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.

all your words are so magnetic, generational pathetic. and I will do it on my own again, and I will say what I will

There are those rare, rare moments that make me perk up and feel thoroughly, substancelessly euphoric. Moments where I feel the most clear-headed, yet hazy at the same time.

Clear-headed because for a few short minutes or partial-hours, it feels so obvious — what else could be the point to everything? And hazy as the scarce appearance of pure happiness couldn’t feel more inebriating. I expected a good show, but I didn’t expect this.

I’m a sucker for atmospheric music with honest lyrics, and Beach Fossils nailed it on the head. Dustin Payseur’s banter carried well throughout their set, being the type of frontman that never said too much or too little. Having experienced too many awkward singers that carried jokes into the land of cringe, I was pleasantly surprised to be chuckling along to his assertions that they were [ridiculous fake band name] and that “Beach Fossils are next”. And whether or not the stories are true, there were touches of surprising intimacy when he explained what the songs were about, even introducing one as “this song sucks”. Other band members chimed in with suggestions such as “everyone should crowd surf at the same time” and they engaged in faux-fights, trying to push each other off the stage whilst playing.

Dustin hopped off the stage in what my drunken friend mistook as a crowd-surf-attempt during “Clash the Truth” and they ended up on a pile on the ground. Maybe I’ve been too bogged down by the daily slog, but it was just so much fun.

I really didn’t care that I had only slept two hours the night before, already endured a 10-hour day, or that I had a full schedule of law lectures and then tutoring to dread. For the first time in a long time, everything fell away and I didn’t care, didn’t worry and didn’t feel. I didn’t mind that I hadn’t done my readings for class, or that my recital charts weren’t finished. I forgot that I had dirty hair and was sweating from being in my own little bubble. Because for once it was a happy bubble.

To add an even sweeter ending to the evening, at the end of their set, they hopped off the stage and hung out with leftover fans like us. It was the second time in my life that I’d ever felt any level of fan-girl-ness*, and I ended up gushing to Tommy the drummer about how I really dig his time feel. Turns out, he’s actually jazzically trained (somewhere prestigious, on a different instrument) so I guess my ears weren’t lying! Jazz schools and music training aside, what a nice, genuine guy.

I think… it was just so lovely of them. To have played a great show, and then hung out and chatted to us. I don’t know if they’ll remember the moments and words exchanged, but that doesn’t matter. I’ll remember it, and regardless of how fleeting, I found some pretty intense happiness on a fucking stormy Tuesday night. I hope they survived their 40-hour trip to Brazil and didn’t lose any instruments on the way.

When I bought tickets, all those months ago, I had obsessively listened to them whilst studying and expected a good show. I’d thought, Diiv was amazing live, I’m sure the band they spawned from could do just as well. I couldn’t have been more wrong. I can get all analytical-music-student about it, but it’s not about just the music. It was the vibe, the honesty, the atmosphere, the ambience in the things sung and left unsaid. Just some cool guys doing what they love. They were mindset-altering, to say the least. I guess I had better work on an excuse to go back to New York soon?

*The first time being when I met Nick Zinner and it turned out he liked my photos enough to get me a press pass.

P.S. This really sounded like a half-review, half-ramble and I really don’t know what the point in this post was. Nor do I know where this blog is going, but I am going to write more. Maybe not blog more, butwrite more. I know bloggers these days are all trying to find a “target audience”, have specialised blog posts such as “Music Mondays”, etc., and some even monetise their blogs — but I really can’t operate like that. Sure, I write for “someone”, unnamed, uncertain, out there, but I never know who that is until I get the odd comment or email that really connects with me or something I said. Well anyway, this is just an archive of a tiny portion of things I see and do and feel and hear.

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.

he cowered beyond reckless tracks of impulse

Who knew that a pimple located smack bang in the middle of my forehead could bring me so much grief! Not to be culturally insensitive (I’m kind of on the fence about the whole “cultural appropriation” thing), but since there is no way that I will supply a picture, the most precise way of describing it is that the culprit has decided to form exactly where people would place a bindi.

