Stylistically I think it is interesting that many blog entries seem to begin in medias res – in the middle of a thought or action. I’ve been running my brain at a pretty high level this week, without enough sleep to back it up, and I am feeling a little in medias res myself – as though every thought or action is neither beginning nor conclusion, but all an extension of past and preparation for future tasks. In short, I am fried up in a skillet on a burner set to multitask.

The following paragraph will use clauses, digressions, and parentheticals in a manner rivaling Hawthorn:

I left home yesterday at 5:30 a.m. as per usual. I taught a full day covering a range of material including Act III of Romeo and Juliet for freshmen (I collapsed on my own floor as a murdered Mercutio pronouncing a pox on both houses – I was avenged by my T.A. who took out an oddly long blond Tybalt in a California pullover), distinguishing sentence subjects by excluding prepositional phrases for credit recovery students (who tried to work ahead, got them all wrong, and actually learned something as we corrected their errors together), the elements of good descriptive writing and Gordon Park’s essay on poverty in 1960’s Rio for seniors (Park’s also wrote the original screenplay for Shaft and I played them the Isaac Hayes song via a hyperlink in my power point).

Then I had to oversee a chess tournament, which started right after school and finished around eight (we had twelve students in a round robin series of matches – which is a good turn out considering how many of my kids were double booked with basketball). Afterward, I managed to do another hour of paperwork involving mainstreaming kids with disabilities – cognitive and otherwise – and then drove home, arriving around 10:30. That’s a seventeen hour day including the three hour commute. I just rolled 19,000 on the car.

I had an interview last week for a school district here in town. All parties are agreed that I must kill my commute. I am still waiting to hear back from them. I was at the front of their process, so hearing back will be determined in part by how many interviews they do. I was told they had two hundred applicants. My interviews went well; I’ve met with three different people so far, so keep your fingers crossed for me.