Miss Mariah!! Miss Mariah!! YAMAHA classes I MOVED and MORE!!

My adorable little closet-sized room in Randwick. What you see is what you get. That pink spot on the left indicates the walll. Touching my bed at the foot end is a wardrobe-no, not built-in, just a device from which to hang things. Small, but intimate, and I LOVE IT!!

I’m back!! Just as I’m about to embark on a ridiculously crazy part of my life, I decided that it’s time to get back into my blog. Hopefully I can keep up with myself! The goal is to post at least once a week, with or without photos. Some major things have happened since my last post (go figure; it’s been a few months) so I’ll recap the main points before launching into my current crazy life.

I moved! To the most AMAZING location in Sydney—for me, at least. I’m a 7 minute walk to uni and 25 minutes to Coogee Beach (and thus the Coogee Bay Hotel and the Palace, two of my favourite pubs). Literally about three metres from my door is a bus to pretty much anywhere I want to go, most importantly the city and to Bondi. On my very street and thus a five minute tops walk away are all the shops: food, clothes, Fitness First (my gym), bus tickets, phone recharges, my phone store, a kebab shop (this is key), a doctors office, a 7-11, a Subway (!!)…the list goes on. The bus to work is, of course, right outside my door, and it’s only about a 15 minute walk away. Speaking of work….

I finally managed to secure full time employment! Just my luck, it didn’t happen until the beginning of January and thus I was only able to work full time for about two full months. Due to my student visa restrictions, I’m only permitted to work full time when school is NOT in session (aka summer aka November-February). When school IS in session (March-June), I can only work 20 hours a week. This makes me one piss poor student—the quintessential “student budget” has my name written all over it! Rent at my room place is around $200/week (dirt, dirt cheap, if you can believe it) and with the combination of only being allowed to work 20 hours a week, pay around $20/hour and the tax rate of 30% because I’m not an Australia resident (grrr…) my income during the school year is…oh…around $240 :) After buying a bus ticket and a few groceries, this makes saving pretty tough. Luckily (being the ever-struggling musician/writer), I’m quite used to this sort of thing and will be just fine.

I work for a company in Alexandria called Schenker Logistics, as a reverse logistics coordinator. The work itself is pretty boring, and has nothing to do with writing or marketing or communications, but the work is steady and the income is fixed. I love the people I work with, it’s close and convenient to where I live, and my hours are flexible because I have a cool boss. So there’s really no reason for me to go somewhere else to find work. I feel like I’ve been struggling to find it for quite some time (since noone wants to hire A-an American and B- a student that can only work part time for most of the year and C-someone who may or may not be leaving the country at an undisclosed time after June 2010) so the best financial decision for me right now is to stay. Career-wise? Probably not. But at the moment I don’t really see myself as having a choice.

Let’s see...what else is new? Ah, yes. Mary Elizabeth Osbach came to visit me for ten glorious days from 24 Feb-7 March 2010. Suffice to say, we had a phenomenal time and tore this country to pieces! I still worked 20 hours/week when she was here, somehow, since uni started during the week of her arrival. We had a lot of D&Ms (deep and meaningfuls) and I might now have some sort of life direction in terms of what I’m going to do when I graduate. That, however, is to remain undisclosed for a few more months!

For now, I’m still just an American girl, living in the Australian world...living the dream!

Oh, and I started teaching!! For Yamaha Music!! I’m four weeks deep and loving every second of it. My first class went tremendously well, and the kids loved it. I think I enjoy teaching the Music Wonderland class over the Junior Music Course (aka the 3 ½ year olds over the 4-5 year olds) but that may change with time. There is heaps more pressure to teach the “older” kids (they are all so young and little!) the notes and the solfege and the lyrics, etc. They’re hands are so tiny…some of them can barely open them up all the way. Props to Yamaha for getting them going so young.

