Juggling a Jigsaw

The juggling act, the jigsaw, use any other metaphor you like, of moving interstate is at the moment quite mindblowing. It seemed such a simple idea. Beautifully simple. Leave a place we don't like for somewhere better. Many, many people talk about it and it is another thing to decide to do it, but on a whole other level to go through the process. Even for me, the veteran mover, the modern nomad.

Today I met my replacement. She who now has my job with all its joys and fucking insanity. I'm happy for her and I wondered, as I watched her walk off down the street, did she feel excited about it? was she at ease with her decision? You can't tell much from the back of an almost-stranger's head. Mostly I felt relief and the now-familiar panic. Relief that the school found someone decent. The panic is for my own situation. And then I went and taught a double of Year 7s with a splitting headache.

I have a phone interview on Friday for a school just south of Perth. Mum and Dad drove down there today to check the area out and did not fill me with excitement about it. It seems...soulless. And if there is one thing we want to avoid it is a lack of soul or heart or community or sense of the place where one lives as being special and part of a deliberate decision about one's life. We don't want to end up somewhere where other people have ended up. Plus, although the school is supposed to be a good one the staff carpark has an enormous fence around it. It's the little things, you see, that make a place what it is. And I'd really prefer to live in a place without large fences and 'dodgy' streets. Is this too much to ask?

There are other jobs to apply for, here and there. Mostly in Perth because I can only apply for non-government jobs until my government approval comes through (any time from now to eternity). But, frankly, how many of those government schools would I want to work in?

In fact, do I want to work in a school at all?

How this will all work out, will I go to WA with a job I want, a job at all? What I will do when we get there? Where we will live and how? And as this cycles around and around my head I wonder what I'm doing in the first place considering that only thing I'm 100% sure of is that I don't want to be here. And there is the niggle - will elsewhere really be any different?