Finished that interview — it felt like I was like interviewing for a six-figure, seven-figure job. Like, I don’t know, it just felt insane to put me through this wringer for a fifth grade teaching position. They told me they’d let me know and days went by and they never let me know. And I was like, “Well it seems like they ghosted me. I don’t know what’s happening here,” and my girlfriend’s like, “Did you check your, your work email?” ’cause I was currently in a separate position. I was like, “No,” but I specifically told them like right off the top like when they asked me I was like, “Yeah please don’t — please don’t use my work email ’cause I’m currently employed.” But on a whim, I checked my work email and they had in fact responded, or reached out to me through my work email and they’d actually sent me an email about fifteen minutes after I left the interview rejecting me. So I got pretty dejected about that, pretty sad, pretty broken up, and I went to the beach to cool out. I — there’s this like private access point to Lake Michigan that I know about. I went there and I just sat on a piece of driftwood, and, you know, focused on the finer things in life. I looked out over the horizon as the sun was, you know, right in that like not quite setting position but it’s getting ready to set, and just kind of pondered life and I had this moment where I was like, “You know, things aren’t so bad.”
And then this deer came out of the woods and began drinking from the river and — or from the lake, excuse me. And I was like, “Yeah, I mean, like look at this right now, here I am, sun setting, on the shores of Lake Michigan and nature just coming out of the woodwork literally.” And you know, setting this beautiful scene, and then the deer began like frolicking in the shallow waves and I couldn’t imagine a more grounding scene laying before me. And pretty soon I was, you know, I’d kind of forgotten about the interview situation as I watched that deer play around.
But then, um, but then, the deer drowned. It — it died in front of my eyes. It was playing in the water and then I saw the water kinda had gotten a little bit deeper than — but in my head I was like, “Well, deer can probably swim and deer know what they’re doing. Deer wouldn’t put themself in any kind of trouble here,” and watched the head dip down, and at some point it never came back up, and I didn’t know how to save it. I was actually probably like just far enough away that I’d have to like run over to it, and I thought about like grabbing a piece of driftwood and — to reach to it, and I was like, “It can’t grab that.” But then I also was thinking about how I — people like have said don’t try to save people in the water because they might reel you in too. But I don’t think I could have gotten there in time. Yeah. I went through the craziest interview process, was rejected almost immediately, it turns out, and then, as I was grounding myself, watched a deer drown in front of my eyes. No one believes that one, but that’s 100% how it happened.