The Adventures of Cowboy Hazel

It’s funny the way we procrastinate. Sometimes I find myself working on completely ridiculous projects in order to avoid working on something that could actually be useful. Now is not necessarily one of those moments. I actually had a fairly productive day. I don’t really know why I started with that. I guess it just seems like I’ve been procrastinating a lot lately.

Maybe I’m still upset about procrastinating the writing of my lesson plan for the NYC Teaching Fellows interview that I had this morning. I didn’t even start working on it until last night. I tried earlier in the week, but I just couldn’t make myself do it – I couldn’t get the creative juices flowing. Even last night I struggled. But, finally I managed to come up with a lame lecture on how the certain quotes in the first chapter of The Great Gatsby show that Nick Carroway associates wealth with unhappiness. It all made sense in my head but I sounded retarded when I was teaching it to the “class” today. Luckily, there were some other interviewees in my group that made me look better by being so completely incompetent themselves. Then again, there were a few that really showed me up too. Actually, now that I think about it, my presentation was probably the only mediocre one. The others were all either really good or god-awful.

Overall, I was surprised by how serious people took this whole thing. I was figuring it would be mostly New York kids, but there were tons of people from middle America. I was talking to this girl who flew in from Texas this morning for this thing. And here I was feeling bad for having to wake up at 8:00 and take the 6 down to Union Square on a Saturday.

I originally worried about being too dressed up in a suit, but almost every guy there was in a suit. Interestingly enough, I wasn’t. I took my gray Armani to the dry cleaners Monday so that it would be nice and fresh for today. I picked it up yesterday morning before work and hung it in my closet, not giving it a second thought. Of course, this morning when I’m already running late and hurrying to get out the door, I notice that my jacket is missing one of the front buttons. Ahhhh! That started a mad rush through my other suits (too conservative, too modern, has a stain and needs to be dry cleaned, too cheap, bulky shoulders) and led me to a pair of gray flannel trousers that I hadn’t worn in forever. I’m out the door when I look down and realize that they are horribly wrinkled. Not just a little bit… They look like they were wadded in a ball at the bottom of my locker for a year (which they may have been at some point). I had to change pants yet again and by then had no time left to stop and get any breakfast. I ended up not even wearing a jacket because I didn’t have one that matched well with the pants I had to wear. This afternoon, I thought about going to the dry cleaners and yelling but realized that that wouldn’t really help anything.

Anyway, other than that wardrobe fiasco and the teaching sample, I think I rocked the interview. It was actually more like a series of tests than an actual interview. We had to do group discussion questions, an essay writing sample, and the final individual interview-like session but even then, the questions were more problem solving questions than typical interview questions. I did a pretty good job on all of them, especially the writing sample, I think.

The interesting question now becomes, what do I do if I’m accepted? If I’m not, no big deal, I go on with my Lantenengo life and see where it leads me. But, if I am, I should do this… right? I mean, I spent a crazy amount of time on my application, spent a few hours last night on the teaching sample, spent half my day today at the interview itself, so there’s clearly a serious level of dedication that I’ve put into this. So why would it even be a question what I would do if I was accepted? This is such a tough, competitive program to get into that offers such high rewards that it seems a given that I would want to go through with it if I get accepted. I mean, for god’s sake, there were people flying in from Ohio for the interview.

The biggest allure of being a teacher in a public school is also my biggest fear. I love the idea of going into an environment where your schedule, objectives, pay scale, and performance measures are all clearly defined by someone else. You go to work and do your job and they say good work. Repeat. It would be great to not have the stress of having to figure out all that for yourself. Yet, at the same time, I am so afraid that I wouldn’t be able to fit into that mold. I love the freedom that entrepreneurship brings with it. Could I give that up? Yet, I know that I’m only being optimistic about the whole owning-my-own-business thing now because I had an amazingly good week. I have to try to remember the bad times (just a couple weeks ago) that pushed me to apply for this teaching thing in the first place.

So, what was that amazingly good week, you may ask? Well, for one, my biggest client is now needing forty hours a week of contracting work from me. Yeah, that’s pretty much a full time job. Even better, I’m going to be working on a bunch of really fun, cool, exciting projects that I can learn a lot from for them. On top of that, through a reference, I have another small site design on the near horizon. In the few minutes I have left over, I’ve been working on my network project and building up my advertising revenues. I spent about six hours on that today and made some big breakthroughs.

The one I’d like to highlight is the fact that I finally was able to wrap my brain around mod_rewrite and use it on my directory site. If you’re wondering what in the hell mod_rewrite is, don’t worry. I’ll explain… When you type in a web address the server generally directs you to file named correspondingly on the server. This works. But, you can end up with some ugly looking URLs that the search engines don’t like and that don’t mean anything to your human visitors. Here’s where mod_rewrite comes in. It displays the real file (with the ugly filename) when the nice, clean URL is entered without redirecting the visitor. Okay, even I realize that didn’t make much sense. Let’s try an example: http://www.fivefishlist.com/list.php?c=38 is now http://www.fivefishlist.com/blogs. See the advantage? Anyway, this was a big technical hurdle for me. I was having trouble getting it to work and I finally overcame it today.

Unfortunately, I got none of the work that I want to get done on East Coast Runners accomplished. I really want to incorporate maps and weather, and also to improve the storage of common route and shoe information for my users (including me). I’d like to get some of it done tomorrow, but that’s probably not going to happen. I am running the Scotland Run 10K in the morning and then hosting a small dinner party tomorrow evening. I’ll have maybe four hours in between and I’ll need to wrap up loose ends on the Five Fish List and respond to the twenty or so messages that are sitting in my inbox and clean my house. This next week’s not looking good either… I’ve got at least fifty hours of work lined up, plus baseball season starts and I have tickets to two Yankees games and then my buddy Josh is coming up from Miami on Friday so the weekend is going to be drunken shenanigans instead of being productive.

I just feel like there is never enough time. Time really seems to be racing by and I can’t seem to keep up. I guess I need to figure out how to because its probably not going to slow down anytime soon…