No job, no job, no job...

*sob* still no word on the job front, so this will be my fourth Christmas in a row where I have spent the holiday depressed and anxious. Last year I was wondering about Tasmania. The year before I think it was a job in Scotland. The year before it was a job ANYWHERE (I'd only been back in Noobah a year and hadn't yet realised that after a while, you get numb to the pain of being back here).

I have started to hate the holiday period. The hot weather makes me miserable and short tempered. Being miserable makes me eat. Eating makes me fat. Being fat makes me miserable AND irritated. I shout and rant and snap at my daughter but really I am angry at myself - FOR STILL BEING IN THIS SHITHOLE! For letting ANOTHER BLOODY YEAR GO BY.

I think the fact it is summer (a season I detest in this country) and the new year is coming and my birthday only a few short weeks after that...well, it all adds to the general gloomy atmosphere. Another Christmas here means another one NOT spent in Scotland. Another Hogmanay missed. Another year closer to 30 and still no closer to being back home.

I feel wretched.

There were a few jobs on the horizon and had I any sense and actually REMEMBERED what I get like during this festive season I may have signed myself up simply to escape this misery. Instead I am stuck to the computer, sweltering in the combined summer and electrical heat, plonking my daughter in front of endless streams of crappy Christmas television and searching the job pages in vain.

And isn't it strange how all the ghosts of job hunts past come back to haunt me when I get down and desperate? I've thought about New Zealand, I go back to the Tasmanian idea, then I think again of the northern NSW coast...and without fail I always end up on the job board of some Scottish council - just to check.

And every year I think that I cannot go through much more of this. I cannot stay here any longer...I might die. I cannot get any older here. How many more years do I want to tread water in this backwater country? How many years do I want to have to look back on and lament as WASTED?

Yet here I am again.