once a month – it’s even on my Entourage calendar. As my professional life gets more hectic, all consuming and demanding, I realize some semblance of balance is also becoming increasingly important. My dissertation supervisor said, once I got this job in the middle on nowhere that I was far too popular to be a successful academic in Miami. Already, one of my colleagues here has noted, if I lived anywhere else, I’d never get any work done. It’s why I keep getting on the planes and coming back, even as my trips home to Miami and Jamaica get more epically awesome. But, living here also means, technically, I only get work done. So this is where this blog comes in, a non-work thing that I can regularly schedule and hope to stay on top of. Y’all pray for me, you hear.

Apologies and preambles aside though, lets get down to the food talk, or at least build up to it. To make up for being incredibly bad, I offer you a two-part post in penance – they cover elements of both my trips to Chicago, but one is less foodie than the next and you will soon see why. You with me?

Good. Last Labor Day weekend, my colleague Andy and I took a road trip to Chicago. 6 hours drive, from Missouri to Illinois and back, where I noted at least every 15 minutes or so, “oh my is that more corn?” Chicago is special to me for a few reasons, which all made this particular trip, with this particular travel partner all the more wonderful. Lemmie backtrack some so I can paint you a good picture.  In late 2007, I went on the job market. The professor’s job market is an unwieldy and incomprehensible beast for the uninitiated. It is a multi-round process that begins with the national job lists. At it’s simplest, every fall, between late September or October the job lists come out (MLA is the major one).  Job seekers apply with packets that take them months to prepare and if they are lucky, they get phone calls round about the second week of December with offers for round 2: interviews at the MLA convention, held at the end of the year in a different city, every year. My year, MLA was in Chicago. 

(Hullo MLA in Chicago)

I got three interviews, got my suits ready, roped in Nadia for moral support and we were off to Chicago in the dead of winter on December 27, 2007.  

(Nadia & I at Grand Luxe Cafe for breakfast)

Amidst the excitement of being in the windy city for the first time and the possibility of both our first sightings of snow – there was also the very real reason I was going: to be interviewed by search committees for a job. Yes we saw snow for the first time, the first morning of my interviews. 

Nervous much? Yes. But that’s why you bring along a travel companion for company and moral support.  Nadia’s fantastic-ness and infectious calm aside, I was overcome by the peace that surpasses understanding – you know the one – and though I was really nervous for all three of my interviews, I was fine, not one drop of anxiety. All went well the first time around in Chicago. We saw snow for the first time, built our first little snowman, survived the second round, and moved on to the third round of the job market process – the campus interview. Two out of my three MLA interviews called back – one was the dream job.

What’s a dream job on this particular market, you may be asking? Well, at its simplest, it’s the job at a research one school (one that is engaged in intense research activity) with as small a teaching load as possible (typically 2 classes per semester) – henceforth referred to as R1 2/2. To give you some perspective on the likelihood of landing one of these specialist positions fresh out of grad school as a freshly minted PhD, I should tell you that I applied for 62 jobs. Of those 62 jobs, only 15 were for a specialist in Caribbean Literary Studies (my area) and only 4 of those were at research ones.  Of my 3 MLA interviews, only one was for a R1 2/2 job. Before my placement at Mizzou, my graduate program at UM had never placed anyone in an R1 2/2 job before. I was their first. 

If you know your girl Sheri though, you also know that no story is complete without the obligatory moment of, shall we call it, blondness? I had no prior knowledge of or experience with the 3 schools who wanted to meet me in Chicago. I just knew they needed a Caribbeanist, and were in Kentucky, Virginia, and Missouri. In the intense prep, I didn’t make too careful of a note of teaching loads; the market can be so brutal, the goal honestly is to just get a job. Any job. The dream R1 2/2 job will come with time and experience. I did do a little research on everyone who would be in the hotel rooms interviewing me though. Did I also mention that MLA interviews often take place in hotel rooms? Two of mine did – one room even had a Murphy bed!  But back to the blondness: I didn’t actually process that one of my interviews was for an R1 2/2, before the interview. Nadia did, but she knows me and knew with that knowledge would come pressure and anxiety and I might fizzle; so, she didn’t tell me. 

2 years into the future, we all know that was the job I got and have since been told that the highlight of the hotel room interview was my expression when somebody mentioned that it was an R1 2/2.  The someone who told me that story was the chair of the committee that hired me, and my travel partner for the journey back to Chicago 2 years later, Andy. Likewise, when I returned to our hotel room after meeting with Mizzou, and asked Nadia if she knew the interview with them was for an R1 2/2 job, she said yes, but I knew you would panic and not effervesce like you do when you are chill, so I didn’t tell you. Not telling me I was up for one of the market’s most coveted jobs in my field meant that I was my normal calm casual self. Lets not even talk about how my brain managed to blank on that! As we finished the interview, I even told them it was my first time with snow, that we made a snowman, and that we named the snowman Herman P. Snowpy. 

 (He kinda tiny) 

(Herman P. Snowpy)

That last bit I obsessed a little about after the fact, but was later told by my senior colleague and now faculty mentor, it was one of my most endearing moments.

There isn’t much by way of food to tell about my first trip to Chicago. We ate Shula’s in the hotel – Downtown Sheraton, had deep-dish pizza that neither of us were too impressed by. But the drinks were memorable – our first time with the very grown up port tawny and my white chocolate martini when all the interviews were over. 

(white chocolate martini)

We were in a fantastic food city, but the stress of the job market put our enjoyment of that at a minimum. This of course is where the return to Chicago came in. My now colleague and inseparable food buddy, Andy, then search committee chair regales me with tales of how wonderful the food in Chicago is and made a point of taking me back to enjoy some of the city stress free, which we did last labor day weekend. And mek a tell unoo, never has anything EVER consistently eaten so good!

Next up:
Chicago, Chicago, Take 2