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Browsing tag: life

  • October 14, 2009

    Either I don’t know how to be social, or I just hate people

    You know what’s really hard? Being in attendance at a party where you don’t know half the people and the others are mostly ones you vaguely know and dislike.

    What happens when you transplant the ultimate bogan party into a city bar? Go on, guess.

    Call me cynical, but I find it extremely hard to humour wasted people who think they’re being deep and meaningful, or females in too-high heels and too-short skirts (IQs usually diminish in relation to how high the hemline is). Oh, and I’m sure I saw a nipple or two flailing about last night. Seriously girls, put it AWAY.

    Also, I obviously need to learn to dance to drum n bass. You may laugh, but it requires a totally different style from the usual poppy/hiphoppy club fare.

    Lastly, I never in my entire life thought I would see a crowd of people dancing – yes, dancing – to Limp Bizkit’s Rollin‘.

  • October 13, 2009

    I want to be the kind of person who…

    Inspired by Saving to Pay Down my Home!

    Basically, I want to be one of those people that has their shit together. I definitely don’t think it’s possible to be supremely successful simultaneously in all aspects of life, but some areas of my life are severely neglected right now.

    I want to eat better. This means meal planning and taking more care grocery shopping, and it’s going to mean increasing the grocery budget. This kind of clashes with…

    I want to travel. Around NZ, and overseas later on. It’s going to mean a lot of saving – starting up a travel fund once I start working – and getting a handle on the budget. Still, money is limited, and I’ll have to prioritise between travel, groceries, eating out, general saving, clothing. Unless T randomly strikes out job-wise, things aren’t going to change drastically once I graduate. We’ll be a little bit better off, with a bit of breathing room, but there definitely won’t be room for luxuries.

    <div xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#" about="http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikebaird/3539161615/"><a rel="cc:attributionURL" href=I want to be greener. I’d like to start up a compost heap again, but it’s way too easy just to dump scraps down the in-sinkerator! Still, it’s better down there than in the rubbish bin.

    I need to get fit. I’m not a gym kind of person, but I think I should aim to go running once a week. I’ll start off slow.

    I want to be better organised. I think I’m going to go back to a physical diary and try that out for a while. Right now everything goes into my phone calendar, but I think my system could be better. And seeing as I’ll be spending all my working hours in front of a computer, I might start using my Gmail calendar too.

    I want to catch up with friends more often. At least once every other week! Will schedule this and try to make arrangements ahead of time, rather than seeing if anyone is free on the spur of the moment.

    What areas do you want to improve on?

    (Photo / Mike Baird)

  • September 27, 2009

    What would you do if money was no object?

    My semester break was a fortnight of absolute bliss. Even though I was sick for a few days, and had to deal with moving, I didn’t work any extra hours for the first time, and spent all my free time bumming around, doing absolutely nothing. I slept, ate, watched TV and movies, ate some more, and slept.

    Normally, I’m the kind of person who likes to keep fairly busy. I feel guilty if I’m not doing something productive. But depending on what happens jobwise, it could be a long time before I get time off to do whatever I want again. Just to be able to relax, and remove myself from the strain of a final-year workload, was AMAZING. It went by far too fast.

    I’ve always thought it would be boring to retire – imagine 20 or 30 years of not working!

    But as much as I like my job, those two weeks really made me think again. If I didn’t NEED to work for the money, would I?

    I’d probably do some parttime or volunteer work for a nonprofit, or an organisation that works with migrants/refugees or the disadvantaged. I’d like to do something rewarding and give back (corny as it sounds).

    For a while, at least, I think I’d eat out once a day or every couple of days. I’m not talking Subway or Starbucks; more like dinner at a restaurant, so I could indulge my love of Thai/Indian/Malaysian cuisine which I don’t know how to make myself.

    I’d go visit family overseas, and travel to Europe, Asia and the States like I’ve always wanted.

    I’d go to a lot of live music events, and pick up my guitar again.

    I might dabble in the stockmarket,and I’d definitely do tons of reading, and maybe start a book review blog – or try to get a gig as a reviewer.

    And maybe, like a few people I’ve come across, I might pack it all in and go live on a boat for a while, or something equally crazy.

    What about you?

  • September 24, 2009

    Who am I?

    The name on my diploma when I graduate in December won’t be my name.

    Well, it will be my legal name – the name I was given by my parents – but it’s not the name I go by.

    don’t relate to it at all and if you were to call it out on the street, I’d say 99 times out of a 100 I wouldn’t actually respond. It just isn’t me.

    All through school I hated this; it was a massive pain whenever we had substitute teachers, as it would be my legal name on the roll rather than my everyday name. At the start of every year I had to correct my teachers in every single class. Anytime I enrolled in something. On my driver’s licence. And now, on my degree.

