All job fairs must come to an end

Actually, the job fair continues tomorrow, but not for me. Today was a great day. I didn't get a job, but there were several schools very interested and looking into bringing me or us down in the coming weeks for full day interviews. So that's cool.

M-N came with today, so at first I thought we'd be 'those people' at our table, but then we ran into Amina, from Colby, and we met some cool people with weird connections to us, including a statistician who was interested in M-N's current school; a guy who currently teaches at a school I interviewed for last time, didn't want, and they didn't want me; his girlfriend, who has a sister at Colby; a woman from Virginia (ok, no connection there, but she was cool); and a guy who is finishing up at Holy Cross (where my brother went) who watched all four seasons of "24" with his brother over Christmas vacation -- that just connects b/c I watched season one in a marathon while M-N was busy giving birth and stuff and we were also big "Lost" fans, an obscure show few people have heard of.

So we had a whole table who talked to each other and were friendly and cool. That's definitely nice between interviews, though M-N didn't have "between interview" time so much as "between job offer" time. She has those intangible qualities that they look for like qualifications, intelligence, and personality, things they notice after first offering her an interview based largely on race.

It's funny to see the folks from VT, NH, and ME schools (and elsewhere, I guess) pounce on the candidates of color. I swear I had a couple of interviews last time around where they thought I was black b/c M-N is and decided not to hire me upon seeing me, then I had to sit through a 30 minute waste interview. Amina had someone leave a note requesting an interview, saying they saw her talking to another school, so they wanted to interview her. Sure, ok. "What made you think Amina would be a great candidate to teach history at your school?" "Well, I saw her talking to someone, and she was definitely black. She'd look great in our brochures and viewbook. I actually added her to some pictures just to see how it looked. Yeah, I sent those out to potential students."

But anyway, even though a bunch of the people at our table were English-seekers, it was still ok and not bitter or angry. At least not with each other. At least for me, b/c I wasn't looking in the Northeast. The schools I liked today are in California, Maryland, Pennsylvania and North Carolina. M-N has standing offers from about 84 schools. Some in Guam, I think.