symptoms

I’m under the weather. My throat is scummy and my head aches, a dull ache that shoots knives into the inside of my skull when I cough. I try not to cough but sometimes the throat dries suddenly and an involuntary reflex kicks in.

Yesterday Nicky and I ride up the Tourist Road to Olinda. I lead, but only because if she goes to the front I won’t see her again. I tell her that pride is all that’s keeping me in front of her. I’m working on cadence, sticking near or above 70 rpm.

My strength is fine but my cardio fitness is down and I huff and puff when the gradient nudges five per cent and beyond. Foolishly I suggest Ridge Road just for variety. Nicky’s never ridden Ridge Road: the grade arcs up to double figures for 700 metres as soon as you veer right off the Tourist Road. Wisely she says she’s not ready yet.

My health is mostly a source of pride: it’s robust and fights germs off without much fuss. Many times I sense something coming on but 24 hours later it’s gone. That’s what I hope for yesterday after riding when my throat feels a little odd and clearing it frequently develops into an irregular dry cough.

This morning in 6:15 pump class my lower back is grabby and doesn’t respond to the gentle stretches I try to placate it with. Still I hope that the signs mean nothing, but as the day moves into late afternoon I know things are bad.

For a five-year spell I have not so much as a cold. Then last year I have two, three months apart. Even then I can console myself, pride myself, that unlike the month-long grips others suffer, I’m all but over mine in seven days, although days three to five are tough going when the sinuses saturate then inundate.

So I wait to see what will come now, knowing that in 48 hours I’ll be on a plane to Adelaide to meet the national MindMatters team I’m about to join. Nice look, the wet hanky hanging out of a pocket, turning away from conversations to hack up a lung, gasping for air between sentences with a bung up each nostril. Makes a fine first impression.

“Leigh. Yes, I think he’s the pasty-looking guy slumped over there behind that potted palm. I’d stay well clear of him if I were you.”

  

Rock on.

induction

The JRT goes nuts when an Australia Post van rolls into my driveway a couple of minutes after seven. I gallop up the hall, bowl of Weeties in hand, to receive not one, but two parcels—a box and a large envelope. I should be more excited about the unexpected parcels than the Weeties, but hey, Weeties are the food of the gods.

The box holds five books, ordered online, and delivered 36 hours after clicking Submit on my order. The young atheist’s handbook feels lovely in my hand. Carrie Tiffany’s Mateship with birds has rave reviews. Alain de Botton I will give to my mother. Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom is thick enough for countless train journeys to and from the inner suburbs.

  

The sender’s details on the large envelope bear my new employer’s name. A clear folder cover with a broken clip spills the contents of a fat induction package over my breakfast table. On top are two copies of the employment contract I must sign and return.

I read the contract, careful not to smear it with the butter dripping from my toast. The only surprise is the salary, which I’m much too modest, and embarrassed, to disclose. Even at three days a week it’s $20k larger than my previous salary. I’m accustomed to working for a pittance after 12 years in the community sector.

I’m unsure what sector I’m about to work in; education, I guess. The contrast with my previous working life could not be starker. In community welfare I received no package and no induction. I signed a contract and got on with the job. I salary packaged more than 50 per cent of my salary to pay my mortgage.

Among the forms in my induction pack are sign-ups for Cabcharge, two car hire companies and an accommodation booking service, luxuries never contemplated in the community sector. I liked that lean and mean organisation and prided myself on costing it little more than my salary.

I check the staff list in the induction pack; what do all those admin support people do all day? Well, they send emails lodge to me with details of my travel to Adelaide and accommodation at an exclusive hotel. My night in the Sealake Hotel at $35 seems like something out of Dickens. It was.

I’m nervous enough about starting a new job, meeting new colleagues, finding my way to an office in Collingwood. But this excess of administrative and corporate wealth is freakin’ me out, man!

Rock on.      

coincidence

I’m at my fourth and final training session as an AMES volunteer English tutor. All 22 of us already meet and work with our refugee or migrant ‘students’. I’ll miss the final session and graduation next week because I’ll be in Adelaide on other business.

I’m the oldest of three male volunteers. Robert would be mid-50s and Raymond mid-30s. There are four young women in their 20s, one around 40, and fourteen women from 50 to over 70 with names like Dot and Hazel. We’re all nice middle-class folk, fuzzy-hearted softies who want to welcome people to a new life rather than send them back to brutality and persecution.

