jobs, life, death, kittens, vampires

I had a job interview last week, pantyhose & Boots and a dress and makeup and that breathless feeling accompanied by why-the-fuck-can't-I-just-write-and-be a professor-and-be famous and nice. Oh, and have a house at the beach. Anyway, it was with Chicago Public Schools, it would be about writing and I was completely myself including mentioning my desire to get a doctorate and to go to CA next fall for this writing fellowship I won. It seemed to go well. Then the consulting company in Arizona called and said they wanted to set up a 2 hour phone interview (2 separate ones). Then this nice lady from Chicago Lab Schools called to tell me I had passed the background check and could be a sub (for like no money). Then I got an e-mail from Kaplan University requesting I do some sort of thing to start their approval process for teaching online. Uh...no. I didn't actually remember applying for that exalted position.

Our friend died. We went to his memorial and arrived just as the beautiful baby pictures, boy, happy smiling man shots were being projected on the wall. He was 37. This woman with a lovely voice sang "Ava Maria" and his heartbroken parents spoke. It was awful. When my friend Julie Browder set herself on fire after years of IV needle abuse my mother called me at work and all I could see was her at 18, already in trouble but beautiful and full of life galloping across the field at PDS to arrive at our graduation wearing pink, very against the rules. Sometimes it feels like the people who are most awake and alive die faster and harder and leave us gasping, reaching out and trying to pull them back. At least my anger wasn't so great this time. Just sad, sorry and grateful for my own life.

Which brings us to the purring kittens. Wired for movement and sleeping and havoc and impossible to herd. They flip and flop and leap and meow. Small packages of wired life.

I finished "Tess". It's actually quite helpful for my Vampire book-Angel Claire rejects Tess because she was raped and had a baby and he wanted something innocent and unsullied but she is much better than that. Malcolm rejects Carmilla because she's a vampire while she loves him for who he is exactly, human, flawed, self-righteous etc.