2008-05-04 - 8:09 a.m.
A long entry you probably care nothing about

I wrote the following on Friday. Crazy stuff has happened since. I'll catch you up later.

5/2/08

I don’t even know how to catch up with what my life is doing right now. Let’s start from last week.

I had a phone interview with this tiny school district in Colorado, my top choice. It went really well and they called me back a week later and offered me the job. My emotions at that point were going crazy. I was excited and terrified. I told the district that I couldn’t accept the job until I had visited. So we set up a visit for April 30.

When I called my mom to tell her the news, she was excited, but subdued. Then she told me my brother had been hospitalized for depression and anxiety, not to mention the fact that he had ceased to eat. That took the shine off my offer a little. My poor brother. He really just can’t ever catch a break.

Over the weekend, my parents were in town not only to come to my honors banquet, but also to see Quint. I tagged along to the hospital after my play rehearsal and the banquet. Man, he looked sick. He didn’t seem too bad emotionally, but he is sooooo skinny. The scrubs he was wearing just accented how bone thin he is. It’s gross. He was supposed to be released from the hospital by Sunday, but the doctor was so alarmed by him that they kept him until this Wednesday and are considering sending him to a facility in Arizona. For $25,000 a month. Yowza.

On Monday, I had another phone interview with a different school in Colorado. I thought my answers during the interview were good, but the interview as a whole didn’t go that well. I got no feedback, not even a “good” or “uh-huh” during the entire thing. I figured it wasn’t a real loss.

Tuesday, I left for my eight hour drive. I picked up my mom on the way through Hometown. When I picked her up, I thought we would drive straight through to my aunt’s house. But no, the crap storm had hit my family again. Poor GMa fell down in her house, broke her femur and then lay there all night long, trying to drag herself to the phone. She made it there, about 12 hours later and the emergency crew had to break into her house because my agoraphobic Aunt Lynn had booby trapped the hell out of the house 5 years ago when Granddad died. My mom had warned her about that, but is too gracious now to say anything about it. GMa had surgery to implant a metal plate in her leg yesterday and will now have to go to a home for at least 3 months because she is not allowed to put any weight at all on her leg for that long.

Ugh. So, after seeing GMa in the hospital, we drove on. We got up at 5 the next morning and just as we were leaving Aunt Bulee’s house for my visit to the Tiny School, I got a phone call. It was 6 in the morning and a Collegetown number was calling me. So I answered. “Hi, would you like an interview with Awesome Collegetown High School?”. I said “Hold on”, put the phone on mute, yelled “What the fuck?!” and then politely said yes, I would. Then proceeded to freak out for about twenty miles about the timing and how much whiplash I felt. In my mind, my foot was halfway in the door of Tiny School. Now, suddenly I might get a job in Collegetown . . .

Whatever. So I went to Tiny School and holy hell, I will never ever teach there. EVER. They held me hostage in their nasty, smelly school, were completely unprofessional (the teacher giving me a tour introduced herself by popping into the principal’s office, lifting up her shirt and saying “Look at how bloated I am!”), the politics are horrible (the entire 6th grade team quit), they did a bait and switch on the position (“Oh, yeah, we want you to teach 6th grade, not 8th”) and worst of all, have a curriculum that is entirely to the state exam and entirely censored. That put the nail in the coffin, I absolutely cannot stand censorship. That is my hot button issue.

So, I finally extricated myself from their clutches, muttering platitudes about calling them with my decision and ran for my life. We had lunch with my sister and drove down to the town I’d had my interview with on Monday on a whim.

It was GORGEOUS. Just beautiful and in a great location. And the high school! Oh my God, I didn’t even think it was the school. I called as soon as I saw the school and asked if I could stop by. The principal sounded really excited and told me to come in at 1 PM yesterday.

Stayed at my sister’s house and got up yesterday morning in a blizzard. How nice of Mother Nature to show me the town in both 79 and 30 degree weather! Drove back down to little town, we shall call it Mountain Town (original, I know), and went into the school.

I was sooooooooooooooooo fricking in love with it by the time I left. Awesome teachers, great students showed me around the building, friendly staff members, beautiful layout, excellent graduation rate, outstanding curriculum and electives, I was just almost in tears I was so happy when I left. Because, after my tour, the principal OFFERED ME THE JOB!

I have two job offers on the table and an interview this afternoon. My life is insane at the moment.

I’m a little nervous that the interview today will go super because my decision might already be incredibly difficult. The only thing holding me back from Mountain Town is salary. I’m not really motivated by money, but one salary is under 30,000 and the other is above it. There’s about $4,000 difference in salary between Collegetown and Mountain Town, in Collegetown’s favor. Cost of living in Collegetown is also lower and my gasoline consumption/commuting would be much less.

It’s a conundrum. We’ll see how I feel after my interview.