Skylar and Hori

I was driving home on Tuesday night after a long day at work.  The sky was golden, you know that perfect time in the evening before the sun goes down and you watch as the gnats and moths start filling the afternoon air, and they look beautiful as they dance in the light.  I turned off the main highway to head home, and came around the corner to see a man and a woman hitch-hiking.  Now, I don’t often stop for hitch-hikers because I’ve heard the horror stories and seen too many scary movies to think that it’s a good idea, but today I was in such a good mood that I thought I’d do another good deed for the day.

As I pulled over, I could see that the man and woman were happy as could be, despite the fact that they were on the side of the road with all of their groceries and their smile only grew larger as I pulled alongside them and wound my window down.  “Hi, my name’s Ike, where are you off to”?  No need to ask if they needed a ride, they weren’t hanging out on the side of the road for the fun of it.  “Thank you so much for stopping”!  Came their reply, “We’re just trying to get home, up the road a little bit”.  “Sure, climb on in, I’ll give you a ride home”.  And with that, they started bundling in their several bags of grocery shopping and a small LPG gas tank.

“I’m Hori, and this is my partner Skylar” said the man who looked to be in his mid to late thirties, seated in the passenger seat beside me.  “Thank you so much for your kindness”.  I could tell immediately that these were humble people, just grateful that someone had stopped their journey to help them continue theirs.  I pulled out on to the road, and we continued chatting as we headed east.  Skylar and Hori had been in to town to do their weekly shop.  I was very curious about their circumstance, and they were kind enough to share with me on the trip home.

Skylar and Hori live on his family land, as ‘kaitiaki’ or, guardians, and they live a very simple life.  As we turned off the main highway and on to a gravel road, naturally my mind started to wander with a little bit of unease, especially as we began to head in to woods and the gravel road narrowed into only slightly larger than a single lane, marked with potholes galore.  The more I spoke with them, the more envious I felt of their life, tucked away in the woods living as simply as could be.  I’ve become so tethered to the world with my technology and internet that I forget what it’s like to live a simple existence, but these were two of the happiest people that I’ve met on my new adventures here in the Bay of Plenty.

Skylar and Hori farm koura (fresh water crayfish), and as they proceeded to tell me how grateful they were for my kindness they mentioned that they would bring a bag of koura to me.  I told them that it wasn’t necessary, because by the end of our miniature road trip I actually felt as lucky to come across them as they had, me.  We drove about fifteen minutes, and came to a point where the road started getting thinner and suddenly we were by the lake and they mentioned that I could turn around there.  I felt a little confused because I hadn’t recalled going past any driveway, but they insisted that we had gone right past it.

I turned the car around and we back-tracked around 50 metres and they said ‘here it is’.  I still couldn’t see what they were referring to as their driveway.  They pointed it out, and as I looked out my window, right next to the car I could see a steep trail of steps that went down in to the bush and within ten metres was engulfed in the trees!  Had they not pointed it out, there’s no way that I would have seen it.  It turns out that the steps lead down on to a strip of bush covered land with water on either side, and a ten minute walk takes them to an island of sorts which is the land and house that hori has inherited and guards to this day as his family has before him.

Hori and Skylar gathered their belongings out of my car and again thanked me for my kindness and promised that they would come and visit me at my workplace.  As I watched them trudge into the bush I thought how thankful I was to have met them in such random circumstance because they reminded me of a simpler way of life and how it can bring so much happiness.

*  I wanted so desperately to get pictures of this place that could accompany this entry, but as luck would have it this would be the one day that my phone battery ran flat!

Hairy Nipples

I remember the advice of a family member who had finished school several years before me.  “Enjoy your time at school while you’re there because once you’re a grown up, it sucks and everything changes”.  I can remember being at school and thinking at the time that this sounded like a ridiculous idea, and yet something that I should probably remember.  At the time I only had a year and a half left at school and it seemed like the day would never come.  Oh, I couldn’t wait to be done with the place that had suddenly become like a prison.

I wish there could have been someone that would have sat me down and told me squarely, that when you become an adult your entire world changes.  You’ll have wants and needs and desire to do different things that will ultimately cost you both time and money.  Your free time starts to vanish, and what you thought you knew of being busy before, suddenly pales in comparison.  Living free at home also changes because you don’t want to live under your parents roof forever (okay, secretly I wouldn’t have minded, but such is life) and then you’ll start to pay someone else rent.  Eventually you’ll realise that you’re helping someone else get ahead by paying their mortgage so you decide to go ahead and buy your own house.

You’ll be a proud home owner, but you’ll stay up at night for the first little while wondering how you’d come to land in this debt and if you’d made the right decision.  But you have right?  It’s the dream for most people, to own your own home, and make sure you do it while you’re young so you can have paid it off sooner!  Oh yes, that’s all good and dandy, but now the bank wants your money, as do the electricity and power companies.  And the insurance companies.  Don’t even get me started on the insurance companies.  You’ve got to eat, so the supermarket wants their fair share as well, and don’t forget that you’ve got also got to fuel your car and make sure it’s road worthy otherwise the police are going to want a piece of your already significantly reduced pie also.

