Happy Post

Have just scrolled through my (very) long list of other bloggers and revisited all of them to catch up on what they are doing (twas like catching up with old friends...even tho most of them don't even know who I am!). Also to get a wee bit more inspiration for my own blog...just like getting out of bed, it's been a little hard lately to keep motivated. The whole reason for starting the wretched thing was to share our travel stories with the world but alas, we are still sitting HERE so it's just not that exciting.

But...happy thoughts!

One blog of which I am particularly fond is silversprite. I guess because they pretty much embody my Ideal Life: living on a remote Hebridean island, working as a librarian as well as having a web based consultancy business...>sigh<>

All this is rather fitting as I am trying, desperately trying to apply for a teacher-librarian position down south (actually not that far...and not on the coast, which I am craving, but still - it's part-time and at this point in the quest for employment, why the hell not??)

I am the original bookworm. Bugger teaching, I should've studied to be a librarian in the first place. The only part I'm not sure I'll like is the cataloguing, but I did realise tonight whilst walking (first time in MONTHS but more on that another time) that the school librarian does not have to do school reports, they have very few classes for which they have to prepare (and even then the lessons are mostly the same thing "How To Use The Library") and discipline is not such a big deal because they don't see the students that often, the work is usually assignment based (at least in secondary) or fun (primary) and they get to choose new books to buy...

Not that I'm trying to be lazy and get out of the hard work of teaching...I just don't have the heart for it ... I hesitate to say "anymore". It might come back, but at present I do not have the zest required to teach full-time. The silliest things completely debilitate me. Plus I don't look into the future and see myself marking reports and sitting up stressing over difficult classes, rushing to staff meetings, coaching a sporting team, none of these things feature...

The Dream :) Haha...reality!

Recruitment Agencies

Whilst I'm here I may as well rant on these as well!


I signed up with Select Education (also called Teach Anywhere) because they appeared to be the only agency operating for international/expat schools. They also seemed to be the only place even advertising these jobs - there's no website called "International school jobs dot com" - so Select were my only option.


Somehow I got 'stuck' with a recruiter who couldn't give a rats arse about me. I'm pretty sure I've already ranted and raved about how she wouldn't respond to my emails until I wrote to another recruiter. Well, I've tried to escape her clutches and sign myself up to another Select recruiter again but instead they keep forwarding me back to her. I got excited when I saw they were advertising what looked like her position for a January start (I even thought that perhaps this might be the reason she was so unwilling to put any effort into finding jobs for me) but so far she hasn't gone away.


I stumbled across another agency: Teacher Appointments based in Brisbane. This is a much smaller operation and were initially a lot more friendly and interested in where I was coming from and what my goals were (as opposed to Select who nod and smile through the initial phone call then proceed to send you just about every irrelevant and out of the question teaching positions they can find!). However, as this recruiter was handling the China job that I could not accept, once I emailed the school to negotiate fewer hours, they readvertised and the recruiter disappeared into thin air.


Hays...well, don't even get me started! They didn't even start. I emailed the contact (someone called Olivia) a few times without response. Eventually I think I signed up on the website or sent a CV or something and she got back to me. Now, she was and still is, advertising teaching positions in Asia with ONE YEAR CONTRACT written all over them. Yet, when I told her I was interested in a one year contract she dropped me like a hot coal. Please explain?


SANZA: I thought they only dealt with jobs in the UK but noticed in my extensive trawling through the jobs pages that they also had jobs in New Zealand and some in Asia. I signed up. I got a phone call from a very nice girl called Karen, who told me she'd look into NZ and Asia for me (I told her I was interested in ANYTHING in either location) and get back to me. She phoned back to ask if I'd consider the Middle East (no I already had and decided against it) and then a few days later sent me an email saying they had nothing to suit and please get back in touch (in a few YEARS) when I was looking for work in the UK. Hmm...NOT BLOODY LIKELY. What the hell???? So although they are still advertising all these jobs, they don't want to fill them? Instead of keeping me on and letting me know if anything came up, like EVERY other recruiter, they just ditch me???


