In other news...

Levi Bryan Quick was born on September 9, weighing in at 10 pounds 9 ounces, or 4.8kg.  He's beautiful, funny, and I am so in love.  It's not easy, this whole motherhood thing, but it is definitely worth it.

It makes me think constantly about the world I have brought him into.  How bad it might get.  How to try to make it a better place.  How to lead by example. How to stop cursing the dog out in front of him.

I love you, little man.

Is this thing on?

So it's been almost a year since I last posted to this blog.  Once I got pregnant, it was almost all I thought about.  The growing life inside me.  My excitement, fears and discomfort. I didn't want this blog to be all about that.  And it appeared I had nothing else to say.  I still don't know I have anything to say but now I have fewer people to say it to.

Now that I'm a stay-at-home mum, my existence has become even more insular.  I don't really have any friends with kids.  I'm trying but I struggle with the whole coffee group mummy thing.  So far I haven't met anyone I would actually like to hang out with. Initially I was quite active on Facebook after my son was born; my cousins in particular were very keen for photos and details.  But then I started feeling like I was spamming my other friends.  I actually didn't post that many photos but I would post often. Then I really started to resent Facebook.  For making me feel like a nuisance.  For making me feel like I was shouting across a large room.  For making me listen to other people shouting about shit I didn't want to fucking hear about.  The number of people I was hiding from my newsfeed grew.  I began to really look forward to my New Years Day cull.  I even accepted friend requests that I normally would've rejected; just to bloat the beast I was going to gut.

But the final straw was when I tried to fundraise for AMI Round The Bays. I didn't go with the default official charity partner but chose one that dealt with child abuse / neglect.  Something that has been close to my heart for some time but more so now than ever.  I got quite excited at the prospect of using online social networking to raise money to help the vulnerable children in this country.  Or at least to do my tiny part.  I thought that the combination of the seemingly constant horror stories in the media and the humour of my fundraising page was going to ensure success.  I wasn't asking for much.  $10 for a great cause.  And yet not a single donation through Facebook or Twitter.  No comments, no likes, no nothing.  Yet if I made a bitchy comment or posted a humorous article, I got plenty of positive feedback.  So instead of a cull, at the beginning of this year I quit Facebook.  I've come pretty close to quitting Twitter too.  Instead I only use it for when I have something I just have to say.  Social networking has tremendous capacity to bring about change and awareness.  But I guess that's true of a lot of mediums and yet we mostly choose to embrace the inane, the glib, the trite, the meaningless.  Fundraising should have been a breeze.  I was really hurt that not one person responded.

So now I have no friends.  I didn't have many friends before, really.  But now I have cut everybody loose.  There are people out there who love/like me who aren't related to me.  But now they have to reach out and contact me.  One on one.  Or wait for me to contact them.  And we've all become such lazy friends.  But I feel happier without the safety net of Facebook. Quite a few of my FB friends don't have my email address or mobile number.  I have probably lost contact with them forever.  We'll see.

Waiting Expectantly..

We are going to have a baby.  And now that we're going to have a baby, we need a car with a backseat.  Preferably a station wagon with a boot for the dog can sit in, so that she doesn't lick the baby's face as it is held captive in its specially designed and designated seat.  Our parents assure us that we need to buy a house, especially as the one we rent has been deemed not appropriate.  I need new clothes as I pretty much wear the same outfit, outside of work, day in and day out.  I did recently buy 3 new dresses for work as my suits were cutting my swelling body in half (my mother put money into my account for my birthday for that specific purpose) & now I just wear these in rotation; each one for 5 days straight. I almost always feel I need a haircut.  I almost always feel I need some beauty treatment or another. I need to exercise the dog more though I would really like to be able to afford to send her back to daycare so that someone else can do it.  I need to learn how to drive.  I need to learn how to cook or to be motivated to cook.  I need to get out of debt so that we can get a mortgage.  (With our parents' help, of course.)

I am not unhappy.  Far from it.  This baby was planned & we are really looking forward to meeting it in another 6 months or so.  I was not unhappy before that.  But I live in a constant state of not being enough.  Of not having enough.  Of feeling so frumpy.  Of being on hold.  Of waiting for my life to get on track.  Of waiting to not be a financial burden to my husband. I am not standing still or moving backwards but progress is sometimes so slow as to not be discernible to the human eye. At least in this one way, I am indispensable. And quite a number of people are currently quite pleased with me.  For a change.