You’ll want to keep up with the latest trends, and you’ll make deals with yourself in your mind that you can afford it, when your bank balance states otherwise.  But it’s okay, you’ll put the money back from your next pay, won’t you?  Sometimes you’ll become ill and you’ll need to pay for someone to look you over, and I reckon it was a lot cheaper ‘back in my day’.  That might be because Mum was paying for it, but that’s beside the point; it’s so expensive to be an adult!

Then you realise that hair is sprouting in strange places.  Like, from your ear, and when did the area around my nipples become so hairy?  Is that a wrinkle?  Oh lord, I should probably start looking into botox.  It can’t be all that bad right?  And at least I’ll always look pleased with, something.

Once, you could sing the entire lyrics to the Savage Garden song, ‘I Want You’, but you’ve started to notice that you’re missing whole lines and putting in lyrics that were never there to begin with, even though you’re sure you’re right and they’re completely wrong. Similarly, you may have an embarrassing encounter where you address someone by a name that doesn’t belong to them, but convince yourself that they must have lied to you in a previous meeting because that was DEFINITELY the name they gave you the last time you met.

It’s not all doom and gloom though.  You get to an age where you realise that you don’t care about what you thought mattered most before, and what seemed important once, suddenly isn’t.  You go through life with the highs and the lows and realise we’re all in this boxing match and have to take the hits with the glory at some point; we can’t always be victorious, but that’s okay.  You win some, you lose some.

You break some hearts and you get caught off guard and your heart takes a beating too, but then you find that one that’s synchronised with yours and that moment, that encounter, that journey that lead you to this point could have been paved in the bullshit you went through to get here a hundred times over, but it’s so totally, absolutely and definitely worth it.

You’re wiser now.  You now make the choices instead of having them made for you.  And eventually you’ll start to recede into an existence not completely dissimilar to the years when you were at school.  Running on the schedule of somebody else, eating what they feed you, until eventually perhaps you’ll need someone to wipe your behind again as you once did when you were a child.

There’s a long way between now and then, so instead of worrying about what the future is going to bring, simply enjoy the ride, take it all in and be thankful that for the moment, at least you only have hairy nipples.

16 weeks

I haven’t had alcohol in 16 weeks now. That’s officially the longest period I’ve gone without touching alcohol since I first started drinking. And you know what? I can’t actually say that it’s been that hard. I don’t want it to seem as though I’m discounting the fact that it’s an absolute nightmare for other people who have attempted to give it up, because that would be unfair to them. But my reality is that I have a drinking problem that I’m dealing with and something that I expected to be an absolute nightmare hasn’t been as bad as I had anticipated.

That being said though is not to say that it hasn’t been challenging, because there have times where it absolutely has been. I’ve made deals in my mind and then clearly nullified them, for example: Oh, I guess I could have just one? And then I think about the point that I came to that made me decide to give it up. Why I wanted to begin a clean and sober existence, and suddenly as though a light just came on, or someone opened the door to my house on a wintry day letting the cold air in, it hits me in the face. I’m on the right path, I just need to stay with it.

I’m so much clearer than I used to be, and that clarity is something that I was actively seeking, I just didn’t know how to attain it. The noise in my head seems like a gentle hum by comparison of what it used to be, as though I was listening to a radio station but it wasn’t quite tuned in clearly. It’s so hard to put into words exactly what I mean, but I feel like I want to share it with the world, just how much better I am as a person for choosing to live like this.

My first couple of weeks into my new life, I would drive past liquor stores and look at them and think, oh there’s the local, and perfect, it’s right on the way home! Then I’d remember my promise to myself. I took it a week at a time, and to be honest I thought that I would have failed by the time the first weekend rolled around. It had become habitual. I wouldn’t drink massive amounts on a regular basis (perhaps see this previous blog entry for context about my drinking) but if I was going to have a night on the booze, I’d make sure it was a good one. Until the next day. Soon the weeks rolled over and I found myself ticking them off on the calendar.

Everything at this table is a prop, but that is indeed alcohol!

At this point I was still nervous about the odds of me slipping back into my old habits with my old friend, alcohol, but a little more confident about where this was leading. Then it was time for my Mum to visit, and there’s my favourite drinking buddy right there, coupled with the fact that it was her birthday while she was going to be here. I let her know before her visit that I’d embarked on a new sober journey and so I wasn’t going to be drinking while she visited, but I was sure to let her know that I didn’t mind in the slightest if she wanted to have some drinks. We even went and bought a nice bottle of wine that she could have with her birthday cake. Three months later and that same bottle of wine is still sitting in the cupboard in my kitchen! Mum said she had an amazing time, and I felt as though I needed to apologise for being so boring and not having a drink with her on her birthday. She told me it didn’t even enter her mind or phase her because she enjoyed her visit so much. Phew!

