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zeborahA friend called me up today to ask if I wanted to go to Mozart with her and her folks and boyfriend, which I did. So at the appropriate hour, I took my laptop, caught the bus, sorted through notes for editing a Wikipedia page I'm working on, and arrived in town.
Went to KFC for dinner and stared in dismay at the display banner, where the very last vestige of a traditional item-list menu has been replaced by bright primary-coloured posters with starbursts, too-good-to-be-true burger photos, and words and prices scattered with no obvious relation to each other. After trying to make sense of this for a while I gave up and asked the nice guy at the counter, "Do you have an actual menu?" --I call him nice because he didn't laugh at me, and even seemed apologetic on confessing that no, they didn't. I ended up asking for a twister, because I've had them before and thus know the meta-rules about them (ie it's possible to get one without a tangle of other things coming with it), at which point he asked what flavour I wanted. When I asked him what flavours they had, he again very nicely didn't laugh but read them out for me from the board. When he read them out I could see where they were written there, but I never did see where the price he charged me came from. (It was less than the various options I saw on the board, so no complaints.) While I waited for the thing to be made, his colleague came over asking, "Did you still want a menu?" Turned out they did have one after all, hidden away; so I've kept that for future reference. Am I getting old, that non-linear menu displays just overwhelming? I had the same experience when I tried to play with MySpace, and it was only partially the blinky flashy advertisements intruding; even Ning took me a bit to get my head around.
The sweet chilli twister was nice. I ate it walking towards the Square on the way to the concert at the Town Hall. The concert is part of an arts festival that's just started, so the Square was decorated with a giant blow-up flower, a fancy telecommunications-company-sponsored marquee, a modern-music concert just concluding, a lightshow on a screen in front of the Cathedral's rose-window, and, just as I was throwing my paper napkins in the rubbish, a Mäori voice chanting -- I followed the words through the crowd and found a movie playing, a short animated film narrating the origins of Aotearoa New Zealand, English subtitles:
In the beginning there was nothing, and out of the nothing came night. --I missed the first bit, but I'm almost certain this is what it would have been. I'm not sure exactly what comes next, but at some point you get Raki (called Rangi in more northern dialects) and his lover Papatuanuku. Raki lay so tightly over Papatuanuku that there was no light and no life and when they had children there was no room for the children to grow. I still hadn't quite got to the screen at this point but the story normally goes that their son Tane Mahuta forced the two apart. Now I was at the screen watching, and it showed all the children visiting their father in the sky in a great waka, but on the return journey they hadn't made the right karakia and there was a great storm -- the rush of the wind came alive in this, all around; the night helped, it was as if you were in the storm, not surrounded by dozens of probably tourists. The waka overturned.
Papatuanuku, in mourning for her children, prayed to the gods to create life on the waka in memory for them, and so it became the South Island. I forget the name the narrator called it because I'd never heard that name before. But then birds and fish were sent to tell the Mäori about this new land. Maui came, and fished up the North Island, Te Ika a Maui. (I can tell many stories about Maui, even wrote a fanfic poem from his sister's pov once about his death. In one version of the stories, Maui's waka is what became the South Island.) Then the Waitaha tribe came. Poutini put in the rivers pounamu, a dark green jade that New Zealanders call greenstone; it's exceptionally hard, and extremely precious. For that reason the South Island is called the place of water greenstone; ko Te Wai Pounamu ë!
There's something different about a city at night. I used to walk home from town a lot after dark, if I'd missed the bus or if I couldn't be bothered waiting. It never bothered me; I was walking through a slightly poorer part of town but it wasn't dangerous, I never thought. If there are lots of people around then you're not in too much danger because what criminal wants witnesses, and if there's no-one around then if anyone at all comes by then it's easy to pay attention to them and figure them out before they get too close. So I always used to just enjoy the quiet of the night, the lights, the different atmosphere, the way you could look up into the sky and see infinity.
So I got to the Town Hall and met my friend and her parents and boyfriend, this last also being a friend of mine. We heard what I dubbed the boarding announcement for the concert, and went through what my friend dubbed border control. A few minutes later she commented to her parents that it had been a good thing they had the tickets as she'd forgotten to think about it on her way into town. "But we gave you yours the other day!" they said. We came to the realisation that the five of us had managed to pass border control on only three tickets, and shared a horrified laugh.
The boyfriend teased me for bringing the laptop to town, I explained it was habit whenever I took the bus, he pointed out I might have been mugged. This concept is foreign to me. I've been all over the world, I've hitched a ride from a van full of strange men in Mongolia, I'm just not in the habit of worrying about being mugged in my hometown. Three weeks of Mongolia drove me batty because I couldn't go out in public without being perpetually aware of where my money was and where every hand around me was. (My pocket was picked twice in two weeks, but the first time was worth it for other reasons and the second time it was only $10, I was more annoyed about the wallet.) I wasn't made to be paranoid. And when a friend gives me a ride home and expresses horror that I'd think to walk a two-minute stretch along a river road between the bus-stop and my own street; or when a friend suggests that I should spend a quarter-hour busride sans laptop for fear I might get mugged in town; I just don't want to live in the world they live in.