Yeah, so anyway...

When I first visited the States, I judged American girls quite harshly because so many of them seemed so incredibly simple and shallow.  But after awhile, I realised that most American guys seemed quite uninterested in what came out of my mouth anyway.  Any deviation from the usual mating script was met by a blank stare, followed by an announcement that he was going to get another drink or use the bathroom & then a cloud of dust would appear where he had just been standing.  I came to see why girls might not see the value in developing a part of their anatomy that the opposite sex showed little interest in.

While it did seem to me that the situation was particularly dire Stateside, the differences were probably more attributable to my going there straight from university, to my living in a ski-town, and to American snowboarders being way more like jocks than Kiwi ones tend to be.  And to be fair, I remember finding many conversations with my NZ tertiary-educated peers quite wanting; wondering how people could do so much talking without ever really saying anything at all.

I guess it could all be blamed on youth, alcohol and sexual urges except that explanation just doesn't sit well with me.  I'm not saying I think that none of those factors had any influence.  Just that I find, across the board, a lot of people seem to switch their brain off as soon as they open their mouths; have the most slippery grasp of reason and logic; and are most uncomfortable if you try to challenge or discuss all but the most basic concepts in any detail at all.

And I don't flatter myself at all when it comes to my intelligence.  Once upon a time, I was a very bright kid but ultimately I placed way too much importance in my natural ability & never really applied myself, preferring to see how well I could do with the bare minimum of effort.  Combined with the most feeble memory and retention of actual facts, in particular statistics, I turned out to be quite the underachiever.  While I have not consciously ripped off anyone's ideas for this blog, I'm under no illusion that many, if not all, of the conclusions I have come to, have not been arrived at before.

Which is why it astounds me again and again how easily I am disappointed. How dull and unimaginative people seem happy to be.  How few of the constructs and paradigms, that make up their reality, they are willing to explore.  How content they are to be spoon-fed.  And of the ones happy to challenge, they often seem unable to differentiate between being critical and being cynical; taking the lazy path of refusing to believe in anything at all; casually waving off any suggestion, that something might be worth standing for, with some vague anecdote about how they heard an unsubstantiated rumour that it's all bullshit anyway.

Godzone.

By now, some of you may be aware that I have another blog that features NZ-made clothing labels (and hopefully soon, stores that sell mostly NZ-made clothing labels).  So it can be correctly surmised that I am fairly patriotic.  And I do love this country & started the blog, in part, because of concerns about employment, small businesses, and how community and economy affect each other.

I think we have a very special deal in this little country of ours.  It could use a lot of work though & we could stand to be a bit more protective and appreciative of it.  I think this country lends itself to more boutique-style enterprises, as far as customer demand is concerned, but unfortunately the government seems uninterested in helping small business.

But mine is not an unquestioning, wholesale love.  Growing up all over, I considered myself a citizen of the world.  Because I moved around so much & because my mother's Indonesian, it felt weird to align myself so completely to one country.  Of course, it didn't help that I was never really interested in sport.  It is easier to critique something from the outside, and patriotism seemed to me to be rife with faulty thinking and dangerous antagonism.  (After all, wars have been fought over nothing less / more.)  What I do think is important is a sense of community, of valuing each other.  Appreciating what we've got.  And preserving it for future generations.

There seems to be a fair amount of capitalising on national pride and nostalgia at the moment in NZ.  Sometimes I get an uneasy feeling that I am just being manipulated.  Like "Kiwiana" is being used like some kind of artificial flavouring in ads to sell us to us; or in movies and TV shows to tug on our heartstrings & as some kind of substitute for actual substance.

There are numerous T-shirts and hoodies with strong patriotic messages, cashing in on warm fuzzies, that are in fact made by "our friends" in China.  (Most of the NZ Music Month gear is not NZ-made; though to be fair, they are trying to do more than sell clothing.)  Like the truly obnoxious T-shirt emblazoned with the image of NZ & the words BORN HERE, that was of course not made here.

I wasn't born or made here.  But I live here.  And I love here.  I know how special it is.  And I don't need the message constantly fed to me.  Especially by those happy to sell NZ out.

On Our Own.

