Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known

I’m not going to count them because they are not hatched yet, but I am lead to believe they are quite promising eggs, and I have a really good feeling about them and I want them to hatch more than I’ve ever wanted anything, ever.

If I could climb on top of some very high mountain and scream with joy and delight about how much I appreciate my life, the opportunities and the people I have in it then I would be old and grey before I would come down again. I am so, so thankful for my universe.

More details as they emerge, cross your fingers and toes for me!

No, no, no, no, no, no.

This cannot be happening.

Starbucks Frappacinos are one of my reasons for living. I have them incredibly rarely (due to the fact I rarely cross paths with a Starbucks in my day to day activities) but just knowing they are there should I need one is one of the reasons why it’s possible for me to get out of bed in the mornings.

Reason #2836 why Japan would be awesome: Starbucks

I got paid!

I was meant to be paid last week but they forgot…they just forgot to pay me, everyone else got paid, just not me. I know, I’m starting to see a pattern as well. Anyways, I asked about it today and they confirmed it was correct that I was not paid and that it would happen on the spot and be in my account tonight. That was fine and dandy but assumed that it would take a couple of days to actually get around to transferring the money and clearing it and all that junk, but no, I’m all cashed up.

I know it’s totally distasteful to talk about money and gloat about being rich, but I have been poor for ages and I’ve never claimed to be tactful or tasteful so this should not be surprising. I am super lucky and have never really done without or any of that but I have not earned good money myself for ages, so it’s extremely exciting. So, for six days work I now have an absolutely stupid amount of money sitting in my bank account. I am used to pays where I’d get paid, drop a couple hundred on bills and petrol and other “essential” things and have enough left over for a pair of shoes or an item of clothing (or, if I bought from the sale rack – two or three items of clothing!) but now, now is a whole other ball game! I could go book an international holiday*!!

In an ideal world I would put a bit on the fantastic plastic, buy a wee treat and chuck the rest into my high interest savings account…but we all know this is hardly an ideal world. The beautiful part is that another one will come next fortnight, and the fortnight after that, and so on so the concept of being sensible with my very first “real” pay just seems cruel and unusual.

The crazy thing is that when I don’t have much cash, I don’t have a lot of trouble pissing through it on unimportant things but when it’s a reasonable amount I’m such a tight-wad because it seems like such a terrible shame to break up such a nice amount. I think I might buy something nice for D’Olds, they’ve carried me very generously for a long time, so it would be nice to give them a treat.

Today at work I found out I wasn’t actually required today, they’d asked me to come in for the wrong days. Tops. I wasn’t allowed to go home though (I was willing to, I am sick again) so instead I did lots of busy work…like cleaning crayon off the glass doors. Yeah, I’m the most qualified staff member being paid crazy amount as a casual employee with a bachelor’s degree and the most appropriate use of my skills was to have me cleaning windows. Whatevs, seeing my new bank balance makes me far less resentful then I was feeling when I was sitting outside in the cold with Windex and paper towel not being a fan of sun-baked crayons. I will happily clean windows if that’s what they want me to do, I’d say it would make me one of the better paid window cleaners around…

* Is Tasmania overseas?? (Jokes! I could go to like Fiji or whatevs, but those places are totally budge-tastic!

1) Japan.

I’ve wanted to go to Japan since…oooh…EVER. Best went in Grade Nine on a bit of a study tour type thing with school and since then I have wanted to go even worse, so that is like 10 years of wanting to go! At our lovely hooping date today I was talking to Lulu and she mentioned going to Japan. I had considered it, but not really considered it, if that makes sense. I know I could get a pretty alright job teaching over there, Lulu will be back half way through next year plus my all time hero lives there so I’d even know people. From what I understand, it’s not too difficult to have a school organize an apartment for you, or at least do most of the legwork for you. Something that doesn’t happen in London. It’s also closer to Australia than London, and has all the exciting parts like amazing culture and snow but still nice weather in the summer. Plus, it’s JAPAN. I’m still going to wait and see what is happening in the world of Best and BP but it’s definitely a strong contender at the moment.

