I know it's only January/Don't you worry, don't you worry!

As the new year gets off to a sweltering start in Cape Town, with everyone complaining about the recent heatwave, may I take this opportunity to remind them that seasons are cyclical? Last year in January and February, we also had very hot weather! In two months' time we'll all be wearing different outfits, shielding ourselves from the nippy autumn weather, and then we'll hit winter, be miserable and complain about the rain, and then spring will either be too late or too much like summer, and then it will be summer again, more heat, more fires, more complaints. Maybe we need to deal with the transcience of this thing called time, this thing called life?

Just needed to get that off my chest. Thank you!

Into my fourth month at home, going through a decidedly different phase. I'll be honest, I never thought it would take me this long to find a job. Many layers to this experience, not all of which are blog-appropriate, so I'll stick to the ones that are. Some days I'm full of energy, buzzing around doing twenty things at once, and on other days, I surf the internet, answer e-mails, do laundry, potter in the garden, but by the end of the day, I can't account for hours of that day. It's like time just slips away. Slips away. Sometimes my significant other asks me what I've done for the day, and I actually don't know!

But let me contextualise this: my children weren't with me this past week, which meant it was that kind of week, where I could go for days on end not cooking a meal, just eating whatever's around. One night this week I had ice-cream for supper. Yum!
Remember when you were a child, and you dreamed about how cool it would be to be an adult, without anyone telling you to eat healthily, not drink hot and cold things at the same time, etc? But then you grew up and you automatically followed all those rules, somehow having internalised that being an adult meant doing the right thing all of the time? Well, because of my part-time status in most parts of my life (haha!), I have the chance to break all the rules, do silly things like have ice-cream for supper and, every now and then, stay in my pj's all day. It's unbelievably cool! My 80-year-old mom lives in the granny flat on the premises, and I think she sometimes wonders where she went wrong! :-).

I've been feeling really low, recently, immensely frustrated at how long it's taking to find a job. People who've known me most of my life think of me as a teacher, which is definitely a role I played for many years. When I was updating my CV last year, I realised that my working life had totalled twenty-five years! For about six of those years, I worked as a manager as well, with the last three being exclusively management, no teaching whatsoever. And you know what? I actually don't want to teach again. Let me put it this way, that's not what I'm aspiring to. I would take a teaching position to put food on my family's table, and to honour my financial commitments that don't magically stop when you lose your job. Even the companies I went to, explaining that I'd been retrenched, and submitting the relevant documents, still send me letters threatening to send the sheriff to my place of work. Eish!

And then there's the perception of me as stubborn, because what everyone else is telling me is so obvious (see previous paragrah) is not so obvious to me. And yes, I won't rule out the fact that I might have to take a teaching post for a while, to stay afloat, but my heart's not in it.

My last stint in the Education Dept lasted 18 months, and I realised then that, after having been in the private sector for so long - seven years! - it wasn't an easy transition adjusting to the bureacracy, etc of a state institution again. In fact, those eighteen months gave me an opportunity to measure how far I'd moved away from a certain mindset that unfortunately tends to prevail amongst many (not all!)government employees. That mindset that says I can do as little as I like, I can stay absent, I can under-perform on a daily basis, but I will still get my full salary, all my benefits, my short working hours, my bonus, my housing subsidy, oh what the hell, I'll just underperform for the next decade or so, and then I'll retire with my nice, fat, middle-class pension. And no, on a matter of principle, I don't support performance-based bonuses, because that means I actually have to be accountable, prepare my lessons, prove that I have educated and not spoonfed my learners; oh no, on a matter of principle, I definitely don't support performance-based bonuses. In fact, I really like the IQMS system, where my equally-underperforming friend and I can just write glowing reports for each other, sign on the dotted line, and we're all set till the next round of "peer appraisal". Yup.

My goodness, I didn't know all of that was going to come out!

And then there are people who know me in the context of my most recent job, where I managed the daily operations of an English language school that taught adults from all round the world. I was good at what I did, I loved what I did, and I took my role seriously. I loved the industry, the students, most of my colleagues (let's be honest!) and I grew in my role, changing in that space of time to whom I am now; I'm not the same Trudy I was in 1983 when I entered the teaching profession, not the Trudy I was in 1996 when I took a voluntary severance package, nor am I the Trudy I was when I re-entered the employ of the Dept in 2006.

I've had to deal with a lot of change, over the years, and it's funny how the different "communities" we belong to handle the changes we go through. Fundamentally, I believe people sincerely want what's best for me, but there's not much room in their neat little solutions for what I'm really about, at this particular stage of my life.

And so I've come up with what I choose to call "The Rushin Solution". Haha! It's so bizarre, you'd think I was crazy! And so I've set my heart on something, which, even if it takes me two years to bring into being, I believe I have a very good chance of turning into a huge success, not only for myself, but for Cape Town.

I have an original song, a samba, called, "I'm so happy today", which I hope to be putting on the internet really soon. These are the words of the catchy chorus:

I know it's only January
Don't you worry, don't you worry
I am gonna go go go and never stop
And though it's only January
Won't be sorry, won't be sorry
This is gonna be the year that I get to the top!