The last two weeks since I returned from Adelaide have been trying, and without wanting to spend too much time dwelling on it all, blogging has suffered majorly. I do enjoy writing every day, but between the torture of funding applications, of which there are more than the number of the beast, and some on-going shittiness that I think I’m about to write about, the silence here has been gnawing at me.

As a part of a broader problem with trying to make dance in Melbourne, I stopped applying for funding early last year as it was doing my head in and really, I thought after five years this approach obviously wasn’t working and it was time for something different. Unfortunately in Australia there is no something different. If you want to make work, you have to suckle the unclean goat, so I got back on the carnival ride.

But for Melbourne though, after so long away and not really part of whatever is going on here, coming back has always been not so celebratory. This, I used to think was just an Australian attitude, but my ignorance was exposed after spending so much time in Adelaide and – I’ve had many conversations on this with dance friends – while I may be prone to a bad attitude in Melbourne, there’s certainly something in the dance scene here that just doesn’t suit me.

This amounts to a lack of work here which is unbearable not simply because I don’t like being poor, but I have the stomach-churning sensation of career-passing-me-by/talent-wasted when I get maybe two or three months in the year to make new work if I’m lucky. Also this engenders no small amount of bitterness, and I really don’t enjoy feeling that way.

Perhaps if I didn’t have my own personal issues to deal with this would be largely more bearable, after-all if all your expenses amount to eating, subsistence and paying for dance classes, getting by on the dole is possible. But lets be under no illusions that being a transsexual, or more accurately, doing something about it is one incomprehensibly expensive chore.

Being unemployed has meant I’ve also been sucked through the Centrelink wringer, that besides being a waste of time (as in how can I get a job in my career if there are no jobs?) has been more than occasionally humiliating. All of which led me to sitting in my doctor’s office earlier this week talking about counseling, which in turn led to repeatedly having to talk about stuff I generally refer to as “stuff I don’t talk about”, and subsequently feeling completely fucked over and eating huge amounts of crappy Cadbury chocolate because no one seems to be selling Lindt anymore.

So, blogging has been scant.

More to the point though, I’ve been coerced for a number of weeks to do the unthinkable, and despite my abject terror at maybe making the wrong choice and finding myself in a months time thinking, “Weeellll, that wasn’t so smart, was it?” and wondering if peddling my ass behind the railway station was the best possible career move I could think of, I haven’t been able to find any decent reasons for not moving to Adelaide. Even Becky thinks it’s a good move.

John Jasperse is coming back to Melbourne at the end of the month and I’ll stay for a few of his classes, and then it’s back to airportland and on to Adelaide.