"That's where the minorities live..."

I'm back from Squirtsville College, where I had a fairly decent interview, I thought. It was like pulling teeth to get the kids to talk during my teaching demo, but by the end of class everyone had said something, so that's something. I got good feedback from the Dean, who sat in on the class, and I was able to drive the conversation toward a topic that he enjoyed, war memoirs. A lot of people missed a lot of meetings with me, however. It seems that they aren't lying when they said that this was a teaching position. The President told me that I was probably not going to be a publishing scholar if I joined them. My thought, "Yeah, but I'd be an employed one, and that's a start."

When I first arrived at my hotel, I had about 15 minutes to chill out before my first appointment. A realtor was showing me around town. And she took me to a single apartment complex to pick up some brochures, and her son is getting married. We drove to a nice, newish part of town, and also her son is getting married. Then we went through the really expensive part of town, and at this point, her son was still getting married, and I "had to meet him. He's in communication and you'd get along real well, since he'd like to write screenplays and the like. Now down here is Squirtsville College and you'll park there tomorrow. The houses around here aren't so nice but over there is where the minorities live, in the free housing. Behind the fence there, yeah. They used to be really bad, but you know, but now if you know a kid is living with grandma and he is caught selling drugs, they kick out grandma too, so it's getting nicer here."

I was floored. Realtors can't talk about the ethnic make up of areas or steer people away from areas based on race. That's positively illegal. My next action, once the search ends one way or another, will be to encourage the school to discontinue using that crazy woman whose son, did I mention, is getting married. I'm not sure she was consciously hateful, but she was was thoughtless and daft and made a poor impression, something a school during the hiring phase does not want to do.

So, that's that. I am currently working through a load of wingfuckery to see what I missed in the day that I was away. So much bullshit, so little time.

HJ