Filed under: Perspective
Three girls walk into a bar on Ponsonby Road. The punchline? The comedy show started several hours ago. Its current audience are backed against the walls. The room is small. There is nowhere to hide. I lean against the bar without ordering. Something tells me I could probably do with a drink.
I needed a drink.
Standup comedy is a tricky beast. Obviously people order drinks because they’re at a bar with the comics. That’s the economy. That’s the beauty of it.
I didn’t order a drink.
People are talking, y’know. You have to listen. There’s a short break between comics. If you get up to get a drink, you might get noticed, and that’s the problem with this formula. We’re not the show, us bystanders. We didn’t put ourselves forward as hilarious or anything other than polite witnesses. For some reason, comedians can see this as a contract. One must laugh, outrageously, or earn their displeasure.
Now, us girls know that comedy, in spite of its universal appeal, is a man’s game. There are men everywhere in comedy. Women are few and far between. We smiled politely through the first act. Obviously that guy had issues with his girlfriend. We smiled through the next act. And the next. For fucks sake! Is it too much to ask for a comedian who isn’t a relationship fuck up and can put together a sentence without fucking swearing?
Nope. It isn’t.
At this stage I realise the comedians are pitted against the audience. They’re angry. This crowd is not delivering what they require. That makes the crowd the enemy.
I can understand, and in fact enjoy, a handful of misogynistic jokes, but the problem with Snatch last night was that the people presenting all had the same sort of similar jokes, that were all misogynistic, and it just got downright uncomfortable after a while. The final nail in the coffin was some guy who had an act that was good enough for Vegas. Only problem was, he came across as a bit of a bully. I’d seen him before, this guy. He wasn’t as much of an arsehole when I last saw him, and he was much more amusing. Turns out hanging with the boys doing comedy just makes you obnoxious, I guess.
On their own merits, these guys were amusing, but here’s where I don’t know what to think- humour can often disadvantage or exploit people and situations in a way that makes the rest of us complicit in bullying, in minimalising and abusing others. I wanted to laugh, but came away wishing I could rinse my conscience clean…
Filed under: Personal
New Year’s eve. I woke up, sick, exhausted, but otherwise okay, and heard this:
“Well at her age, and she’s never been married…”
My boyfriend’s best mate, dissing me. Nice.
He went on to say a few other mean things, at which point I wandered out into the lounge and announced to the boyfriend that I was going home, due to lack of sleep. I had the decency to quietly mention to him that I’d heard his conversation in full- I mean, he had a chance to perhaps come up with a decent explanation for their behaviour. Without any remorse or sorrow expressed from the boyfriend, I got in my car and drove home. I called him later.
“That’s not what I heard,” he said, when I repeated verbatim what his friend had said. An hour later, I received a text apologising if I’d been offended by his friend. IF.
I’m not angry. I am offended. I’m wary of men making judgments about women that they don’t ever have to apply to themselves. The same person insulting me is unmarried and my age. Some people younger than me are divorced already. Some people older than me have only just got married. Who was this guy to judge?
Marriage is not the cornerstone of my life, nor is it the absolute pinnacle of life for my friends who are married. It’s part of them, it’s part of their journey, but it doesn’t give me a reason to respect or disrespect them. I don’t get to judge people on the basis of their relationship status.
So I’m not married. So what? I’ve made decisions to be in or out of relationships, I’ve learned from my mistakes, and I wouldn’t have the gall to make that kind of statement about anyone- because I know, and understand, that the expectations we hold dear are often our kryptonite. They are our weaknesses, our failures, and are eventually left discarded in the past.
I can’t change what was said. I can certainly dismiss it as gossip, as petty, and as disrespectful. I can also give myself permission to walk away with my head held high. Screw it. I’m only gonna live once. If I can’t please everybody, at least I can please myself.
And weddings? And anniversaries? And New Year’s? It’s a date. It’s just a date on a calendar, a ritual, another passing of time, another ceremony. Do what you like. There’s no pressure. Conformity be damned. Live it the best way you know how. Just know that your best is good enough.
Filed under: Perspective
I live in a polarised society. We see the world in digital and analogue segments, news bytes, fragments of opinions, and opinions based on perspectives that hinge on fragments of segments of bytes. We hear what we want to hear, see what we want to see, and know what we want to know.
In today’s world, it would be just as easy to see the world as flat as it was in the bad old days. The only difference is, the information we have available is footage, evidence and opinion that could just as easily be misleading or faked. Information is still power. Power is still abused.
