Goodbye, fall semester. I won't be missing you.
I'm on a little lunch break during Winter Break camp and am beginning to feel my brain come back a bit. This semester has been a study in Learning to Pay Attention to Those Who Value You and Not Those Who Drive You Up a Wall.
Those Who Drive You Up a Wall was T'arts, mainly. I won't be going back. I had to tell them in an email because no one would ever return my phone calls or emails. Some of those phone calls and emails were about Where the Fuck is My Paycheck? Some were about how my classroom space was absolutely inappropriate for what I was hired to teach.
Last Wednesday was my last day and I started the drive feeling a bit giddy as I knew that on the drive back I'd get to have all the glory that is leaving something behind. But T'Arts managed to ruin even that for me.
During the last five minutes of class, the Woman Who Hired Me and Then Never Spoke to Me Again No Matter How Hard I Tried dashed into class--heartily interrupting our final activities--and blurted out "I take it Ida isn't here?" while looking right at me. I replied "I'm right here." Reponse? "Oh, you look like a student. Here I need you all to fill these out so we can get our grant."
And just when I'd gotten over that, I got a voice mail from a woman from the school which said "Hi, we're canceling tonight's meeting because we found out not all of the artists had been told about it." Yeah, like me. (And like I would have gone all the way back there.)
Word is both my November and December paychecks are being mailed today. We'll see.
In better news, I've loved all of my other classes. I got a DVD in the mail--including special extras--of a project I worked on in November. Fantastic. And I got a job in the spring at a school I worked at two years ago and loved. And I've got a fun little student-written play in W'ville (sorry, no pregnancyabortionsuicides this year). And the ol' Greek play is moving along famously.
And I'm leaving for New Hampshire in three days. Three days! And then staying there for seven! I'm deleriously looking forward to it, so much so that I might go all Sugarbush Family in the woods.
So I guess it's not all nightmares and lessons learned, even if last night did include an actual nightmare about The Theatre Refit that included a morph of company members falling off a cliff face but ending with my doing the backstroke through cool, calm, dark swells of water. I was warm and happy, strong in swimming backward even though there was a shark nearby.