I’m fresh from my second meeting with TZ. I tell him I want to find out about his knowledge of English at this session. He knows numbers and dates and weather and can speak about how he gets to work. His reading and writing is not bad, self-taught from a book during years in an Indian refugee camp outside Delhi. Listening and speaking is not so easy.

A small boy appears in the room. TZ tells me this is his nephew, his sister’s son. The child climbs onto TZ’s lap and stares at me from the security of TZ’s chest. I extend a finger but no child’s finger meets it. TZ’s wife and a small female enter. The child returns to the small female who I guess to be TZ’s sister. She is small enough to be a 13 year-old.

I ask how old the little boy is. He was born on 3 September 2010, the same date as Nerri, my grand-daughter. I introduce the word coincidence and try to explain its meaning. I find coincidence in his battered English-Chin dictionary but still he looks blank.

TZ shows me the classwork he is doing at Box Hill TAFE on Monday and Wednesday evenings. I read an essay he presented to his class about Chinland. He says he misses it so much, his home city Hakha, the lakes, the birds.

Most Chin are Baptist. American Baptist missionaries, the Reverend Arthur Carson and his wife Laura Hardin Carson, converted the Chin from 1899 onwards. On the wall is a framed oval picture of a bleeding-hearted Jesus, Catholic iconography. TZ tells me a local op shop gave it to him when he asked to buy it.

I ask about Chin cooking. Rice is the staple, of course. TZ’s wife cannot work because of her health so she cooks. Unlike African men, TZ can cook. I look forward to the day when we share a meal.

He shows me to the door where I put on my thongs. We are laughing.

Rock on.

the killing fields

8:00. First call: the blood bank, the home of all sorts of Aussies. No Australians of foreign extraction—no Asians, no blackfellers—donate blood. I’m sure the Red Cross would welcome them. But giving blood is a peculiarly white Caucasian behaviour. I’m giving 902mgs of plasma.

9:40. Second call: Centrelink. They remove blood by other means. Their clientele are not exclusively white. The Asians in the waiting area with me are neat and clean, the Africans braided and colourful. The white Australians are something to behold.

Call me elitist, arrogant, whatever. I’m out of place here among the shaved heads, both male and female, bellies sagging over belts, tattoos, baseball caps, blonde tips, girls in tattered jeans, and squealing babies from dubious gene pools. Seated to my right this morning are two overweight mute lesbians with a squalling boy child. No doubt he has no other language.

Since my last resort to Centrelink’s support in 1999, they’ve tried to make their service customer-friendly. But every stratagem backfires because their heart isn’t really in it. And the heart is absent because governments make it impossible for Centrelink to have one. An icy undertone flows through the veins of every Centrelink document. Each is bloated with reminders to do certain things, or else. No uncertainties are possible.

Centrelink gets everything wrong. A customer liaison officer greets every person to add ‘a personal touch’ and direct customers to appropriate counters or waiting areas. But all this person does is slow the process. Queues back up and extend out the door. Better to take a number and a seat than shuffle along for 20 minutes to be directed to a chair one might have sat in from the off.

Centrelink offers online services—log in, fill out the requisite forms and all’s well. Nice theory, but they don’t quite trust you, so I still have to front in person each fortnight so they can verify my online form. The online service is just one more dehumanising process in the process.

And that’s Centrelink—process, process, process, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. No real help is offered. Whether I sit opposite Angus, Lorae or Christine, they’re going through the motions. The job seeker process is a joke for professionals. It’s designed for pregnant 19 year-olds and obsolete boilermakers.

For all its efforts to present itself as something else, Centrelink remains the last refuge of the desperate, the dispirited, the downtrodden and depressed.

I don’t need them any more. 

Rock on.

holiday

Apparently it’s a public holiday. What would I know of that? I’m hardly Joe Public and the unemployed know nothing of holidays.

My good woman is on holiday. She’s with me in the Jazz on the way to Wonthaggi to ride our bikes on the Bass Coast rail trail. The trip down is easy enough. I fill the vehicle with petrol and my good woman provides lunch: burek—cheese, cheese and spinach, and cherry, bananas and vegetable juice.

I unload the bikes at Anderson just as the V/line bus pulls in. I re-attach pedals and front wheels and away we go. At Kilcunda the trail crosses Bourne Creek on a marvellous old trestle bridge pretty much on the beach. The 12 kilometres from here to Wonthaggi are flat and there’s not much to see but six wind turbines whirling in the easterly breeze.