    You might say “get over it! Just use your name, it’s a beautiful name” as some do. Or tell me to just change it.

    I’m definitely at the stage where I’m starting to consider it. And if I’m going to do it, the sooner the better I suppose, because the older I get the more documentation I’m going to have with my old name on it and the more difficult it will be to organise.

    So why haven’t I pulled the plug? I don’t know. I guess it feels like a bit of a rejection of the name my parents took the time and trouble to choose. The cost – and paperwork involved in doing so is putting me off.  And although realistically, it’s not going to have much of an impact in my day-to-day life, apart from making it a little simpler, it feels like a BIG change.
    Have any of you gone through anything similar?

  • September 22, 2009

    Green shoots

    (God,don’t you just hate that phrase??)

    Despite the gloomy economy and the contraction of the media industry, three people I know were recently offered jobs!

    And a bunch of others on Fairfax scholarships have guaranteed jobs waiting for them anyway, so they are well and truly set.

    Man, it must be relieving to know you have full-time work lined up already.

    Realistically, I need to leverage what I already have going for me – that I already work within a news organisation. So the next step I should be taking is to approach the higherups to see whether there are any journalistic opportunities for me, seeing as I’m about to become fully qualified. (Alternatively, whether I can simply carry on in my current role – which is mainly administrative – but full time.)

    This terrifies me. It’s not a conversation I feel at all prepared for. I’m going to be swotting up on career resources, but if any of you high flyers with REAL jobs and REAL careers have any advice on asking for, and getting what you want, please feel free to throw your two cents in the ring!

  • September 21, 2009

    Sexism – it’s a thin line

    6a00d834516c2469e200e550696bd38833-800wiOne thing that grates on my nerves is when guys insult other guys by calling them feminine. eg, “You run/throw/dress like a girl”. I live with a bunch of, shall we say, “guys’ guys” who pride themselves on their masculinity, so I hear those kinds of things a lot.

    At the same time, I remember in PE class only being able to throw a tennis ball a pathetic seven metres, while the guys were averaging 30+metres. Never mind – I kicked ass  at the beep test, so I made up for my lack of muscl :P.

    Anyway, I accept that generally men are more physically capable than women, but that doesn’t make it okay to use females to deride other guys.

    It makes me recall when my dad scoffed at me for joining the soccer team (an inappropriate sport for girls). Sure, I was terrible at soccer but I got a kick (ha) out of it, and I DON’T like being told what I can and can’t do, especially when it comes from someone who not only thinks girls, but single mothers/sex workers/gays are inferior human beings. *breathes*

    Thoughts? Good old fashioned chauvinism or just the cold hard truth?

  • September 20, 2009

    Blah

    A few things have got me on a bit of a downer. For instance, my mum telling me about how she met up with a friend from PRIMARY school (pretty neat, if you remember anything at all about each other after 40 years?) who now has pancreatic cancer. And she’s all alone – her kids are overseas and her husband’s working in Africa. Imagine going through something like that by yourself.

    I also came to realise that my “big” cousins – who were all 20something when I was a freshfaced wee thing on the cusp of adolescence – are now in their thirties with careers, families and houses. Now, I’M that 20something cousin to the little ones! How, and when, did that happen????

    Finally, one of our flatmates – he was actually crashing with us for the last month or so at the old house. He’s lovely and good-natured and always smiling. But he is not the brightest crayon in the box. a) he has terrible luck and b) he makes stupid choices.

    He’s racked up so much debt. First he was given $10,000 on his 18th birthday, went and bought a ridiculous car, and it was all downhill from there). He had a series of car crashes, clung on to a relationship with a total wackjob, racked up a ton of traffic fines… He’s been out of work all year after an injury, and relies on his single dad for help quite a bit. They all seem really close knit – him, the dad, his little sister, and his nana; he has a framed photo of him and his grandma next to his bed. (His bed, inside the big windowless walk-in closet off the hall…. but at least he’s not paying a full share of rent.)  Yeah, I don’t know why, but it’s really getting to me – it’s such a shame.

  • September 17, 2009

    Out with the old

    I wish my parents were more like other parents and kept all my childhood stuff stored away. Unfortunately, they’ve pawned it all off back on me. And  I just don’t have the space for it. Every time I move, I clean out a little more. I throw out a few things and slooooowly am cutting down on the crap I’ve collected. I’m talking diaries, drawings, the several versions of my “great novel”, old schoolwork, exams, reports, you name it.

    At what point do you get rid of this stuff? I don’t really know. I have a hard time letting go of things.

    But this time I’ve purged more than ever before. I really feel like I’m moving into a new stage of life and I don’t need to hold on to the past. I’m not going to need old reports. I don’t want  to read my angsty journals; they make me cringe, and I wouldn’t want anyone else to read them either. I doubt I’ll ever write a bestselling novel, but if I do, it sure won’t stem from the pages and pages I filled when I was eleven years old!

