Italics are mine

On the road late at night

Last night, as the Bieber bus pulled out of the Port Authority Bus Terminal to bring me back to PA after a concert by the Emerson String Quartet, the thought occurred to me that I've turned into my mother. She commuted about three hours by car twice a week for thirty years (she had an apartment near the community college where she taught, in the Parisian suburbs) because that was the way she made her life work for her. I won't get into the details of why she made that choice, but I was in the car with her quite often, and to this day the soft purr of an engine on the highway late at night brings back these memories of happier times.

Before I moved to Bethlehem I could have sworn I would never do anything remotely close to what my mother did all these years, and yet here I am, hopping in and out of the Bieber bus, on the road just as late as she was, giving serious thought to the idea of renting a place in New York City, because life goes by fast and Bethlehem - in spite of qualities such as the quiet that allows me to write and the short commute - just isn't where I want to be. I do worry, sometimes, that I'll imitate my mother for more than that, but that'll be the topic of another post. For now I'll just think about the concert. New York City is worth every single minute spent on the Bieber bus. This is how I make my life work.

Many Paths, At The Same Time

To follow up on my previous post, I want to mention the work by Marci Alboher, who used to write the Shifting Careers blog on the New York Times website a few years ago and published her insights about individuals who have several, seemingly unrelated lines of work in the (now out-of-print) book One Person/Multiple Careers. The book was the focus of significant media attention when it was released; you can read articles in BusinessWeek here and here.

I got the book from the public library and thought it was okay. I enjoyed reading the stories of "slashers", as Alboher - herself a lawyer-turned-journalist/speaker/writing coach - calls them, but I felt the book was targeted at people who have only begun to tread that path. Being farther advanced in the process (for better or for worse), I would have preferred a closer look into the lifestyle of "slashers" who have created an environment that most fulfills them by pursuing distinct strands of interest, and expressing non-overlapping sets of skills in separate avenues. But of course it occurred to me that what I really wanted was to meet more people like me, juggling two different careers because they have broad interests that cannot be fulfilled in a single job.

So what is it like to be a fiction writer/engineering professor? I love the creativity of writing and the interaction with students that academia affords me - both are ways of making a difference, the former on paper by helping (hopefully) people see the world in ways they had not envisioned before, and the latter more concretely by guiding students through the learning process and giving them skills that will be valuable for them in the workforce.

The difficulty lies in not feeling guilty for the time I spend writing, while there is always more to do in my academic job - thankfully I don't watch television, and I don't like bars or most restaurants, so I use that time to write instead. But it is certainly a logistical challenge, and fighting for what I believe makes me a happier, more productive and well-rounded worker is not without its hurdles. It is also tough for many full-time writers to relate to me, since I have a good job in academia that pays the bills, and I doubt other engineering professors will ever understand why I don't spend more time writing academic papers. But everyone has hobbies, at least, so I hope we can all respect each other's choices. As my career as a published writer moves forward, I hope I will meet more individuals with dual career paths like me, determined to use the full array of their skills one way or another. We would make a joyous tribe.