2. Single.

Like 98% of the time I am so fine with being single it’s almost insane. I rather like not having to consult anyone else before I do things or make plans and things, should I not want to. I like caring about other people, but sometimes I am quite glad I only really have to worry about myself. Last week Best sent a group email with the details of accommodation for the wedding. There are like 18 or so rooms available at the resort and I am the only single person on the list. Everyone else staying is a couple, excluding a few family groups. It feels like I am the only single person I know sometimes, but that email just hit home and made it very black and white.

I was telling Jac today that even if I could take a date to the wedding, I have no one I could take. I wouldn’t take a boy, and I don’t know any single girls (straight or not) I could take with me. I don’t even want a relationship, I’d be happy with a mutual crush or just a “thing” so I have someone to go out with and pash every now and again. Is that so much to ask?

No, I don’t really know what the point of my little sad was either. I just needed to whine a little I think…

… a hoop spinning around your waist, girltalk blaring in the background and feeling wonderfully warm and alive on a cold, wet, miserable winter’s day.

These are the feelings you want to bottle.

I know this is the right thing for me to be doing.

• I know I assured you all that it would be ok and then promptly ignored my blog for a fair while but everything is still ok. I’ve been busy hanging out and working and junk and have spent very little time being bothered by the decision to cancel my flights. I’ve been looking into the job market in Canada and it seems less promising than London in terms of positions available and income but I’m still going to suss things out a bit more before deciding for sure what will happen.

• Spree’ in a week tomorrow. God, I am so excited I could just die!

• I am so set on a Kurt Halsey tattoo. Every time I look at his work I just love it a little bit harder, so I know fo’ sho’ that I want it on me forever! I’ve also decided to fork out some of my hard earned cash on one of his pieces. He puts an original painting or sketch or a couple of prints every now and again on eBay. I found his real eBay store via some minor detective work and I’m going to watch it obsessively to find something I like and can afford. I’m not really into the pieces with people in them (mostly because it’s all boy and girl couples, which is fine, but I’d prefer girl couples [or even two girls I can imagine are couples]) so I’m looking for something with animals and words.

• I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before (Best knows because I’ve been banging on about that since..oh…forever?) but my ideal proposal has always been via an illustration. I know it’s a bit of a weird idea, but I love the idea of walking into our bathroom (yes, it specifically has to be the bathroom) one morning and seeing a “Will you marry me?” type illustration hanging on the wall. Ideally, it will be like a “vintage” bathroom because it would just make it that much sweeter and now I know I want it to be a Kurt Halsey sketch. He seems to be super nice and does little custom jobs every now and then so I am just certain he’d do a proposal illustration. So there you go ladies, if you wanna ensure you get a “yes”, go see Mr Halsey.

• I’ve decided to do my teacher training in September. I was gunning for August but the dates are just too soon and it’s the weekend immediately following my graduation so it would just be too insane to jam it all into that weekend. I also haven’t been hooping much lately so it will give me a chance to brush up and hopefully improve a bit so I don’t embarrass myself when I go down with all the other awesome hooping girls to hoop it up.

• I think it’s time I introduced a new character into the blog, let’s call her…ummm… Susie Q. Susie Q is a girl I met a while back through uni, she has a wrist tattoo that I liked (despite being absolutely blind at the time, I noticed it and thought it was cool) and I don’t even really know how we came to be friends, but anyways we are going to get fingerstaches together. She loves the ‘stache which makes me extremely happy, but she also wants to come with me while I get another so she can get one too. Yay for cool people.

• Tomorrow I’m going to go back to the shop I got my poi from and get a contact juggling ball. What is contact juggling? It’s sort of like moving around a ball with your hands and body without the throwing part of normal juggling. This is a video about one trick you can do. I think it’s so fucking awesome it hurts! I love that it looks as if you are playing with a bubble but really they are acrylic balls kind of like a billiard ball. Yes, it’s entirely possible that I will end up much closer to a circus performer than an early childhood teacher but I am so alright with that. The Cirque just might want me one day after all!