So that hurdle was leapt over, but then I was going to go home to the Far North at the end of September. Yikes. How could I possibly go there, see my friends and not drink?! Absurd right? Some of the conversations were amusing, a lot of them expected. “So, you’re never drinking again? Yeah right!”. “Oh come on, you can have just one”. It doesn’t really bear repeating, if you could imagine a variation in your mind of what may have been said, it probably was. But every single person was accepting of it and my reasoning. I didn’t really need to go into great detail about it. I have friends, and not just acquaintances and that’s a nice feeling.

By this time I’d made it through various family and friend situations and I returned home with an enormous smile on my face. Is it possible that I get redemption and a pass to start over? What’s the catch? It surely can’t be this easy, I must be missing some crucial piece of the puzzle. And I kept on waiting for the cravings to begin. And it did, but only for a fleeting moment. The weather had started to get warmer, and I live at a lake where the sun sets on the balcony late into the evening. A cold beverage absorbing as much UV as possible, entertaining banter with friends and good music is an essential equation of oncoming summer, right?

I went on a road trip with friends to Thames, and enjoyed Lemon, Lime and Bitters while they consumed the golden amber of their Coronas, but I didn’t even desire it. It was at that point that I realised I had crossed the threshold. I’m still me when I’m sober. I don’t need to drink alcohol to be fun, and I get it, like, really get it. I’m still loud and fun. I still go out and have a good time. I still dance like nobody is watching. I’m just having a lot more fun the next day than I used to.

I’m loving making mocktails, and I enjoy being able to be the sober driver, the guy that will take you home at the end of the night and make sure you get there safely. I’ll listen to the same story you told me five minutes ago and react to the crucial parts of it as though I’m hearing it for the very first time because you forgot we already discussed this. And I’ll stay up all night with you if you want me to, because I’m your friend, I’m just your new sober friend. Same shell, but the software has been upgraded 😉

My favourite mocktail

Adventures in Rotoma

As I write this, I’m laying on the beach of one of the most beautiful lakes I have ever seen, and I just so have the good fortune to also call this place home. I was about to write that I am the only person occupying this little piece of paradise, but as I was about to type that, a man in a white Subaru has just invaded my lake. Yes, I’ve decided that this is my lake and he should really ask my permission before he turns his engine off. He doesn’t even appear to be dressed in the correct attire to attend my lake; khakis and a business shirt. I can only assume he’s stopped off for lunch. I’ll allow it, I suppose.

I’ve decided I love having Mondays off. It almost feels that I, and my newfound friend (or invader) are the only people alive while the rest of the worker bees tend to the hive. I quite like my time by myself, so this is rather ideal. I’ve even been for the first swim of the season and I’m glad I gave it an extra month before dipping my toes in because the water feels just perfect for swimming now. You know when you jump in sometimes and the water is so cold that it takes your breath away and what seemed like a good idea at the time suddenly isn’t? Well I’ve had no regrets thus far.

It’s just me, hanging out at Lake Rotoma

Getting rid of the tee shirt tan

Legs

So, I’ve been living here in Rotoma for four months now; I know, I know, where did the time go? And what have I been doing? Am I happy? Has the relocation worked out to be everything that I hoped it would? Let’s discuss.

Rotorua and the area as a whole is nowhere that I ever thought that I would be living. Of course I’d visited here in the past and I’d thought that it was a great area, but I didn’t imagine that this would be somewhere that I’d move to. It just seemed, to me, to be one of those places you travel through, not land in. Even right up to the moving day I had reservations going through my mind about whether this was a good decision, not only for myself personally but for Ryan and I both. Was shifting here a good idea for his, my and our relationship?

Well, I’m glad to be able to say that I love it here, and I can’t recall a time that I last felt so happy and content for such a long period of time, and that is what makes me feel validated in my decision to move here. I’ve met some amazingly interesting people along the way who have changed me and contributed to my happiness. Moving to a new location is such a daunting decision to make, but I’ve come a long way past the notion of worrying what other people think about me, or even if they’re going to like me. I’m just fortunate that the people that I have met have been so accepting and inclusive, otherwise I could imagine that I would have struggled integrating into their world and my newfound home.

Ryan and I live in a house that is a half hour drive away from Rotorua. In the morning we both head in different directions; he heads east towards Whakatane, while I go West for Rotorua and we meet back in the middle in time for dinner. We’re just at the entrance to the lake, and it lends itself to the perfect little walking trek so that we can often get in our exercise before we begin the working day. We moved here in the middle of winter, and I have never lived somewhere so cold in my life. I’m quite the wuss when it comes to temperature. Very Goldilocks. I don’t like it too cold, and I don’t like it too hot, so I was devastated when on the second day of being here I woke to find a blanket of ice outside on the lawn. Fortunately it started warming quickly, but lately you’d be forgiven for thinking that it was still a little wintry what with the cold snap in the wind.

The top of my car

The top of my car

Down by the lake

Ice!

