At the end of November, I started at a new job. For the least 6 years, since I finished a postdoc, I’ve been working only peripherally to my degree. That’s been harder than I wanted to admit. It often felt like having my “nose pressed against the glass.”

I love to write, but I find it very difficult to do so when I don’t have anything else going on. The last two books I finished writing, I was working full-time when I did so. I’m hopeful that this new job will encourage me to write more.

My new job is as a data engineer, which is well-aligned with my education and my experience. I’ve worked at it for 4 weeks already, and they’ve been wonderful. Great company. Very supportive. And, as if I didn’t need reinforcement, today I received an email from an editing agency that said, in broken English (cleaned up here so that it can be comprehended), “A client from 6 months ago complained that you didn’t fit all 20 concepts of their paper into a 12-word title.” Just… no. Go away. And that’s what I actually wrote to them.

Glorious feeling.