School & education related.

in uncertain times I wanna go where my thoughts can take a nap, and if the atom bomb should end us both, I’ll be happy to go to the stars with you

It’s weird being back in real-life for just under a week now, after traipsing up the West Coast from LA up to San Francisco and Seattle, then back down to Malibu to attend my sister’s graduation. I shot purely on film and didn’t even have a digital camera with me, so it will be a while before I start to slowly get my films processed — but hopefully it will be like wine and age into maturity, best to be shared around.

Below are a few of my photos photos from the last batch of film I got back. I was super flattered when Reatha at Film Soup decided to feature these shots as part of her “Scanning of the Week”, you can check out her post here.

All taken on Kodak UltraMax 400 at Hard to Find Bookstore in Onehunga:

It’s funny how these photos captured a golden afternoon in all its glory and nothing else. We’d gone to one of our favourite places, I’d tripped on a book going up the stairs (that place is brimming with books to the point of dangerousness), which led me to almost falling down the stairs, I couldn’t find the book I’d hoped to find, and then was struck with a strange curiosity and moral dilemma when I found a handful of old photos tucked into a book. That sentence is a rambling mouthful to read, but so was that day. It all screeched to a halt when my car remote ran out of battery and I couldn’t deactivate my immoboliser to start the car and didn’t want to ruin his birthday dinner plans. What a mess. And yet the photos show none of this but merely the fleeting split seconds that I had decided to click the shutter, or left it on a timer to put myself in a photograph. I think that’s what I enjoy most about the photos that I take. I’d like to think that they’re very honest and documentary-styled, since I don’t “set-up photoshoots” and stuff — yet I hope they’re kind of fleeting and in media res, maybe making it a little dreamy, that you feel like they might be lying.

Ironically, since I’ve arrived back from America, my little yellow car has finally had its last legs with me, and I feel like my adolescence has really died along with it. All the music that was blast, the excited, cramped, drunken passengers, the driveways and carparks and drive-thrus that car has seen me taxi people in. It’s yet another thing sentiment I just have to put down and let go.

I’m also really struggling with living in the moment right now — I’m looking backwards, at easier days, at happier times, or looking forwards, looking forward to things in the future. There’s a roast dinner to celebrate a friend’s engagement on Thursday evening, or the potential of a job offer, also that day. There’s a comedy act I agreed to go to on Friday, there’s my two hockey games, and maybe getting some music recorded or something, and hopefully cramming in one last surf before my wetsuit becomes too useless for the winter. There’s the further stuff, the promise of the summer holidays, whether I’m working or not, I won’t have to study for a couple of months. I might actually spend all my summer wages on a trip back to my favourite city. Or do something else. Regardless, I keep looking away from the right now and avoiding being in my head. I know that’s how people cope with stress and pain and difficulty (and apparently how Generation Y just likes to live on their smartphones, period), but I know I need to be more present, especially if I want to get my academic shit together. I honestly feel like I would be a straight straight A student if I was getting paid to study, rather than accruing debt to do so. But I’m sure everyone else feels the same. So it’s back to playing catch up on law readings and trying to compose so I can finish my LAST EVER music paper and get one degree finished. Here I go again with the looking-forward-too-much thing. To be honest I’m actually fucking terrified of finishing my music degree.

And we could feel under our backs that the earth was round

It’s only been little more than a month into 2014 and I’ve already had so many photos and thoughts I wanted to post — the accumulation of it all got too much and if I don’t start somewhere, it’ll never happen. Frankly, I can’t believe January is already over, and I’m sure I’m not the only person who feels that way.

I’ve been restless lately because of all the changes going on in my home life — being between flats and house sitting, etc. — but I’m finally about to move into a new flat, which will hopefully be a little “permanent”, if I could use that word at all. I’ve complained all summer long that I don’t want to return to university. That I just want to run off somewhere and do “things that I want to do”. That I want see the Great Big World, ASAP. But I realised something, just moments ago, as I was typing: the only permanent, constant, unwavering thing in my life for the past four years has been university. Throughout this time, I’ve changed addresses, instruments, gone through parental separations, had my sister move overseas (who is soon to graduate), succeeded and failed and fell in and out of love and hate with all sorts of things — and through all this, I’ve been at university.

For the longest time I’ve been bitter that my choice of conflicting paths meant an extra year tacked onto my time in what I consider a money-sucking institution. Whilst I will still view the place that way, I need to let that shittiness go, and just see it as more time to grow, rather than time spent being stuck.