A swan on the lake

Lake Tarawera Falls

Lake Okataina

Morning stroll around Lake Rotoma

Morning at Lake Rotoma

Morning at Lake Rotoma

I also appreciate that this place is so central to a lot of great things. Did you know I got to see snow a couple of months ago? I know that sounds really country bumpkin to say, but I have never seen falling snow. Ryan and I went to the snow back in ’07 on Mount Ruapehu, but it wasn’t falling and so I decided to ask him to take a picture while I scooped a heap of it up and threw it up in the air. He has the picture printed in his office at work, me with a dreaded look on my face as I realised the idiocy of my idea right before it landed on my head. It wasn’t soft and fluffy like in the movies. It was hard and lumpy, like coming out of a chilly bin that you use to cool your drinks at the beach in summertime, where it’s solidified in to one icy mass. Well anyway, as we were driving to our friends in Mangaweka we were headed across the Desert Road and the snow began to fall. Only a light powdering, but enough to fill me with glee and make me squeal like a little girl.

Snow on the Desert Road

Yesterday, I asked Ryan if he wanted to go and get ice cream. While he was in the States last month, my friends and I took a road trip to Thames. We stopped off at this little place on the way home and bought the most delicious ice cream with real fruit inside, made fresh to order. Ryan agreed to go for said ice cream but didn’t know where we were headed, and to be honest I couldn’t remember how far away it was from home either. Well, it turns out that little drive is an hour and a half away, but one hungry lick of deliciousness and we were of mutual agreement: worth it.

Katikati Ice Cream

Hanging out with Ryan near Katikati

It’s these little things that I love. Ice cream and snow, and knowing that if I want to head home to the Far North, it’s not a big drama to. The sound of Tui singing, and the wind blowing through the trees. Going swimming, safe in the knowledge that there’s nothing in the lake that can eat me (except for a Taniwha perhaps?) or that Ryan can come too and his chances of drowning are in my mind reduced significantly. I do miss living in the Far North. It’s a beautiful place and I’m lucky to have grown up there, but we can always go back and visit.

Julia

I miss you.  You’ve been gone for half of my lifetime today, and still I feel as though you were here yesterday.
I’ve grown so much since you and I last got to speak to each other.  I hope that you’d be proud of the person that I’ve become, I’ve gone through this life consciously making decisions where I ask myself, would this make Mum, and Julia proud?  It’s silly right?  I know you’d say it is… but I do it anyway.

Sometimes I see you in my dreams.  The last time was a few months ago, and we were back at home sitting around the table at Mums place while she pottered around in the garden.  We chatted about so many things, but I can’t remember what exactly.  You’ve grown older with me in my dreams, you’re no longer seventeen forever, you’ve aged beautifully.  I tell myself not to wake up because I don’t want to lose this moment, but I eventually wake up in tears.

It’s not fair that you only had a glimmer of a moment to be here and experience all that this life has to offer.  I think you’d be a Mum by now, a few times over, and I’d get to be Uncle Ike.  I’d spoil your kids rotten and you’d probably growl me for doing so.  Our Mum would be a Granny, but she probably wouldn’t let your kids call her that, it just sounds so, old!

Mum misses you terribly.  We love to talk about you but we’re only ever one sentence away from becoming an emotional wreck.  It hurts sometimes to feel like I stole this time with her, that for some reason or another I was chosen to remain and your time was cut short.  Sometimes I envy you because I had to stay here and be tortured by the memory of you and how you left us.  There was a time when I thought I’d never be free of that feeling but time has passed and eased the pain.

This day creeps up on us every year and I can’t believe that sixteen of them have now come and gone since you passed.  I would literally give anything, if only to have the opportunity to sit in front of you and speak to you one last time.  This day used to be a painful reminder and a time of mourning, but time has changed it to a day where I think of you fondly and smile.  I’ll still listen to the song that reminds me of you and remember how you’d changed the lyrics to say “Juuuuuuublia… Juuuuuuublia”, and likely it will make me bawl.  But every year I shed just a few less tears.

I love you, Sister.

Song of the day

When You’re Gone – The Cranberries

Why I’ll never drink again

The night of this pic, I drank so much of this wine I can’t remember Ryan driving me home.

Earlier this year I wrote a blog entry which in essence was announcing that I was giving up alcohol.  I hopped on my soap box and declared to the world through my blog, “hear ye, hear ye, from this day forth I shall live this life free of the liquid devil!  Be gone vile beast, you are banished forever from this day forth”!  Okay, it wasn’t quite like that, I just have a flair for the dramatic.  I also have the resolve of a schizophrenic amnesia sufferer, and within three days I had withdrawn the entry because I’d gone and gotten, for lack of better phrasing, pissed.

I have a drinking problem.  I can say that, because it is true.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s definitely hard to say and even looking back at that sentence right now I am freaking out about how it may be perceived.  But if I was worried about a perception of me then this blog probably wouldn’t exist in its current format and my entries that you’ve previously read here would be a ghost of what I actually want to say.  I have a drinking problem.  There, it’s said.

My problem is that it stopped being fun.  It is also that I cannot control alcohol, it tends to control me.  Anyone who knows me will know that I am loud (I’m told that at least once per day), bubbly, extroverted and genuinely happy.  While all of those are completely true, I am however also a bit of a shy person who needed alcohol to loosen up and make friends.  I took a moment to think about how I met some of my nearest and dearest friends, and most of those times tend to be during a night out on the sauce.  That doesn’t make our friendship any less valid, but what does it say about me, that I need to have liquid courage to meet people?