And at the end of all this, bloody Timeplan send me an email asking if I know of anyone who might be interested in the position of Australian coordinator in their London office. Well, SURE I DO! I would be interested in the position but I am cursed with a bloody Australian birth certificate and can't live there, so I can't do it.


I have had just about enough of this shite.

Nothing

Still nothing. We are just sitting here, bored out of our skulls.

Worked a little over the holidays as a study tour teacher. Discovered pretty quickly that it was nothing I imagined it would be...or at least the children weren't (um, how do I say this? Spoilt, pampered little pets comes to mind!) I should have realised that the students who would end up in learning English in Australia over the summer holidays would be the wealthier ones. At least I know now what NOT to teach.

On the other job front: give me strength!

We are still treading water, going nowhere. Another January, another birthday and I am still sitting here. It is enough to drive you to drink...rejection after rejection after rejection! I don't know what it is about this time of year: perhaps because it's Christmas and spending so much time with family (wanting to know what my plans are and whether I've given up on Scotland yet), or my birthday (another year older, still don't feel any closer to where I want to be)?

I did have a job lined up in China. It was in a kindergarten - not an international/expat school. This meant the pay was lower, but I thought it would balance out as the workload expectations would also be lower (which seemed to be the norm looking at similar jobs). Then the school sent me their contract outlining 40 hours + contact per a week, with additional Saturdays from time to time! Tried to negotiate. They readvertised.

I started packing boxes with things anyway, and dusted off my backpack. Nutcase...eternal optimist? I'll leave that up to you!

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.

Oh crummy crum CRUMBO

ARIEGHOSEIGHGGHGHHH!

I am a numpty!

Numpty (num-p-tee) Dialect, chiefly Scot. ~ n. 1. a bumbling fool; One who is intellectually challenged ("no' the fu' shillin'"). 2. widely known in Scotland as an MSP (Member of Scottish Parliament) [as in "Thae numpties couldnae organise a piss up in a brewery."]

Just got off the phone from an interview for a literacy tutor position in Cape York - that's right, waaaay up north where it's hot all year round...hardly my favourite climatic conditions but the opportunity is a one-off. I've even had to put my school in China off for a week because I want to have this chance. The program is highly successful at rapidly improving the reading level of students who are struggling with literacy. They even offer training in Sydney for a week at the start of January before a 6 month deployment to Cape York...

Buuuuut...at the end of the interview (which actually went well - usually I am terrible at phone interviews - especially the international kind but more on that another day) for some wildly inexplicable reason I TOLD HER I HAD A 3 YEAR OLD! @?!*# Why oh why oh why would I do that? It wasn't planned AT ALL. I haven't mentioned my poor wee girl in an interview for a year: not after my parent status cost me not one but TWO brilliant teacher recruiting jobs earlier in the year. The first one was also a phone interview and I had not intended to mention Miss M, but unfortunately I kept talking about "we" and "us". When she asked who else I travelled with, I would've been better off telling her I was a nutter and liked to talk about myself in the 3rd person, but instead I confessed. She practically hung up on me.

Discriminating on the grounds of being a one parent family or having a child is not allowed, of course, but that's even MORE reason to stay mum until being offered the position. I don't like to be underhand but I prefer to be the one to decide whether or not I will handle a position, or a location, rather than have the decision made by somebody who doesn't know me or who maybe doesn't have children at all!

I honestly have no idea why I said it. Talk about shooting oneself in the foot. Talk about self-destruction...argh! It was like some imp was pulling the words out of my mouth - I started saying it before I even realised what I was saying. I tried to stop but I'd gone too far to backtrack without sounding like I was covering up a terminal illness or a little bit of crazy.

>sigh<

So now we have to wait. This is probably my least favourite part of the job process. Applications are draining and time consuming, waiting to be contacted for interview is nail biting but at least you've not had your hopes raised too high yet. Preparing for interview is stressful but the waiting afterwards is dreadful.

Especially when you may have shot yourself in the foot.

Holy mother of God

I hate cockroaches.

I hate cockroaches.

Jaysus I can barely even get my fingers moving to type...

As soon as it starts warming up in Queensland, these filthy, repulsive, devil-bidden bugs start crawling out of the pits of hell and up our walls...