Wonthaggi is shut for the holiday. My good woman wants to walk on a beach so we pedal back to Kilcunda. A metre of gloriously coppery snake freaks her out as it slithers across the trail. She can’t even look at it. I stand between it and her as she pedals gingerly past. It nudges my front tyre before crossing the track.

We lock the bikes to a sturdy bench, descend rickety wooden stairs to the beach, and wriggle out of bike clothes and into gear appropriate for beach-combing.

Surf fishing is big today and two surfers brave to pounding waves. We see neither a fish nor a wave caught. The spray crusts my glasses and I stumble through the coarse sand in a fog. My good woman collects beach ephemera and stares out to sea. I wonder how I’ll get the sand off my feet before putting my bikes shoes on again.

Back at Anderson I stow the bikes in the car and we polish off the last slices of burek. An unbroken stream of traffic trickles down the road from Phillip Island and onto the South Gippsland Highhway. At times it simply stops. I consider taking back roads through the Gippsland hills but decide that road works near Bass are causing the delay and once past we’ll scoot along. And so it is.

Just before six we’re home, tired, sunburnt, and sleepy. A cup of tea goes down a treat before we say our goodbyes for today and retreat to our respective worlds; hers will be catching up with her children and cooking, mine catching up with three programs of football highlights and feeding the dog and cat.

Late at night I go online to report my work and job-seeking activity to Centrelink. I tell them nothing, especially that I’m on holiday.

     

Rock on.

locals

Although thousands of folk reside in my suburb, we encounter few, me and the JRT, when we walk the local streets.

People like Fio and Alvena in Unit 4 drive to work and occupy their house. The only time either walks out the front gate is on bin night. Dan from Unit 2 shambles to the milk bar 100 metres away in the morning to get the small paper but otherwise ventures no further than the bus stop out front. The adult Liberians in Unit 3 only leave the property in cars.

Various dog-walkers pound the pavement at different times. Don we encounter irregularly—perhaps on three consecutive days, then not for a month. I speculate: has the booze got the better of him? Has he just dropped dead? A tall older woman—Dutch?—who leans forward from the waist stalks along with two golden retrievers and a black lab on leads. She looks neither left nor right, says nothing.

   

Nobody beats the mystery woman from a big block of units up the road for regularity. At 8:08 every week morning she steps onto the footpath and sets a brisk pace for the station. Her return is less regular, somewhere between half six and half seven.

She is about my age, perfectly coiffed, elegant like no one else in this part of town. She drapes a swanky bag from a shoulder and carries a more substantial bag by hand. Her clacking heels announce her coming and she leaves a perfume trail the dullest-nosed human could track ten minutes after her passing.

I concoct her story: owns a swish boutique of high class women’s fashions on the upper deck of a large shopping complex, husband confined to a wheelchair in their cosy unit.

This afternoon the JRT and I wander off on a long mid-afternoon ramble. I stop at the top of Mystery Woman’s drive to whistle up the JRT who’s sniffing every blade of grass, lagging badly. And here she is. It might be Sunday but she’s immaculate. We exchange hellos as we do when we pass in the street. She moves off.

“Excuse me. I hope you’ll pardon my curiosity. You leave here at the same time every morning. What do you do?”

She catches the train to the city, the 8:25—“You can always get a seat”—works in sustainability, training people. She goes to the gym on her way home.

I thank her for enlightening me and ask her again to excuse my nosiness. Having got my story so wrong, I decide not to ask after the crippled husband.

  

Rock on.

seven days

They say a week is a long time in politics. And football.

My family goes months and nothing much happens. This week is the usual seven days long but a year’s worth of events unfolds.

My sister and her husband buy a magnificent house for $830K. My son and his partner Katie finally get the kiss of approval from an estate agent for a rental in Carrum Downs. Mo tells me he has saved a sixth of a deposit to buy a house in two months since resuming work after their round-Australia trip.

My mother falls down steps while inspecting my sister’s new house and, according to my sister, is miserable. I speak to her several times on the phone and while I hear her pain, she seems chirpy enough. I visit and she seems OK. When I take my leave in the late afternoon, she almost implores me to stay for dinner.

My daughter, touring Tassie, ends up in hospital after a tick bite undergoing tests for Lyme disease. My grand-daughter has a foot, mouth and hand rash. Gemma rings early while eating breakfast on the bank of Lake St Clair. She’s fine, she says. So is Nerri; it’s just teething, eye teeth, and her resistance drops when she’s got new teeth coming through.

I go to Ballarat to organise some training I’ll present, work on the templates project, and land a paid job on Friday.

My back and buttock pain finally disappear all but completely. I return to the gym for three early morning classes—two pump, one spin. And Rock hops back on his bike, broken rib OK, torn shoulder ligaments under sufferance. We set a record slow time up the One-in-Twenty but our only aim is to get to the top.

After everything else, it’s enough.

Rock on.

validation

It’s a beautiful number but I’m happy to relinquish it. I am no longer Job Seeker 616666009. I’m no longer unemployed. I have a job to go to.

I’m in the middle of my fortnightly phone appointment with Sarah, discussing the templates project, when an unknown number appears on my smarty-pants-phone’s screen. I know who it is.

“Sarah, another call. Ring you back soon.”

It’s Jill, the MindMatters national program manager. I hear no joy in her tone and prepare for bad news. She circles round, offers me a job, but not the full-time job I applied for. Someone left, she explains, and the other project officer wants to work part-time, so she wants to appoint two part-time project officers. Would I accept a position three days a week?

Would I what! I’ve worked three days a week for the past six years. Even at three days a week this job is a substantial pay rise on my employment for the past 12 years.

“I’m delighted to accept your offer,” I chortle.

“Welcome aboard then.” We discuss a starting date and other details. My first day’s work will begin at 4:10pm Wednesday week when I fly out of Tullamarine to be at the MindMatters annual one-day staff conference in Adelaide the following day.

Immediately I call and text my good woman, my parents, son and daughter, my referees, anyone in my personal address book. Everyone congratulates me, says how smart I am. I don’t feel smart at all. But suddenly I am again a person wanted for my skills and talents, and paid for them.

  

Why is a job so important? My abilities are no less for not having one, but a job validates me, gives me an identity people incidental to my life can hang on to. “What do you do? Victorian project officer, eh? Mental health promotion. What’s that about?”

This should not be so, but for most of us it is.

 

Unemployment could be a catalyst for new opportunities, but in practice it strangles most. Money drains from bank accounts and is not replaced. Life contracts, everything goes on hold.

Now I can think about replacing the TV my son will soon repossess, getting the new glasses and denture I need, paying my owners corporation fees, and the JRT’s registration.

My slide into retirement has hit the wall.

Rock on.      

chin

I am nervous as I walk up the path to the less-than-modest brown brick house. The railway runs behind it. A small silver SUV sits at an off angle in the middle of a decaying double carport. The garden is Spartan. I am here in the late afternoon to meet TZ for the first time. I am to be his English tutor.

At our second AMES training session last week each volunteer gets a folder with the details of the refugee or migrant we will help learn the language. My ‘student’ is 41 year-old TZ, a Chin from Burma. His English is rated intermediate, but that’s only his reading. His speaking and comprehension are a level below.

We are able to converse well enough, though he struggles to find the right words for some things.

The Chin constitute about two per cent of Burma’s population, though the regime is trying to reduce that figure. They are concentrated in the Chin State which borders both Bangladesh and India. In the 19th century the British occupied the region and suppressed the Chin who didn’t take kindly to the British presence.

American missionaries arrived in the 1890s and between 80 and 90 per cent of Chin converted to Christianity, further enhancing their minority status in Buddhist Burma.

“On 20 February 2002,” TZ begins, and I compliment his memory for dates, “I and others in my village must build … “ (long pause as he tries to find the right word) “ … a house to celebrate Burma’s national day. It is ‘not good enough’ so the soldiers beat us.” TZ had his front teeth kicked out. My compliment to his memory grows ridiculous.

He spent nine years in India before being accepted into Australia.

Over an hour TZ tells me he has ten siblings, four in Australia. He has two daughters and two sons. I meet the younger of each. His wife S comes into the room. She speaks no English. TZ wants to be able to go to ‘offices’ and speak for his family and not need an interpreter.

When I ask how he feels about Australia he sheds tears and cannot talk. He has rights here, he says; he owes Australia so much for taking him in. He works at a trailer factory in Kilsyth. He has no education but wants to study and learn English to be able to help other Chin settle more easily into the community, to save the Australian government money.

I ask the word for his sarong. In Chin it is hni. I am honoured to be his tutor and his student.