I enjoyed the feeling of getting a couple of drinks in, usually on a Friday night.  As I started to get older, I realised that it would take less to get me drunk and leave me with a hangover which I would still have mild symptoms from on a Sunday, but what I was hiding from everyone around me is just how upset I was internally with feeling disgusting, head spinning, knowing that I’d get a hangover later in the day.  Ryan was probably the only person that would constantly see me at my worst, looking a dishevelled mess, laid up on the couch all day watching television, occasionally dragging my sorry behind to the bathroom to put my head in the toilet.  In what logical world does this make sense to intentionally do this to myself?

I can’t stop.  That is a major component of the whole problem with alcohol and I.  Alcohol and I have a love/hate relationship.  I love alcohol and alcohol loves me, we have a great time together, but it’s not long before we get sick of each other and vow never to spend another minute in each others company.  After a few days, we start to think our fallout probably wasn’t as bad as it seemed at the time and by Friday we’re reconciling our differences and can’t understand why we fell out in the first place.  We laugh, we dance, we cry and we talk shit through the early hours of the morning.  Sometimes we’ll have such a good time that we’ll decide to spend the entire weekend together, but more often than not one of us does or says something to ruin it all and we’re back at square one, destined to repeat the cycle again when we forget all about how we felt the weekend before.

I lied in my last blog entry about giving up alcohol and that’s why it was always destined to fail.  I dressed it up all fluffy, trying to hide the actuality of what I really wanted to say.  That’s how problematic my drinking had become, I was making excuses for why I had done it for so long and acted like I could just stop.  Look, I’ve never been a raging alcoholic and saying I have a drinking problem may have you thinking I’m constantly written off, it’s a problem in my definition of the word, which I have decided like all other problems I’ve ever encountered, need to be solved.

It’s been four weeks since I last touched alcohol, and I actually in all honesty don’t care, but I feel like I need to share that here because for someone like me who went from drinking most weekends to not drinking at all, it’s a big deal.  I won’t touch alcohol ever again.  I feel like I have more clarity, determination and happiness in my life; it all just feels better.  Genuinely, completely and utterly better and I can’t remember the last time that I felt this happy and sure.

Song of the day…

Vengaboys – Kiss When The Sun Don’t Shine.

I’m feeling a bit nostalgic and I love this song.

Added to the blog playlist, scroll right to the bottom, click below to listen:

http://open.spotify.com/user/1231002198/playlist/5d1G5zVPkHJHODZRhsnnoI

Hey coffee lovers, this ones for you… meow!

Hey coffee lovers, I know how much you love your precious beverage.  That piping hot fuel injection you use ritually to start your day, and the way that you crave it’s caffeinated goodness because it gets the motor running.  To be honest, I don’t know that much about coffee, nor do I understand why people love it so.  But I do find myself curious about a particular type of coffee, you may have heard of before; kopi luwak, or, civet coffee.

If you’re like me, the first time you may have heard of this coffee is by watching the movie, ‘The Bucket List’, where Jack Nicholson isn’t aware of how kopi luwak is made until he is enlightened by Morgan Freeman (sidenote: I know I can’t be the only person alive who would want Morgan Freeman to read their eulogy).  So, if you are like me, you know the basics; there is a cat-like animal that eats the berries, poops them out and then people collect the fecal matter and make an expensive coffee that we have decided we’d like to drink.  There is in fact more to the story, and I’m going to break it down for you.  While the above is basically on point, as with most products our species desire that require some sort of assistance from animals to create, we have glossed over the actuality of how it happens.

The Asian Palm Civet (also known as a toddy cat) is native to the Indian Continent and Southeast Asia and weighs between 2 and 5 kilograms.  Producers of the coffee beans that makes kopi luwak (Kopi being the Indonesian word for coffee, and luwak being the local name for the Asian Palm Civet in Sumatra) believe that the process is improved through two mechanisms; selection and digestion.  The civets, which eat the beans are thought to choose the coffee berries that contain the better beans, and their digestive mechanisms then may improve the flavor profile of the beans that have been eaten.

Basically, the civet has an uncanny ability to choose the better beans and does so for the fleshy pulp of the berries, then through the process of fermentation in its digestive tract the civets proteolytic enzymes seep into the beans.  The civet then defecates these beans and any other fecal matter, which is then collected, washed and roasted.  It is considered to be a real delicacy. Mmm, yummy.  Fecal matter from a cat.

Kopi luwak is the most expensive coffee in the world, with prices reaching around $822.00NZD per kilogram, where the price paid to the collectors is around $25.00NZD per kilogram!  And this is where human nature shows it’s true colours.  Just like everything else we’ve decided we can mass produce to make money from, kopi luwak is no exception, and the traditional method of collecting feces from wild cevets has given way to… you guessed it, civets in battery cages.  The cevet is force fed coffee beans, which raises significant ethical concerns over the treatment of civets because as is similar with other battery farmed animals, they live in horrific conditions including isolation, a poor diet and small cages.

It has also been widely criticised largely by traditional farmers because through this process, the cevet does not select its berries as it does in the wild so its beans are of a poorer quality.  Regardless of where the beans come from, kopi luwak is widely regarded in the coffee industry as a gimmick or novelty item, with the general consensus of the Specialty Coffee Association of America being that “it just tastes bad”.

That’s all I really need to know about this coffee to know that it’s probably not something I’ll ever be willing to drink.  The whole idea just seems a tad on the ridiculous side, yes, it’s slightly interesting and I always wonder how people found that they could make coffee from this thinking it was a good idea, much the same as the first person that discovered cheese.  But I’d eat cheese over and over again, so maybe not the best comparison.

What are your thoughts on kopi luwak and would you drink it?  Maybe you’ve tried it before and would like to share your thoughts?  Personally, as someone who knows nothing about coffee, I reckon the Nespresso machine on the bench does just fine.  Coffee lovers that I’ve made a beverage for before have stated that it makes great coffee, so that’s probably the only endorsement I need.

 

Song of the day:

Black Coffee – All Saints

Added to the blog playlist, scroll right to the bottom, click below to listen:

http://open.spotify.com/user/1231002198/playlist/5d1G5zVPkHJHODZRhsnnoI

The zombie apocalypse already happened!

You know what’s really concerning and something that we should all be worried about?  The zombie apocalypse.  Anyone who’s watched a television in the last fifty years knows what I’m talking about; the undead coming back to life and trying to eat our brains.  I’ve always found the concept very interesting and loving things gore as I do, I’ve found myself recently wondering if there is an element of premonition in our fascination for giving zombies primetime space on our television and movie screens, much in the same vein of The Matrix; that one day machines will harvest our species.

Part of me believes that the zombie apocalypse happened a while ago, but it appeared in a somewhat different fashion to what we were expecting.  All one really needs to do to understand my meaning is to take a seat in the middle of a busy town or city and observe people for twenty minutes to see that, the undead are already walking amongst us.

I sat down in the food court at the mall in Rotorua with my Subway sandwich. For future reference, I like my Subway as follows:

Foot-long meatball on Italian herb and cheese
Swiss cheese
Toasted
Lettuce, tomato, capsicum and jalapeno’s
Cover that baby in ranch dressing
While we’re at it, let’s make it a meal and give me two M&M cookies with a coke zero, because I’m trying to be all healthy like.

Let’s be honest, if I knew I wouldn’t be judged on it, I’d skip the vegetables all together.  Right, where were we? Oh yes, I was at the food court.  I sat down to eat my sandwich (I like to start with the smallest half first, which is always hard to tell because they pretty much cut it smack bang down the middle, I’m sure they’re trained to get that right, sometimes you’ve just got to make a judgement call) and I’d already checked my Facebook and there was really no need to trawl through that again, so I began to people watch.  Or, for the sake of keeping in line with the theme of this entry, Zombie watched.

The Zombies shuffle around, often with glazed over eyes.  I sit in the corner booth, hunched over my sandwich daring not to move too much and inadvertently draw attention to myself.  I simply observe.  Not all of them are zombies, some of them are regular people who have not yet been infected.  They travel in packs too you know.  You can tell they’re infected because even though they’re together as a group, they spend their time with their faces buried in their phones, occasionally coming up for air to mumble something, before quickly retreating to their device.

Some Zombies were turned a long time ago, and have lost basic motor functions, especially in their faces.  You can tell that they’ve been gone for a while now because they no longer possess the ability to smile, they simply speak in monotone and their sentence syntax has diminished greatly.  “Yes” has become “yip”, “no thank you” replaced with “nah” and conversation limited to whatever is required to obtain a food source.  But in this new world, Zombies can also be lurking behind the counter as well.  You know them because they possess all of the aforementioned traits.  These Zombies are especially dangerous, because they don’t have a vested interest in what they do or who you are, AND they’re preparing your food.  And that’s why I like to see my food being prepared.

Not everyone is part of the undead army however, there is still hope that the infected will not consume us all.  The antidote is a smile.  Smiles are more infectious and the virus can be passed far more effectively and swiftly from person to person.  Sometimes you can even bring a Zombie back.  I reckon we should give it a go before the pandemic spreads beyond the the brink of no return, I’m gonna give it a go, who wants to join my army?

 

Song of the day:

Zombie – The Cranberries

Added to the blog playlist, scroll right to the bottom, click below to listen:

http://open.spotify.com/user/1231002198/playlist/5d1G5zVPkHJHODZRhsnnoI

I’m sick, and the only thing that makes me feel better is moaning about it

Cold and Flu tablets, tissues, orange juice and… garlic?

I remember when I was young and I would get sick.  My Mum would tuck me in to a little cocoon in my bed, blankets pressed right in with my arms at my side.  She would get a cold, wet flannel and place it on my head, and she would run her fingers through my hair as I drifted off to sleep.  As odd as it sounds, that touch, even though I was sick at the time, is one of my favourite sensory memories.

