so, guess what?

i'm now employed.

yayayayayayayayayayayayayayayayayayayayayayayayayayayayayayayayayayayayay!

words cannot express how great it feels to have a job, but i'm going to try to use them to do just that.  imagine being hit repeatedly in the stomach with a baseball bat while a swarm of angry bees, who have stealthily entered your skull, play ultimate frisbee.  additionally, president taft is perched on your shoulders.  throughout this, you have to be coherent, pleasant, knowledgeable, and charming while being constantly grilled with questions.  that's basically what job hunting felt like for me.  when i got a phone call from a principal that said (i paraphrase) "wanna come work for us, dude?" suddenly taft found better things to do, the bees buzzed off, and the baseball bat (apparently swung by nobody) realizes this and drops.  there might have also been rainbows.

quick funny story about how i got this job in the first place: en route to an interview i get a phone call.  it is my new boss (though i didn't know it at the time) asking if i would be at all interested in interviewing for this new semi-uncategorizable class.  he got my name from a posting my fourth-grade teacher's next door neighbor put up on a list.  i asked if he was free in two hours (when i'd be in town) and he said yes. during the interview we discovered i'm not technically qualified to teach this job.  however, he asked me to send him all of my school/work info so he could contact human resources just in case they would be able to make it work.  i did, he did, they did, and thus, i got hired.

so the job i have: i am going to be working in an ABA-formatted (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applied_behavior_analysis#Efficacy_in_autism) classroom with 6 or 7 kindergarden and first grade students with severe autism (and two teaching assistants to help out, thank goodness).  it's a great school with an AMAZING principal (he'd have to be amazing to go out on a limb and hire a newbie who has never WORKED in an ABA-format classroom) in a fabulous location right in the middle of a highly acclaimed school district.  i am very excited.

real world, here i come.