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.

Departure blues

Perhaps it is the literature I am reading but I was dreaming last night that we were living in a different place.

My heart and mind are definitely on the move out of here. I am finding it harder and harder to feign interest in what is going on around me. My sister and her partner are planning to build a house (a mansion, really. Not bad for 2 non-professionals still under 30, but what do I know?) I do know that it strikes me as very Marie Antoinette - there are people in the world who are starving, who can't get a house, who can't read or write...anyway.

I have even started to take down my postcard wall (a staple in every house, hovel or cell-sized room I have lived in since I was 21). I wander round the house every so often and daydream about the garage sale I will have. I am even thinking about having a garage sale right now, just to get rid of the clutter.

Perhaps it is a good thing. I know it won't be easy to leave here, despite my boredom and frustration with the place. But unfortunately we have stayed here too long, tentacles of habit have wound their way into our hearts and lifestyle.

My daughter is also a lot older than I thought she would be when we left, and certainly older than she was at the start of last year when we moved to Alice Springs. She noticed the sudden disappearance of family then (her father also chose that moment to return to Scotland, so that added to her distress), I'm sure she'll notice it more this time.

Fortunately we will be going somewhere completely new that will fill up her senses and distract her. I think it will be best if I get a job quite suddenly and the departure process is fairly quick. Just like removing a Band-Aid - it seemed to work when we left for Alice Springs (I was phoned and offered the job on Saturday and we arrived by the following Tuesday).

Of course, it will not be the glorious departure back to Scotland that I have pictured in my mind over the past 3 and a half years, but it will be the beginning of that journey - with our final destination: