New goals

My goals for the rest of the year:

• Learn to drive our car (it’s a manual).
• Pick up my guitar again.

I am LOVING the fact that my after hours time is now my own. No more staying up late reading. No more studying. No more spending all hours working on assignments. Plus, it’s coming up to summer, so the days are even longer! The possibilities are endless.

Quitters

This month T sat his final test for his course. Depending on his results, he may or may not be guaranteed entry to university. Whether he decides to carry on with that… well, that’s another matter.

They’ll have a graduation ceremony in late November – exactly a month from now for friends and family. Obviously I’ll be going. But I asked him who else he was going to invite… and he said no one. Not even his mum? No, not even her.

Apparently, he said, she doesn’t think he’ll end up going to uni.

“Why not?” I asked

“She thinks I’ve quit too many things before.”

Now, I think that’s a little hasty. I think that’s completely unfair, actually. What has he started and not completed? He didn’t finish out school, and joined the army, which he decided wasn’t for him. So there’s that. Then he got into a good line of work, and got laid off after two years. (No dropping out there). Then with some prodding from me, he enrolled in a foundation course so he would have the option of going to university. Even if he doesn’t, it’s a fantastic thing to have under his belt. And it’s a darn sight more than any of his siblings have.

Even going further back, what else has he started and not finished? He decided not to carry on with high-level athletics. That’s not uncommon. And let’s be honest, a career in sports is not the best of career plans anyway. I can think of so many activities I did throughout my school years and never carried on with… violin, badminton, debating, tennis, soccer… I got a kick out of all those while I did them, sure, but I didn’t want to keep going with any of them on a regular basis.

Sure, he’s messed up a lot of things. Some of it is due to being naturally carefree, or careless, even. He’s never relied on his family to bail him out, although they have helped him out on countless occasions. And yes, he’s 21 now, and it’s time to start getting serious about something, especially with people bleating about the recession ending and things picking up. But he certainly isn’t the first, nor will he be the last, 21 year old to be drifting, to not have their shit together. Maybe more is expected of him, because he has possibly the most potential out of anyone in the family.

Where to?

Those of us with partners who’ve been laid off – or have experienced it themselves - know just how disheartening, demoralising and downright depressing it is. It’s been a year now – a WHOLE year – I cannot believe it.

Let’s get one thing out of the way. It’s not a lack of ambition that is T’s problem; it’s more like a lack of direction. Not all people know what they want to do in life, although this seems more acceptable if you’re female (it’s okay, increasingly, to say you just want to be a wife/mother/homemaker; not so much for a guy to say the equivalent).

I’m very proud of him for having finished his course, and he now knows he can apply to university and that he can do it. Jumping into the academic world isn’t easy when you’ve been out of it for years, and when you’re not super academically inclined in the first place.

He may not be a straight-A  student, but neither am I, and I shouldn’t expect him to be – as long as I do my best, I’m happy, and that’s the same standard I should hold him to.

If he simply wants to work whatever job he can get, that’s fine – but having been absolutely bollocked by the recession, I’m wary of that path. In the longterm, I firmly believe that having a qualification (trade or otherwise) is essential.

So, I guess I don’t really know where to from here. I’m not expecting him to come up with a 50 year plan, but I do expect him to have some sort of direction. I don’t think that’s too much to ask.

We’ve clashed over this lots of times – he always reiterates: “I wouldn’t care if we were living out of a car, as long as we have each other.” Call me heartless, call me unromantic but there are some lines I’m not willing to cross.

At the moment, he’s fired up about one of our flatmate’s fathers, who is keen to start up a business and employ both of them. Not a career type of job – just a job. He’s been to the careers counsellors at uni, who clarified the options that we’d already settled on, without giving him anything definitive. He could go ahead with the plan to become a teacher, or he could try to get trade qualified in engineering/fabrication, which is what he was working before. (Or the army, again…something he’s increasingly talking about).

It’s October now, and I thought he would have a pretty good idea of what he wanted to do. It looks like uni is out of the picture, at least for the first semester of 2010 - applications aren’t going to stay open forever. I’ve spent many hours late at night sitting up with him helping him with assignments. I feel I’ve invested a lot of energy into this, and although there’s no way I’d ever force him to do anything, I really do think carrying on with study would be in his best interests.

Whether he could stay motivated through the three years, slogging through papers that he might not enjoy (some he definitely won’t) would be another challenge. For me, I see deadly dull core papers as a necessary evil, but I plough through anyway. To him, he’s so disinterested that he doesn’t put effort in. And that’s something you have to deal with at university.

I know I keep saying I want a crystal ball…..but I really, really, do!!

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‘.

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.

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)

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?

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?

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!

Sexism – it’s a thin line

One 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 .

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?

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.