I have a cold, and it seems to have swept through my workplace like embers that have caught a gust of wind and set off a fiery path of destruction, annihilating everyone in its way.  Okay, I’m ill, and I naturally have a flare for the dramatic so those two things combined have probably made me a tad emotional with my writing.  That, or it’s the cold and flu medication.  Although, I find myself annoyed with the drug dealers of the world and blame them for the fact that cold and flu medication is no longer as effective as it used to be since they figured out you could make methamphetamine from it.

I was out walking on Saturday morning, and I can pin point the exact place my feet landed when I first sensed that I was getting a cold.  You know that tickle sensation you get?  It might be the shallowest of feelings, but you’re so in tune with your own body that you know the difference between hayfever and an oncoming cold.  Well, yes, I indeed experienced that feeling.  I returned home in the hopes that I was simply imagining it, however, my demise had already begun its twisted spiral into the depths of misery.  Okay, that too, was dramatic, what the heck have they put in these new fandangled cold and flu meds?!

Anyway, back to this pointless entry which in all honesty is being written to elicit your sympathy.  I went to work on Tuesday, and as chirpy and chipper as I try to be in the day, it sure is hard to be so when it feels like ants are doing the macarena inside ones right hand nostril.  Yes, when I get a cold apparently it likes to manifest on one side first.  So I felt a bit like Two-Face for a time, the left side was ready to party, but my right nostril was tickling, which then led to my eye leaking.   And that’s just awkward for everybody involved, when you’re trying to have a discussion with someone and your eye starts dribbling.  I’m pretty sure at least one person I saw yesterday thought I was crying.

And then there’s the sniffles.  You know when you have to keep sniffing in an attempt to haul any mucus that is trying to escape out of your nostril back in to its rightful place, but it seems to have formed a pact with gravity, determined to embarrass you at all costs.  I’m not even sure that anyone noticed it yesterday, or for the sake of my own pride I hope they didn’t, but there was one instance when I felt it touch my upper lip.  Yep.  That happened.

So, Imagine my delight when after going to bed last night, I opened my eyes this morning to find that it was the left-hand side’s turn.  Ugh.  Dear reader, sense the tone.  Anyway, it was much of the same today, like a mirrored groundhog day, except this day came with a special dose of headache, hurrah.  I found myself home early and on the couch, where I crashed out and woke in a puddle of my own sweat.  I don’t know about you, reader, but I’ve never felt sexier.  I won’t post a picture of myself right now, I’ll simply let your imagination conjure up its own masterpiece.

I’m going to sleep again soon, I feel exhausted.  I guess the cold really does take it all out of you.  I just wish my Mum was here to tuck me in to my little cocoon, place a cold flannel on my head and run her fingers through my hair as I drift off to sleep.

Sidenote:

I’ve eaten two cloves of raw garlic this week.  Yep, popped one in and chewed it raw.  Garlic is hot as heck, but one of my Twitter friends suggested it to me.  I actually think it worked in clearing me out, and I felt like it made me feel a bit better on the first night so I went to sleep pretty easily.  When my cold symptoms came back on Sunday I tried it again but it wasn’t as effective and my breath stank.  Eww.  My question to you is, what do you do when you have a cold?  Do you have any tried and trusted remedies that works everytime?  Feel free to share!

Song of the day:

You Make Me Sick – P!nk

Added to the blog playlist, click below to check it out

http://open.spotify.com/user/1231002198/playlist/5d1G5zVPkHJHODZRhsnnoI

Reflections

It’s funny, and a little strange that as I start to wind things up that have been a journey of sorts in the Far North, I’ve found myself in places that make me appreciate what it means to have come from such a great community.  And these things I’ve discovered have all happened organically, that is without deliberate intention on my part to chase the best out  of this place that I call home before my impending departure.

Yesterday I visited the place I went to school in Taipa

It’s been ten years since I returned to Northland, and the place that I grew up.  I can’t really recall a time that I was truly upset about being here, because it’s home, it’s the place that I can take my shoes off, put my feet in the dirt and feel like I’m born of it.  I have a story to tell of the majority of locations North of the Mangamuka Gorge, and West of Mangonui.  Nothing of real significance, but more of the “I remember the time…” variety.  This ‘bowl’ that I grew up in shielded me from the rest of the world, until I was old enough to venture past the invisible boundaries on my own.  And even in to adulthood, there’s something about rounding the bend and coming down the hill by the Taupo Bay turnoff that resonates within and says, “I am home”.

Last week I made a trip in to Kaitaia and I thought about when I had come back in 2004.  The vast majority of my school friends had now begun their lives elsewhere, or had started having babies of their own.  For a while it felt pretty lonely, and that was probably when I begun to wonder how I was ever going to start over and make friends again.  For the most part, I believed that I was shy and would find it difficult to get people to like me.  Why would a complete stranger take interest in me?  How could I trick them in to wanting to stay a little while, get to know me and not come off desperate enough that they exit stage left at the first opportunity?