I want to live on the grey line.
It’s not that I don’t want absolutes. I’m a perfectionist. I want absolute control, I want absolute truth, I want to know and understand that what is known is verifiable.
I want to live on the grey line and feel calm.
The grey line, for me, is that moment of clarity when I can see more than one perspective, or more than two. The grey line is where I can see that the decisions I make are not dependent solely on what other people think, or on what society generally expects, or a general rule or book of rules that I apply in any particular situation. It’s where I see that right and wrong are subjective, and I breathe, and I think through what could or could not be, and I know that all decisions have elements of truth and justice and freedom in them, but some of those elements are only evident to me, and other elements are for society, or small sections of people.
It’s not that I don’t think there is such a thing as right or wrong.
I have learned that there are minority and majority stories- that there are narratives that are known to society because they are propagated by the status quo. I know that counter to these narratives are ideas from minorities who have to be identified simply because they are not in the majority. This is a paradigm that I have accepted- I am sure there are philosophies that I will come across that change and modify this perspective. However, in the grey line, in that blurred distinction where I come to realise that my opinion is not entirely truth itself, I find peace. I find an awareness of life as it really is.
Life is not pro-life or pro-choice, pro-Maori or pro-separatist, or pro- or anti- anything. Life just is. It’s not just grey, or black, or white. It’s a spectrum, a spectacle, it’s whatever you can see at the time and more than that.
I want to stand on the grey line and see all the colours of life, and know that it’s going to be just fine. I want to stand there and lie there, and sit there, and dance there, and know that however I do it, there is clarity and peace and I will grow from it- and if I am lucky, others will benefit.
The grey line. Not the fence, not an opportunity to avoid thought or abstain from decisions, but where that thought and decision is made with awareness and integrity.
Filed under: Perspective
I’ve been an angry woman. Stressed, tired, over caffeinated and overwhelmed, I make it to the holidays feeling like I’ve been dragged through a minefield in my underwear. I have massive bags under my eyes. I can’t sleep properly. I spend my first day of the holidays cleaning my room and sitting in the bath with a face mask and a glass of wine and a particularly gruesome book about women who dismembered a murdered husband.
I felt better when I meditated.
I started meditating in January. I’d decided my angry, stress-ridden ways were to be no longer. Frankly, I was tired of being angry and inflexible and frustrated. Relieved that meditation seemed to have a positive effect, I went every Monday and Wednesday to the Sri Chinmoy centre in K Road and tried to stay awake while the soothing incense wafted over me, and the calming music sent me to sleep.
After a month or so, you were asked if you wanted to continue, so I did. So what if they said you couldn’t eat meat? Most of the time, I didn’t. Wearing a sari? Well, they said I didn’t have to if I didn’t want to. Would I mind missing out on a relationship when I wasn’t already in one? And how about buying this CD about creative visualisation while you’re at it?
All groups have their rules. I would ask questions about why people didn’t wear makeup. We all know I don’t wear makeup, so it’s ironic that I should be asking, but when everyone wears their hair in a ponytail pulled back from their face, I start to wonder if we all can’t look a little different. I ask what other rules or secrets there are. I’m told none- but there are obviously practices and ideas that aren’t taught to people in the general courses. I can tell. They look annoyed when I mention the internet. They look annoyed when I mention dancing. When we go out for a walk, and people meditate publicly, I wonder why we can’t just wear long robes like the Pharisees. When they keep promising a meditation session in the back room, and never deliver, and keep changing times and days, and discourage people from even having relationships at all, even when they’re already in them, I tend to think that I’ll have a quick look in the back and then be on my way.
And that is what I did.
And it made me very, very angry. The back room, for all its vaunted powers, is still just a room. The meditation practices are okay, but you can get more out of a meditation book if you know what sort to look for. The problem is, I don’t believe Sri Chinmoy is ‘the last Avatar’, a holy man, or even a very good leader. From what I’ve seen on the internet, he’s a charlatan, insisting people meditate on his picture as if he were the source of all peace, and taking advantage of followers financially and yes, sexually.
You won’t find information freely available about what he did. Let’s just say I found it because things didn’t add up. I also felt motivated to find out why the centre was organised in a fashion that seemed to make men superior to women – I couldn’t get used to men ignoring me when any ordinary person would be civil, I didn’t see why they were getting preferential treatment, or why we were being separated by gender to begin with- it all seemed childish and irrelevant. Surely meditation was a way of releasing stress, but in the centre it seemed to be an excuse to be intolerant, selfish, rude and patronising.