Some things that I got up to in the last while (some of which involved photos yet to be produced, chemically, the old fashioned way):

  • When my sister was back in NZ over Christmas, we decided to do the Tongariro Crossing, with mum and the boy in tow. Or, realistically, the boy had us all in tow and helped hustle mum along towards the end, so we wouldn’t have to wait an extra hour for the second shuttle. It was a beautiful, beautiful day and I’m annoyed my Nikon F3 was broken and I had the wrong Contax lens and it was heavy and awful but I hope whatever photos I took will turn out well, once I save enough to get a huge batch of film developed.
  • I still suck at surfing but I can stand up alright and now it seems my biggest barrier to improving is the masses of other wave-users at Piha.
  • Riding bikes downhill in the forest isn’t my biggest forte but I hear I’m really brave because I lost skin but kept going anyway. I hope that really means I am a little brave because at times it got scary as fuck.
  • Meeting a lot of new people in a short space of time and having to remember their names. It’s so much easier for everyone at work to remember my name because there is only one of me. I have to confess that sometimes, right after someone speaks to me, I go on the company website to make sure I do indeed have the correct name-to-face.
  • Eating a ridiculous amount of ridiculously good food and trying to burn it all off without getting sunburnt.

satisfy myself, avoid beginners, who long to shut my mouth

I’m really not into setting goals. Especially those with a clear, definite end-point and calculable intended-outcomes. But this year I set myself an overlapping handful of them and guess what? I somehow managed to only fail at one, or possibly one and a half — although I technically made it anyway, because what I “failed” at, was really just a less pretty means to the same overarching end.

It’s been a really, really hard year.* I honestly don’t know how I made it, except that I’ve really enjoyed doing next to nothing for the past six and a half weeks since uni finished for the year. I don’t know how I’m going to plough through another two years, but at least it will eventually read BMus/LLB(Hons) next to my name. This combination isn’t even offered as a conjoint degree, so I have to do everything the long way (aka two full degrees — read: BMus 360 points + LLB(Hons) 540 points). But hey, hey, in the words of Robert Frost, taking the road less traveled has made all the difference, and although I often feel trapped by uni, I wouldn’t change a thing.

Mentally, the toughest thing this year besides my self-doubt, was the doubt of other people around me. My friends from either faculty would be stressing out about rehearsals and charts to write and deadlines — blah! — or law opinions and studying for tests and so on… and then often they’d freeze mid-sentence and be all “oh my god, I’m freaking out over this, I don’t know how you’re doing all that!” and it would really get to me. I know they didn’t mean anything by it, if anything, they were being sympathetic, but the overwhelming sense of pity sucked. I’d feel like, shit, this is really hard, even on a lesser workload — I am crazy I can’t do this, I can’t do this, I can’t do this! Needless to say, it really gnawed on my self confidence and assertion that I wanted to, I chose to, I must and therefore I will — do ALL OF THIS.

It was even worse when people in positions of somewhat-authority flat out told me — “I’m not sure you can pulls this off”, or worse, “you’re not hoping to get into honours, are you?! You’ve really set yourself up to fail.” And whilst I’m glad that they were wrong, this isn’t about “proving” anything to anyone, and I’m mostly just awash with relief. I’m particularly grateful towards a handful of closest and dearest that believed in me more than I believed in myself — or were at least very good at pretending so, until some faux machismo rubbed off on me. On a similar wavelength, I saw this Ted talk too late into the year, but it was a good (if placebo) effect for a short while.

One big thing about “Amanda’s Struggles of 2013? I’m going to try and take forward, is the need to remember that I wanted all this. At the start of the year, I told close people around me that, when the going gets tough and I start complaining, being shitty and lazy, they should remind me: “you want this”. I think that’s been the most important, underlying drive that’s gotten me through the year, and it’s pretty accurate that, “if it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. It’s the hard that makes it great.” I think we often forget why we are putting ourselves through unpleasant experiences, and forgetting why or what it was that we wanted to get from it. So by having others remind me that I’m doing all these shitty things because there was an outcome I want to reach, it made the blood, sweat and tears seem a bit less pointless, when I remembered the bigger picture.

