Going Forward or Dying Slowly?

I am getting antsy, professionally and personally.  I am in a rut on both accounts and this should be understood quite broadly.  The advantage of this blog is that absolutely no one is reading it aside from me, perhaps not even my collaborator at this point, so I feel a certain freedom here that I lack elsewhere.

I no longer have the fire of teaching, part of this is a consequence of the lack of variation.  I teach the same three classes over and over again, one class I teach two sections every semester, and it is exhausting to see the same errors over and over again.  I often simply don't care enough to prep because I can do the lectures in my sleep now.  I have difficulty looking at twenty-five or thirty more years of this, nor do I relish the thought of more pointless meetings.

I want out of southern California, weather aside there is little else to commend the place.  At some point one has to decide for whom one is living, right?  Is the job more important than quality of life?  This is more than an academic question (haha!) for me.  I am the job, in both the best and worst readings of that phrase.  I have made some terrible personal decisions based on the assumption that I am the job, that I have worked for years to be the job, and that has led me to break off relationships or allow others to wither on the vine (in retrospect).  What has this yielded me thus far?  Long hours, two professor of the year nominations, no spouse and no children.  And perhaps I am losing that love of the job as well.  Is that a reasonable yield?

Freshman, ah hum.

In what now I can only assume was a fit of misguided duty and intrigue, I agreed to teach a Freshman Seminar (although we now call these First-Year Seminars) this fall.  Although I am trained as a historian I do not teach in a history department, so I viewed this as an opportunity to return to my training.  As anyone who knows who follows the academic hiring market, jobs, especially tenure-track positions (heck, even permanent, decent full-time positions that allow for something resembling a decent life) are rare, so rare, that I was forced to look outside my training, and luckily, found a good school and a good department that appreciates the training I worked so hard to acquire. 

However, that opportunity came with a price, and that was teaching business ethics, and a quasi-history course on US business history, but only between 1860 and 1932 (a curious cut-off, no?).