Holiday and "Christmas" are NOT the same thing.

This will be a moderately pointless post with no educational relativity.

I am on holidays
That does not mean that Australia celebrates Christmas at a different time of the year just because the seasons are opposite.
It just means I am on what we like to call “vaca”. 

Every day I take one of the several buses than run through Kotara, a suburb in Newcastle. The bus rides are always interesting. Let me paint you a picture of what a ride on a Newcastle city bus is like. Depending on the bus you take, you become familiar with some interesting characters. Two men in particular get on a few times a week when I am riding home from work. They both wear their hair long, greasy, and uncombed, one always wears his in a ponytail and the other lets his hang down his back. They are short, one is old, both reek of booze and body odor, and they always sit in the back. Once they’ve taken their seats at the back half of the bus, they wait until the bus stops at Westfield mall to begin their useless chatter about the length of the school girls skirts. I only catch these conversations on days that my ipod has died before the end of the bus trip, and lucky for me, this is when I press the "bus stopping" button, and usually where I get off.

I always wear my ipod on the bus. Let me rephrase that, I always wear my ipod, full stop. I’ve become moronically dependent on to the point where at times, I will get absolutely nothing done if I don’t have music. I lose myself in music. Music allows me to become a genius multi-tasker, but the moment someone starts speaking to me, a human voice with no harmony, especially one that nags or questions or talks to him or herself next to me, I lose focus. Many days at Newcastle High School when I have my free periods, I spend them in the teacher resource center in the library, because nobody goes there, it’s quiet, and I don’t feel antisocial or rude for wearing my ipod. On some level I think this allows me to be a more understanding teacher, because I get it.  It’s hard to focus when the kid next to you is breathing heavy, cracking his gum, or clicking his pencil, and sometimes you just have to hear one song to feel complete.

My last few days on vacation have been calm, almost boring. I’m learning to accept being bored. I’ve always been a busy bee. I can come off incredibly laid back but to be honest, I will reduce myself to becoming a workaholic if I am given the opportunity. I like being busy. That being said, the last two months of student teaching, not getting paid, being in a foreign country, and having complete and utter independence, is mentally draining. I’m a fee bird, I like my independence, I like not knowing where I am going, not seeing faces I know, not having mom and dad around to help me, relying on common sense and survival skills, I like the feeling I get when I look in the mirror and acknowledge that I’ve made something out of myself, for myself, and by myself,  but DAMN IT…I am exhausted. And not an accomplished, successful, good kind of exhausted, but rather a “bartender get me a tall drink” kind of exhausted. Don’t get me wrong, I do feel accomplished and successful, but I’m drained.

The last few days of holiday have been sincerely healthy on my brain. I didn’t mark anything, I didn’t read anything school related, I didn’t even look at my school bag, but I did manage to I spent an entire day in bed. Seriously, a whole day.  I crawled out of bed to make tea, I ate yogurt for brekky, I watched 5 episodes of friends, listened to the new Sara Bareilles CD on repeat, wrote a few letters, and didn’t TOUCH my work. Other than that I have spent about 4 days at the beach, a mixture between alone time with my book and with friends, because the weather has been remarkable. One day crawled up to 79, and naturally I forgot that Australia is lacking ozone, and sunscreen. I’m sure you can guess how that ended. 

Newcastle Beach takes my breath away. Many people our age cringe at Newcastle Beach, because it’s where all of the “Westies” go…or maybe it’s where the “derros” go, all of the colloquial language begins to blur together. Unarguably there are more spectacular beaches in Newcastle, but Newcastle Beach just represents a completely carefree time in my life when I was studying abroad, lived down the street, and was first finding my way around this city a year ago. Now, whenever things seem to get too hard or complex, and trust me as simple as I like to keep things complexities always seem to find me, going to Newcastle Beach brings me back to the mindset that everything can, and will be, simple again.