I’ve had my 24 hours of wallowing, so now it’s time to get on with it. This morning I got some delicious cupcakes from my cupcake lady’s shop (and ordered two dozen for my not-going away party) and it just so happened to be right opposite a shop in West End that I’ve wanted to go to for ages. The shops sells all kinds of wonderful circus type toys and hippy clothes and assorted other wonderful things – my kind of place. I treated myself to a pair of poi and a little book about learning to spin. I’ve had poi before but never really put any real time or energy into learning how to use them and consequently gave up, but now that I am feeling a little lost I’ve decided to put the energy I’d usually spend towards being a big Negative Nelly and instead use it to increase my skills. I love knowing how to do stuff, especially cool stuff like hooping or twirling poi. Ideally, one day, I’ll learn to twirl fire. It’s been almost a life long ambition and I don’t think there is anything more impressive than fire play. Fire is just amazing!

So anyways, I came home and spent a good few hours practicing with the poi and just thinking. I realized I can either feel shitty for making a decision that is for the greater good (even though it doesn’t feel good right now) or I can make the most of right now and just let the rest of it happen, because angsting isn’t going to change anything. After a bit of twirling and some thinking, I emailed my oracle Deanne. It is no secret that I just adore Deanne, she is who I want to be when I grow up. She’s a teacher, a business owner, a professional hula hooper and she has the coolest hair ever (that she does HERSELF!), she is also an extraordinarily shiny, happy person and I just knew she’d be able to give me a shove in the right direction that I need.

So my shove is that I’ve decided I am going to train with Bunny to be a hooping teacher. I *am* a teacher now and I just love hooping so it seems like a perfectly lovely idea to combine the two. I have the time and the money right now to do it, so rather than wait and then puss out and then whine about never doing anything awesome I’m just going to make it happen. My ultimate goal in life is to make a living from something I love to do, teaching is fun but it’s not my ultimate goal in life. Teaching hooping for a living would be pretty sweet and running my own business would be sweet and being a professional blogger would be super, duper, amazingly wonderful and if I could end up anything like Gala while doing the stuff Deanne is doing I think I would probably explode with uncontained glee, coating every surface with glitter, wonderment and happiness.

Something else that makes me incredibly happy is being tattooed. I really, really love tattoos. I love everything about tattoos, mine and other peoples. I have no desire to be a tattoo artist, I can’t draw and I’m not great with hurting people or blood but I want more! I am going to get my fingerstache touched up at the end of this week (it’s finally started to scab) and another on my other hand. My next piece will be a Kurt Hasley work across each forearm (yes, another pair of tattoos). If I could draw I would want it to be exactly like he does, I think his work is magnificent and it would make me ecstatic to look at it every day.

I’m starting to realise that I will soon be too tattooed to be employed in an traditional school setting, but I kind of feel that it’s just the way it’s meant to turn out. My whole life I have preferred to do things the “quirky” way so I just kind of suspect that it’s all going to work out exactly as it should, tattoos, hooping and all.

A pearl of infinite wisdom Deanne shared with me today was “YOU ARE DOING IT ALL EXACTLY AS YOU SHOULD BE!”

That idea totally works for me.

Why does canceling my flight feel like a break up?

I went into the travel agency have rehearsed my little speech in my head, “I still want to go overseas but now it not the right time for me, what are my options?” After a bit of typing and a quick trip to the back room I was assured my the counter jockey that my deposit on the original flight would be held for three months to be used towards any international travel I decided to book. I told Mr Travel Agent that I’d be back soon to book and he just smiled and nodded.

To console myself I went to Myer and tried on shoes I don’t need and bough a plum colored handbag. Then D’Mummy (who is currently off work and enjoying the disease I had the pleasure of having last week) and I went to JB HiFi where she bought me everything I looked sideways at because she is doing a poor job of hiding exactly how thrilled she is that I am going to be around for a bit longer than originally planned.

