As you may have noticed, we at ShoutingLoudly generally don’t discuss our personal lives in our posts, major developments excepted. Well, this is a major developments kind of summer for me, so here are some details.

1. I got a tenure-track job in the Hunter College Department of Film and Media Studies. This has meant getting ready to move to New York, teach courses in the fall, set up my new offices, etc. I’m excited to be moving in with two good friends of mine whom I’ve known for a couple years.

2. I’m also getting ready to move to Somerville, MA, right next to Cambridge. As I mentioned earlier, Tina got a 2 year postdoc at Harvard’s Grad School of Ed.

For a number of reasons, including the fact that the rent prices are much more reasonable there (still high, just not NYC), which means we can afford a 2 bedroom, most of our stuff is going to Mass. (As a not-quite-practicing Catholic, I’ve gotten a small giggle out of that abbreviation as I’ve been packing. “Bill, Mass., Philosophy Books.” I keep picturing my boxes of philosophy books and small electronics standing, kneeling, and saying the Our Father, while a priest with Mayor Quimby’s accent discusses the joys of salvation. Not what David Hume had in mind for his treatises, I’m sure.)

So between Tina and I, we’re getting ready to move into four new abodes–2 apartments, and 2 offices, with about 250 miles separating them. Sadly, this means we’ll generally only see each other on weekends, but happily, I have zero on-campus obligations on Fridays–and a lot of her research is on New York. So we’ll be able to extend the weekends in both directions.

3. My family came to visit for 11 days in June. They’d never been to NYC before, and they loved it. If I dare say so, Tina and I even turned out to be decent tour guides. (After 2 years living in Newark within a 10 minute walk to the train station–and almost all of it without a car–we’ve gone into the city almost every week, and I usually go more than once. I think I know more about New York City than I ever learned about Philly or Newark; it’s crazy what a difference comprehensive public transit makes.)

We loved having them visit. We did lots of the touristy things we’d never do on our own, like visiting the Statue of Liberty (nice, but roughly what you’d expect) and Ellis Island (waaay better than we expected). While they were here, my mom bought me a Nintendo Wii on a whim. I LOVE it. A little too much, actually. (I’ve already made “Pro” on golf and bowled a 233.) It had to be one of the first things I packed so that I would actually get other packing done.

4. I’m still writing my dissertation. It’s going reasonably well, actually, and I still expect to defend this summer, committee’s schedules pending. All the same, I reeeeally wish I was done and could focus on moving and getting ready for the fall. I’m anxious about stopping, moving all my books and a desk to NYC, and finishing there. Writing in a sparsely populated apartment is no big deal, but I need to get the packing and moving done properly. If something goes in the wrong pile, it’ll wind up either in Boston or some Hunter Film and Media Studies storage room.

But really, I can’t complain–okay, I can and did, but it’s wallowing in my own success. Many quality ABDs and recent PhDs are scraping together adjunct work as we speak. My job isn’t even contingent on finishing by the fall. I still expect to defend this summer, but Penn’s summer graduation deadline requires one to hand in a defended, proofread, properly formatted dissertation by August 8, which I will almost certainly not do.

In any case, that’s my life right now. Thanks for caring enough to read. If you know me (even if you just met me once at a conference 3 years ago) and want to say hi because you’ll be in Boston or New York, you can write using Bill D Herman at gee male dawt kom.