5th Best Hugger = Me

Hah! I just read the sidebar on Conan’s blog and discovered I was part of a poll! (I normally just read the content stuff, which is a great mix of self-analysis, philosophy, and talk of fascinating business venture. But I noticed the sidebar on this visit, because I’d already read the main content.)

Stream of Consciousness Poll Eleven
Who is the best hugger in Wellington?
Morgue – he may be wiry, but he makes up for it in enthusiasm: 2 votes (10%)

I came fifth. Quite frankly, I’m not satisfied with that. I have plans to move up the rankings. I think, in advance of the inevitable re-polling Conan will do to reaffirm his position at the top of the table, I will embark on a campaign of pro-active hugging in order to build up a storehouse of positivity among the huggable blogging community. I will hug freely and with abandon.
And, when I have lured the person in the fourth spot into a false sense of security by my general hugging, and I have my arms wrapped around her, I will strike.
She will feel no pain. She will be in a better place. And I will be one step further up the hug rankings.
*steeples fingers* Excellent.
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Remember, kids, hugs can cause misunderstandings in the comments section of your blog.
And thanks, my two fans.

Marketing Co-opts Street Culture

Stencilling is a new kind of street art that has risen to prominence in only the last couple years. Like graffiti, it involves placing artworks on public walls and pavements. Unlike graffiti, a huge part of stencilling has been political comment.
Wellington has a healthy tradition of stencil street-art. It’s been going on here for some time – I remember stencilling starting up before I left NZ, so 2002 at the latest.
Today, walking down Willis St in central Wellington, I stepped on some pavement stencil art. It’s actually quite uncommon to have stencil work underfoot, so I noticed, but I didn’t slow down. Then, brain kicking in, I backtracked and forced the lunchtime worker bees to route around me as I examined it. My brain had not lied to me – this wasn’t urban art, it was advertising, an ad for Listerine of all things.
Not that this is surprising. This is how marketing works, after all, and I’m sure there have been other instances of stencil-marketing before. But this was the first time I’d seen it, and it’s a turning point for me – a new urban medium of the 2Ks, one of which I am fond, has finally been co-opted before my eyes.
Maybe I should be glad it took so long?