All of this served as a wonderful distraction until we got home and D’Mummy went to sleep and I was left alone to deal with what has happened. I have eaten everything in sight today – just before it was ice cream, cookies and milo – all of which I am fairly impartial to, but it was there and my heart aches so I ate. I also have a strong desire to cut and dye my hair (but I won’t, settle down Best). Mid afternoon I felt the familiar slide into a dark place start to happen, so I went to bed. It’s so much easier to sleep than deal with things. It’s times like these that I start to wonder if everything they say about Zoloft is really true and that if I take a handful of them whether it would actually make me feel happy, but the fact I am too lazy to renew my script yet stops me. I was so ready to self destruct earlier, I wanted to go out and drink anything I could get my hands on and end up sitting outside in the cold, wee hours of tomorrow crying and very possibly chucking into a bin on the street. It won’t fix anything but being in a state like that would match how I am feeling inside right now. Thank Jac for being sick and not wanting to head out because otherwise I’d be in a bar on the fast train to Vom Town.

I don’t even care about not going to London right at this second, it’s not about London. It’s about the fact I am back to being useless again. I had a purpose, a plan, some direction and now I’m back to being a semi-employed grad who lives with her parents who has no set plans to go overseas. I’m awesome! I even have a going away party booked which will now be an occasion to celebrate the fact that I’m going no where fast.

Don’t fret, I promise not to self destruct, this too shall pass. Just like a break up I need to mope for a little while, get drunk and blab about how sad I am feeling and then realize there are plenty more airline tickets in the sea, tickets that will be much better for me than the old ticket. Tickets who will treat me nicely, laugh at my jokes and buy me flowers…or not?

Either way, it’ll be OK, don’t panic.

The last couple of days have been interesting, let’s say. I don’t really want to get into it on here because it makes me feel sad and upset but I have come to realise how (un)important I am in the lives of certain people and it’s not quite what I was expecting. This new information that has come to light changes things, just in the short term.

London is not happening in September. I am moving overseas, I will be having adventures and it will all be happening in the not too distant future, but not in September.

Best and BP are now considering another job offer that will see them in Canada, nothing is decided yet and they will have a firm idea of whether it’s going to be London or Canada in the coming weeks. This indecision on their part combined with aforementioned events seemed to make it very obvious that going to London right now, under these circumstances, is not the best idea. It would be possible, of course, but would be expensive, lonely and most probably far more stressful than it needs to be.

Stripping back everything else from the decision to move overseas I came to realise that it’s always been about having adventures with Best, wherever that may take us. It was never about London. I’d love to go some day, but I’m fairly confident it will continue to exist beyond September 08 so if I don’t get there in the next year or two it will be alright. London was just the place BP’s company was going to relocate them too. Wifey was only ever a bonus, she was never part of the original plan so taking her out of the equation won’t make any fundamental differences to things.

The only regret I feel in regard to the decision to hold off for a bit is having to tell people it’s not happening right away. I’m still going to have adventures overseas but it’s just not going to be in the next couple of months. I’m trying very hard not to go down the “You’ve failed, I knew you couldn’t do this” path and appreciating that by waiting for just a little while to see what is happening with Best/BP I will be able to make a better, informed decision that I am comfortable with and prepared for, rather than clinging desperately to my original plan for no other reason other than it’s just the plan I’ve been working from all along, even though circumstances have now changed. If anything I an ensuring a greater degree of success by waiting rather than flinging myself into the very deep end and thrashing around hoping to make it work. I could survive using that method, but this new option is more about jumping in the deep end with a pair of water wings on – I’ll still struggle and be scared but I’ll have a bit of a helping hand to make sure I don’t sink like a stone if I stop fighting for just a moment.

Plus, I’ve always liked floaties.

So Kindy has become an obstacle course of sorts, aside from the literal obstacle course I encounter daily – trying to duck and weave through tiny bodies to retrieve the one who is screaming after having fallen off a bike, been hit by a block, bitten, had something snatched off them or has lost a shoe part way across the lawn*, I also have the pleasure of trying to avoid all kinds of weird and wonderful diseases.

