Sunday Seven II

[pax_athena]

1. L. was here the whole week - it was amazing but I am all talked out and want to not communicate again ever. She is still in the area (but in a hotel not on my couch anymore :() because of a conference so we plan a dinner on Tuesday. And then other friends arrive on Thursday and stay over the weekend, partly at my place.

2. So much great food this week. French-inspired great food and Indonesian great food (rijsttafel) and Dutch pancakes-great food and fondue-great food and great cocktails and great beer/cider and great fresh stoopwaffels.

3. We had a post-colloquium dinner with all women, two of them faculty, another one with a signed tenure track position contract. It was a first for all of us. (It also made the most liked facebook post of mine ever.)

4. Ooof. That's the overall feeling today night looking over to France. (Did you know that Paris is just three hours by train from Amsterdam? I still find it somewhat mindblowing.) Also reading Houellebecq again. (No, that particular restaurant does not exist on this street, at least not anymore, but I've actually been in two of their other locations. Yes, his freaking society analysis is to the point. And if you haven't read anything by him, you totally should.)

5. There isn't a single position I could apply for out this month. Not a freaking single one.

6. It took me several months to work up the nerves how claiming works with my health insurance (we have to pay first before we get the money back) - of course it is totally painless, but gosh, did it drive home that I hate dealing with this stuff. I want my German health insurance back just to never ever have to deal with the money side of it.

7. Are the Sunday Seven going to become a thing? Likely not. But right now they seem a good idea.

Comments

[sighnomore]

Ich hab so ne private Zusatzversicherung (zum Glück!) u.a. für Krankenhausaufenthalte, aber die macht Dinge auch sehr kompliziert x_x I feel you.

[pax_athena]

Bei mir ist halt alles privat gerade und ich weiß, dass ich geradezu anxiety habe, was so Geldsachen angeht (I know, self-diagnosis - aber ich weiß auch, wo es herkommt; Danke für 10 Jahre meines Lebens, die wir vor jedem Brief vom Sozialamt gezittert haben ...). Dabei war es echt einfach, nur einscannen und fertig. Hoffentlich. Mal gucken, ob die das so annehmen.

[sighnomore]

Ugh ja unter den Umständen ist das ja kein Wunder >_<. Ich drück die Daumen!

[giallarhorn]

Ahh, it sounds like a good week overall? Especially actual fresh stoopwaffels omg.

I wouldn't worry too much about there being a lack of positions, though. When you get to where you are, aka the top of an advanced field that most of us can barely begin to understand, I think that it's good and bad because 1) you're there! at the top! but 2) it also means there's just less stuff to apply for since you're so overqualified for a lot of things.

Whoa, that's how your health insurance works? You actually have to claim money back from the insurance company (which does sound like an anxiety filling experience cause claiming money, yikes)

[pax_athena]

It was.

And yes, you are right about the air getting thinner and thinner the higher up one gets. But I still look towards the USA and how many jobs are offered there vs. what is offered here. Although part of the problem is also that Europe is not a coherent job market, not even in science - there may be nice jobs I would like to take in the next country that I will never ever hear about (research positions somewhere in France or the Italian system of tenure or whatever else are utterly incomprehensible to me and I may never ever hear about that job in Sweden).

Mine yes, Dutch no. I am working for an international organization so we have an extra insurance, etc. It is supposed to be rather benign from all I've heard (our employer *wants* us to be happy) but yeah, ugh. I just like the idea of the insurance directly doing everything with the doctor, the way it works in Germany or the way most of the normal Dutch insurance works.

[giallarhorn]

Is it just a space issue (ie, more universities across the US vs Europe) or just a general concentration of more jobes in the US? But yeah, I don't even know how you'd hear about jobs the next country over even if you're neighbors distance wise- I suppose the hope is that academia is small enough that word will travel?

Ohhhh, I forgot about that part- is it not actual Dutch insurance? And sure, I get that if you have the patient pay first, it should in theory create a sort of buffer for the insurance company to make sure they only get billed what they should be, but still. Insurance exists mostly for the health care profession to wrangle with, not the patients.

[pax_athena]

It's complex - quiet some places that are called universities or colleges in the USA may not be universities in Germany (imagine a university landscape that consists of R1 only; plus technical colleges that focus on applied sciences, i.e. engineering and such) as the whole education structure is somewhat different. In particular, general education is considered finished in Germany in high school (which is longer + more focused; we do, for example, calculus and two foreign languages in the type of high school that leads to university), so no liberal arts college that hire 1-2 astronomy faculty to provide their students with a nice nature sciences elective since university is concentrating on your subject only.

Yeah, agreed. Which is why I HATE private insurance so deeply. Oh well, one advantage if I leave academia and get a proper job in Germany, I can get back into the health insurance system (hopefully).