mind matters

I snip the MindMatters Victorian project officer position from the big Saturday paper weeks ago thinking I’m no more than a one in twenty chance of getting this job. It’s a high-paid, high-performance role based in the Melbourne’s CBD, a place where feel uncomfortable. The condemned work here.

I write a great application and my chances increase four-fold. It’s still a tingling surprise to be offered an interview. Today’s the day.

Home at eleven o’clock last night from a two-day gig in Sydney I prise myself out of bed at six to put together a five-minute presentation that will demonstrate my ability to work a room. It takes two hours to harness the thoughts that bucked around both my conscious and unconscious brain three days ago, and bolted in Sydney when SKIPS pushes everything else out.

I read my Jack Irish novel on the train to the city. The writing is spare, elegant, every word precise, a winner, just how I’d like to be in this interview.

I sit on a plush sculpted chair outside large frosted glass doors in an ante-room of the Oaks on Collins. A thumb drive with five PowerPoint slides is in my top pocket and long pants surround my usually bare legs. I’m ushered in by a vertically-challenged woman, blond hair, in her fifties, red-framed glasses with bright green arms.

I might not have an intimate knowledge of MindMatters, despite a website’s-worth of reading I might have conned in preparation, but I’m psyched, I’m primed. If I could script the dozen questions I answer during the interview, these are the questions I would write. I like the two interviewers, think they like me, are impressed. I am.

I walk back to the station thinking that whoever gets this job will have to be bloody good to knock me off.

Later I ride to the community hall in Ringwood for the second evening’s training to become an English tutor for a refugee. Rain threatens. The training is repetitive, monotonous, but I’m surrounded by good people.

Gitta hands me a folder: inside are the details of the 41 year-old refugee from Burma I will tutor. He works in a trailer factory, already has some English.

I pedal home, soft rain falling from the night sky. I’m on a roll.  

Rock on.