Volunteering at the Community Law Centre // you’ve got no feeling, I want my blood hotter

Saatchi Gallery, London; taken on Ilford HP5 Plus 400 B/W film with a Nikon F3.

Surprise! Lawyers aren’t all money-hungry sharks and some of us care.

For the past week I’ve been volunteering 9-5 at the community law centre as part of my community placement.* It’s been… a really interesting experience, to say the least. Basically my role is to research and draft legal opinions/advice on specific questions or areas of law that our clients are having problems in. Over the past four days I’ve had to become familiar in all sorts of things, ranging from parenting orders to the effect of family trusts on healthcare subsidies, to Canadian pensions in New Zealand, to the Property Relationships Act. I think tomorrow I need to look into a restraint of trade…

In other words, I’m helping to dish out free legal advice. I’m supervised, but not very closely. And that’s the thing that really gets to me. It also bothered me over summer when I clerked at a major corporate law firm — people are trusting me to get my research right? My word on what the current position of the law is, isn’t really checked?! I do not feel anywhere near qualified enough to be doing this. Which is the other point that terrifies me — I’m in the last year of my degree! Am I ever going to “feel qualified enough” to be doing any of this?

These feelings weren’t so pronounced during my summer clerkship because I was dealing with things that involved a lot of money. Everything was at arm’s length. But now I’m helping people whose lives, families, and often livelihoods are directly at stake. These people qualify for free legal advice because of their financial (and geographical) circumstances. They need our help because they can’t afford to be paying (or paying much) for it. That thought terrifies me, so I’ve been throwing myself at these tasks whole-heartedly all week. But frankly, I’m exhausted. I don’t know how the full-time solicitors do it. Day-in, day-out, also with comparatively little pay.

I feel like half if not more of us go to law school, thinking, hoping, to one day do some “good”. We don’t really have any idea what practical, realistic form that this “good” would manifest itself in, but on some level, we intended it. And sure, we’re in it for the supposed employability of our law degrees, the intellectual challenges, the masochistic buzz you get at realising you’ve written yet another 10-20k words. But I often feel that no one really stops to think about what doing “good” with our law degrees is going to look like.

Those of us who haven’t or couldn’t land a grad position at a “big corporate”** joke about it as being a catch-22 type of blessing in disguise — if you got a job, great; if you didn’t, don’t worry, you get to do something “Good”! There’s a moralistic tinge to all this that I simply couldn’t shake for the longest time. But now that I’m doing something that is undoubtedly “good” in every sense of the word, and is actually directly affecting people in society, I’m not sure if I’m cut out for this at all.

When you’re on the phone to a mother who oozes concern and anxiety over wanting the best for her child, it really wakes you up, even on just five hours’ sleep. When you recognise that someone is basically wasting your time because their silly monetary ventures didn’t go their way, you kind of want to slap them across the face with their stupid debt. You wish you could say, okay, but someone else is in shit, through no fault of their own, they need my time more. When your hourly analysis of self-worth revolves around how viable your, uhh, “creative” interpretation of some statutory provision (you hadn’t heard of until said hour) is… it’s tough.

It’s been a long, rough week but I’ve been glad to do it. I’ve got another full day tomorrow, but I was thinking that I may consider returning to do a few hours here and there, after exams. Maybe. It’s at this point that I wonder — why do people love to hate on lawyers so much? No one seems to quite hate on musicians in the same way. We’re kind of just there for entertainment. No one is expected to be doing any form of “greater good” through the arts. If you can, that’s amazing. If you don’t… well aren’t artistic pursuits quite a selfish, often-introspective venture? But no one ever chastises us for that. So why, society, why do you all view lawyers as money-hungry sharks?

For the record, sure, I have some “plans” based around completing my degree and employment in my immediate future, but I don’t have a grand 5-year/10-year plan. I went into my music degree because I wanted to challenge the crap out of myself and learn a shitton of things, and I went into my law degree for the exact same reasons. I’ve come to realise that I’m definitely in neither worlds for the supposed prestige or perceived glamour, nor am I on a “greater good” crusade. And there is absolutely fucking nothing wrong with that.

*Full disclosure: I’m doing community placement in lieu of a 3,000-word paper, because I’m already writing three other ones this month.
**Second disclosure: okay, I did indeed land a grad position at a “big corporate” firm for next year.

til now I’m doing great, doing well is pretty vague

New Year’s Day 2015; taken on Ilford HP5 Plus 400 B/W film with a Nikon F3.

It’s April Fool’s Day, and I’m writing this post at 4.20 — the irony of this does not escape me.

Where have I been and how did I get here?! For the first time in my life, on paper at least, it would appear that I have all my “ducks in a row”. Since uni wrapped up in November last year, I have completed a summer internship and managed to secure employment for February 2016. During this time, I have also been on 22 flights for a mix of (very little) work and (a shitton of) fun. How did I get here indeeeeed.

Of course, anyone that knows me will know that there’s no rest for the wicked… Let’s just say there are a lot of things in the pipeline.

So it’s taken me a quarter of the year to come back to blogging. I’ve been itching to write about absolutely everything and nothing at all, and ended up writing in many places but here. I think the crux of maintaining this site is that I need to stop thinking about it as “blogging”. Rather, just as writing. Last night, whilst looking for a very particular photo, I accidentally fell into memory lane via an old hard drive. It’s been nine years since I registered staticimage.net, and ten years ago I blogged — much more prolifically — at rockgeek.net. Terrifying how time has not flown, but simply disappeared. Irrelevantly, I wish I was as cool of a 23 year old as I was a 13 year old!

