Meg and the Rampaging Angst Of Doom

I'm tired.

Seriously.

I got up at 5:00 this morning (thank you, Ms. Lindsay, for the text from the eastern time zone!) and left by 6:15 to drive to Palo Alto for my job interview.

Palo Alto is about 80 miles from Stockton, and Google told me it would be an hour-and-a-half. Well, Google should know better--it's in the Silicon Valley after all, and it must deal with 880 every day. I gave myself two hours and fifteen minutes...and I ended up being fifteen minutes late to the interview.

I apologized and said the magic words ("Oh, the 880 was terrible!") and received some understanding nods and smiles from the three-woman panel. Then I resolved that really, once I answer the questions and walk out of the room, it's all out of my hands.

The interview went well enough, I think. The job--well, the job is exactly what I want. K-5 music, all at one site, support from the school for a couple of performances for the parents and community, and a collaborative staff that pitches in on everything. I liked the women who interviewed me and think they'd be pleasant to work with/for.

Anyway, I arrived home at 10:30 and sat down to relax at the computer. Only to find that the maintenance guys are hunting dinosaurs murdering a poor, defenseless wall out to make my life a living hell doing some renovations on my next-door neighbor's bathroom. The apartment, that is, that shares a wall with mine.

Commence near-breakdown.

I've come to the conclusion that I have a seriously low tolerance for invasive noise--car alarms going off, loud bass pumping all over the neighborhood, the kids upstairs jumping off the furniture over my head, yappy dogs, etc. I get really, really irritated, really, really quickly. It's all part of apartment living, but being unemployed means that I'm in the apartment a lot. A. Lot. And I'm getting to a point that the next time one of the gardeners is standing outside my living room window, gleefully demolishing the shrubbery with a chainsaw, I can't promise that I won't run outside in my pajamas and stand in the middle of the parking lot screaming at everyone to just be quiet and let a woman watch some "Supernatural" in peace.

I really need a job, people. My sanity depends on it.

When I brought this noise-intolerant theory up with Summer a few days ago, she snorted and said, "You're a teacher." She has a point, but I would argue that when you're in a music classroom, the noise is a thing of joy (I still get annoyed by whining and sniveling, believe me), and therefore, not something like a jet blower. (I swear, the maintenance guys here are in LOVE with their jet blowers--they use them at least three days a week and I'm not entirely sure they don't take them home and use them in their living rooms on other days.)

Anyway, the noise nearly sent me overboard this afternoon. I decided that in order to save my sanity while the demolition crew was at the peak of its fury against the poor, defenseless dividing wall (and before they accidentally put a hole through it just as I'm using my own toilet or something), that getting back out of the apartment, even for just 10 minutes, was just the thing. A trip to the post office accomplished this and now the noise seems to have finished. Thankfully.

But before I can relax on the sofa with lunch, much-needed tea, and a movie, I have one humiliating chore left to do. Turns out I filled out my claim form wrong last week, so my check is delayed. So Meg, your intrepid blogger, who will be 33 years old in about 7 weeks, texted her Dad asking for money. For gas. So I can get up at 4:30 tomorrow and leave my apartment by 5:30 for the next job interview, three hours south of here.

I'm so tired just thinking of it.