Rock on.   

cynicism

For ten years I want to retire. I slump at my desk at EACH in 2006 and 2007 wanting work to end and something else to begin. I see myself pottering around the garden, cycling every day, writing and reading as I choose. I want to leave the world alone and hope it lets me be. But the chance of retirement is nil because, well, I have no money and scant super.

While I work in Bendigo my mortgage recedes like the tide. Visions of books and bikes dance on the screen of my closed eyelids. As I close on 60 and the end of my contract at St Luke’s draws nigh, the prospect that retirement might inexorably engulf me looms. The choice of time and place might not be mine.

My contract does end and I explore the possibility of sliding into retirement, coupling a bit of self-employment with volunteerism. It means choosing relative poverty. But when I crunch the numbers, retirement comes literally to nothing, no money, life as I know it grinding to an unentertaining halt.

I resign myself to five more years in the paid workforce. In the two months since my contract ends I look at countless jobs in the paper and on the web. I apply for three: two I don’t want and the rejection letters get me fist-pumping.

Then along comes a job that I genuinely desire as MindMatters project officer: it incorporates everything I’ve learned in my working life. It entails three things I regard as anathema: working in Melbourne’s CBD, working full-time (and then some), wearing more upmarket attire than I’m used to, but I can do these things.

What’s going on here? Far from embracing retirement, I’m hankering after a big job, a tough job.

I realise that it’s not retirement I’ve been wanting, just a job that inspires me. I’ve been chasing my tail for years. The challenge of new roles—publications, youth mentoring—moves the blood but fades quickly as a gnawing sense of the futility of contract work in community health and welfare gets to me.

I do good things with people and programs but always with a feeling that little worthwhile will endure. Government departments will cruel my legacy. What is learned in this funding cycle will be unlearned in the next. Ten years hence parent drug education, or youth mentoring, or whatever, will be flavour of the month again at the whim of some politician, and the squeaky wheel will come full circle.

I won’t be around to see it. But I will say I told you so.

Rock on.   

vocation

As we progress through school we become clearer about what we’d like to do, the career we’d like to follow. That’s the theory anyway. Of course, circumstances choose for us and we seldom have our way. My father is an example.

I must ask him what he thought he might become after Wesley. One day the headmaster summons my father to his office and tells him to empty his locker. No explanation is offered and he is to go straight to his father’s office. My grandfather loses his staff to the war against Hitler and Japan. At 16 my father fills the breach and at 17 is himself on a cruiser in the Pacific.

After the war his father and accountancy choose him. He works first for his father, then with his brother in Warrnambool, where I am born, then again for his father when he falls out with his brother over a question of ethics, and then for himself, but always as an accountant.

For a time at school I think I might make an accountant of myself too. My mother determines that I am to be a forester, scientifically studying forests, not chopping them down. So, of course, I become a teacher, then a single father. And when both my children go to school I think I might have a librarian inside me, but RMIT begs to differ and suggests I consider something more interesting.

I never choose any subsequent job. They choose me or happen by accident. My friend Rock, the principal, asks me to fill in for five weeks at Berengarra. I stay seven years and take his place as principal. Billanook College asks me to spend an hour or two in their annexe: I run it for four years.

I apply for three jobs at EACH: working in AOD (alcohol and other drugs) chooses me. Then EACH needs someone to write the copy for their new website, so I become a writer, and editor, their publications officer.

After nine years I tell my daughter in Bendigo I’m done with EACH. A week later she tells me two jobs in Bendigo might suit me and I become the regional youth mentoring co-ordinator.  

“Everything happens for a reason,” says my former colleague, the spunky Ms Barnfield.

“No,” I shake my head in reply, “nothing happens for any reason whatsoever. The universe is utterly random.” And she looks at me as if I’ve completely lost it.

Life chooses what we do. We choose how we do what it chooses for us, how we do life.

Rock on.    

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.   

diy

The temperature stays high overnight. I sleep badly and wake with a headache. My good woman is beside me so the headache bothers me less because she is present and more because I want to take advantage of her presence. 


She sleeps on while I grope my way up the dark driveway to retrieve the paper and relieve the bladder. I return to bed but the sleep that never gelled during the night continues to evade me. I get up and set about keeping 37 degrees of heat out of my house. I water the garden and fill all the saucers under pots.


I return to bed. My good woman stirs and groggily suggests that I read to her from the paper, but is asleep again before I finish a short article. I read the weekend magazine, the sport, travel and arts sections before my good woman unwraps herself from her winding-sheet around nine. 