It used to be that we were told what to think and how to behave by religion, the class system and social etiquette, but these are all struggling to stay relevant and respected.  We can pick and choose traditions now and create our own.  There is a much greater sense of individual freedom, as illusory as it may be.  The majority still rules but what it agrees on, or decrees, is in constant flux and can be more easily ignored or circumvented.  We often don't even know our neighbours.  And can pick and choose our own social networks.  We still have the law to guide us (which is slower to change & the enforcement of which tends to uphold the prevailing socioeconomic hierarchy) but the emphasis has maybe moved, from what we should and shouldn't do, to what we can get away with.

So are we thinking for ourselves now?  About what we want our lives to mean?  About the world we live in?  How we are all connected?  Or have we just stopped thinking about anything but ourselves?  Religion cannot be replaced by science for a number of reasons.  For one, the message needs to be repetitive and completely self-assured.  Science needs to always be happy to be proven wrong & to let new light shine on old subject matter.  Also, by its very nature, it is not as accessible to the masses as religion.  Its focus and scope is often too small or too infinitely large to give us any answers we require in our daily life.  And it tells us time and time again how inconsequential we are.

Might we turn instead then to the arts to fill the void?  (The very thing our education system tends to place very little value on.)  The arts tell us that what our hearts and minds contemplate does matter.  That, whether or not it continues to exist after our bodies expire, in this life, our soul does exist.  Our expressions of love, anger, sorrow, humour and fear live on after us in these mediums.  Which is why it is so important to tell your truth & not temper it in the name of commercial viability.  Art and entertainment have always had a tenuous relationship; and while it may not be possible to accurately gauge whether the balance has shifted, it is always safe to say that we could certainly do with less processed junk food.  The arts remind us, rather importantly, there is no one reality; that viewpoints are just that; and of our interconnectedness and the commonalities of the human experience.

I have read countless online remarks about how undeserving an artist (whether it be an actor or a couture designer) is of reverence or appreciation, even when they have just recently died, because they did not discover a cure for cancer, etc.  How infinitely more noble it is to be a scientist.  Despite the fact that many scientists are merely whores of capitalism, pushing the frontiers of production and exploitation, rather than healing the world's woes.  Much of what ails us has been caused by us.  And the cruelest blows can be those inflicted by the loss of love, of kindness, of hope.  Anyone who seeks to restore these and celebrate beauty and joy is worthy of our esteem.  Anyone who strives to remind us to take our blinkers off, and to think of others, is deserving of our respect.

I believe there is no big plan, no invisible puppeteer.  Bad things happen to good people & good to bad.  Everything can be taken away from you in an instant.  There is no inherent justice in the world, except that which we actively uphold.  It is now that matters.  How you represent yourself.  What you do more than what you say.  What you bring to the equation.  And what you learn from others.  We are heaven and hell on earth.  And there is no-one else to blame.

Resolved.

To...

Stop saying "awesome" until 2012.  I don't say it more than most but struggle to come up with alternatives.  Which is ridiculous in the Age Of The Superlative.

Blog more often.  Sometimes I feel like I am out of opinions but it's more the case that I haven't really been engaging my brain lately.  I need to read more and socialise more.  I will still refuse to stress myself out about this blog.  It will still be something I do only when I am inspired.

Write a web series.  And maybe short stories.  I have problems with story lining.  And getting started.  But not with coming up with a hundred reasons why something won't work or why it'll be crap.  Have to stop fantasising about getting on a writing team for a TV series (and learning on the job) because I'm pretty sure you have to have written something other than a blog to get hooked up with that kind of sweet deal.

Fix my lower back pain with yoga and professional massages.

Halve my debt.  No concrete ideas on how I am going to do this just yet but will work harder on not having gaps in between employment, bringing lunch from home, supermarket shopping more, stuff like that.

Fight for a better world.  A more conscious, meaningful and understanding one.  Not let the bastards get me down.  Fuck the naysayers!  Stand up for the underdogs.  To still be me, just a better version of me.  To make sure that I am spreading love more than anger.  To suffer fools (marginally) more.

That's me for 2010.  Off to Ocean Beach tomorrow where there is no internet or cellphone coverage.  Thank you to those who actually read my blog.  To those who bother to comment, subscribe or are visibly following - it means more to me than I can say.