Whilst touching pimples is generally unadvised and causes irritation and discomfort, I think my skin-type makes it even worse. To backtrack a little, I’m actually quite lucky in the sense that I have pretty neutral skin which is neither oily nor particularly dry, which means that I rarely get pimples at all. I only tend to get them when I’m really stressed out. Even then, that means getting maybe three pimples in a month where I have tests or exams — which my friends berate me for complaining about.

So what’s the problem then? Well, unfortunately the pimples which I do get, tend to be of the sort that stay under the skin and never quite “mature” and sprout a head. Which means that they stay around for ages and hurt in an eye-watering way when bumped. I’m sure that most people can relate to the surprising pain of pressing down on a pimple, but these type of pimples seem to hurt a lot more than the normal sort, as I think they’re deeper in the skin.

What I discovered this weekend was that I bump my forehead more than I ever would have guessed. Or at least my forehead makes some kind of contact with things and people a fair bit. For example, at my hockey game yesterday, I collided with an opposing player. It wasn’t a head-on collision, but her body sort of slammed into my face, shoulder and body in general — basically what happens every few minutes I’m on the field, with or without the ball. I just never realised that my forehead was ever involved in these bumps and pushing around — until the pain emitting from my pimple told me so! Later on whilst trying to snuggle with the boy, I realised I couldn’t sleep with my face or head pressed up against him. Because it hurts. An accidental bumping of heads this morning hurt a lot more than it should have for such light contact. I also discovered that when I lean forward towards my steering wheel whilst in fits of laughter (due to conversing with a friend in a parked car), my forehead cannot bear the momentary contact at all!

This darn zit has made me suddenly aware of all the contact that my forehead actually comes into. I never knew that my forehead touched anything or anyone at all, let alone on a regular basis. I guess it’s not a part of my body that I particularly note the sensations of, until pain is involved. It’s just been really silly how I keep unexpectedly going “oww!” at things I usually don’t even notice doing.

free yourself that leash is long, long, long

I feel like it’s a miracle I managed to survive the past week. I had a contracts test, a technical jury for double bass and a torts moot, back-to-back in the space of 72 hours. That I did not feel prepared for virtually anything, is a momentous understatement. My daily brain-function quotas were maxed out and I probably used the next three weeks’ worth, explaining why I have not so much as pretended to open a book all weekend. To top it all off, I’ve had a flu for which I’ve been drugged out on codeine, making it all the harder to stay awake. Somehow, in the space of the past seven days, I managed to do all this, photograph Esther’s wedding, pick up another commissioned assignment, and did a graduation photoshoot for a friend.

Oh yeah, and the boy graduated in the middle of the week, during my tech jury, so I didn’t witness the ceremony itself. But afterwards, we had too many celebratory drinks and I irresponsibly got too tipsy to write my moot which was at 9am the next day. I don’t know how I hauled myself out from under the pillow to write it at 5am. I also don’t know how much I like being me right now. It may sound like I’m complaining, but I’m not, really. I signed up to do all this. I signed up for far more than what qualifies as a “full-time study workload” — I chose to do all this, so I’m not really complaining. Just… trying to vent to get through it. And get through it well. Because, let’s be honest here, a certain lecturer may try to tell us all she likes that getting a C-grade for contract law reflects that our work is “satisfactory”, but no one ever got an internship or job off that grade.

I’m just feeling really envious of all my friends who have been capped and awarded with their all-expensive “piece of paper(s)” that’s been earned through hard work, blood and sweat. Although I do have an odd choice to make next year — do I attend a graduation ceremony for my music degree alone? Or wait to wear white an light blue simultaneously?

A handful of photos from Wednesday night:

P.S. I love the song that I nicked the title of this post from, but I think I must’ve subconsciously chosen it because it’s what I feel I need to do: free myself from the leash that is university and my ever-violent battles with time constraints. I’m working hard, by my standards, but hell, definitely nowhere near 100%. What is my 100%? How will I know? How does anyone know if they’re putting in 100%?!

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