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.

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.

and I don’t make particular plans cos they don’t matter, if you keep on foolin in bed with my sleeping patterns

I’ve been thinking lately that I’m really not that healthy or good to my body. Leaving aside all my sporting injuries and physical problems that I need to work on, I don’t think that I eat particularly well, nor are my lifestyle habits any good. You could almost say that I eat too well, meaning I love, loove meat (steak!!!) and my favourite green-type-food happens to be spinach, which is also high in protein. This is not a bad thing at all, but I’ve decided that I really need to balance things out.

Like many people my age, I sleep too late or too little altogether, drink too much, and eat too much bad food at very bad hours. So my first step towards encouraging myself to have a better breakfast regularly, was that I went out and invested in a decent blender. I got one on sale for $113.99 which was down from $189.99 — it’s one of those ones with a solid glass jug and the ability to crush ice efficiently. I then went to the supermarket and green grocer for supplies, and went home to make this smoothie:

I put in: yoghurt, almonds, frozen berries, nectarine, granny smith apple, banana and a tiny bit of ice. It’s a lot cheaper than the $5-7 that cafes charge for a smoothie and undoubtedly healthier as I didn’t add in any extra sugar or flavouring powder.

The boy has also ordered some organic goji berries, cacao powder and mesquite powder to usher towards us healthier diets. I know this all sounds a bit overboard, but I could never have the discipline to turn into one of those “clean eating” people (in fact, what exactly is “clean eating”?!). I just want to make sure that I at least eat something healthy every day to make up for my other unhealthy habits that are lot harder to kick.

I also couldn’t help but try my hand at making a soup, since I wanted to see my blender’s “puree” function in action. Considering I’ve never tried to make soup before, I think the results were pretty good for someone that literally made up the “recipe”. In case you hadn’t noticed already, I tend to make things up as I go…

I used: two large carrots, a whole bag of stalked spinach, chicken stock powder, a bit of water, five pieces of toast crumbed in, and obviously salt and pepper. I pan-fried a small amount of chicken with garlic, and towards the end I threw in a small amount of sliced salami to give the smell a bit of a kick. If I wasn’t so full from my smoothie, I would already but gulping this stuff down by the spoonful because it’s good!

This has turned into a bit of a “how lazy, unhealthy students kid themselves into thinking they’re eating healthy”-post, but hopefully I can eat like this more often. And go to the gym! The rowing machine is waiting for me again.

shaking the habitual

In a conversation with a friend the other night, we were discussing our childhood and adolescence, being bullied by girls and general bodily awareness, etc. She pointed out something that I had never considered before — that, before a certain point in time, your body was just one whole part. You were you, that’s what you looked like, and that’s just the way it was. Until one day, someone makes a comment about your body, and suddenly your awareness heightens, and you start to question your body and the form that it takes.

After thinking about this, I realised that I can remember a very distinct shift from merely acknowledging that my body looked a certain way, to realising that my actions can cause my body to look different. It’s sad that, once you cross that line, there is no going back. Life used to be, oh, swimming training, ballet classes, run the 800m heats, blah blah, and all was well. Then one day, I realised, it’s all this swimming and ballet that has given me a really lean physique with strong abdominal muscles. That switching these two for hockey then gave me a thicker build, along with hockey thighs. That my gluttony over a few meals will amount to jeans being tighter or beers equating to a gut. And as a woman, these are consequences that are too hard to ignore sometimes.

Even though I don’t really “watch what I eat” and barely try to be moderate about it all, admittedly, one big reason I love hockey season so much is that I can then consume without as much thought as when it’s off-season — because it’s almost guaranteed to burn off. Case in point: in December I bought a beautiful pair of Rag & Bone jeans in New York, and this was right after a season of winter and summer hockey, and I’d walked and walked and walked on my trip. Then I get home, Christmas and New Years happens, with no hockey… and now I can’t fit them anymore. Hopefully if my coach continues her current plan of playing me on the left wing for the first sixty minutes (of a 70 minute game, ouch!) I will definitely be reaping in rewards in the form of muscle gain and fat loss. (Disclosure: I’m weird in that I gain and lose muscle easily so my weight fluctuates not 1-2kg like most females, but more like 4-7kg) But if I were ten again, I would just think, oh yay, I feel a bit fitter and lighter. Not, I lost muscle and put on fat, boo hoo, must reverse this. This body awareness thing was much easier when I only ate what my mum put on the dinner table, and did the amount of sports prescribed.

Also, I’d forgotten about these photos until I stumbled across these scans just before. They were taking during a jazz combo rehearsal at uni last year. Funny how I can forget about these completely, yet now that I’ve found them, I can remember what it felt like at the time, framing these shots in fairly quick succession, then putting the camera away to not be a distraction.

All taken on Kodak Colour Reversal film; Nikon F3.

louder, lips speak louder, better, back together; still it’s a shock, shock to your soft side + NYC pt 1

In twelve hours’ time I’ll be looking for the lecture room in which I will spend four hours, every Monday, Wednesday and Friday for the rest of the year. This last month of summer has flown and I can’t believe I’ve been on holiday since November 10th. It’s such a distant, distant memory by now, and little did I know then, what the next three months would throw at me. In the past few weeks I have reverted to a weird situation of being a single, free bird again, and it’s the most bizarre feeling in the world. Which is ironic as I’ve always been the most commitment and relationship-phobic person I know, but I guess I turned soft, and people make you comfortable. Unfortunately with comfort comes complacency and whatnot… but I no longer have quite the same view of my immediate future right now, and that’s both exhilarating and petrifying.

I’ve also decided to move out of home, which is a lot earlier than expected, but all factors considered (such as my potential for 11am-6pm Mondays with no breaks), it seems to be a good decision right now. So on the same wavelength of venturing into the great unknown, here are a couple of photos from back on November 29th, when I flew from LAX to Philadelphia, to New York. The latter flight was on a plane so small that I think there were only twelve rows and the cabin felt low for me, even though I’m only 5’7″. I was lucky to score the window seat because sunset washed over New York as we approached, and only after the skies turn black did I remember that, oh duh, I had my camera and should take pictures of the pretty lights. The last photo shows my first meal in New York — Japanese food delivered to the door of my friend’s beautiful apartment that I wish I lived in.

Let’s hope I survive this ridiculous venture of doing two (non-conjoint) degrees so that I can one day move there.

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