Weekend Despair

I hate weekends, because nobody calls job hunters about their applications over the weekend. That means I have to sit around and wait, and since I'm down to one part-time job right now, I have nothing to take my mind off stuff.

I did a huge gob of staff and adjunct apps and the last of the CCs at the end of March. I feel like I should have heard from them if I was a contender by now. Sure, I know it takes everyone a long time to close a search, months and months ---- but I still think that people who actually are desired candidates and get interviews and move on to the next stage hear much faster than the rest of the pile, you know? And so I feel like all the stuff I sent out is probably moving on to stage two without me. Sigh.

I think it's going to rain today. I should go out for my coffee snack before it does that.

And a couple postdocs have opened up recently, which I hate. I mean, of course I will apply for them, but I expect those to take even longer to close and they will be due at the end of April or even later, so I could prolong this waiting period, this sense of floating in limbo, across almost the whole year. I was just talking to a friend about how I had noticed the rents dropping a bit on Craigslist and how I was thinking about moving somewhere with a roommate so that my rent would be more manageable, but that I was also expecting any of these jobs I've been applying to to pan out any day now, so why move if I have to move again? I'm afraid to look back through my old posts and figure out how long I have been on the cusp of moving away at any moment. I will depress myself.

My health troubles have started up again. It doesn't match up quite with the food theory or the idea of stress. So that's one more thing I'm dealing with.

Another thing is that this friend who I ate dinner with (fun!) is the same one who worked at The Weird Hippie Place, if you remember my old posts. She was fired. Ok, now you could say I was fired too, but I was hired to teach during first period for one year and then they let me go at the end and pointed to money troubles. She was asked to leave in the middle and to bring back all their proprietary materials. (It's the equivalent of cleaning out your desk when you don't have one.) Much good gossip there, but I won't tell you about it.

Anyway, she still talks to people there, I guess, and she said that one of the old guard had recently walked out --- just retired himself and stopped showing up. (I know; it's a crazy place. What does that tell you about it?) This had actually happened a few years back but it was a bit more understandable: this older guy had suddenly up and left, without much explanation, and the administration went and checked up on him and turned it into a health leave and then an early retirement, and then he died abruptly from long-term alcohol-related problems. It made a lot of sense to me that he somehow knew he was getting very sick but was dealing with it in a poor way, because of the damage that alcoholism had done to his brain. This was before I got there, but soon enough before that people still talked about it. It happened probably a year before I came there, so my pt status was probably partly to fill his absence.

So, to make a long story even longer, when another person ---- Extremely Neurotic Tinfoil Hat Hippie ---- took a health leave that became permanent last year, I sent some very polite and nice emails to the principal saying how sad it was that she was having health problems and I was very sympathetic and would love to teach for them again or do whatever I could to help out. No answer. They hired a couple young and competent people, who I know, and pulled in another grad student to do the same first-period thing I had done. But their funding is also precarious enough ---- and their reaccreditation shaky enough ---- that I could see them closing this side of the program outright in the next few years.

So now that I know someone else is leaving, I'd really like to apply there again, except there is nothing official to apply to and sending a subtly worded plea for consideration didn't work the last time. But it could have been as much about lack of funds tying the principal's hands as anything else; I don't know. What could I do, how could I "apply," in a more effective way this time? Is there any better way I could get my "in"?

If you remember, I said I loved to work there and I hated it. I would loooove the chance to go in there and radically change it so that it actually fulfilled the vision of the school. And I'm sure that having young and new people in there already is changing a lot about the place. And the old guard is on the way out; they have gone from from 6 people who probably were at Woodstock and think and move and talk like they have pot-induced dementia down to 2. On the other hand, I did hate a lot about that place and this mass exodus plus a rocky financial situation may mean that I don't want to work there. I dunno! I don't know how to get that (potentially nonexistent) job! Any suggestions?

Or, you know, someone could actually invite me on an interview or offer me a job or something. I'm getting pretty tired of doing the same thing over and over and over again and not actually seeing any results. I'm going to have to move somewhere in a few months, though, as my little hoard of spare money I've scraped together rapidly dwindles. I would like that next place not to be my parents' basement, or the equivalent thereof. But I guess that would be better than moving out under a bridge somewhere.