Friday Night In = Snore-times

I am not in a very good mood.  I'm fed up being unemployed and never having anything to do, and never having money, and applying for jobs I don't even want and not getting them.

ED is back in Sicily after a short hop across to stay in mainland Italy and he says he could get me a job over there with the same people he works for.  I'm so sick of being jobless here that I'm really thinking about it.  It would be teaching English, which is the first main drawback - I hated being a teacher when I first went to Spain, but I do think a large part of that was to do with the school I was teaching at and the way the classes were. 

The whole set-up was a bit ridiculous and the heads of the school were always complaining and making us do extra 'training' which usually made me feel about 2 inches tall.  Also, when the lazier students who refused to study were shite in my class it was blamed on my accent; when they were equally shite in the other (southern English) teachers' classes they were told to study harder. 

And don't even get me started on the man who apparently told his pal in the class that he couldn't concentrate in my classes because he was so mesmerised by my 'huge tits' - his words not mine.  My head teacher told me that someone had said that, but wouldn't tell me who (she obviously knew I'd go mad if I found out who it was) and the result was that I suspected every man in all my classes and was quite shocked to realise that when I mentally eliminated who I thought it was, there were only about 5 out of maybe 90 men who I was 100% sure wouldn't have said something like that.  I also noticed, of course, that the head - a woman - heard one of the pupils saying that and never reprimanded him or even let him know that she'd heard.  Instead she told me, like it was my fault, and I was the one who had to deal with it.

So, all in all, it wasn't the most confidence-building place and I ended up really loathing it.  I was so happy when I got to the end of the year and didn't have to go back.  I think now, if I were in the same situation, I would tell them to sack it and just quit, but back then I was new to Valencia, and didn't have much money and I ended up just sticking it out the whole year.

I have heard some horror stories about teaching.  My friend worked teaching kids English, and one of them - a wee brat of a 5 year old - scratched herself on the face and told her mum that my friend had done it.  I'm not sure if she quit or was fired but either way she never returned and I'm pretty sure the head teacher never had her back in that situation either.

So, that's my teaching experience and it's not something I ever wanted to repeat.  On the other hand, I never thought I'd be unemployed for 8 months and counting either.  So now ED has told me I could go to Italy and get 1000€ a month plus live in paid-for accommodation courtesy of the school.  Doesn't sound like such a bad deal except that I still have huge reservations about teaching again.  And I wouldn't want to do it for an entire year anyway, I think 4 months would be about my limit, so not even sure if the school would go for that.

Oh yeah, and I don't speak Italian.  Not to sound big-headed though, but I don't think it would really be a problem - I can already understand a good bit of spoken Italian just from its similarity to Spanish, and I think I'd pick it up quite fast if I were actually living there.  Wouldn't have much choice, really!

I mentioned the whole thing in passing to my friend and fellow Granada-Erasmuser AM, and she actually said that if she had money for flights she'd go with me!  Now, that makes a whole world of difference.  Even if I hated teaching, having a friend there who's in the same boat and being able to just chill out after work makes everything so much more copeable. (Is that a word?)

So...  Who knows?  I still have massive doubts and so far I think they outweigh however much I want to go, but I really am sick of having no job here, and the prospect of having any job at all is massively appealing, without even counting the adventure side of it all!

I'll keep thinking about it.  Watch this space.

"Sorry... no matching jobs available."

That's what it says every time I do a search on S1jobs recently.  Today I've tried:

• Fundraising/Charity - 1 non-voluntary post that was a management position for Scottish Opera, no good.  
• Heritage/Cultural/Library - 0. 
• Admin - only crappily paid reception jobs (which, I'm not just being fussy here, I've applied for before and never get because I don't have 'reception experience'), plus
• 1 job at Glasgow School of Art that I'm applying for, though this is only a 9 month maternity cover, which would put me in the same position I was in with my last job, and we all know how that worked out. 

I'm debating whether it's even worthwhile applying for a temporary job that's not going to lead anywhere, but I probably will anyway if only to make me feel like I've managed to do something constructive today.

Haven't heard back from Woman Kind, and now I don't think I will.  It's amazing how quickly the positivity seeps away, really.  But there it is, it's all gone, and today I feel crappy. 

That's right kids, it's not all shopping and wine-filled lunches when you're unemployed - there's also the rubbish flip-side where you sit in the house filling out forms for jobs you don't want or are over-qualified for, or watching daytime TV and drinking coffee.  Then, once in a blue moon, you find a job that gets you really excited and you know you could do well, and you spend ages applying for it and then you don't even hear back about it.  Not even a rejection email, because most places are "eliminating surplus admin costs" which means they can't spare 20 mins of some admin assistant's time to stick your name and email in a Mail Merger and send out a standard email telling you didn't get the job.

Definitely, today is not a good day.  Maybe it's hormones, or the come down from the huge excitement I felt for the Woman Kind job, or maybe it's just boredom, but today I'm feeling really shit and can't snap myself out of it.  For some reason, I just feel really upset about everything and that's stupid because it's not going to change anything, and all it does is make me not even get anything done, like redoing my CV, because I feel crap and can't concentrate.  I might go and have some coffee and sit on the patio for a bit of fresh air, and then come back to it.

I've also got my jobcentre appointment coming up again, and I always go in feeling like I haven't done enough, or like I should have a job by now.  And then when I'm there the 'advisors' don't even give a shit anyway, and there must be tonnes of people who go in and actually haven't even bothered trying to get jobs, but I still feel like I'm being lazy or complacent cause I haven't even had any interviews yet.

The weather's very strange today, uber foggy, I can hardly even see the other side of the street out my window.  It's kind of mirroring my moods (or maybe I'm mirroring the weather, who knows?) - yesterday was a lovely bright, cheerful sunny day, even though it was quite cold.  And today is grey and cloudy and foggy and quiet.  That's kind of how my head feels just now: fuzzy and full of cotton wool, and grey, negative thoughts.

I'm meeting HM and KM later today, about half past 5, so that'll probably help cheer me up.  I don't mind wallowing in my own thoughts but I don't tend to talk about it much, really, and I think that's a good thing.  I can kind of explain how I feel but I don't want to go on about it when I'm with other people, and then, I guess, just thinking and talking about other stuff gets me out of my own funk, a bit.  On the other hand, maybe I'm actually suppressing all the crappiness and will end up with an ulcer or something, ha ha.

Think I'll go for that coffee now and then come back to the jobs.  I'll look up the London websites, instead of the Scottish ones, and maybe I'll feel a bit better to see there are actually some jobs going and it's not all hopeless...