July 31, 2007

Pardon My Glee

By this time next month, Rachel and I will be gone from Longview. We are moving away. Rachel interviewed over the phone for a teaching position on Sunday evening and they offered her the job the next day. She'll be teaching first grade in Waco, starting in just a few weeks. I'm drowning in details just at present, but I'm very excited about the change.

I gave notice at work this morning (August 20th will be my last day). That's one hurdle. We still have to break our lease, buy out our cable contract, leave a forwarding address, find a forwarding address, change everything to the new address, close out our bank account, pack up all of our junk, and haul it three hours away . . . and a hundred million other things I haven't thought of yet. And all of this must be done on a very precisely-timed but as-yet-undecided timetable. Rachel will have to be in Waco on the 13th, 15th, 16th and 17th, and then again from the 21st through the 24th (that's my birthday!) before the school year starts the following week. It's all kind of making my head spin, but in a good way.

After a few months of complete uncertainty about what the next few years were going to look like, it's great to have a direction that I'm happy with. Once things get settled, I'll start looking for a part-time job (there are 2 openings at the library there . . . that's a start), and I'll apply to Baylor's graduate program. With luck I can start working on a masters in English lit in the spring. I hadn't dared to hope that I might be within reach of a suitable program for maybe two more years, so I'm thrilled at the opportunity (to say the least). Now the hard part: Getting accepted and earning the degree.

Meanwhile, Waco is a pretty nice city with lots of stuff to do: scads of museums and historical sites, a zoo, a riverwalk, symphony, opera, and more live stage events than you can shake a stick at (I count 4 distinct theater groups with their own production seasons). And if that gets boring (ha!), Dallas is an hour and a half to the north and Austin is an hour and a half to the south. Plus, I keep threatening to try and get some papers published. Maybe I can get on that now. I'm almost out of time if I want to use it as CV padding for grad school applicationing.

Anyway . . . all that aside: Huzzah!

P.S. Nobody's happier about this than Rachel. She just called me from her "last day" at the hated Michael's job. She went in today determined to give them two weeks' notice, despite my misgivings as to whether they deserved it, and found that they had already cut half of her hours for this week and (sure enough) would now be withholding her hours from next week since she's leaving anyway. So this is her last day.

Turns out the money-grubbing, penny-pinching, brown-nosing, fat-cat, scum-sucking, puppy-drowning low-lifes over at corporate headquarters noticed that one of the managers gave out too many hours last week and they're making her pay them back by giving out fewer than the normal allotment this week. Fewer hours . . . and Rachel's already been given a paltry 5 or less for the past few weeks.

Oh, but she does get to keep the apron. Thanks for nothing and die in a fire, corporate f***ing America. That's right, capitalists are lousy, no-good bastards. I said it, and I'm not sorry. Drowning in raw sewage is too good for them and a napalm bath is too quick. The only reason they're still around is because no one's found a horrible enough way to kill them all off yet. Someday . . .

Posted by Jared at July 31, 2007 04:45 PM | TrackBack