a blended life

It's the 31st and I want to be able to say I blogged 4 times this month. It's also 11:45 pm so this will be short. I don't know how to explain the ups and downs we've had this week, mostly involve my job/identity crisis. We need money. We need me to be the one bringing in the money. It has taken an act of Congress for me to figure out what in holy blazes I am supposed to be doing with myself down here. I had a job interview on Friday with another private school for learning disabled kids. It was the strangest one I've had yet. I was asked to write 6 essays about lame crap (What are the 3 things students need most?) before even meeting with anyone. Then the director spent about 3 minutes looking at my stuff and said, "I know you're an exceptional teacher because you're a classical musician. That tells me you are dedicated and focused." I stared at her quite dumbly and she said, "Your writing is fantastic. You can say the most profound thing...

So I had a job for a week. I can't believe I had it that long, considering I never felt right about it. I went to teach my first day on Monday and it was the worst first day in the history of teaching. One hour into it and I knew I couldn't return another day. I hated the kids and the job and nothing was right. I've never felt this way before. Meanwhile, on the other side of the county, Jacob got the girls ready for school (this included packing Hannah a lunch in an empty Oreo box and taping shut with medical tape. Voila, lunch pail) and took them to find their teachers, find their way around, etc. Keep in my mind that this place has NO back to school night or orientation for newbies or anything. You just show up and hope for the best. He texted me, in the middle of my bad day, saying that there is no option for after school care because it was full. To make a long story short, all the planning I had done to get childcare before and after school had fallen through. Unless...

I posted a few days ago about my job weirdness. I took the post down because it ended up being a work in progress--no pun intended--and I didn't have the time/energy/mental clarity to fix the post. Here's the shortest version I can muster: I was offered a job. I have had some very conflicting, confusing feelings about working there. It has nothing to do with the job itself and everything to do with the commute and being so far away and just not feeling like it was a good place for me. I called the director and told her I couldn't do it. We talked for a long time and agreed that I would try it out for a few weeks. At least she really wanted me there. I just finished my first week and have decided that I will stay there but will keep looking and applying for jobs when I can. It's a private school for kids on the autistic spectrum. They are too severe to really function in a typical classroom. It's a tiny place--there are 4 classrooms with about 6 kids each. Each c...

Hash tagging is one of those things that I refuse to do but love reading other people's. Not sure why, maybe I'm staging my own one-person rebellion against pop culture or maybe it just seems like a lot of work to write all those scrunched up words. But honestly, some of them are really funny. And I've noticed that since moving here, my mind has started thinking in the form of hashtags. I know you do this, too--you write status updates or haiku or short poems in your head all day long and they never get on paper or any kind of social media. Everyone does that, right? RIGHT?!?!?! So the past few weeks I've been hash tagging this one in my head : #miamiproblems. I even went on Twitter and discovered that my idea isn't that original, many people are posting Miami problems of some sort. Usually in the form of drinking or plastic surgery. Here are some of mine, straight from my head to this piece of paper: Take a wrong exit, lose 45 minutes of your life. #miamipr...