on pigeon-holes

I began my experiment with blogging about a year ago, intending to chronicle a year of many changes. Indeed, I completed my degree, found a job, and got married! I had thought that by this point – having navigated the title-change from A.B.D. to professor, and bride to newlywed – I would have arrived, sitting pretty, smugly secure. But it turns out that a new set of liminal spaces awaited: adjusting to a new stage in my personal life, shuttling back and forth between my old home and new job, becoming a "real professor," and learning how to handle major leadership responsibilities. And until my brand-new husband finds a job near mine, how could I possibly feel settled?

So I find myself in yet another in-between place. This makes me uncomfortable. I love ordering the universe through reliable categories! I like the way Robert Darnton put it in his discussion of the subversive power of Diderot's Encyclopedie:

Pigeon-holing is therefore an exercise in power. A subject relegated to the trivium rather than the quadrivium, or to the "soft" rather than the "hard" sciences, may wither on the vine. A mis-shelved book may disappear forever. An enemy defined as less than human may be annihilated. All social action flows through boundaries determined by classification schemes, whether or not they are elaborated as explicitly as library catalogues, organization charts, and university departments. (The Great Cat Massacre, 1984)

Unfortunately, I'm beginning to realize that I may never achieve that longed-for sense of "settled," "achievement," "permanency," safety in my own little pigeon-hole. So this is adult life, huh?