when I heard the knock on the door, I couldn’t catch my breath — is it too late to call this off?

Last month I handed over seven rolls of film to be couriered, processed and scanned. What happened instead was the courier damaged my films and refuse to be accountable. I hear one of the rolls has been completely flattened, although I really cannot fathom how, since those things are tough m’fuckers that don’t need “fragile” labeling. It’s really been quite the emotional rollercoaster because, dammit, I took some good photos, I know I did!

Here is the roll that’s been the least damaged, but it still suffers from a light leak that I haven’t edited out. I doubt I will ever edit out the scarring that’s happened to my film, but maybe one day I can be convinced otherwise. A few shots have been omitted because there was a two-hour span or so where the camera kept malfunctioning — probably because it hadn’t been used since circa 2006 and probably 1996 before that. I didn’t take my trusty Nikon F3 on the Tongariro Crossing because it was getting repaired but I sure as hell wished I had it with me. Sorry, Contax. Old habits die hard, and I won’t let that camera die until I do.

I’m popping over to the states for my sister’s graduation in a couple of weeks’ time and I may try to shoot LA/Californian National Parks/San Francisco (and maybe Seattle) purely on film. I’ll see how that goes. If anyone wants to meet up, email me.

Tongariro Crossing on Ilford HP5+ 400 B/W film; Contax RTS iii.
P.S. yes, that is an active volcano, gotta love Middle Earth.

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:







feeling fallen like a stone, you ask your mother, “is it true?”

I mustn’t be the the only person who feels like it is much easier to continue something, that it is to start it in the first place. A couple of months ago, I was on a really good health and fitness streak — it was towards the end of the hockey season, and I was also doing really well at the gym. And then I stopped.

Blah. I have a tonne of “excuses” which I see as fairly legitimate reasons, but the bottom line is — I stopped. I don’t actually regret it, because those extra hours of not exercising meant either much-needed sleep or charts being fixed or practise or reading the backlog of law cases I had accumulated, etc. but it still sucks. I wished that I had simply been more motivated or less lazy or managed my time better, but I don’t actually regret it at all.

The point is, now I have to start all over again. Yesterday I went to the gym for the first time in a long time, and I had to bust my arse to do the same routine that I was just about to upgrade from, seven or so weeks ago. I wondered how on earth I had done more reps with heavier weights, and my declining fitness really showed at 11-a-side summer hockey on Monday night. I had to play two positions (neither of which I usually play) simultaneously towards the end of the game when we were a player down, and I just felt like walking instead. I have hockey again tonight and have agreed to meet a friend at the gym right afterwards — the prospect of which frightens me immensely. Gulp.

Recently, howtobea20something posted about a “Self-Improvement Summer”, and a lot of what I want to do overlaps with his list, so I guess what I’m embarking on is some kind of self-improvement mumbo jumbo as well… and it starts with continuing this little streak of exercise that I’ve started. Starting was the absolute worst part, now I’ve just got to keep it going. Which also relates to me struggling with learning to surf. Apparently I’m not really struggling and I only suck as much as someone who’s only attempted it once. But I hate being bad at things, so I feel like a total failure so far. The boyfriend’s board had to get repaired this past weekend and I was moving house, but we’re going again on Sunday and sometime next week I’ll get a proper lesson along with a friend or two.

For the record, I’m not one of those mindless souls at the gym who just does a shitty, half-arsed routine and goes home. Nor am I trying to kid myself that I can change my body type and want to shed 15kg. I mostly just enjoy the feeling of being fit and able to do and lift things with relative ease.

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