There are nice people who meditate, and there are nice people at the Sri Chinmoy centre. There is also an undercurrent of secrecy and an unwillingness to openly examine assumptions and beliefs.
I can now meditate a little to get some peace, but I still initially feel a deep sense of anger at the way people who were hurt by Sri Chinmoy were treated. I still initially think of what a terrible breach of trust he committed, and of how so many people are willing to overlook that for their own spiritual advancement. It worries me that the Sri Chinmoy centre continues to recruit members when it has an agenda that is more strict and inflexible than the Catholic Church.
If I do find a path to meditation that doesn’t involved being swept up in some cultish, unbalanced lifestyle I shall be sure to let you know. Meditation itself is a valuable tool. Just check who is teaching you and what their motivation is. I didn’t get to the bottom of what I was dealing with- nor would I want to. I don’t want a demi-g0d, their believers and messed up spiritual half truths giving me an approximation of ‘nice’.
I want peace.
Deep breath… I am in my thirties. There, I said it. Not the prime of my youth, the preferred consumer of pretty much anything worth selling, not the advertised ideal woman, not even married or with kids- I’ve made it well into my thirties, and, well, I’m actually pretty happy with it…
I’m happy with it, until I come up against my age in some other context, and then I realise that youth remains one of those factors that people inexplicably hold as valued when it is fleeting, out of our control, and in a lot of cases irrelevant. If you’re young, are you stupid? Not necessarily. If you’re young, can you make your own decisions? Even children have to make their own choices where they have the opportunity or need. If you’re young, are you less important than someone older? No, not in the least. Turn the tables for a minute. How do we treat the elderly?
I say this because the older generation are often invisible, ill treated, delivered service with contempt. They were once like us, heading out to parties, having a few drinks, maybe like me they made idiots of themselves on the dance floor- maybe, like me, they still do. What is it with us, the adults, the children and the youth of this society, that we forget the humanity of these older citizens so easily? When did we start to value people solely on their youth, when youth itself is merely the early stages of acquiring experience?
As a woman in my thirties I’ve had to deal with all sorts of indecent suggestions from people ‘looking out for me’. I should harvest my eggs, because apparently I need to have children. I should probably look at having a kid on my own, apparently. I’m a ‘free spirit’, whatever that means, because I’m not married with a family. Either that, or I’m a ‘cougar’. I’m a ‘shark’. A ‘predator’. That guy is my ‘toy boy’. God, it gets awfully boring sometimes…
In truth, it’s never been interesting. This concept that we only matter in terms of stereotypes has never really been a palatable ideology for me. I couldn’t care less about age when I’m talking to someone- I genuinely want to know who that person is, for the moment, or what they think, or perhaps I’m offering them a hand or just entertaining myself being part of a wider community instead of waxing lyrical while I pick at my navel lint. Just because I happen to be in a particular age bracket, does not mean I am suddenly desperate, pathetic or needy. I’m fairly certain I can call up those personality traits no matter what my age, so why should my status as a mature adult woman suddenly make it easier for strangers to apply those labels to me?
I would happily accept my status as a second rate citizen, if only it were true. I’m so much happier now than I was in my twenties. I contribute more, I am successful, I’m kinder and a lot more tolerant and actually, I do more of what I want to without hurting others, and often I’m even responsible. I look back on my youth, and I don’t miss it at all. But mainly, I look back on it and realise that I still carry it with me, and that actually, that grey haired man peering out behind the steering wheel, travelling at 30 in peak hour is carrying it with them too. We all do.
I think we value youth because we value our memories. But let’s not hold it any tighter than we hold our experience, our wisdom and the lessons we’ve learned that pulled us through to where we are now. I’m sure many of us have lost people on the way who now only remain in a picture frame captured in their youth. Let’s appreciate that age is valuable, if only to acknowledge that the alternative is death, and that’s a hell of a lot harder to adjust to.
Filed under: Personal
Memories of missionaries
Warriors
The first ships
The fearsome
The fearless
Wearing a crown of fury in anticipation-
Woven into ceremony and speeches:
Ribbon god
Sit on the throne
Your money necklace
Resplendent ritual
Rich in stories.
