Melbourne Big Day Out Friday 26th January 2013, on disposable camera. (The thing on my forehead is a Y from the YYYs)

The other night, I had an application for something that was due a minute before my birthday, at 11.59pm. Due to a torts test and uni all day, I had about two hours left after my hockey training, to finish my cover letter. I don’t think writing such things under time pressure is the best idea, but in writing it, and compiling my CV, I unexpectedly learnt a lot about myself.

At first glance, my CV isn’t exactly cut out for the corporate world whatsoever. I scarily realised that I’d been playing in various music ensembles for the past fifteen years and that it’s been eight years since I started playing hockey and fatefully broke my nose on my birthday. Some days, I feel like what have I got to show for myself?! now that I’m no longer a teenager. Other days I feel like I’ve managed to do quite well in what (relatively) short time I’ve had on this earth. But the thing I realised when I was writing my cover letter was that, I’m quite proud I never really did anything just “because it would look good on a CV”. The pages and lists of things I’d put on there, were truly things that I wanted to do, even if in the cold of winter I didn’t want to train, or didn’t like early morning rehearsals. I wasn’t in those sports teams purely for my ego nor did I spend twelve-hour days at high school because I thought that it would “pay off” one day. And maybe it never will. But it doesn’t matter.

Even if nothing came of this application I submitted, I’m happy that the process of writing it made me feel really content with myself on my birthday. People that know me quite well would know that I struggle to be content with myself — there’s always more I can do, more to be done — so this is a good start. I’m really passionate about the the photos I’ve taken, the experiences I’ve sought out for myself, and bass callouses born from pain.

Whilst I know that law school will always make me anxious that I’m not doing the “right” co-curricular things, I insist on not pretending I’m someone that I’m clearly not. I’m making a conscious decision to continue to only do things that I want to do, rather than because “it would look good”. (Disclaimer: I do realise there will be things that I must do that I don’t necessarily “want” to do or feel passionate about. But I feel there’s a difference between things you’ve got to do in general, versus things above and beyond, merely because it looks nice on a piece of paper)

Also, it’s amazing how many indirectly-relevant and awesome skills I’ve managed to get out of all the “wrong” (read: unconventional) mixture of things that I’ve been doing. Anyone can sit at a desk and grind books into their brains all day, but how many will leave their comfort zones and chase down lofty dreams?

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%?!

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.

Yesterday I had to buy a bus card for the first time, since I live much closer to uni now, and don’t need to catch the ferry anymore. Auckland Transport has been implementing new transport card systems, and it seems like they are trying to unify everything. But it’s still an absolute shambles. In all the other countries I’ve visited, if you qualify for a concession fare — student or otherwise — you show your ID card at the time of purchase, and will then be charged a reduced fare from that point onwards. However, Auckland Transport seems too incompetent to pull this off.

I know that some people cheat the system and try to get away with paying lower fares, but the level of student-ID-checking that’s going on is just ridiculous. I don’t know why they can’t just apply the discount from the point of purchase! Instead, I had to queue up to buy a card (have my student ID and sticker* checked), then queue up elsewhere to get hold of an application form (on which I filled in my student ID and sticker details), then queue up once again to hand in said form, THEN have my student ID and sticker checked yet again. Seriously — do they want students to take public transport or not?! This whole process wasted a lot of time, not to mention the inefficient chain of bureaucracy that this is, and the unnecessary number of people they had to employ in order to supervise this. I don’t understand why having person at the ticket booth checking people’s IDs and stickers does not suffice!

To make mattes worse, I came home to register my card online… only to discover that the $20 credit I had paid to be put on it isn’t there. Thank goodness I kept the receipt, but now I have to make yet another trip out of my way to Britomart (it’s a train station/transport hub) to sort this out. I hope whoever I have to deal with tomorrow is quick-witted enough to remedy this quickly, if at all.

So much for life being easier if I didn’t have to deal with the fiasco that ferrying has become.

*We have to go and get a new sticker either at the start of every year or semester, which verifies that we are enrolled in enough courses to qualify as a “full-time student”, in order to get a student discount on public transport.

Taken on Ilford HP5 Plus 400 B/W film; Nikon F3.

