i am quite literally, dizzy. light headed, even a little bit breathless. my life has a mind of its own at the moment and i feel like i am just the passenger, watching it swerve around the bends like an overloaded bus on a peruvian mountain road. i couldnt stop it if i wanted to!
and i dont want to. i said in my last post that i had been in the US and interviewed for a position at Emory University in Atlanta. I was offered the job and accepted, but everything was provisional on the US government deciding i wasnt a terrorist, drug dealer, or facist dictator of a third world country travelling to the US for the purpose of acquiring child soldiers (seriously, those were actual questions on the D160 application. it always makes me wonder who actually answers yes?). anyway, i was honest and answered no, and paid my money, and waited for the US dept of labour to give emory permission to employ me, and then i went to sydney and waited in the interminable queue, through security, up into the consulate, waited two hours with everyone else and their screaming children where NO KNITTING WAS ALLOWED (purgatory. utter purgatory), and then went up to the window when my number was called, talked to the nice american lady there for about 2 minutes and 25 seconds, at which point she said ‘well your visa’s been approved, have a nice day’.
three days later, my passport, with this attached,
arrived back in the mail. so now its official. not only am i a legal non-immigrant worker in the united states of america, but i am an assistant professor, tenure track, and the andrew w mellon faculty fellow for nursing and the humanities. i cant even tell you how excited and honoured i am about that. there is still a part of me that cant believe they chose me!
and for no good reason, i didnt quite believe i would get the visa either. but i did, and this makes it real. its actually happening. i have an E3 visa, a special class available only to tertiary qualified australians, valid for 2 years, renewable every 2. i am allowed to arrive in atlanta not more than 10 days before i start work at emory (november 2) and i can come and go then from the US as much as i like.
before then i can only go in and out on my usual 90 day visa waiver, so i leave australia on september 12 for the AAHN conference in dublin and after that i will go in to the US to do my rockefeller archive work in new york, then fly over to stuttgart in germany for another conference, then come back into new jersey to see W & J & Miss M and go to RHINEBECK!! and then i have scheduled some meetings in montreal in late october, and will go down to atlanta after that. i have also been in indecision land about where to live, but with the help of some of the lovely women i met when i went for my interview, i’ve decided on an apartment in a new complex in the pretty suburb of decatur. the management there have been hugely helpful, and i put my deposit down this week, and i have a 4th floor apartment on hold, overlooking the pool!
i have officially resigned from work here. that was weird. how do you resign from a job you love? what do you write in the letter? what do you say in the email you send to everyone? ive had so much support, so many people telling me they are so happy for me, so excited, will miss me so much. these are the people i value, and i am so lucky to have them, these people are the reason i love my job, that i’ve done so well at it, that make it so hard to leave, that i will miss so much.
i am caught in this space of being so excited and so keen to leave, so busy with so much to do, so annoyed by suit case living but so grateful to have somewhere to stay, and so pleased to be out of my old house. its been a huge effort to get it empty. when you’re moving from one house here to another, you pay someone with a truck to come and do all the heavy lifting for you. but this time, i had to get everything down to about 15 boxes. i decided not to ship furniture. there were only a few things i was attached to, and the shipping quote for a small amount of furniture came in at over $8000US, and that was my entire relocation allowance. so i decided to bite the bullet and just take clothes, work books, and essential personal items. and i was pretty pleased to finally get everything down to these final 13.
they go on a boat next week and will arrive in atlanta after me (estimated shipping time is 11 weeks).
people who follow me on instagram etc have seen this process blow by blow, box by box. everything had to have a home. i sold what i could be bothered selling, gave a whole heap away to charities and friends, and bit the bullet really hard to put 20 something boxes of all my favourite books into storage. thankfully trent and tracey are letting me have some space in their storage unit so i dont have to pay for it. i hired a truck and lots of people came to help and claim things last saturday, which was great, and tuesday i took another truck load of old books and kitchen things to lifeline, and then yesterday i took trents car back to the house
and did one final tip run,
loaded her up again with bits and pieces for here and other friends, vacuumed the house, and finally, it was empty.
