the foolest month

Nearly April. Every little patch of grass is spangled with daisies and dandelions. The end of my contract is flying to meet me, looking a lot like a cheeky cherub with a drunken giggle and a shit-eating grin.

It’s been an insulated sort of an existence, this year. No TV, no movies, not much getting away—most of the time it's been me, and my apartment, and a dozen paperbacks. I’ve had a lot of time to reflect. Chiefly, I seem to have been getting very cosy with my own shortcomings. I think I've been reading too many excoriating nineteenth-century novels. Satire was cosier when I was sixteen and, by my own assessment, blameless. Well, anyway, I hope I am a smidge the better for all this hard thinking, but I wonder if there is such a thing as too much self-examination. Thank goodness for those dreamy weekends at Cinque Terre and Brescia and Bologna and Venice, and thanks again to the excellent people who shared them with me.

And the work’s been interesting. The kids are amazing—their faces are full of swift thought and they open windows into new ideas every time you look them in the eye. The work with adults has been good for getting to know some locals. The worst thing about this job is the emotional head-messing. It would be one thing if I could say I was above it, but, wow, am I not above it. In all, I’m about ready to leave.

I’m looking around for summer work and the big what-next, and I feel pretty optimistic. I can feel the good luck spreading out like warm electricity along all filaments that bind us, me and all the people that I love. Lily and Matt have got great new jobs, Luke’s got a boyfriend, Jenn’s settled in Melbourne. If you’re reading this and you need a lucky break, look lively: it’s on its way.

kamikaze doocing 1.1

I just wrote a very angry post about my job and deleted it again, because unless you live on a garbage tip with your twelve brothers and sisters, it's hard to make your complaints about work sound compelling. And there's nothing more irritating after airing your grievances than failing to receive abundant sympathy. Suffice to say that my boss is, as the Italians put it, proprio in fuori. Wild mood swings, garbled demands, and, the latest installment, the malicious and excessive docking of a teacher's pay for a simple mistake, meaning that the rest of us will be finding every possible excuse to feed him next month rather than letting him starve.

Some people have noticed, and I love you all, that it's been over a month since I posted. This whole thing with work has me so knotted up and nauseous that I have lost my will to blog, and that makes me mad. Until I have something coherent and generally grateful to say, let me report that I had some people to visit, we went to Venice and Cinque Terre and they are still beautiful, and I have never embarked on a job hunt with so much relish. It's amazing how your fear of the unknown just melts away when the known is so execrable.

Here's a treat for sitting through my silence and my whingeing. If you go here you can get yourself a gmail account, and I cannot recommend this highly enough.