Yesterday, one of the wee ones from my room had a power chuck all over himself. I’ve never seen vom like that from ANYONE, let alone a three year old. He was sitting down and managed to soak all of his clothes and his shoes and socks…and toys in his immediate vicinity. Today, one of the girls I worked with yesterday also caught the power chuck bug and spent the morning in and out of the bathroom before crawling home. Today, one of the toddlers I spent a large part of yesterday with has developed a particularly sticky case of conjunctivitus…. a toddler who touched ever square centimeter of me and my face yesterday. Plus, just for good measure there is also the standard cold that is pertually circulating any child care establishment as well as the nice chesty cough thing that I seem to have had the pleasure of catching the week before last.

I am basically counting down the days until I drop like a sack of potatoes again. I’m not 100% better yet, so I am sure my weakened immune system is delighting in the choices as to what to infect itself with next. I’m tipping the power chuck bug, I was the other person who spent the most time with Mr Power Chuck yesterday and seeing as my counterpart has already fallen victim to it I’m really just counting down the hours until I too have the pleasure of driving the porcelain bus. My stomach has been churning since midday and it’s become more and more spirited as the day has gone on. Super.

This afternoon was particularly fabulous. The children has become absolutely mental after having such a gorgeous morning and after they’d had their sleep and eaten afternoon tea I was very glad to release them into the yard to play. Because of the threatening clouds that were building we packed up and bought them inside early. One of the wee ones took himself to the bathroom and when I went to check on him found him standing in a puddle of wee with his pants off and some poo on the floor next to him. If you did not encounter poo on the floor of your workplace today, you had a good day. No, really, you had a good day. Trust me. After enticing the wee one away from his…creation I grabbed his school bag and forced a pair of undies and some trackie dacks that I found in the bag on him. After this, I handed his bag back to him and told him to take it back to his locker. He was getting upset and wouldn’t take the bag…and then I realized why. I called another girl in to double check, and my suspicions were correct, I’d dressed this poor child in someone else’s spare clothes and had been calling him the wrong name the whole time. I’d be upset too if I had an accident on the bathroom floor then someone I didn’t know came over to help, calling me the wrong name and dressing me in someone else’s spare clothes.

Uggggh. Despite all this, I don’t hate it. I actually like going to work, the kids are lovely (most of the time) and it’s a nice environment. This is a particularly relieving feeling as it means I have not spent a thousand seven years at uni to arrive at a career I actually dislike. Holding a degree and working in a child care center is basically the lowest rung (pay/condition wise) and I figure if I like being at the bottom of the ladder then teaching in a big school and not having to deal with nappies, tears, poo or children who touch you all of the time will be that much better. Hurrah for making good decisions (in the long run).

For now, I am off to listen to my stomach gurgle and churn while I fall asleep. I spent a large amount of time today hauling around children who were intent on ignoring my requests to stop/move so I had to do a lot of the moving for them. It’s amazing how good some children are at making themselves incredibly difficult to be held/picked p when they don’t want to be. Seriously, Cirque du Soleil should employ them as contortionists!

* Funny story, one of my wee ones was playing in the yard and I heard him let out a blood curdling scream. I naturally dashed to his assitance to find him standing next to a little bike with two of his friends near him. I sussed out that no one had hit each other (little ones are always willing to admit they hit someone, even when they know they shouldn’t have done it), no one had stolen a bike off someone else and no one was otherwise feeling sick/injured or wronged. Yet still he screamed. I noticed he was standing on one foot and though he might have hurt his toes or something until I noticed a tiny shoe about a meter behind him. I got the shoe and put it back on him and he immediately recovered and went on his merry way. Yes, the earth shattering problem encountering my wee friend was that his shoe had fallen off while riding his bike and it meant his socked covered foot may have to touch the astroturf if he was going to retrieve it. The though of such horror seemed far too great a problem for him to deal with alone so he squealed until someone could help him. Poor sausage. How many people would like it if their biggest problem in a day was the mere thought that their sock might have to touch artificial grass??