Pineapple juice drips
White cotton table-cloth
Coconut cream fish
Green blue red flashes of lavalava
Pig
Embroidered tuvaevae baskets
Chicken
The slap of feet on woven mat
Tastes entwined on the tongue
Coconut oil arms slapped with dollar bills
Tapa cloths circle
The curved path of dancers
On the rock
They, too, do this
Snip off boyhood
Sharing out your youth
In braided bits.
Filed under: Poetry
She rides taxis for free
through government subsidy
talks to strangers when
She is supposed to
sleeps uneasily
Has forgotten about another girl’s
scandalous one night stand because
Earth’s signature spin delivered her
Spiralling through the night half cut
To the
“It’s how we’re drinking” scene
She receives the sympathy of strangers
Drinks copious cups of tea
Dreams uneasily
Carries memories around in sound bitten press statements
is
absent from the archival image of a station wagon and its makeshift awning
her form filleted in a
knife exhibited
her anonymous contribution
an admonition
from foreign shores as to the
inappropriate apparition of
serious crime in
other people’s holidays -
long hair trailing forlornly through the aperture of a hiker’s tent ten years earlier notwithstanding
It’s obviously how we’re camping
It’s how she’s writing
long legged words striding out in bare skin
It’s
how she’s reading
Head bowed as if her mouth works in silent prayer asking for it
It’s
how she’s too young and too stupid and her skirt is too short
Or she’s old enough to know better
She’s simply not helping herself or she’s walking home alone
When obviously she shouldn’t
She’s just a crazy cat woman gone missing
Some poor old lady attacked in her own home
Some saintly teacher screaming in an isolated rural classroom
Some burka figure in yet another war zone
Or perhaps
She’s
Just
A
Whore.
Stoned silence
washed out evidence spilling into the shower plug-hole
words served up in whispers
just a necessary intonation
dressed demurely as a warning
Exploited
Serving it up in literary form
one
more
sentence
One
more
name that’s gone on the list
Aestheticising violence
Subject
Subjected to scrutiny
Giving the deed
perennial relevance
We look you not quite in the face.
We say
I remember her name
As if
She remains: A statistic; defined in the past tense
Filed under: Poetry
Your imprint
where you sat, once
has lifted,
your image remaining
unchanging
from pixels pushed into position.
At a distance
you are almost moving
-my eyes slit
I turn my head,
refuse to see you
through periphery’s dynamic lens
unless you shift:
thus, you slide through memory,
as I prefer it.
It is unfortunate
I now see you
lucidly
shadows lending clarity
to that last encounter.
Filed under: Personal
007
007: Licensed to Pt Chev
Able to kneel on request
Takes a turn for the worse Northwest
North being direct
If being five
Returning
With ice creams melting
Mum’s change
With runaway dogs gone roaming
Is accurate a compass
Somebody’s backyard
Thrown head first onto the street
Sundressed formica table
Left out for rain to wear
Plant pot arrangement
Corrugated iron accent fence
Kitsch of brick monument
That’s when I saw the apiarist
Modern day Edmund Hillary
Climbing
Out of a Toyota Starlet
Blue Circa 1990s
This isn’t
B e e k e e p e r P a w el K o w a l c z y k i n U p p e r S i l e s i a n E t h n o g r a p h i c P a r k
This is
Parked on the side of the road
Veiled against the threat of
Angry bloody insects in frantic orbit
Brush flailing
Trying to
Knock the buggers off
I walk past
She climbs back behind the wheel
Drives off
Hive half boxed in the back seat
Half swarming into the city towards me
So I keep walking
Cops wailing past the both of us
Helmet blind bee struck motorist
Pedestrian half-drunk on cough mix
Thinking
The state of our suburbs
The architecture’s shit
POST SCRIPT OF SCRIPT TO SCREEN
Tena koe
Or tena koutou
Hello one and all
I am of a tribe you do not know
One now remembered by housing projects and shopping malls
profit mountains and legal avenues and oil slick seas
And fictionally accurate movies
Defined urban
By what is not available
Under jurisdiction
Under the table
To the Underprivileged
To the lost generations
For our children are lost
Between two stories
They are lost
They are stumbling over the kerb with their eyes fixed on a digital screen
They are milling around Queen St
They are falling out of bars laughing and crying
They are huffing on bags and tagged high on corner dairies
They are lying under bus shelters for white people to write about
They are under hooded sweatshirts on the news on TV
They are waving guilt like a gun demanding your money
Give me your money
Your fucking cash
You got a dollar, mate?
All I’ve got is a blanket.
Well I walked out the door
On that speech
Went looking instead for poetry.