I insist on not getting lost in the rat race, not forgetting why I subject myself to such constant strain and stress, and not doing anything for reasons any less than those of my own. No, I’m not sure if I want to be a lawyer, and no, I cannot stand it when people ask, “oh, so you wanna be a music lawyer?” — at this point in time, I just really like the education and whatever may or may not come with it. In the meantime, I’m going to keep scribbling stuff like this at 4am:

live together, move apart
the sequence of things
we’re supposed to do, tied to
this checklist people mistake as youth
dive in, heads spinning
confusing thoughts and screams
how to swim, how to float
I’m lofty but I’m starting to choke

and tell me, tell me, tell me
you told me
tell me, tell me, tell me
you told me
that now is not the right time
oh tell me, sell me, tell me
you told me
tell me, tell me, tell me
you’ll hold me
but now is not the right time

put things off for another year
we’ll get around to it, maybe
if not, we’ll have more savings
though aren’t you tired, always, not lately?
slaves to our characters on paper
your haircut cost two hours’ pay
it’s worth the comments that you’ll save
but we can all grow if we leave today

and tell me, tell me, tell me
you told me
tell me, sell me, tell me
you told me
that now is not the right time
(etc.)
now is not the time
there is never a time

*I knew that I had taken on a LOT this year, but I only realised whilst trying to work out my timetable for 2014, that I’d actually done 160 points this year — and they weren’t neat papers either — four of them were year-long law papers and two were jazz papers that used to be worth 50 (2x 15 and 2x 10), but got restructured down to 30 points without the workload being altered much. To put it in context, students are recommended to take 120 to a maximum of 135 points, especially for law. Basically, I’m really fucking exhausted, but at the same time I kind of feel like I’ve super lazy on and off all year, but either way I’d just like to crawl into a glass igloo and never reappear from hibernation.

Then we could be dancing, no more missing you while I’m gone, there we could be dancing and you’d smile and say I like this song

I just want to put it out there that I really don’t like hate the way in which mental heath issues are ignorantly trivialised by many people. You hear people say “oh my god I am soooo depressed!” about their favourite restaurant being booked out, or people getting told, “you are sooo OCD!” because they value cleanliness more than the average person — the list goes on. It really irritates me. It makes me feel like mine, and other people’s mental health issues are undermined as merely a description of a fleeting problem, a hyperbolical description. Surely I’m not the only person out there who feels like their personal struggles are trivialised by these terms being casually misappropriated in popular culture and everyday use?

A few months ago, law school had a “Mental Health Awareness Day” which involved (via sponsorship, of course) a bouncy castle, warm fuzzy post-it notes, puppies for petting, etc. Needless to say, I was really unimpressed. Whilst it coincided with the release of a survey of law students (which unsurprisingly concluded that we are one of the most stressed faculties, and that many people develop mental health issues, or their previous difficulties worsened), none of this was the focal point. It really should have been called a “Stress Relief Day” or something a bit more mild. I realise that stress in itself is a serious problem, and it also exacerbates other mental health conditions, but the whole thing looked like a magical, colourful fun-day joke and I felt like it rudely trivialised the seriousness of other things caught under the umbrella term of “mental health.”

In happier matters, I recently did a photo shoot for some friends’ presskit:







the cold and the loud and they won’t let me sleep

My mum likes to whip out a saying in Chinese that literally means “plans never keep up with changes” (although it sounds more eloquent when my mum says it because in Chinese it’s a bit of a play on words).

Anyway, that maxim seems to ring true far too often in my life, and this past week has been yet another example. So besides feeling like I had messed up three out of my four exams, they were done and dusted, and everything felt great. I was ready to relax, to hit the beach, to chill in general… then the status quo at home and at the flat changes so now I have to move back home within the next week to house/cat sit for the next couple of months, and then start flat hunting again. I can’t even be bothered regurgitating statements about how bad the Auckland housing market is at the moment and how competitive the flat/rental scene is — it just ain’t pretty. Plus I hate moving. I own a lot of stuff. Which I had planned to be cull down after exams anyway, just as a general spring-clean type thing, but now I’m forced to. I get stupidly sentimental about dumb things I own and I’m far too into shoes and books (both of which are very heavy), so moving is going to be a mission. Urgh.

I guess I’m just going to have to suck it up and deal with unexpected changes. I just wished that life gave you more warnings though, you know? So you can brace yourself a little, and close your eyes for the impacts, no matter how minor. I feel like I’m always getting smacked in the face by unexpected shit when I least expect it, when I’m most vulnerable. I just wanted a break! But I’ll be packing boxes and doing some heavy lifting instead.

During the exam period, I had somehow managed to build up quite a substantial list of “things to blog about”. But I haven’t gotten around to it yet, because I’ve been too busy enjoying my short-lived carefreeness and seeing friends that are going away for almost the entirety of summer. I wish I was the one going away instead. In the meantime, here are some crap-quality iphone photos. I’m doing a photoshoot for some friends in a couple of days’ time and also need to finish a previous project, so hopefully this blog’s photo quality will be resurrected. The photo above is of Piha, on my first day of trying to learn how to surf (before the weather and waves deteriorated), and the bottom are some of the dishes I got treated to as a “yay exams are over” meal, by the boyfriend. Apparently I’m really, really into south and central American food.

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