I have a Dream.... of a stuffed cat?

Location of Cat: Snuggled up in bed with no intention of getting up

I have a dream….

….that one day I’ll have an office with a wide-oak desk, with a green, tiffany bank lamp. Shelves from floor to ceiling will cover the walls, lined with leather-bound and expensive looking books. There will be a fireplace, and a little basket in front of it for my cats. My chair will be a throne, and my crown and gown will be made of tweed with little patches for the elbows so that the fabric is not worn away through my many musings of History.

But this is not to be. My desk is a home-made one, my chair from Ikea and my books stowed away in boxes in the basement. I am currently an unemployed (though, in my defense I do have a summer-job lined up as a Viking/Iron Age woman but that’s a blog for another day) historian. The world is full of history, but there is not a great deal of employment for historians. What do historians do, you might wonder, aside from rant on their Cat-blogs? Historians, in a nut-shell, challenge the paradigm set by their historian-ancestors and, if successful, decide the way in which their society think about their past (and make them feel good about it). They also drink a lot of tea and wine and have permanently bad hair-days. In fact, in University, I had a professor who wore the same sweater –every- day. At least two of the students would mimic this trend and wear the same clothes the whole year around, the only thing changing was their bear growth as the semesters progressed.

The historian’s throne is filled with a few, hairy men and women who quite often sit it in until they are carted out in a black bag. (I had this dreadful dream that, when this happened to me, they’ll wheel my stuffed cat out too, though I am not quite sure why I’ll put wheel on (or even stuff my cat), but I am fairly certain that I will!) And a historian’s dream is to get published, with a proper book read by more than the cult of their academia. As an author of a blog, it should come as no surprise that I am quite keen on writing, though I find my skills and lack of a publisher, lacking. (Ideally I’d write a book about the history of cats!)

So these days, I suck it up, and search for the Dream Job, while hoping to make myself more into a round peg so that I can fit into the round holes that it is the Norwegian University systems. If I sound to you bitter, dear readers, it is not your imagination and I fear it is another gentle nudge from Real Life towards Cat-Ladyness.

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