Should I stay or should I go now...

With the summer session heading this way, the joys and disasters of this job are switching places on the scale.

I've said all along that one reason I'm not sure about this job is that I don't want to work this hard. But you know what? With summer just around the corner, the workload has already gone way, way down.  And it's going to go down even further.

Of course, there's research. I have to do some of that. But I like doing that. And seriously, at this tiny little college, the expectations are pretty low. I can do what they need me to do.  This summer, I'll be building new courses for next year (assuming I'm staying). Next summer, I'll probably have another course or two to build. But after that, dear reader(s), I'm in the clear. Teaching will become easier when I've taught it all before and I'll have a third of the calendar year with basically nothing on the schedule, other than the self-directed stuff I choose to put on there. That sounds pretty sweet.

Is it realistic to work like a maniac for 8 months to have 4 months of reasonable schedule?  Maybe not. But that 8 months of mania won't have to be mania once I've got my courses under my belt. It could end up being 8 months of regular full time work, but not excessive, and 4 months of bliss. That, I can do.

Advantages of the University of Shitville: It's small, so their standards are low. While there's a ginormous teaching load, that means I can have variety and I can teach a couple fun courses that I want to teach. Of course, the flip side is that it's so small I have no colleagues and along with the fun courses I have to teach shit I don't know or care about.

And then there's the whole Shitville component. Let me tell ya, y'all, I still ain't in love with this grungy little town.  The neighborhood I'm in now is gross, gross, gross. But I can relocate to the sort-of-almost-livable area and maybe be okay.  It's not where I want to be, not by a long shot, but that job talk I just flew out to showed me that it could be worse on many levels. Not dirtier, but a whole lot smaller.

Why does the decision have to be so hard?  The "good" news is that it's not really a decision yet since nobody is exactly offering me another job anywhere else, despite the resumes that continue to go out.