  • September 15, 2009

    Army wives

    I was very nearly an army girlfriend. Thankfully – and I don’t say that to belittle those who are, it’s just not a lifestyle I want for myself – T chose not to continue down that path.

    But the army still holds a sort of fascination for me. I often come across blogs written by army wives/girlfriends and devour them for reasons I can’t quite articulate. I guess I admire them, while thinking “I’m glad that’s not me”, because I couldn’t handle the separation. I recently dealt with one of the defence spokespeople regarding a feature we were running on NZ troops in Afghanistan. He was pleased to hear about it; he said there were a lot of army families out there who were “hungry for news”.

    I know there are many people out there in relationships with soldiers. I can’t imagine how hard it must be.

    I can’t imagine being apart for months at a time, with only the occasional letter, and having to hear about events through the mainstream media. When T was down in Waiouru, and then Christchurch, I got letters from him basically every week. That wasn’t too bad. Being stationed in a whole other country though… it just wouldn’t be that simple.

    We had been together for about two months before he left. He was in training for six months. I went down to visit him a few times, and it was always so horrendously awkward. I didn’t know how to act around him, having not seen him in so long, and having his family around whom I barely knew.

    I loved his letters. It was like an old fashioned courtship. I still have every single one, including most of the envelopes they came in, because he often wrote little quotes and sayings on the back of them. He also misspelled my name on lots of the early ones, which is sort of endearing. Sort of.

    It sounds stupid to say, but I became extremely emotional during that time. I don’t really know why; maybe it was the isolation, who knows? I never used to cry at soppy ads or tragic movie endings. Now I find myself leaking tears at any remotely sad TV show. And when I watched The Perfect Storm? Or the Green Mile? I bawled for about twenty minutes straight.

    Shortly after he was first approved for unemployment, WINZ tried to send him on a short army course. (I think it’s pretty much what the TF [territorial forces] goes through for their training). He explained he’d already been through much, much more than that. Which of course begs the question – why leave?

    For me, I would’ve said (aside from obviously despising the regimented routine) not wanting to die in the line of duty. For him, it was more like not wanting to be trained and paid to kill others.

    His stint in the army still provides endless conversation fodder for him. And sometimes it is tempting – cheap housing, albeit in the middle of nowhere, generous retirement, steady job.

    But the army life isn’t something I want, and I’m glad I don’t have to be the one to make that choice. I remember how hard it was for T to readjust to civilian life when he came back to Auckland. Not just in terms of the weather, and clothing, but being around people – SO many more people – and living daily life. The stress manifested itself physically, and it was weeks if not months before he got used to the routine and could sleep and go out normally again.

  • September 4, 2009

    Making it in the grownup world

    The best thing I’ve read all week? Guy Kawasaki’s guide to navigating the real world.

    Seeing as I’m about to truly step into that realm, I’m really taking it to heart!

    Some of my favourites:Board-Meeting

    In college, you’re supposed to bring problems to your teachers during office hours, and you share the experience of coming up with a solution. In the real world, you’re supposed to bring solutions to your boss in an email, in the hall, or in a five-minute conversation.

    How to have a conversation – Generally, “What do you do?” unleashes a response that leads to a good conversation (hence the recommendation below). Generally, if you listen more than you talk, you will (ironically) be considered not only a good conversationalist but also smart.

    What about freeloaders? (Those scum of the earth that don’t do anything for the group.) In school you can let them know how you truly feel. You can’t in the real world because bozos have a way of rising to the top of many organizations, and bozos seek revenge. The best solution is to bite your tongue, tolerate them, and try to never have them on the team again, but there’s little upside in criticizing them.

    Incompetent coworkers also drag everyone else down. Unfortunately, you just gotta grit your teeth until they screw up big time or buckle under the pressure and leave of their own accord. And at least it lets everyone else bond in their mutual resentment for said incompetent – they all have something in common!

    First, slowly say your telephone number once at the beginning of your message and again at the end… Second (and this applies to email too), always make progress. Never leave a voicemail or send an email that says, “Call me back, and I’ll tell you what time we can meet.” Just say, “Tuesday, 10:00 am, at your office.”

    I am pretty sure I’ve left messages where I’ve completely (despite my intentions) forgotten to mention crucial info, such as my number. Taking the initiative to progress the conversation is also really important – I tend to defer to others, especially as I usually deal with people busier than me, and bend over backwards to organise arrangements that suit them. Which of course can result in a lot of running around in circles…

    Also, a great post I stumbled across today on Jezebel dealt pretty comprehensively with how to go about finding out what you’re worth and how to negotiate. As you can tell, I’m starting to freak out about graduating!

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