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%?!

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.

down down under the earth goes another lover

I’m writing this from a new bedroom, in a new neighbourhood, with a new Macbook, in the company of a new teapot. Some things haven’t changed though — I still can’t manage to go to bed early.

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.

Now, they’re scared of where their daughter’s been, ’cause who knows, she could be alone with men

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.

But I’d love to see you before I leave, I leave next weekend, I’m not ready to go

Knowing that I’m a sleep-wrecking advocate of “trying to do it all”, my sister sent me some lecture notes from her religion class about how we simply can’t “do it all.” Whilst I haven’t gotten around to reading the lectures themselves (I think I can be forgiven, some days I have uni from 11am-6pm with virtually no break!), the email with her views on it have been really interesting. So I’ll rephrase — I’ll try to do everything I can. Good news is, I did make it back into the Division 1 hockey team after all, despite panicking about how badly I had trialled on the first day; I must have made up in round two.

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.

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