It's About Time, Maybe

One of the most nerve-wracking things one can do is bid on an online auction for something they really want when the auction has about twenty minutes to go. And someone is bound to be waiting, ready to pounce at the very last second. How cruel. The refresh button keeps calling.

So in... seventeen minutes, I may or may not have a new black blazer for $15. The same kind of black blazer that is currently going for around $70-80 in the clothing chain stores. I think my frugality is to be admired.

However, cool thing, we sold our couch and DVD player today, and because I arranged the deal I got 25% - this is partly because my parents pity me and my poorness.

ARGH TWELVE MINUTES.

Anyway, the actual reason I decided to write this blog was to go "omg" because this is the second to last week of term one, and after all the point of this blog is to document where school is at, not my wardrobe or my funds. Sooo, yeah it's okay. I have a French internal next week, on Wednesday and Thursday (evil, I know, in the last week, but it's better than the first week back). And also four art assignments on the go, as I'm taking painting AND design, so I get a double dose of research/drawing assignments. But those are actually really interesting, I love love love contemporary urban art. Believe it or not, there's so much more to it than graffiti. Let me point you to the wonderful Dan Baldwin, whose work I have (attempted) to emulate as part of the process of "breaking down and understanding the works of an artist model" - I'll post my experiment paintings on my art Tumblr later.

SEVEN SEVEN SEVEN MINUTES.

NOW FIVE.

Okay, I'm going to keep this blog post open until I know whether I've won or not.

*goes off and does other things*

*i.e. clicking refresh fanatically*

Oh my gosh. Two minutes. C'est insupportable.

SOME TOSSER JUST PLACED A BID. NOW THE AUCTION EXTENDS.

48 seconds can't beear itttttt

I WON I WON I WON I WON I WON.

Thank you for living through this with me.

What About Thy Neighbour?

You've heard the story
You know how it goes
Once upon a garden
We were lovers with no clothes

Fresh from the soil
We were beautiful and true
In control of our emotions
'Til we ate the poison fruit

And now it's hard to be
Hard to be
Hard to be a decent human being.

- David Bazan, 'Hard To Be'

On my street, living over the road from me, there are two families. On the right, at number 25, are the Parkers -- Mr and Mrs Parker, and their four sons. They're a white, middle-class, christian family, involved in the YWAM (Youth With A Mission) organisation down the road. We have lived opposite them for about ten years.

The house on the left, number 27, is home to a large family of Afghani refugees. They are a muslim family, not at all wealthy, and their children go to the local school. At one stage, there were about fourteen people living in the average-sized suburban house. They have lived there for about five years.

A couple of years ago, when my parents decided to put down paving stones beside the house, the Afghani boys and their father were over like a flash. They brought their slightly uncertain smiles and their hardworking generosity, and within an hour or so, the job was done.

In the evening, the middle daughter, Fatimeh, brought over warm, Afghani-style flatbread, with a smile and her long winter coat and her hand-me-down ensemble of clothes in the hot evening sun. It was not the first nor the last time that they would bring over food, or gifts from father's trips back home.

Countless small kindnesses have passed between our two families over the past years. We sponsored Fatimeh to go to a better intermediate school -- she fed and visited our cat religiously and collected the mail and watered the plants when we went on holiday. They borrowed our lawnmower, we gave them our childhood bicycles. And all the while, the Parkers went about their lives, busy with their churches or their jobs or whatever they did, the boys in the driveway, having loud and juvenile shouting matches with their father while packing the car to go to their christian music festivals.

And then my mum's illness began to get worse, and my dad began to have to transfer her from the car to the chair each morning and evening, and vice versa -- a change that was plain for anyone to see, especially those living in perfect line of sight. And if ever the Afghanis were on their driveway in the afternoons, from time to time, one of them would be sure to make the crossing over the road, offering forth their broken English. "Not good, not good," they would say, gesturing at Mum concernedly -- "We very angry for you."

But the Parkers, all throughout the past five years of Mum's deterioration, have never said a word. Barely a hello, let alone any kind of expression of concern or neighbourly interest. While they busily go about their church lives, evangelising and enabling and supporting missionaries off all around the world, it seems that they have forgotten the most basic christian ideal. Loving thy neighbour.

It's not as if it's difficult. No-one can offer a cure for suffering, nor try to explain it away. There is no justifying what my family is facing -- three terminal illnesses. People have said to Mum, "It's not God's will that you're this way." That just makes me angry. It is a redundant platitude. When you are suffering, and it is something beyond your control, you don't need people to tell you that it's all some cosmic mistake. How are we ever going to know why things happen the way they do? The act of simply noticing, acknowledging, and expressing regret is enough.

We're united by our collective ignorance, our common suffering. And when you strip it away, all you can do is love your god, and love people. I don't know about the rest. Maybe, today, I don't really want to.

A Day In The Life

Year 13 camp was the best camp I've ever been on in my liiiife, and that's a lot of camps, including various Easter camps, Soul Survivor, Parachute (okay maybe not Parachute '08, that was actually freakin' amazing) and of course heaps of school camps over the years. At around 9am on Monday the 1st of March, 180 of us went to Half Moon Bay on the bus. When we arrived we discovered that our ferry was having engine problems, and that we would have to wait two hours for the Waiheke ferry to arrive. So we all hung around the rich peoples' lawns and looked out over the harbour, and put on sunscreen and ate. Finally we were able to board the ferry and about half an hour later we had arrived on Motutapu Island, which is really not that far away, but the fact that it's an island somehow lends it a sense of isolation and awesomeness.

