My high school was public, but it was a small school in a tiny town with really high property prices and taxes, so it really resembled a private school much more than a standard public school.

I just remembered that, a few years ahead of me, there was a guy who put in either his yearbook or the senior issue of the school newspaper that his goal was to become a pediatric gynecologist. And they printed it.

Up until, IIRC, the year before my senior year, the "senior superlatives" thing in the school newspaper would have the whole senior class vote on a bunch of different categories. Some were things like "smartest" or "most athletic" or whatever, but there were also a bunch like "ugliest" or "sluttiest" and things like that. They wouldn't print your name for those categories unless you said it was OK, but the process for asking you if it was OK was for someone on the newspaper staff to come to your classroom and ask to talk to you for a moment, and then, out in the hallway, show you that your classmates had voted you ugliest or whatever, and ask if you wanted it printed. Almost none of them were ever printed -- they just printed the category name and "Name redacted" or something like that -- but it was a small enough school that everybody knew who got called out of class and then came back in looking like they were trying not to cry.

Oh, and sophomore year, I got voted homecoming princess as a joke. A third of the class voted for me. And the class advisors, rather than just announcing whichever actual popular girl got the next highest number of votes, pretty much just let the news get out, and announced that there was no princess that year. About a month later, for my birthday, my friends decorated the outside of my locker (which was standard thing there for friends to do for birthdays -- you'd "casually" mention your locker combination to your friends a few days before your birthday, and they'd get to school early that day and decorate the outside of the locker and fill the inside with candy and stuff.) During first period, some guys tore up the decorations and wrote rape threats all over them. One of my friends went with me to report it to the vice principal (I'd been unsure about whether to say anything, but this friend insisted that I had to), and three of the guys got detention for a day or so and had to write me apology notes.

Sorry. This week sucks. Getting way too many flashbacks to stuff I hadn't thought about in years.

Holy shit, Hil. All of that sounds nightmarish.

Oh Hil, that is just horrible. It makes it all the more impressive and remarkable that you achieved the level of academic success you have. Yellow bellied me probably would have quit school and never entered a school building again.

Zero tolerance for bullies. There were a couple boys in our circle of kids that exhibited bully tendencies and I called them out about about it in no uncertain terms. One I don't know anymore, but the other one grew to be a fine adult and remains a friend. I wonder if he remembers how I took him to task.

Kind of grateful I have so few memories of HS. Unmemorable seems a plus.

In totally other news, I am trying to decide between two candidates, and it is killing me. One is internal, the safe choice, a pretty known quantity. I think the other might actually be better in the job, but not by a huge amount, and what if I'm wrong? The main person I need buy-in from prefers the internal person, and if I hire the external, the internal candidate will work closely with them, so I'll feel extra bad if I do that and it's the wrong call.

I guess I'm going internal, but I can't get rid of this nagging doubt!!

Yeah, it sounds like internal is the better choice without knowing any more. For me there would have to be a significant advantage to the external choice to go that direction.

My gut is usually better than this! I think I was surprised at how well the external person did, which is what is making me second-guess.

I understand. It is generally very easy for me to make decisions so when it isn't it throws me.

I also have other anxiety right now about other things, so that also isn't helping. Am I worried about this hire, or the strangers who are about to come stay in my house? WHO CAN TELL???

Wow, people are terrible.