She suggests we walk the dog around the local park before the real heat; it’s hot enough already so we sit and watch a game of cricket before trudging home. Finally breakfast. We chat as she drinks coffee and I nurse my headache. She bemoans the fact that she must pay a six-monthly visit to a Serb friend on the other side of town on a day like this of all days. 


My good woman has commented that my chair covers are filthy and this is a perfect day yow ask them. She’s right. I dump them in the washing machine, one load, then two. While they wash I sit and wait out my headache.

At four I drive through the heat. Ikea Richmond finally has the loft bed I’ve been waiting months for. I make a lightning raid, entering the refunds door and marching through the check-outs straight to Aisle 30. I’m in and out in less than 15 minutes. 


The time it takes to assemble the loft bed is inversely proportional. I start at five and finish the six-step ladder after nine. I stop at ever-decreasing intervals to greedily suck water out of a bottle. 


This loft bed is a major logistical exercise. I spread the wooden pieces around the spare room and spend almost half an hour nutting out what’s what, what goes where, and in what order it all happens. People go crazy trying to put Ikea furniture together. 


Staring at it for a while can make all the difference. So does reading the entire set of directions before beginning, in this case 40 pages of them. Two hundred and forty-six nuts, bolts, dowels, and small things I can’t name pull all the bits of black wood together. 


Once started, it comes together easily. I think this bed is an expensive item by Ikea standards, and they might have sent an assembler home with me.         


Rock on.   

dithering

The hot weather returns. A final burst of summer clouts us.

At 8:45 I front at Centrelink for my next contact interview. The interviewer is a drab woman with red-rimmed eyes and the charisma of a hibernating turtle. She regards me suspiciously. I tell her I’m working harder at getting a job than if I worked full-time. She tells me to come back in a month. What a waste of everyone’s time.

I complete a document for the templates project and speak to my project leader. She’s pregnant, suffering a horrid first trimester, and working at home. In the past fortnight she’s reviewed all the first drafts. Some are brilliant, she says, and some she has taken to with a big stick. I’m not precious; I’m sure the stick is deserved.

After lunch I finish reading my novel. It’s a Pulitzer-Prize-winning disappointment. The story hangs together loosely, too loosely for me. It’s New York chic, literary chic, I guess, and seems to go straight over my unsophisticated, unchic head. For aficionados of the NY music scene it’s probably laugh a minute stuff. One or two glorious similes don’t warrant a Pulitzer.

I fret about the five-minute presentation I must present as part of my interview for the mega-bucks job next Wednesday, but fritter away the late afternoon as the house succumbs to the heat. Between now and Wednesday I’ll have precious little preparation time when a trip to Sydney is about to occupy three days.

Despite a growing urgency I find myself dithering. Such a lovely word; such a lovely thing to do if you have the time. I don’t. Then I decide I’m not dithering, but cogitating. The presentation circulates in my brain, snippets of pithy sentences swirling in mix.

Toward eleven at night my good woman comes for a sleepover. We have not seen each other for days and she’s very welcome. She brings a custard and sour cherry tart. The miracle is that she didn’t bake it; it comes from a German food chain and is utterly delicious.

    

Rock on.   

modules

Driving home from work about 15 years ago I’m listening to the radio. A woman—researcher, social commentator, whatever—talks about the way of the future for humble workers. Modules.

The increase in part-time and casual jobs means workers will construct incomes from work modules. At lunch the other day Andrew tells me he has three jobs—two days a week at a southern community health service, one day at an eastern service, and two days lecturing at a university.

So far I’ve applied for one full-time job. I put a one-day-a-week job in the bin. One is three days a week, and the other casual—a half day or evening as required and no work (and no income) during school holidays.  And I’m about to begin volunteer tutoring with AMES. Piecing it together won’t be easy.

Tomorrow I go to an interview for the casual job. It won’t pay the mortgage, no matter how many half days or evenings I work. Two days a week of reliable uninterrupted income would keep me afloat, with my business just bridging the gap. The business is irregular but up till now it just covers times when the bank balance nudges empty or a big bill crops up.

It’s a strange society where so many complain of being asked to work too long, while many of the rest of us try to manipulate work modules into a mosaic that helps us picture exactly who we are. Andrew tells me he struggles with it.

In 2003 I work Monday, Wednesday and Friday in community health and Tuesday and Thursday in tertiary education. No two days of continuous identity. Both jobs suffer and so do I. Now instead of being two workers, I might end up being four.

    

Rock on.