So we loaded our luggage onto a truck, and then began a six kilometre walk on a gravel track that went up and down through the dry sunny hills. (We thought we had it rough, but on our returning walk before we went home, we passed Rangitoto College, with ALL of their luggage on their backs. Thank you, Roskill, for having mercy on us.)

When we finally got to the camp, an ex-military camp nestled down by one of the beaches, the head instructor or overseer (who calls himself Troll, which is a thoroughly appropriate name) proceeded to give us a sort of warning/introduction lecture regarding matters such as sun protection. Away from the smog of the city, the hole in the ozone is a bigger problem, and temperatures go into the 30s. Troll claimed to have spent time dealing to girls with blisters on their shoulders the size of his fist, thus it is a camp rule that no one is permitted to go around during daytime with exposed shoulders. The punishment for that offence as well as the usual alcohol/drugs ban was an even longer 10.5km walk, with luggage, in the hot sun, alone, to the ferry. Funnily enough, people were really well-behaved at this camp.

So then we just launched straight into activities - our first one was the Survivor Challenge, which was a kind of assault course with two forts on either side, and you challenge another team. One of the obstacles is a cargo net that you have to crawl under, and I sacrificed comfort for technique, resulting in bleeding knees within the first half hour of our activity. I must admit I actually felt pretty ruthless. =p

And then we did Waka Ama, which is a kind of long canoe that fits eight people, and you all paddle, and it has an arm out to the left which stabilises it. We had to race the other team and we won, because Mr. Cornes, who was the teacher on our boat, has actually represented New Zealand in that very sport. Strange what you learn.

I'll just go through and list the other activities and give a short description.

Art - screenprinting t-shirts with designs to remind us of our camp.

Snorkelling - self-explanatory. We went down to a part of the beach called Stingray Alley but I saw no stingrays. Snorkelling out at Goat Island is far better... all we saw was a little group of snapper.

Kayaking - awesome fun. Paddled out to a little rocky island then played some games in the water. This was when the moment with Swanwick happened - if you've heard about the cicada incident, this is where it was at.

Sailing - omg. So fun and hilarious yet so frustrating. I would really really like to try it again with better instructions. MR. HORNE.

High ropes - let's not talk about this one. I climbed to the top of the centipede which is a sort of hanging pole with staples and footholds in it, and then I also climbed to the top of the wooden pole that connects up to the high beam. But there was no way I was walking over the top.

SEAL challenge - as in Navy Seals. Lol. A kayak was placed on the sand, we had to dig a hole underneath it to fit the entire group underneath the kayak and out the other side, without talking, without tools, and without touching the kayak. Every time someone slipped up, we had to run down to the water and do whatever the sadistic instructor requested - for example, lying down in the shallows (which were rocky, and covered in pointy razor-sharp oyster shells) and rolling three times to the left, three to the right... sit-ups, singing the national anthem... whole group going underwater... Then once we'd all climbed through we had to fill the hole under the kayak with water and all of us had to go through the water underneath. After all that, we had to play a game transporting pieces of a puzzle down a field without talking and without moving with the pieces. Then we had to carry our kayak through the swamp. Yes, so much fun.

Archery - again, it's obvious.

Confidence Course - destroys your confidence.

Beach Games - a failure of an activity. One game was "frisbee golf" in the grassy hills. Most of the time, me and Nic and Jono and Nandita were just looking for our damned frisbees. Then we played Invaders on the beach, which sort of petered out.

Pump - we had this last, on the last day. Hahaaaaa omg. The idea is light weights, loads of reps. We were flattened after that.

Raft-building - ours floated! We won.

Annnnd that's it I think. Ah wow. It was pretty amazing really. And all the good times at mealtimes when we sat out on the deck and just talked and joked, and then the skit night was great. I was relieved when it came to an end but also sad. It's one of the highlights of the year and now it's gone.

Except now I think I'm thoroughly at peace with the idea of leaving school. It has become tired - the routine is old and repetitive and nothing is new. That's not to say at all that I'm not going to absolutely make the most of this year - just that I will not feel a desire to stay at school.

In terms of changes to my future plans, I have been talking with my family and I think things will go as follows:

In December this year and January/February of next year I will work my butt off and earn lotsa money. Then in March I will go to Auckland Uni and start a conjoint BA/BfA degree. Then in June when the first semester ends, I will go to England as I have planned to for a long time, and spend a couple of months there - spending some time in Bristol and also having the Europe experience - visiting my exchange student friends whom I won't have seen for two years, and some family around France and Switzerland. It's nowhere near as long as I planned to go for, but with recent developments in my family, I know that there is all the time in the world for me to travel and "follow my dreams", whereas at this stage in my life I need to be here with/for my family as much as possible. After I come back I will work for the remainder of the year and into 2012, then resume my degree where I left off. Aaaaahh it's all so exciting and confusing and I really hope it all works out. I always knew my plans would have to change, thank God I'm such a flexible person. It has not yet put me into a tailspin. I think I'm okay with it all.

Does anyone even read this blog? Hahaha.