It's amazing that I haven't been posting up much here lately, because it probably seems to the outsider that I am doing nothing else with my life.
Forgive me, but I am very depressed this morning. I have tried for the second time to start the only full-time job I can get in this town (Production line drone in a fish factory. Marvellous use of my abilities!), but have again been turned back by the rumblings of my stomach and its express wish to redecorate the toilet bowls of New Zealand, however briefly, in alarmingly vivid tones. I do hope you haven't just eaten anything.
Ye gods it's not easy to find a job - and I don't mean just here, I mean anywhere, for me at least because I have no redeeming features an employer might value, if the adverts are to be believed. When I think of all the thousands of miserable, unhelpful bastards that hold down jobs in my home country, yet who surely applied to adverts requiring `self-motivated team players, with strong interpersonal skills and a genuine desire for excellence` I can't help but feel there are things wrong with the world that only runaway nuclear fusion can solve.
Who thinks of these phrases anyway? Buzzwords are seldom less than irritating and all too often are the base layer of unhappiness in the workplace: millions of jobs are built on fundamentals that are false and unattainable - every position requiring the least bit of team leadership, "Oi! You lot do this. No, shut up, get on with it. Or you get a written warning/clip round the ear with a brick/nice cigarette up against the wall, that's why", or cursory experience in the same field demands that applicants be on top of the world and generally fantastic in every way.
And how many people can you honestly say are like that at work, even 50% of the time?
I am lucky in that I spent 6 years around immensely happy, cheerful, personable and interesting people, to the point that members of the public often pretended to be customers just to hang about at the counter to listen and join in the banter, but even so there was a large counterweight (in the shape of near-terminally skinflint boss) and despite the good cheer and constant laughs there were still clear undercurrents and shameless facades everywhere to cover the basic negativity at the heart of (most) things.
Anyway, I am pissed off with not finding a full-time day job to go with my bar job, pissed off that we have swapped out awesome duty manager (Jess) for the Shrew Bitch of Nelson (Jane) and work is no longer fun, am mildly concerned that my ear almost exploded and I started losing my balance on Saturday night, and am eternally pissed off with myself (I warned you I was depressed!) for not having the skills or qualifications - any qulifications at all - that might provide the means to better employment.
`Oh, if only there was something I could really get involved in` I cry - but of course I fell into the same trap as many of my generation, and had so many possibilites in life every single one of them paled into the smudgy vision that was The Future, that now it seems to be becoming The Past at a frankly terrifying rate.
One small dot of self-pity that really is justified, unlike, I am sure, every word of the above, is that people do not want to employ travellers no matter how many bibles and torahs and qu,rans we might swear upon that we are actually staying and will not fuck off to Auckland at the first sign of trouble or a better job.
You have to see where employers are coming from, of course. In most cases the positions offered are a little more involving than the menial rubbish I hoped would be my backfall, but not so, because those employers are places like newsagents, supermarkets and basic retail shops and the like, who must have a pretty high turnover of indigenous local staff anyway, and still I have got nowhere, still I am not allowed to operate anything so taxing as checkout till or a food trolley for these towering behemoths of commerce.
Now I happen to know I'm getting shafted because of the colour of my passport, because when I worked in a very small supermarket when I was 16/17 we used to get about one person every month who would work two shifts then depart from our lives forever; and that was a little country town Co-Operative with a peak-time team of staff of about seven.
That the local Countdown or Warehouse or Woolworths (remember Woolies over here is a supermarket) will not give me employment is a pretty sad state of affairs. I used to co-manage a multi-million dollar business for fuck's sake, wrote and imaged a website that brought praise and cutoms from hundreds if not thousands of people, yet unfortunately I don't have any qualifications after leaving (read: being asked to leave 
) school; but who would have though I needed them when I was living and working and earning a better wage than many people with specialist degrees?
Over here, despite the lovely attitude of people, the usually glorious weather (this morning we had a rainstorm but it's not common) and ease of life, it is still hugely dispiriting to not be able to do anything, to be losing money every day, to be getting closer and closer to the point of failure where... well, where I'm pretty fucked, actually. As it is I don't have enough money to go home, so I'm really rather in a spot of trouble - and even if I did what is there for me there, for my future?
Nothing. That's why I'm here; bit of a vicious circle isn't it?
Ah, fuck my life! That's a favourite phrase of the kiwis, and actually I think it's more of a safety valve and not to be taken literally. My life is pretty amazing on the global scale of things, it's just that, probably unlike all of you lovely lot, I have no career, education and skills, and while I don't actually want two out of the three, I do rather need to eat and travel and party.
Hmm.
I'll be saying "Ah, fuck my life!" with a wry chortle a lot today. I may mean it or I may not. We shall see how things go by eveningtime 
