Watching Kos on C-SPAN (online archive) - really interesting to hear him talk...the origins or Daily Kos, his politics and the world of blogging.

It's nice to flesh out your idea of the person whose site you read every day. There is some reassurance in his age - he's a year younger than me (he looks even youner than that). Good to see one's own generation making an impact, but also good to know that he isn't as young as he looks. He's making a decent living off the web site, but not a celebrity lifestyle. That has some appeal.

Which gets back to the issue of age. I was really bothered a couple days ago when I realised that I have come to the point where my options are no longer infinite. I am well on my way to being what I will be "when I grow up". I would like to have children sometime in the next few years, and that means that any travelling I want to do would have to happen before that. But more importantly, I can't just pack up and go around the world. Not only do I not have the money...there are the "career" considerations as well. To get anywhere with my desire to be an academic I need to find a tenure-track job, and then stick with it. As is I have more chance of (some day) having summers off than I would in most other fields (albeit, summers to do research) but it isn't the same as when you were a student. Somehow I have never really let go of the idea of getting your holidays off - I have never adapted to a "real world" in which you have a few weeks of holdidays a year to play with. Teaching four days a week weighs on me - a "real" job might ask more of your time, but if you needed a week off for some reason, you could take that week off. Teaching puts you in a position of being indispensible (for the course of the semester) while being highly dispensible in the grand scheme of things.