The End In Sight

I'm starting to think that the chance of Principal Palpatine being here at Empire High School next year are getting slimmer and slimmer. If she isn't dismissed outright, she'll probably be shuffled to another school. Of course there's nothing official, so there's no reason to throw a party just yet.... just rumors that the district is thinking about re-shuffling the principal deck and dealing new hands.

You'd think that I, of all people, would be fidgety with anticipation. I'm not.... I'm actually kind of numb. My conflicts with Palpatine have already left my overall perspective of working under a principal as a wasteland of destruction. So it looks like we're winning the war, but the city is burning.

I'm actually not quite as pessemistic as that sounds. I'm just reflecting on my own curious indifference. Had this all been going down a year ago... six months ago... I would be approaching all of this very differently. I think that once I heard that she was planning on staying another year after this one (it was January or so when that reached me) something... changed. It was like accepting the occupation of a hostile foreign entity. Suddenly I foresaw not just one year, but several. After all, if it's glory through test scores that she wants, there's really no place better than Empire High School (in the public school system, anyway). We already have a pre-existing paranoia over college resume's and GPA. All we need is a little "guidance" and we could be transformed into the high-numbers machine that would have launched her career into educational fame.

So I stopped waiting for the cavalry to come in and save the day, and started trying to maneuver myself so that I was off her radar. Once I did that, I started sleeping better, and I stopped driving to work miserable. Happiness was on the return. She even started being nice to me... Make no mistake though, I am still bitter about her attempts to shape the Empire High Music Department to be her little PR dog-and-pony show... as well as the strong-arm scare tactics and behind-the-scenes scheming that she employed against me over the years. I haven't forgotten, nor forgiven.

It's for that reason that I became a link in a chain of people that worked to collect information and pass it along to people who can do something about it. It may not even be necessary at this point; there are far more controversial and very public issues that are threatening to be her undoing. Those same issues are, however, causing a lot of collateral damage along the way. It's kind of the equivalent of using a nuke to take out a dictator. Even Bush was smart enough to avoid that (barely).

In short... even if her office gets cleaned out by the end of the week, I don't know if I'll be in the mood to do any celebrating. The task of rebuilding is enormous, and the uncertainty of the future of Empire High is daunting. I will, however, enjoy a touch of what one might call.... satisfaction.