Winning A Triangular Bag

The Wednesday night indoor netball team finished its season with a minor-semi at 7.40, which we won, so it was followed by a minor-final at 9pm, which we also won. I think this means we came fifth in the grade. I don’t really know, or particularly care. They gave us triangular shoulderbags.
What I love about it
I don’t post much about the sporty stuff here, considering how much of my life revolves around it at the moment. I was gasping for opportunities to play sports I enjoyed in Edinburgh, and have dived right in now I’m back on familiar ground. Most weeks I’ll have two netball games, plus ultimate and basketball. It’s great.
I love the exercise, I love the competition, I love the challenge. I love being part of a team striving to execute well. I love being in a situation where failure to concentrate is immediately punished with a loss of possession or other kind of penalty. I love constantly responding to the changing conditions of the game – who’s ahead, how much time is left, who’s playing well, what the opposition are doing, what my team are doing, how tired I am, how tired everyone else is.
Most of all, I love getting into that headspace where you don’t think, you just act. That’s great.
I Ramble About My Past: Early Days
I was never remotely athletic growing up. I am in no way a natural athlete. In my family, the football World Cup exists principally as an excuse for my mother to bring up the hilarious experience of watching single-digit-age me attempting to play football.
(I remember quite enjoying playing, even though I knew that I was rubbish. I also still remember a couple of humiliating moments; those are the things that stick in the childhood memory the best.)
I did, however, develop a bit of enthusiasm for basketball. I played a bit at school with friends, we were all aged 9 or so and didn’t really know the rules so just made up stuff that sounded plausible. I was taller than the other kids, which helped with the interest I guess, but it was also the nature of basketball that appealed to me – a team game (I have a deep personal preference for team games, because they give me something other than myself to play for), in which a ball is played using the hands (which I was vastly more confident with than feet!), and with a fairly steady reward frequency (so I didn’t feel like I was wasting energy for little reward).
I Ramble About My Past: Latter Days
Fast forward to my latter years in high school. I started playing in the school’s basketball team, my first bout of serious sporting endeavour. It was a hard road. I wasn’t very good. But I got better, thanks to effort put in and some good coaching. By the end of school I could handle myself okay.
(I remember one of my teammates telling me I had been a subject of discussion, in which the conclusion was that I was “unco, but that made me good”. I was very pleased, because I knew I wasn’t the most co-ordinated guy around, but apparently I was turning my limitations into an advantage because I was unpredictable, or something or other. Heh.)
I have plenty of good memories of those two seasons. But I also had some pretty rough times. One of the bigger emotional experiences was desperately trying to stay out of that horrible pit of self-doubt that says, you’re not good enough. Give it up, go home, stop trying. Because I wasn’t good, I knew it, and time after time it was proven to me. Sometimes I just couldn’t do what I knew I needed to do. I tried as hard as I could and failed. And every time it felt like crap.
I Ramble About My Past: Life Lessons (With Stirring Orchestral Score)
I almost quit, actually.
(Hmm, I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone about this. Huh.)
After a particularly dispiriting training session I came to the bleak conclusion that I was doing no-one any favours by continuing in the team, and the next day I would give it up. Who did I think I was fooling?
It turned out that I decided not to quit after all, but I don’t remember that bit. All that stuck in the memory was that feeling of frustration and disappointment, of not being able to achieve.
I guess this was what you call a ‘life lesson’. I hardened up, basically. Worked harder, concentrated more, kept trying, and sure enough I improved, a lot. School ended and I kept playing and kept getting better. Those hard times in secondary school were far behind me. I guess that is what you call a ‘happy ending’.
I Finally Start Getting To The Point
Alongside the basketball, I’ve played a lot of indoor netball through the years. In indoor netball you can shoot the ball from a distance to earn 2 points instead of 1. I was always okay at shooting that 2-point shot. For a while I was pretty damn good at it. It was a key part of my game.
So I come back home and I get back into basketball. It takes a few weeks, but the old game comes back, the shot comes back, the awareness comes back, the hustle comes back. Sure, I’m an old man of thirty now but I didn’t feel like I was rebuilding a skillset from nothing.
And I got back into netball, and a lot of stuff came back real fast. But the 2-point shot? That just didn’t. Weeks turned into months and I kept trying, putting up a couple a game, but the shot just wasn’t falling.
And it felt bad. It felt just like it had as a teenager, although less drama-queeny and more straight-out frustration. I knew I was capable of doing this thing, but I wasn’t doing it. I felt like I was doing everything right but it wasn’t working. I joked about it a bunch, but truth be told, it really started to bother me.
(There is an alternate universe where this same story is being told as a parable on the inevitability of physical decline and how we all must learn to cope with a reduction in our capabilities. But not in this universe.)
It’s a horrible feeling, that. Failing. Setting yourself a goal that you know you can meet, and trying your damnedest to achieve it, and falling short time and time and time again.
I Get To The Point
A couple weeks ago, with that horrible feeling hitting me, I suddenly realised that I had been going about everything wrong.
I’ve made some changes over the past few years. As part of these changes, I have a much better set of tools for dealing with challenges like this than ever before. I’m no longer a teenager feeling despondent and powerless.
I recognised that my mental state has been contributing to my continued failure to perform. My confidence had been eroded and I’d fallen into a negative feedback loop. I recognised further that many aspects of the physical are actually mental, and that I could improve my performance by coming at it from a perspective of self-awareness and self-control.
I decided to fix it. I shifted my perspective. I stepped out of the negative feedback loop. Most importantly, I decided to be confident.
Since then, my shooting percentage has shot up; it’s not where it used to be, but it’s getting closer all the time. More tellingly, playing feels different now. It feels right. My head is straight. It’s all good.
So, there you go. It worked.
And that is the point of this post.
Postscript
Now that I have made this post, the mystical laws of the universe will ensure I play like crap for at least the next three weeks.
Unless acknowledging these laws in this postscript changes their impact. The mystical laws of the universe don’t like to be predictable, after all.
Anyway, next time I have a crap game, I’ll just be able to shrug and say, ‘not my fault. Mystical laws of the universe. Sorry, guys.’

