[Izulde]

"Tell me what drew you to creative writing."

It was all I could do to suppress a groan as the pretty, young woman looked at me from across the desk.

The first thing you need to know about writers is that we despise any form of the question, "Why do you write?". And this was a form of that question. I decided to be honest.

"It's instinctive, something innate that we're born with. Like I heard Junot Diaz say once, there's no real explaining *why* writers do what we do. It's just a compulsion, a calling."

She raised her eyebrows, nodded politely, and jotted something down on her pad, the well-put together blues and greens of her business professional attire attesting to her fashion sense and capability.

Yep, Izulde had a job interview recently. I can only nebulously say that it was in a business-related field and that they promised to call me if I made it to the second round of interviews.

They didn't call.

This didn't surprise me. I surmised after the interview, with the preternatural ability I have about job interviews and roleplay scenarios in competitions, that I hadn't made it. (I've only been wrong once in my life - the time I thought I had a job at a Panera Bread opening in my hometown. Turns out they went with all older women for the launch, which was smart, but I was still annoyed. I'd nailed that interview. To this day, I've never eaten at Panera for that diss.)

Anyway, I bring this up because the interview also illuminated several other things:

1. When asked what I looked for a job/career, I answered variety - doing different things and having a wide array of experiences and meeting different people. The thought of being in one place and doing the same exact thing day after day was anathema to me. (This job involved half-days in an office, and half-days in the field meeting with clientele, FWIW).

2. When asked if I was a people person, I said yes and no. In formalized, structured situations with clearly defined roles, such as work or the classroom, absolutely. In social situations, no, most likely because there the roles and landscapes of the conversation and interactions were undefined. (Note: I realize this was the wrong answer according to conventional wisdom about the question, but damn conventional wisdom anyhow).

3. Further reflection on the interview made me realize that I did genuinely enjoy many moments of teaching at the college level, and the relative freedom and flexibility are very important to me. Of critical importance, actually.

This last point became particularly clear when I received my teaching schedule for this semester and was ecstatic to discover that I had all evening classes. The night hours are when I'm most awake and most effective, and my various student evaluations in the five years I've taught at the university level attest to this. With one exception, the later my classes are, the better the evals are (The outlier was an early morning class at UArk where I loved the material I was teaching and got excellent evals as a result, and my best overall evals until last fall when UNLV started giving me later classes and allowed me to start teaching my comp classes as a themed course in college sports, whereupon the last two semesters have had the highest ratings of my career.)

Drifting along in the wake of all these recent revelations - the recognition that I really wanted to reach the pinnacle of degree achievement and become Dr. Izulde Jestor (to use my fictional alter ego).

Of course, there can be only one route for me - the PhD in Creative Writing. 32 or 33 schools (I forget the exact number) offer the degree (really a PhD in English with a creative dissertation as opposed to a research dissertation).

My GRE scores are null and void, so I need to retake it, in the scary, new, harder format this fall, and I will also have to take the GRE Subject test most likely. So it's a good thing that although I really, really wanted to teach World Lit, that I'll instead have three sections of my Contemporary Issues in College Sports class to teach. New course prep is very time-intensive.

I'll conclude this post by noting I feel very blessed right now. So many of my fellow adjuncts across the nation are struggling to make it, and more than a few have to teach at more than one campus to survive. But I've been very fortunate to be given full-time adjunct status, which comes with health insurance benefits. That's huge, particularly since it makes me think of one of my friends still in retail, still stuck with just below the hours to qualify for benefits, who is *still* paying off a surgery he had to get a few years ago.