I’m supposed to be moving out of home in a week’s time and I haven’t packed a single thing. My room is a wreck but I keep telling myself that there’s no point in tidying since I will be leaving soon anyway. I think the main thing I need to do is throw things out, rather than pack it all. Because who really needs shoe boxes full of clothing tags when they have boxes worth of postcards? Clearly, I “collect” too many things. The amount of books and clothes I have will be a mission to sort through, let alone everything else. That’s the mystery with me — because I can happily live out of a suitcase for weeks and not miss anything, yet when I’m back home, I can’t seem to let anything go.

I’m also starting to get terribly nostalgic about everything, thinking like, this will be the last weekend I sleep in this room and other pointless, torturous thoughts. I’m just too sentimental. And yet, I don’t think I would care half this much, if I was moving far, far away to the other side of the world. I’m only moving twenty kilometres away, it’s really not a huge deal. Plus I’ll probably be home for dinner at least once a week since I am still tutoring around here, and hockey is five minutes away. I just don’t know how my sister ever coped with leaving the cat!

Case in point — I found him sleeping on my double bass yesterday afternoon. Just too adorable:

Also, I’m pleasantly surprised at how much The Strokes’ new album is growing on me. For some unspecified reason, my favourite track so far is “Slow Animals” (below). I’d almost forgotten about their ridiculous 5-album-contract until I read this the other day. It’s an interesting analysis of what’s happening there, but I don’t know… maybe when it comes to bands from the early noughties, I really don’t like to over-analyse. I’d prefer to hang onto that feeling I had from ten years ago when I first started blogging, first really fell for music of my own accord, and was far too young to register half the lyrical content of  bands like The Strokes, Bloc Party, and of course the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. As much as I have to acknowledge that great things happen in Auckland and New Zealand, I can’t help but constantly feel that we’re so far off from being at the epicentre of anything. Maybe that’s why I wouldn’t care that much for all my stuff if I were moving far, far away.

Anyone who knows the boy and I quite well would know that we’re not advocates of marriage. I don’t even believe in little things working out, I’m such a bloody pessimist. Being the lofty thrill-seeking person I am, it’s surely no surprise that I always question the doctrine of monogamy. Without going on a huge tangent, I’ll clarify that I’m not about to ever be a swinger, and I simply couldn’t deal the jealousy and uncertainty of being in a “relationship” that isn’t monogamous. But I often encounter existential issues like “what’s the point?”, or my strong belief that I can’t be with someone unless, for its duration, I believe that I’ll always be with them, and will always want to be. Regardless of if that actually plays out in reality, I feel like, if that’s not how you feel when you’re together, then WHY would you bother being “together”?!

Some time in 2012 I devised a test for “how I may one day use to gauge whether or not I will accept someone’s proposal for marriage” — this is, assuming that anyone would ever be crazy/stupid/brave enough to stick their neck out for slaughter like that. The test is, I’d ask myself whether I would be willing to get a tattoo related to the person. It doesn’t have to be their name or anything, just, something sentimentally, symbolically, intimately related to them. Everyone knows that it’s a dumb idea to get a lover’s tattoo (sorry for the grand generalisation, though I’m not sorry if anyone actually thinks it’s a great idea), but regardless of if I’d ever follow through with something so stupid, I think if I could ever answer that test in the affirmative, then it would be pretty telling. There is so much more on how I feel about all this that I haven’t breached, but I’m looking forward to chucking my casebooks and real book on the floor, and climbing into bed with a book called Sex at Dawn. Before anyone jumps to any conclusions, it’s a New York bestselling anthropological book with the subtitle that reads “How we mate, why we stray and what it means for modern relationships.”  I think the key point to be extracted from praise on the back cover is “that humans evolved to be monogamous” — a topic I’m clearly fascinated by. It seems messed up that I’ve talked about these things for years but this book actually belongs to the boy and he read it sometime recently and has since shoved it under my nose. Let’s ignore the fact that I’m three quarters through Malcolm Gladwell’s What the Dog Saw and the infamous American Psycho. Those can surely wait, whilst I uncover the thread of how modern human relationships came to be, right?

Here is Master Flakey, cute as ever, always managing to find a spot of comfort in the mess of a life I lead. I’m going to miss him so soo sooooo much when I move out soon.