How Nice!

This is a simple post about nice things, because nice things are nice, and my last few posts have made even my head hurt.
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Nice thing #1: I am thoroughly enjoying the John Ralston Saul book, The Collapse of Globalism. Reading him is always a pleasure, and this book is a much better piece of communication than previous stuff by him, including magnum-opus Voltaire’s Bastards.
Nice thing #1+1: My brother is letting me live in his apartment while he’s away. So good. And it gives me a chance to watch Buffy season 7, which (believe it or not given my history of indoctrinating people into Buffy appreciation) I’ve never seen before.
Nice thing #11: I sold an article to the Dominion Post. It’s a travel piece on Mexico’s Day of the Dead. (Those of you who subscribe to morgueatlarge will have read a piece on that before – well, this one’s different.)
Nice thing #11b: I like how I had brief pangs of ‘omigod teh DOMPOST is EVUL did i sell out?!?!1!’ and concluded ‘nope, you’re getting your propaganda into their media’ and then thought ‘you sold a travel article you stupid moose, not everything is a political moment’ and then I remembered Skunk Anansie ‘Yes it’s fucking political, everything’s political’. Anyway, it hasn’t seen print yet, so I shouldn’t be counting chickens. Run free, chickens, run free.
Nice thing #111: The reveal at the end of Doctor Who series 2’s penultimate episode has been spoiled for me, and it fills me with silly fanboyish glee. Hee hee hee. *sigh*
Nice thing #—: I have made some progress on Sekret Personal Project A, with a brainstorming gathering last weekend setting off a whole new train of thought on it. (It’s only Sekret because I don’t want to put it under the pressure of observation yet. The whole thing is still ill-formed. But I had some splendid people gather to discuss some key aspects of my ill-formed ideas, which was exhilarating, humbling, and, for me at least, worthwhile.)
Nice thing #all: People.

Food Labelling

Me, two weeks ago:

Food and produce labelling continues to be a massively important battleground. At stake isn’t just animal welfare, but every aspect of food production in our society, and the attendant impact on our health and well-being.
There is no good excuse for opposition to effective labelling. Companies fight it solely because they know their customers would be unhappy if they were better informed.

NZPA, yesterday:

Sue Kedgley’s bill to enforce a labelling regime detailing GE ingredients in food was voted down in Parliament yesterday night.
Labour and National joined forces to defeat it 99-20 on its first reading, despite the Green Party MP saying it was supported by the vast majority of consumers.
Under the bill, GE ingredients and GE-derived ingredients would have to be shown on food labels, as well as the country of origin of all food items.

Dammit.
(My awareness of the happenings at Parliament courtesy No Right Turn.)

[mediawatch] The Kahui Twins: Opinioneering

One of the big stories in New Zealand’s media lately has been the awful murder of 12-week-old twins, and the way the family has closed ranks and failed to co-operate in any way with police. Politicians and pundits have weighed in. Talkback and letters pages and blogs are awash with calls for decisive action.
The Kahui twins story, as it is being told, combines a bunch of conservative favourites in one neat package of indignation:

  • The Kahui family are Maori, and in their few comments on the case have specifically invoked their Maori status to evade responsibility and justify their obstructive actions – playing directly into the ‘one law for all’ covert racism that got Brash so close to winning the election.
  • The Kahui family survive on benefits – playing directly into the ‘welfare bum’ mythology that claims the presence of welfare encourages immorality.
  • The Kahui family do not have anything resembling a clear nuclear family – playing directly into the ‘demise of traditions’ mythology that claims the absence of a strong father is a social evil.

