Day Three

Right now I'm listening to Vampire Weekend's new album 'Contra' - I love it, I think it's awesome, and I really want to go to their live show when they come to Auckland in April. It will probably be around $50-60... let's see if I can afford that. Josie, Eva, you should come with me. WOULDN’T EVER GAG YOU WITH A SPOON, MY ONLY TRUE LOVE.

So far the classes I most enjoy are media and English. Ideology, hegemony, discourse – these are the buzzwords in media at the moment. And in English we’re looking at this poem, which I really like:

On the Subway, by Sharon Olds

The boy and I face each other.
His feet are huge, in black sneakers
laced with white in a complex pattern like a
set of intentional scars. We are stuck on
opposite sides of the car, a couple of
molecules stuck in a rod of light
rapidly moving through darkness. He has the
casual cold look of a mugger,
alert under hooded lids. He is wearing
red, like the inside of the body
exposed. I am wearing dark fur, the
whole skin of an animal taken and
used. I look at his raw face,
he looks at my fur coat, and I don't
know if I am in his power-
he could take my coat so easily, my
briefcase, my life-
or if he is in my power, the way I am
living off his life, eating the steak
he does not eat, as if I am taking
the food from his mouth. And he is black
and I am white, and without meaning or
trying to I must profit from his darkness,
the way he absorbs the murderous beams of the
nation's heart, as black cotton
absorbs the heat of the sun and holds it. There is
no way to know how easy this
white skin makes my life, this
life he could take so easily and
break across his knee like a stick the way
his own back is being broken, the
rob of his soul that at birth was dark and
fluid and rich as the heart of a seedling
ready to thrust up into any available light.

I was thinking about how you simply cannot extract yourself from your context - your birthplace, your family, your ancestors, and what that will lead people to assume about you. In the poem, the woman's inherent guilt is a perfect example of this: she has never directly interacted with this man nor had any influence over his life, yet she inherits the "sins of her fathers" and feels a moral obligation to the people that previous generations have exploited and abused. It's so interesting, and something to consider - that while you can try to understand and to learn about other people, you can never move from your own standpoint. You are rooted to the conditions that have shaped you.

So my job starts tomorrow, I’m getting trained up on how to smile and use the till by Michelle Lim, who used to go to our school. I’ll be working five hours a week so far, Wednesdays and Thursdays... but I have to swap with Jennecca, Mondays for the Thursdays, since my university lecture is supposed to be on that Tuesdays and Thursdays. I didn’t think of that earlier. Facepalm.

I'd better go and sleep, things are full-on already and I was really feeling it today.