hats

I roll down to the gym in the dark for the 6:15 cycle class. My buttock hurts on the stationary bike when I sit up between tracks. My body’s aches mystify me.

After breakfast I work up a major sweat moving a rock border in my garden and revamping the bed under the side fence. The satisfaction is immense.  

I shower and settle into my office. Time to bite the bullet. I ring ‘Jim’s man’, a property manager and valuer, to ask questions about our owners corporation. He’s a hectoring bully like Jim. I have no expertise in subdivision or property values, so I’m powerless to challenge his unsubstantiated assertions. I don’t trust the man and go hunting an independent arbiter on the interweb.

A red car pulls up at the front door. Liz waits in the garden while I reply to a voicemail and confirm that I will attend an interview next Wednesday for a full-time, full-on state wide project officer position in mental health promotion in secondary schools. To me the salary is huge. I’m surprised and excited to get an interview in what must be a large and talented field.

Liz and I go over the SKIPS training we will present in Sydney next Monday and Tuesday: the travel arrangements, the running sheet, the on-screen presentation. She leaves and I hunt the interweb again, this time for background material for the big interview next week. Then I prepare for this afternoon’s interview.

My good woman rings and says she will come around with afternoon tea. I can think of nothing nicer but have to tell her I’m walking out the door right now to go to a sexuality educator interview.

Two women sit on cheap chairs in the middle of a long white back room in an old church in Camberwell. The first question throws me: it challenges my unconventional approach to the selection criteria. I defend myself by saying that I’ve always been unconventional. Later I think of five better responses. I emerge uncomfortable. The fit is not right.

I sit in the car—windows down, door open—eating chips from the bag in a side street. The first training session for AMES tutors begins soon. Five tables each seating five tutors squash into a community hall. Late middle-aged woman predominate; four in their 20s add some spice. In coming months we will share our experiences of teaching refugees English.

During the break, Robert, one of only three blokes training, approaches. “What do you do?”

Although my previous job is nearly two months gone, no one has asked this question, and I’ve not considered an answer. “I guess I’m either unemployed or retired.”

Sometimes it occurs to me that this jobless interlude might continue indefinitely. I don’t think of my business, Plain Talking, as consuming enough time or generating enough income to call it a job.  

So many hats I’ve worn on such a long day. Very late, on the phone, my good woman listens to my account of the job interview. “Nah,” she says in her strangely endearing way. “You don’t want this job.”

She’s unerring. I don’t want this job.

   

Rock on.   

interviews

I get no response to my first job application—for an admin position I probably don’t want.

This morning I go for an interview to be a volunteer tutor at AMES, the Adult Multicultural Education Service. I’m amazed that it’s been going—AMES, not the interview—since 1951, the year of my birth, under a name minus multicultural.

Family Life Victoria started in 1926 with a different name—the League of Youth and Honour. Their address in Camberwell begins ‘Rear of’ which suggests limited funding. I waltz into their meagre HQ bang on seven o’clock for my second job-related event of the day, an information session for prospective sessional educators. Twenty-five of us will vie for six positions.

The AMES interview is not so much an interview as a briefing on what I’ll be doing. Training is five two-and-a-half-hour Wednesday night sessions. I ask about paid teaching of English to migrants and refugees. Eventually I want to teach groups and be paid. I’m told money is tight—it’s a bad time—but given the names of two people I might speak to at the local TAFE where classes run.

So the first component of constructing a new ‘working’ life slots into place.

As a 12 year-old I go with my father to a Father and Son night at a local church hall in Ormond. The one-hour session is literally about birds and bees, with a couple of chooks in the act too. As sex education it’s both primitive and enlightened.

Family Life, the former League of Youth and Honour, then the Father and Son movement, still run evening sessions in suburban halls. Now they’re for families, undefined, and are about sexuality not sex. The programs are no longer primitive, but remain enlightened, as they were in 1963, in being value-free—no morality, no bullshit. They celebrate human diversity.

Three women about my age run the session and the organisation. They’re fine people and utterly dedicated to their cause: facilitation of discussion between ‘family’ members about sexuality and human relations.

The evening family sessions are only one part of a sessional educator’s work; most sessions run in primary schools in class hours and are almost identical in structure and nature to the mental health promotion program I’ve presented to grade five and six kids irregularly over ten years.

The pay is unattractive, the hours spread across days and evenings. It’s work that chews up time but not the mortgage, and they want a cast-iron commitment to the cause for two years.

I come away enthused but wondering if I’d soon become bored.

  

Rock on.