Funny story about week 2 teaching :) I teach this song called 1! 2! 3! About crazy crabs marching, silly snakes, tiny ants, etc…and the final verse involves millipedes marching. This is the Music Wonderland class, the wee lil’ ones. After class, I’m shifting my teaching materials from Music Wonderland to JMC when I hear a tiny voice cry out from the hallway: “Miss Mariah! Miss Mariah! Look!” This alone is music to my ears, but I rush out to see what’s going on. About 2-3 kids are crowded around an object on the floor, and one of the parents has pointed out that a real LIVE millipede was marching along in the very hallways of Yamaha Music! They loved it, of course, watching it closely as it crawled/”marched” its way along with its tiny little feet. Some more kids who hadn’t yet left picked up on the excitement and gathered around as well, until soon there were about 5 of them watching. Suddenly, one of my students, a little boy, marches right up to it, with this determined look on his face. Gee, he’s keen on bugs, I’m thinking. Then, out of nowhere, he takes his foot and STOMP!! There goes the millipede. I was shocked. I had no idea what to do. I looked around at the parents, and they had similar looks of “AHH!” on their faces. The mum of the little boy, especially, had a priceless look on her face. “My son, the millipede murderer!” it read. We all simultaneously looked down at the kids to see how they would react, and it was quite curious, indeed. Noone cried, noone screamed and noone hit the little boy in anger. Instead, they all just looked…confused. “What happened to the marching millipede?” one of them said aloud to noone in particular. Having never worked with kids this little before, I had no idea what to say. Was it just playing freeze tag? Is it sleeping? Did it crush itself up as a defense mechanism? Is it in millipede heaven? Unfortunately, none of the parents offered any assistance whatsoever (they were still on break from the music lesson, I suppose) and so it was all on Miss Mariah. I avoided the question entirely, however, and simply reminded them how lucky they are that they can still sing about marching millipedes at home. I then enthusiastically asked (as everything out of my mouth on Saturday mornings is enthusiastic! And exciting! And so much fun!) if they thought they could march to their cars like millipedes, and took off toward the door, away from the deceased creature (though part of it was probably still on the bottom of a shoe). I sighed a breath of relief as each child followed me obediently toward the door, even clapping and singing the chorus with me as we went. Whew!

Moving forward, these next months will be a bit crazy. I’ll work 8-5 two days a week, and I have uni Monday through Thursday from 6-8 pm. My two classes are Saturday mornings at 9 and 10 am, and these each require a fair bit of preparation. Saturday night will be my one fun night out, and it can’t even be that big what with the course load that I have. Sooo much reading! My calendar is packed (though pretty, as I colour coordinate), and apparently all of my professors decided to get together and make all of the assessments due on the same weeks. I kid you not, my assessments are in purple, and there are huge chunks of purple across the next four months followed by huge chunks of no purple. I don’t think I lke this, because while that means I’ll get major stuff out of the way within a few days, the final preparations for those assessments/projects etc will be crammed into the previous weekend. I canNOT procrastinate this term! I have to stay on top of everything and I want to get all HDs this term. I came close last term (all HDs and Ds) so I know I’m capable. I work my butt off for this masters program, one because it’s intense, two because I love it, three because I'm good at it, and four because I’m paying for it and want to get my money’s worth! Five because this is real life—these professors are my key to networking in the real world. My favourite professor from last term even recommended me for an internship at the ABC! That’s a big deal in Australia, as there are so few networks available (they haven’t caught on/don’t want to catch on to the idea of cable television having more than five channels).

I’ll be writing some more topic-oriented posts in the upcoming days, but I figure this is enough for now. For those of you still reading…thanks! I realise this is a lot to take in, and I tend to babble when I have a lot to say. Upcoming post ideas:

- My new/awesome roommtes

- Mary's trip

- Plans for the future

- Life of a CBD bus driver

- The weather (haha kidding, though in case you're wondering and/or reading this from Michigan...it's 88 and sunny and the last day of summer was weeks ago!!)