Not only that, but (for the unitiated), Queensland cockroaches @*!?%# fly...big fluttery, paper scratchy WINGS.

I hate them.

I am almost reduced to tears just typing this, but I have to get it out. We had one in our house the other morning. It was dead (well, lying on it's back by the bathroom door and giving every appearance of being lifeless) but it still managed to wrest a scream from the depths of my soul and turn my legs to jelly.

I am fairly sure I have a cockroach phobia. I have an aversion to all flying insects and most creepy crawlies but the one that reduces me to tears and hysteria like no other is this guy. They are simply gruesome - the murky brown colour, the crunchy shell, the spiky legs, the looooong waving antenna...simply the way they move around the room...and the way they FLY. Why oh why, God? Why do they have to FLY?

Just before my 5th birthday, my first brother was born. It was a hot December morning and somehow I had managed to get him out of his cot without my parents intervening and had take him into the lounge room for a nurse. I was sitting on the edge of the brown couch when I felt something on my leg. Looking down I saw a gruesome beast making it's way up my leg. All I recall after that is my dad coming out (probably in response to my screams) and letting go of my newborn brother.

On another balmy Queensland evening my extended family were out at a resort in Surfers Paradise. Having stuffed ourselves senseless at the buffet the kids and uncles were wandering through the resort pool and gardens. The moment is burned in my memory and I recall that I was wearing my puffy blue and white polka dotted "Shirley Temple" dress. I felt something at my throat. It felt like a scratchy leaf. I reached a hand up to flick it away and instead my hand closed around a flubbering fluttery bloody giant of a cockroach. I screamed, of course.

As her four children started to get older my Mum decided to enclose a section of verandah to create an extra bedroom. It was properly constructed (walls, not curtains) but for some reason the bugs simply refused to relinquish what had previously been open air verandah. On a number of occasions I woke up with something crawling on me. Flicking on the fluro would reveal the hideous brown nighttime visitor. I recall one night that I woke up to a sound and when I switched on the light discovered a cockroach was not even ON me yet - I'd become so paranoid that I could hear the tiny scritch scratch of their spiky feet on the wall.

Since then I've had various other close encounters but I believe these were the ones to really concrete the phobia into my psyche. Whilst at uni I used to phone my old flatmate (Kim) to come over to my new place to remove cockroaches. She'd grown up in PNG so was braver than I - I who would be reduced to a shaking, clammy, sweating mess at the mere THOUGHT that I might have glanced one out of the corner of my eye...

Oh, I had another episode when I lived in one of the last dodgy little duplexes in Mermaid Beach (off Hedges Ave aka Millionaires Row). The screen door had been taken away and the Giant Winged Variety used to make their way in and get comfy. The night before I was due to start work in my first ever REAL teaching job, one flew into my room as I sat up preparing. Now, technically these beasts are not supposed to like the light but this fella was quite keen. I phoned my Mum (she was 2 hours away, it was midnight and NO she would not be coming to kill it) and in the end had to resort to sleeping in the 2nd bedroom (this was before I had a flatmate) which had only an old stinking, double ensemble left over from the previous tenant and a newspaper in it. I squashed the newspaper into every crack and crevice, laid some out on the bed, curled up on top and had a fitful sleep. I was also late to my first day at work.

My fear of the beasts is all consuming. I lose all sense of reason and rationality. From about mid-thigh down I lose feeling. I taste vomit. My hands shake and my palms sweat. There have only been a few (VERY few) rare occasions on which I have not had this physical reaction to a roach sighting and nearly all of those involved me having something to drink first. Last summer one flew in and I ran straight out the door, leaving my 2 year old to defend herself. I could not bring myself to go back into the house.

In Scotland I discovered something magical (and indeed, this may be the primary reason for my enduring love for the bonnie northern land). THERE ARE NO COCKROACHES IN SCOTLAND!!! Okay, so maybe there are some of the pale wee German variety, but those I can handle. It's the big brown winged beasts that send shivers down my spine.

It took about 6 months over there but I finally freed myself from the compulsive habit of entering a room/switching on a light and automatically checking the ceiling, cornice, every corner, edging and floor before entering. I didn't have to throw back my covers before hopping into bed. I could leave my window open WITHOUT A SCREEN!