(There are other aspects to the case as well, but those are the big three.)
As usual, I’m most interested in how the media are dealing with the affair, and how opinions in the media guide and reflect the nation’s mood. There is much to consider.
First: NZ media have certainly pushed a lot of angry conservative voices to the forefront, and made great hay out of their condemnation of the Kahuis, but the worst we have is still miles more considerate and dignified and sensible than the tabloid culture in the UK. This is something for which we should be very thankful. Once a tabloid culture is in place, it is all but impossible to shift, and for whatever combination of reasons we have avoided one so far. This is a definite positive for our national culture.
Second: That said, we don’t have any strong left presence in our media at all, or indeed any differences of opinion worth noting. The Evening Post was NZ’s only remotely lefty paper, and when that was swallowed up into The Dominion nothing remained on the left but the odd columnist in small community papers. (This is part of a bigger issue: the way in which NZ’s homogeneous media converge quickly on a single perspective, which becomes massively influential on NZ society’s perception.)
Third: Today’s editorial in The Dominion Post is as good a summation as any of the ‘party line’ on the Kahui affair. It certainly reflects the underlying premise of much reporting I’ve encountered, and of course the letters pages and talkback are full of less-eloquent expressions of the same ideas.
Unsurprisingly I have a lot of problems with the editorial, its premises and its conclusions. One thing that stood out as a good example of the kind of rhetorical gamesmanship surrounding this and similar issues is the speed of generalising. The whole affair is understood in terms of categories much more than people. (This tendency bears some relationship to the Either/Or stuff I was thinking about two years ago.)
Check out this paragraph, answering a claim that this kind of abuse is due to the legacy of colonial injustice:

“Few dispute that early colonists forcibly took Maori land. But such theft happened more than 100 years ago and successive recent governments have worked hard to atonie for Pakeha sins. Neither colonists nor Pakeha killed Chris and Cru Kahui.”

The nasty elegance of the final rhetorical question is particularly striking. Responsibility for the deaths is parsed in terms of categories, and if it wasn’t the colonist category or the Pakeha category who killed the children, the clear implication, left unsaid for obvious reasons, is that it was Maori, as a category, who were responsible. And this message is exactly what has been and will be picked up and circulated in the story we tell of the Kahui twins.
(I am aware that the construction has an alternate reading, condemning the specific people attempting to shift blame to the general categories “Pakeha” and “colonists” instead of taking responsibility; but the meaning I talk about above is just as present, perhaps even more so.)
While I’m at it, have a look at the “But…” sentence. Aside from the charmingly naive Kiwi perspective that 100 years is a long time, the Pakeha response to injustice is framed in terms of ‘atonement for sins’. Actual redress for the harm done to Maori is nowhere to be seen; the injustice is implicitly constructed from a Pakeha viewpoint, such that a sufficient penance is all that is required to see an end to the matter. The real problem, one that our country has been struggling through for the past thirty years, is that those injustices were a systematic abduction of power which has perpetuated to this day. Penance is not at all what is required to answer what happened in our past; power redistribution is.
Power is precisely what is at stake here. The Kahui family, a screwed-up collection of relatives with no interest in social responsibility, surviving entirely on welfare, is an archetypal example of the legacy of powerlessness. This is exactly what we should expect to have created.
As might be expected, the editorial puts great faith in the redemptive power of capitalism. Paid work, it claims, would have saved this family. This claim is made completely straight-faced, without elaboration, as none is needed; we all understand the assumptions at work here. Once, ‘christian faith’ would have been the solution; the babies would have been killed by godlessness, not joblessness.
The moralism, however, is exactly the same.

Will You Join Me Please In Welcome-in-ing

New face in the blogosphere. Well maybe not so new as a face – a lot of you have been subjected to his grinning visage when you went off to worship him…
That’s right! Leon the God, exiled King of France, has a blog, and is even updating!
All the faithful can check it out here.
(Cheez. Everyone got blog now. Leon got blog. Chewbacca got blog. Even Geoffrey Chaucer got blog. Cheez.)