I began working in a local bar and suddenly interesting people were filling my life with little, to no cunning tricks used on my part.  Had I actually found people that didn’t see the desperate-to-be-liked person lurking just below the surface of my skin?  And I would find my internal monologue proclaiming loudly, “you like me!”, while my external body language would read as, “Sure, we can hang out sometime, I’ll see if I can find time to fit you in”.  I probably wasn’t as suave and cool as I’m thinking I came off, but let’s let history be just that shall we?

So, back to my trip to Kaitaia last week (side-note, can you tell how easy it is for me to fall off topic and ramble on when there was probably a faster way to reach the destination?).  I had parked my car and was walking through town and a person that I hadn’t seen for some time stopped me, gave me a hug and asked how I was, how Ryan was doing in Whakatane and when I start my new job in Rotorua?  I felt a little guilty for the delay in my head that didn’t let me recognise them instantly, but the overwhelming feeling I took away from that interaction was that this person and I had crossed paths at a particular time and we had affected each others lives.

This continued to happen throughout the day, and I had to scold myself because I had begun to tire of the same conversation, the same questions, and the niceties.  Why was I not appreciating the beautiful thing happening that was a person who was taking the time out of their day to open the pages of my book and read a few pages of the story?  I felt an overwhelming sense that I was being unappreciative and that was a decisive moment for me when I told myself not to let these moments be fleeting.  To be as invested in them as the other person, be present and live in it.  And I can attest that this happened throughout the rest of the day with numerous other people.  I reflected back on that person that felt so lonely ten years ago, desperate to be noticed by others and I found myself appreciating every person that I spoke to that day.  I was driving home with a smile on my face that filled my whole being with warmth.

That night, I had friends and my Mum come and stay with me.  We were cooking dinner and chatting away, and unbeknownst to them, I was stealing little moments away in my head.  Now, I’m not religious or anything; I believe in ‘something’, I’m just not sure what, but I found myself thinking, “Thank you”, because these friends had come into my life and had chosen to be here with my Mum and I.  I’m very well aware that I’m a grown man, but let’s be honest.  Anyone who knows me personally, knows that my Mum is my best friend, someone that I could hang out with, and choose to over doing other things because she knows and understands me completely and we always have fun.  I’m fortunate to have had as great a relationship as it is with my Mum.  This evening I was thankful for as well.

Over the weekend I visited The Earth House in Peria.  I will admit that I am somewhat embarrassed that it has taken me so long to get out there and see it, because it’s only a short fifteen minute drive from where I currently reside.  The Earth House is open on Saturdays and Sundays and is run by a group of passionate people in the first in situ adobe earth building in New Zealand.  Now, I can’t give too much away about it because I really do want you to get out there and visit for yourself, if only to take in the amazing work that was undertaken to create this fantastic community space.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

The Earth House greets you with not only the friendliest people, who you would be forgiven for thinking that you’ve known a long time as they are so approachable, but the building itself welcomes you in with its gentle curves and feeling that it too, comes from this land.  I was greeted by Nicole, and Donna who I had met last year at the Doubtless Bay Farmers Market.  Donna had left a wonderful impression on me when we had first met, as her presence just radiates light and the spirit of someone who is truly present in this life.  Donna had encouraged Ryan and I to visit The Earth House at that first meeting and the action of actually doing so had been relegated to the ever increasing pile of things to get around to.  In an attempt to remove some of the things off the list, I can now say I wish I had visited sooner.

The Earth House runs on a gifting economy, whereby you will be offered food and drink when you enter, however it is up to you to decide what you will pay for it.  I had never heard of a gifting economy before I had met Donna, but it is an amazing idea that just works.  Donna, as do all of the other people that were inside The Earth House while we were present, made me feel welcome, at ease and as though I was at home.  I could have just whiled away the hours, sitting in the sun and taking in my surroundings.  I don’t think I’ve felt as at peace as I did there, in a long time.

As we were leaving, Donna advised that a group of them would be going to 1904 cafè in Mangonui that evening to feast on the fabulous Italian menu that a friend of theirs cooks on Fridays and Saturdays, and asked if we would like to join them.  I’m so thankful that I was able to make it there to devour what is possibly the best risotto I have ever had, good company and wonderful conversation.  I’ve learned to be present in the moment, and I found some very interesting people that through a series of events that lead me to being in the right place at the right time meant my life has been enriched.  Isn’t that just beautiful?  I truly encourage you to go and see The Earth House for yourself.  There is no cellphone reception there, so if you’re a techhead like me it forces you to be present and to look and absorb everything.  It’s perfect.

Today I spent a few hours with my Cousin Bonnie and her two daughters, Lara and Erika and we Skyped for an hour and a half with Holly and Julia in Australia.  I refer back to the beginning of this entry; it’s all happening organically that in the lead up to my relocation, in a way I’m saying “seeya later”, without actually needing to verablise it.  And that’s how I want it to be; no goodbyes, just seeya later.  And so this blog entry is a thank you to all of the people that I have met in the last ten years or so.  To anyone who I’m fortunate to have that cares about me, because even if I don’t say it all the time, or at all, I’m pretty sure it’s reciprocated and I care about you too.