Have I learned nothing?

I'm trying new things. I like trying new things. This post contains info about two things I'm trying.

Thing the first: I have started this blog. (Hi!) It's been a minute since I blogged, and it's been a minute since I blogged because it's been a minute since I felt I had something to blog about. Which leads me to thing the second.

Thing the second: I have started an MBA program. Well, I've been accepted into an MBA program which starts in early January. If you've known me more than a couple years, you understand this for the seismic shift it is. Calvin's not a business man—Calvin's a poet. Like, an actual poet. And an academic. Hasn't he, like, taught college for the last decade?

All of this is true. I even went so far as to finish my PhD in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media in May 2023, which was unbelievable timing, because HB (the person to whom I am married) landed a legit academic role (poorly paying tenure track for the win!) at Ohio State, and they wanted to hire HB so bad the provost's office paid a chunk of my salary to incentivize the English department to hire me. Spousal hire, baby! 

Well, my friends, this poet-turned-academic feels he's washing out of academia (or, perhaps, more correctly, being thrown out with the academic bathwater, but more on that later). The life of an academic, especially a creative-turned-academic, is fraught with punches with which one must roll. I'm pleased (?) to announce that I finally took one of those punches square on the chin, and that chin shot coincides beautifully with my upcoming 40th birthday. Ergo, it seems my version of a midlife crisis might be summed up in the phrase, "When one door closes, it's time to go through that wall."

Enter the MBA. I promise to maybe explain why and how I chose an MBA later. For now, I will admit that at this point another seems like madness even to me, the king of going back to school instead of getting a job. My name (Calvin Olsen) has one more letter than the number of letters behind my name. And I'm fresh out of a PhD, which is a slog and a half (more on that later, too). I had graduated some version of school for the fifth time, landed me a nice little pays-less-than-McDonald's spousal-hire teaching gig, and paid off a solid 2.44% of my final student loan. I had made it—I had a five-year plan, for crap's sake. Then again, as my homeboy Bobby Burns says, "The best laid schemes o' mice an' men Gang aft a-gley."

Join me as I take a run at that wall.