And now I'm thinking about going back to Scotland via Asia and Europe. I had spoken to a friend who spent time in various places in Asia and she reckoned the roaches weren't that bad, and on this I have put my trust throughout the TESOL journey. Until my Mum started laughing at me yesterday, thinking about me taking on the roaches of Asia. So I sat down and googled, and sure enough, Mum is right. Not only do they have filthy flying bat-like roaches, they even have the German ones. They fly in, they come out of drains...they are in restaurants, in garbage...

My worse nightmare would be to survive the nuclear holocaust - and be the only human survivor...because there would be nobody to call to come kill the critters!

Beast shown is actual size - AAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!

Random Scottish band has the answer

Alright, so I don't know why but somehow I expected finding a job in Asia was going to be fairly straightforward. Sure - there were extra issues such as making sure schools were not dodgy and trying not to head into locations with significant malaria risks or active civil war, but everything I read pointed to the plethora of jobs available, that someone with a B. Ed would be able to pick and choose, that I'd be fighting them off...

Well, in that sense I am fighting them off a wee bit, but that's because none of the jobs I'm being offered seem to FIT.

I don't know why I am surprised. This is the story of my life. Nothing goes according to plan. Nothing fits. Nothing that I actually, specifically HOPE or PLAN for ever seems to come to fruition. Remember that Midas story? Yeah, well at least he had things around him turning to gold. Everything I touch seems to turn to shit. Not that I want that to be my mantra or the motto over my life. Oh no. I don't ACCEPT that everything I start will fail - hell no! It makes me even more determined to succeed! So out I go, again and again, doing the same bloody...

Hang on a minute. Maybe it's BECAUSE I'm doing the same bloody thing?

No, no I'm not. At first I tried to go to Scotland. Then I tried to go to England. I tried every other country in Europe. I investigated Canada. Finally I started looking into the rest of Australia - I tried WA, Tasmania, even went to the NT. New Zealand cropped up from time to time (and again recently) and if I am honest, Scotland has been a constant throughout but has simply faded into the background at times. I started looking at ELT in Europe and now it is Asia.

Okay, so I am trying to do the same thing - get out of this arse of a town, but at least my method is changing! I've looked at studying, I've looked at teaching, I've tried other jobs, I've looked at running a business...Every river I try to cross, every hill I try to climb, every ocean I try to swim, every road I try to find...

Dammit just lost half an hour watching Runrig on youtube! >sigh<> I can't help it. I try not to listen to them, try to avoid any reference to the place because each time I think about it, it breaks my heart again. It kills me not to be there, missing day after day, year after year, the people going about their business, the weather changing...

This is definitely the long way round. I do wonder if I am crazy, thinking that I could possibly be so bold as to believe there was a place for me over there. Miss M is sorted - she's half Scottish so technically has rights. I just have a bunch of ancestors who turned their backs on the place and came...HERE.

Nice move, guys.

Sometimes I do start wondering why I don't give up. Forget about it. The place ain't that great anyway. It rains all the time. Sometimes it's grey for months at a time. There are more wankers per head of population than possibly anywhere, immigration don't want me, Miss M's dad lives there (this is probably the biggest deterrent, damn him) ... and it is just so bloody DIFFICULT to get there. All the hours of my life I have wasted and we are still no closer. And now we are going to go and spend 2 or 3 years traipsing around the earth to try in a sense to come in the back door - and who's to say we won't face a big boot for all our trouble?

It doesn't matter how I reason with myself. The hope won't let go.

Runrig ... again:

like shadows on the wall

you come and you go

through the streets

and the rain that falls down

on our sin

no more good-byes

forever this way

whenever the greatest flame in the world

starts burning

this is our life, and our time

and nothing, is ever going to break us

now we're on our own

always in your eyes

a waking of souls

we gaze out on the road

that brought us up

to this place

the signposts never change

we'll go where they lead

whenever the day to break us comes

we'll not give in

this is our life, and our time

and nothing, is ever going to break us

now we're on our own

this is our place

in our lives

and no one

can ever change this moment

or pull this mountain to the ground