Drama Department

As if the drama of our precarious financial situation weren’t enough, some anonymous gossip read my last entry and decided to tell Jen that I thought she was a terrible parent. Jen in turn confronted me about it and now she and Jay have decided that I can no longer be a part of their lives. I sent her an e-mail with the relevant passages from this diary, as well as an explanation, but she hasn’t e-mailed me back. I’m not saying that she’s wrong to be upset about what I wrote, because it does indeed question whether the way she and Jay interact with their son isn’t the major cause of any behavioral problems he’s having. I’m sorry, but speaking as a teacher, any time I see a behavioral issue, the first thing I’m going to do is look at the dynamic between parent and child. I think she’s mostly upset that I didn’t tell her in person, but part of why I wrote about it was to work out for myself a way of advising her that wouldn’t be offensive to her sensibilities. Like I said in my last entry, she sees me as a friend, not as a teacher with experience in dealing with behavioral issues.

Aside from the hurt I feel over the fact that Jen is willing to throw away 15 years of friendship over someone’s spiteful behavior, I’m seriously pissed that someone reading this diary would betray the confidence I put in this community. There are a very few people that I know of who read this diary that know Jen. One claims that it wasn’t her, and I would extremely hurt if it were, so I’d very much like to believe her. Two others I would doubt know Jen well enough to tell her something like that. The other is actually a diarist here, but as she hasn’t updated in some time, I had thought she’d lost interest. Up till now I have always allowed my diary to be public. Unfortunately, I will now have to limit its readership to OD members, and I will be blocking the one diarist I suspect is the root of this problem. I hope that these actions are enough.

And sorry as I am to lose such a close friend, I still have my life to live. I had an interview last Tuesday at a community preschool program in Ansonia. It was shockingly short, even though I did my best to ask questions and extend the time I spent with the three women conducting the interview. I was surprised to learn that they did not put much stock in my resume and cover letter. I did, after all, explain that I was a state certified head teacher. That means I have a minimum of a CDA equivalent, plus more than 1000 teaching hours. Yet they still asked if I had any intentions of going back to school to earn my CDA or Bachelor’s Degree in Early Childhood Education because they required all teachers and assistants to possess that credential. Obviously they weren’t aware that almost every childcare program requires the same thing and that in order to be a head teacher I would have had to prove that I met those requirements. Still, they’re looking to fill positions in both their Ansonia and Milford centers, and I hope that if I got a position in Milford, I wouldn’t have to deal with those particular people on a regular basis.

The day after my interview I went up to Vermont to dog sit, a prospect full of dreariness, as my parents’ house is rather dark and gloomy even under the best circumstances. It comes from being a log cabin. Walls, ceilings, and floors are all the same color and the roof of the front porch makes the large windows fairly pointless. The overall effect is that of a cave. Still, my mom paid me $150 for the three days I was up there, which will help a lot with the bills that are due at the beginning of August. Plus I got to see the newest Harry Potter movie. I think it was better than the fifth one, but I was still disappointed at how much got left out, especially in terms of discussing the horcruxes. It’s never clear that Dumbledore has already identified so many of them or that anything other than the diary has been destroyed. At least Emma Watson’s acting has improved since the fourth and fifth movies. She was leaning towards terrible, but she’s much more believable in this one. And I do like the little glimpse of #7 you get in terms of Snape really being a good guy, even though Harry doesn’t understand it yet. I really didn’t like Narcissa Malfoy, though. She just looks so contrary to how I pictured her.

And despite our rather desperate circumstances and how much I’ll miss Alan when he’s gone, I am looking forward to the housing allowance I’ll get while he’s at Basic Training. It’s determined by the area we live in and really meant for a family. Given that we live in a very expensive area of the country, but only have a tiny one-bedroom apartment and no kids, the housing allowance will be more than enough to cover our rent, utility bills, and even groceries, with enough left over to go towards paying down some of our credit card bills. Plus I’ll spend less on groceries for just myself than for the two of us, and I plan on stopping birth control since Alan will be gone anyway. Add to that the fact that I’ll have health insurance through the Army to pay for my other medical issues and the bills will be greatly reduced. Any income I have will just be extra and since Alan won’t have many expenses during training, we can really throw money into savings. And I hope to use the extra to replace some of our Ikea furniture as well. Perhaps I’ll just save it up until we move and buy new furniture for a new place and leave the old crummy stuff here. Mike could buy it off us and charge for a furnished apartment. Not a bad idea actually. I’d keep some of it of course, but the bed and armoires could stay. Maybe even the kitchen table and computer desk, since they probably wouldn’t survive a move anyway. ::rolls eyes::

Anyway, Alan and I have to take a trip to the bank to get me added to his checking account. We decided to use his because Milford Bank obviously isn’t national and he hates Bank of America for some reason, so People’s it is.

~Liz