Two birthdays and a funeral

First off: many thanks to Warren, Blue, and Jbash for opening their home this weekend. The party was absolutely fabulous, full of board games, cuddles, and tasty food. I'd never had a tofu scramble before, but it was mightily tasty. Also lots of good conversation, as I've come to expect from Warren's parties. I just wish I weren't allergic to cats, so I could have stayed longer.

Today I went to a funeral a little west of Brockville. It was for a woman I'd never met -- my aunt's mother -- and it was mostly just an act of familial obligation for me. The service was Christian (my aunt converted when she married my uncle), and very much focused on Jesus, as opposed to the deceased. It was quite odd for a little Jewish girl from Montreal.

The drive wasn't bad, but was quite long. My uncle (for reasons not worth going into) needed a lift to Ottawa, so we detoured north before heading back east. In short: we left the luncheon around 1:45 and only just got back to Montreal. Whew! Now I'm going to decompress and revel in *not* being in a car and *not* wearing panty hose. Yay!

Getting excited again

As most of you know, I interviewed last week at Dawson for a short-term replacement position in their humanities department. Specifically, someone is on sick leave, and they don't know when and if she's coming back, so they're looking for someone to take over two of her classes for the time being.

For a while, I was very ambivalent about this opportunity. It was weird, since cegep teaching is my first choice of profession, and this is an opportunity being handed to me on a silver platter (if they hire me, of course).

I finally realized the problem: I'd given up on ever getting a cegep job. I really had. I figured that no one was hiring me (due to lack of teaching experience), so I'd just start looking elsewhere. I crossed out "cegep teacher" from my mental list of potential professions and shut it out of my mind.

So when the opportunity snuck up on me, I wasn't ready for it. It's taken me the better part of a week to reopen the "cegep teacher" mental file and get excited about it. To do it, I've had to think back to all the reasons I really want to be a cegep teacher:

( The reasons -- how on Earth could I have forgotten about all this? )

So, in short, I'm now excited about this opportunity. Whether I get it or not is out of my hands: the hiring committee will decide. But I am grateful for the interview, regardless of the final outcome, because it gave me a chance to re-evaluate my priorities and look at the situation with fresh eyes.