Global Warming Frames

Quick post while I have a connection.
Weather has been miserable this week. Was considering this the other day and developing the ongoing analysis of how we talk about climate change and weather events and whether global warming is caused by humans. (It’s a frame-related point, so those with Lakoff in their toolbox will get it easier.) Namely –
We/the media allows the debate over global warming to be framed in terms of scientific inquiry – is there still, scientifically speaking, doubt over whether global warming is caused by human activity?
(Answer: yes, of course. That’s how science works. The doubt is massively diminished, but it’s still there, and that means certain organizations will have room to resist any controls on carbon emissions and Kyoto and so forth.)
The frame in which we should be discussing this is one of risk assessment. Is it acceptable to risk that global warming is caused by human activity?
(Answer: no. Not even remotely. This is the fate of the millions we’re talking about.)
Talking about it in terms of science assumes a much higher burden of proof than is appropriate. Allowing the debate to be framed in this way is making it much more difficult for those arguing for urgent change.
(The fact that, despite this unhelpful frame, we’re still winning the debate is a pretty clear sign of how serious things are getting.)
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Worth a read: Making Light reads a 1939 book on social control.

New Alignment

I’m living somewhere new again, on the Terrace in central Wellington, in my brother’s apartment while he does a Euro-mission. Internet will be infrequent while here as he has no phone line, but right now I’ve found an unsecured wireless connection to leech off. It wasn’t there yesterday so I’ll take advantage while I can.
It is damn good to be back in Wellington and able to walk places. This is my habitat; I get a little pleasure rush walking out the door and finding myself in the heart of the city. Now all I need is an affordable plan to live in similar locale long-term. Hmm. This dissolute bohemian life has its complications.
On the Terrace reminds me that I read Maurice Gee’s Blindsight the other day, and enjoyed it very much. A crucial piece of action in that book happens on the Terrace. Blindsight is a novel inspired by now-deceased Wellington street personality, ‘bucket man’. Now Wellington has a new street personality, ‘blanket man’. I approve that Wellington’s homeless person has a Wikipedia entry.
Finally picked up Pynchon’s Mason and Dixon again. Despite enjoying it very much, I stalled out on it a couple months ago around the 450-page mark. Now it’s back on the table and delivering reliable laughs once again, even if it is too clever by ‘alf. I think I was vulnerable to stall-out because of the complete lack of narrative momentum – the story isn’t going anywhere at all, and it takes its sweet time to not go there. But it’s just so much fun to read.
In a flurry of creative energy I started writing a short story last night. I crashed out on it only about an hour in, with the heavy-lidded thing going on – too little sleep the previous night. Nice to have popped something new, though; making space for the new has been tricky as I’ve tried to be so diligent about resolving the old. Even that’s disingenous, of course, since this is a riff off an idea I had some years ago, but it feels new, which counts for something.
Life continues to deliver interesting times, but I feel I have my footing back and everything is as it should be. I’m starting to run the show again. Getting things in their correct alignment; everything takes longer than expected but it’s worth it to get things right. Perhaps I should resume some kind of meditative practice to set this pattern in? Or perhaps I will simply voice that thought in this blog as a simple alternative, recording intent and thus absolving self from action. The mind is a terrible thing to second-guess.
Also, considering the number of times in the last couple of weeks I have had to negotiate Complications arising from communications failings, it occurs to me that I am not speaking much to people at the moment. I would suspect myself of failing to heed my own advice if it wasn’t so clear that it’s working for me. Do ye as I say, not as I do.
It is an apartment with a balcony. There is no cat here.

Citizen Friday

Tonight I spent a couple hours in Krazy Lounge nursing a coffee, listening to a jazz quintet and reading last year’s John Ralston Saul book on globalization.
Finally, I felt like a fucking citizen.