Anyway, it really got me thinking about why I had found it so easy to blog so frequently and enthusiastically back in the day. The blogosphere has changed a lot since I started blogging over a decade ago, and certainly the vibe of the internet as a whole. The façade of internet anonymity really dissipated when facebook came along, and with the increasing popularity of monetising blogs, they just feel like such work these days (even if you’re not involved in the blog $$ world).

On a personal level, I’ve always struggled with privacy. I’m never particularly particular about anything, and that makes for tough writing and a boring read. But “anonymous” blogging was never quite for me, and my photos are damned well getting attached to my name, so that’s not a viable option. I was recently discussing the issue of creative freedom versus our imminent legal careers with friends, and they pointed out some things that stuck with me. One said, “lawyers have feelings too”, and the other bluntly said I should publicise and continue to take whatever the fuck style of photos I feel like.

Also, I’m going to stop thinking about this as strictly “blogging”-blogging and just throw things in here. I think that will work better.

Without wanting to offend anyone (who am I kidding, I’m sure I will), I’ve realised that the new direction that the blogosphere is going in just doesn’t really suit me. Ten years ago, blogs that offered help/tips/advice on blog-related things were largely to do with the practical side of how to build a blog. Literally, how to build a blog, i.e. coding, graphics, database imports, and in the pre-Wordpress days — manual versus cutenews versus whatever-else-I-can’t-remember-it’s-been-over-a-decade! Now it’s all about “find your niche” and “how to monetise” and “affiliate programmes”… the list goes on. At the heart of this discomfort and tension, really, lies the fact that I simply do and see and think too many things about too many things. So whatever website/blog I own, will ultimately reflect that.

I’ve also finally conceded to myself that I am never going to sit here and blog about my trips. Not in the way that other people do. I will, however, get off my arse and start writing stories and try to scan my films with a bit more urgency. Twenty one rolls are on their way back to me and I cannot wait.

Also here is the happiest sound of a song I have heard in a while, from whence this post derived its title:

that’s all I can do, give my shadow to you: losing 18 months of my blog

It’s Christmas Eve and I’m sitting at my now-very-tidy desk at work, looking out over Auckland’s morbid skies. From the 36th floor, the sky is eye level, and several times a day, I get to watch punters paying solid cash to jump off the Sky Tower.

And so it is… due to some mysterious reason (probably an automatic WordPress update that happened last month), I have lost 18 months’ from my blog’s database, and it’s as if it never happened at all.

2014 has been a rough, rough, tumultuous ride of a year, and bar a couple of posts I really enjoyed, I care much less about losing 18 months’ worth of my blog than I would have imagined. Neither my webhost nor I have a viable database backup from the right time period to restore from, so I’m just going to have to ride this newfound wave of faux maturity and calmness, and get over it.

I’m trying to treat this as a cruel blessing in disguise. A forced “fresh start” of sorts, if you will.

The only to-do list left on my desk is a post-it note of Christmas-related errands. I want to visit a particular book shop to pick up something. Farro Fresh for fancy food treats to take home, and maybe the mall for last minute presents and to get some shoes fixed. Boring.

One more day until Christmas. Three more days until New York. And seven more days until 2015.

“Never lose sight of the fact that just being is fun.” — Katharine Hepburn

three o’clock this morning and we’re playing all the records that we own

I went to Venice maybe twice just a couple of weeks ago, and it feels like such a distant, distant memory now.

In the past week, I have been lucky enough to have celebrated: the engagement of one of my close friends, graduations of seemingly everyone but me, and receiving internship offers from pretty solid law firms for the 2014-15 summer, which is supposed to translate to a graduate position in 2016. Yesterday I played the Div 1 game, winning 5-4, and today’s Div 2A game resulted in a 3-2 win also. Perhaps it’s a little greedy, but I feel all I need for this amazing week to wrap up properly is for West Ham to beat Man City, and for Newcastle to lose…

I feel like I am such a hard person so satisfy. Especially when I’m trying to please myself. I’m often told that I’m overly critical of myself, my work, my efforts, etc. — I guess it’s an inherent trait of a pessimist, but lately the domino effect of life is really taking a toll on me. I’m sure I can’t be the only one that feels like there’s this never-ending list that you check off, in which even successes lead to more work to be done. To point out an obvious example, law school goes something like this: get into law school, get good grades, get into honours, get a summer clerkship, get more good grades, get through honours seminar/dissertation, get through profs, get admitted to the bar…

…and somewhere along there, it’s so terrifyingly easy to forget that any one of those separate things is a notable achievement on its own. It’s just that there is always more to be done, more that could be done, and for someone like me who is somehow ridiculously lazy yet prolific at the same time— well fuck. It’s just a lot of cognizant dissonance. On the one hand I want to have celebratory coffee, lunch, dinner, drinks (beers, beers and more hopefully craft beers), on the other, I’m panicking that upon signing my employment agreement, I’ll need to adhere to the clause where it says my GPA needs to stay up. So now not only will there be the internal pressure (from basic instinct and innate desire?) to do well, but there will also be an external pressure in the form of a legal contract. Good fun.

These photos are actually from the previous time that I was in LA at the end of 2012 — I hadn’t gotten them developed for over a year and a half. Hopefully I’ll see my 2014 films soon, as I’ve dropped them off to be processed.

Taken on Ilford HP5 Plus 400 B/W film with a Nikon F3

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.
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