i have to go back tomorrow to let the cleaner in, and then the keys go back to the real estate, and i am done. i am exhausted, and will still need to throw a few more boxes in storage or in the mail as i decide what to travel with, but that’s it for me and port kembla. i’m not sorry about that. this week has also been a year since lila died there and i’ve hated it since that day, so there is no love lost. in some ways, lila dying was the catalyst for everything that has happened since. getting her was an attempt to find peace and settle here, and her loss was like the universe telling me to let it go.
the universe has been busy in that department this week again. on monday, another east coast low settled over this part of the world (funny they seem more frequent and more intense, as though the climate is somehow, changing…. ) and monday night a flash flood rose up around this house, and ran through the area between the house and the garage, actually rising as high as the front step into the main part of the house, and there was a mad flurry of activity as we tried to get everything up off the ground in the garage and then we realised there were cars under water, two in fact, one of the resident teenagers little Golf, and my beloved, precious, love of my life, Subaru Forrester. in the morning, we tried to start her, and water blew out the tail pipe and water filled the cup holder, and the glove compartment, and eventually the tow truck came, and my 12 year old, $45000, 340,000km car was declared dead. she has been towed to salvage in sydney, and an assessor will confirm the mechanic’s suggestion to write her off, and the insurance company may or may not argue with me about the agreed value for pay out. i have had quite a few feelings about this. i didnt plan on getting rid of that car right now. she was my ‘get out of atlanta’ free card, in a way. but the universe has other ideas. of course, i’m one of the lucky ones, able to afford insurance, and with a good insurer who probably wont try to rip me off. but gees. what a week. a good week for ducks, really.
being busy has had its benefits, you dont get a chance to think or feel much when you’re busy running around like a blue arse fly and then dead tired and sore from running around like a blue arse fly. i have been trying to work as usual, i am still at work after all, and i have assignments to mark and conference papers to write.
today was my first chance really to relax, and rather than work, i took myself up the coast a bit to the stanwell tops conference centre, where the nsw knitters guild was having its annual knit camp. i just booked in for the day, and i got to sit outside in the lovely late winter sun and catch up with my favourite people
and knit a lot, and just breath in the serenity
and then the lovely lyn who i wont see again before i leave gave me this beautiful gift,
its a gorgeous soft light white, black and grey scarf using ‘sequence knitting’ and i’ve been admiring it as she knit it, and it is perfect for me in the colours and length and lightness
and i will wear it everyday as i head into a US winter and be reminded of lyn, and of the amazing friends i have here.
when i was in atlanta, they asked me what i would miss. the first thing i said was ‘the ocean’. to get to and from knit camp, i drove along this gorgeous stretch of coast now serviced by the sea cliff bridge. this morning, it was cold and the surf is still big from the Low, and the waves were way up the cliff face, creating a salty foggy mist rolling up and off the sandstone. it was breathtaking. on the way home, it was warmer and brilliantly sunny, in that way that only australia can do in the winter, and i took this photo looking south from the road that snakes above stanwell park
and it took my breathe away, thinking how much i will miss this. the squawking parrots and cockatoos, the laughing kookaburras, the smell of eucalyptus crisping in the sun, the salt air, the wide open space and big blue sky. as much as i liked atlanta, it isnt this. it isnt what i’m used to, what i’m familiar with, what i’ve grown up with.
i guess this is what i’m balancing – the desire to leave the old and start something new, against the very same fear of leaving the old and starting something new. there is comfort in the familiar, and i know eventually atlanta will feel familiar, it may even feel like home. but it will never be this.
when i got home, i cried. i had a lovely time this afternoon just being with my people. im not good at friends. it takes a lot for me to open up and trust people, and it’s taken a few years since i set out on my own to find my space, to figure out who i could trust, who i could be myself with. i have those people now, and i am so lucky, and i will miss them beyond words.
so its been a bittersweet kind of day, and i can feel the tears behind my eyes, because now its getting real. as excited as i am, as much as i want to do this, how much i cant wait to start this amazing new job, leaving this country and starting over somewhere new, mostly on my own, is a huge prospect. i feel like im on the edge of a cliff contemplating jumping, not strong enough to jump, but about to step off anyway.
wish me luck!
k xx