On Thursday night the boy and I went to see Bloc Party. I’d seen them in December in LA with my sister and they were amazing, but the crowd there was awful, and — not to be racist, merely factual — a black chick tried to get in a fight with me. By that, I mean she actually did hit me several times. Just, what the hell, it’s a concert, when you’re in the fourth or fifth row and there’s a big gap in front of you, someone is going to go and stand there! So yeah, that was an experience and a half. But the Auckland crowd was predictably much mellower, and I certainly enjoyed second-row views of Gordon Moakes. I was sad they didn’t play Sunday (see blog title), but Signs was definitely a pleasant surprise. I just have no idea why Moakes looked so sad during the whole set, like something was wrong and he didn’t want to be there, who knows?

After the show I’d managed to get my hands on a set list, but a nasty girl knocked it out of my hands and into the photo pit. Then she went bailing over the barrier head-first to retrieve it. I really wasn’t in the mood to lose any dignity over it, so gave up. Luckily for me, an old friend was in the opening act, and although they didn’t get to meet Bloc Party, he’d seen the whole fiasco from upstairs and promptly went to retrieve a set list from backstage for me. Yay. And from the bass tech, no less, so I’m going to fawn over potentially having Moakes’ handwriting sitting on my desk. I honestly don’t care that it’s from the 5th in Brisbane rather than the 7th in Auckland. Nor do I know where this bass-player-fangirl-dom has come from, because as I’ve always said, bass players don’t typically tick any boxes for me… because I am one. I shall keep collecting “what stories are made of” experiences.

Here are two photos I took at the Met in New York. Both taken on Ilford HP5 Plus 400 B/W film; Nikon F3:

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.

As the boy correctly pointed out, over the past couple of months I’ve had a few “big dreams” come true. I finally went to New York, I finally saw the Yeah Yeah Yeahs in concert — and then I managed to photograph them too. It’s evidenced in my previous posts and lastfm page just how much I love the YYYs, so when I spotted Nick Zinner spinning tunes the night after their show in Sydney, it was a no-brainer that I had to speak to him.

At first he seemed caught off-guard. I doubt anyone else had actually spotted him, nor bothered to even care; the bar was buzzing with “where the fuck is Karen O” and I’d grown tired of hearing average bands which consisted largely of females oozing sex appeal rather than musical ability. So I wrote Nick a note. I even had to write it twice because I was afraid my illegible handwriting would never be understood. Then I snagged him as he was hurrying away from the sound desk, and I gushed and said all sorts of probably fan-girl-type things that I can’t remember, urged him to read my note later, and who knows how that conversation even ended — but it was over too quickly. The one thing I remember most clearly was how he smiled and seemed genuinely impressed and happy that I’d flown to Sydney just to see them. Although I felt like a fool immediately after for probably embarrassing myself and being too starstruck to even introduce myself, for the next 24 hours, that exchange appeased my sadness that their show at the Metro was over.

I’d never received any replies to the emails I’d sent to them months ago which were probably all filtered out by management, so I never expected what transpired next. The next evening, I received an email from the YYYs’ management, saying that Nick had told them to hook me up with a photo pass for their appearance at Big Day Out in Melbourne. Understandably, I freaked out, flipped out, went crazy, and the rest is history.

I still don’t know if any of it has sunken it at all, and maybe it never will. The boy stresses the fact that I met my childhood hero and he was actually amazing in real life, actually took the time to read my note, check out my website and decide that, hell yeah, I like her stuff, let’s give this girl a shot at something she always wanted to do: photograph her favourite band. It all seems too surreal and movie-like and I can’t really deal with how overwhelming that feels so for now I’ll put it in a box and keep it as a gift of happiness. One thing’s for sure though — I’m more motivated than ever to do all the things I want to do. I always feel like I don’t have enough lifetimes to do all the things I want to, or that I feel greedy for trying to do too much. But I’ve only got one lifetime so what the hell, I’ll do what I want… it seems to be working out so far. I’ll figure out this musician/photographer/law school thing somehow. I’m just really happy and thankful that this all happened.

We only got back to New Zealand yesterday at 5.25am so my body, mind and room are still all a wreck, but much more of this to come:

P.S. I stumbled across this quote last night and I found it too relevant not to share — I just can’t believe I’d never thought of things from this perspective before.

“Never give up on a dream just because of the time it will take to accomplish it. The time will pass anyway.” – Earl Nightingale.