And I don't think I have to. I walk through the night believing, because it never occurs to me otherwise, that I'm perfectly safe -- just as the five of us walked into the concert believing, because it didn't occur to us otherwise, that we had every right to be there. Of course, confidence isn't everything, and maybe someday I will get mugged or raped or murdered or whatever. But chances are slim, and I absolutely refuse to curtail my life for fear of it. But I didn't tell the boyfriend that I also use the laptop when sitting at the bus-stop in my own suburb, in an area the police recently targeted to try and cut down burglaries.
My friends' parents were annoyed that the stagehands didn't wear gloves to move the pianos around and thus smeared fingerprints all over the Steinway. Despite this, Mozart was beautiful. There's a shape I want to try out one day for introducing characters at the start of a story, and I've come up with a trope to describe the Perfect Orchestral Performance, if I ever write about an orchestral performance in a slightly surreal mode.
Went to KFC for dinner and stared in dismay at the display banner, where the very last vestige of a traditional item-list menu has been replaced by bright primary-coloured posters with starbursts, too-good-to-be-true burger photos, and words and prices scattered with no obvious relation to each other. After trying to make sense of this for a while I gave up and asked the nice guy at the counter, "Do you have an actual menu?" --I call him nice because he didn't laugh at me, and even seemed apologetic on confessing that no, they didn't. I ended up asking for a twister, because I've had them before and thus know the meta-rules about them (ie it's possible to get one without a tangle of other things coming with it), at which point he asked what flavour I wanted. When I asked him what flavours they had, he again very nicely didn't laugh but read them out for me from the board. When he read them out I could see where they were written there, but I never did see where the price he charged me came from. (It was less than the various options I saw on the board, so no complaints.) While I waited for the thing to be made, his colleague came over asking, "Did you still want a menu?" Turned out they did have one after all, hidden away; so I've kept that for future reference. Am I getting old, that non-linear menu displays just overwhelming? I had the same experience when I tried to play with MySpace, and it was only partially the blinky flashy advertisements intruding; even Ning took me a bit to get my head around.
The sweet chilli twister was nice. I ate it walking towards the Square on the way to the concert at the Town Hall. The concert is part of an arts festival that's just started, so the Square was decorated with a giant blow-up flower, a fancy telecommunications-company-sponsored marquee, a modern-music concert just concluding, a lightshow on a screen in front of the Cathedral's rose-window, and, just as I was throwing my paper napkins in the rubbish, a Mäori voice chanting -- I followed the words through the crowd and found a movie playing, a short animated film narrating the origins of Aotearoa New Zealand, English subtitles:
In the beginning there was nothing, and out of the nothing came night. --I missed the first bit, but I'm almost certain this is what it would have been. I'm not sure exactly what comes next, but at some point you get Raki (called Rangi in more northern dialects) and his lover Papatuanuku. Raki lay so tightly over Papatuanuku that there was no light and no life and when they had children there was no room for the children to grow. I still hadn't quite got to the screen at this point but the story normally goes that their son Tane Mahuta forced the two apart. Now I was at the screen watching, and it showed all the children visiting their father in the sky in a great waka, but on the return journey they hadn't made the right karakia and there was a great storm -- the rush of the wind came alive in this, all around; the night helped, it was as if you were in the storm, not surrounded by dozens of probably tourists. The waka overturned.
Papatuanuku, in mourning for her children, prayed to the gods to create life on the waka in memory for them, and so it became the South Island. I forget the name the narrator called it because I'd never heard that name before. But then birds and fish were sent to tell the Mäori about this new land. Maui came, and fished up the North Island, Te Ika a Maui. (I can tell many stories about Maui, even wrote a fanfic poem from his sister's pov once about his death. In one version of the stories, Maui's waka is what became the South Island.) Then the Waitaha tribe came. Poutini put in the rivers pounamu, a dark green jade that New Zealanders call greenstone; it's exceptionally hard, and extremely precious. For that reason the South Island is called the place of water greenstone; ko Te Wai Pounamu ë!
There's something different about a city at night. I used to walk home from town a lot after dark, if I'd missed the bus or if I couldn't be bothered waiting. It never bothered me; I was walking through a slightly poorer part of town but it wasn't dangerous, I never thought. If there are lots of people around then you're not in too much danger because what criminal wants witnesses, and if there's no-one around then if anyone at all comes by then it's easy to pay attention to them and figure them out before they get too close. So I always used to just enjoy the quiet of the night, the lights, the different atmosphere, the way you could look up into the sky and see infinity.
So I got to the Town Hall and met my friend and her parents and boyfriend, this last also being a friend of mine. We heard what I dubbed the boarding announcement for the concert, and went through what my friend dubbed border control. A few minutes later she commented to her parents that it had been a good thing they had the tickets as she'd forgotten to think about it on her way into town. "But we gave you yours the other day!" they said. We came to the realisation that the five of us had managed to pass border control on only three tickets, and shared a horrified laugh.
The boyfriend teased me for bringing the laptop to town, I explained it was habit whenever I took the bus, he pointed out I might have been mugged. This concept is foreign to me. I've been all over the world, I've hitched a ride from a van full of strange men in Mongolia, I'm just not in the habit of worrying about being mugged in my hometown. Three weeks of Mongolia drove me batty because I couldn't go out in public without being perpetually aware of where my money was and where every hand around me was. (My pocket was picked twice in two weeks, but the first time was worth it for other reasons and the second time it was only $10, I was more annoyed about the wallet.) I wasn't made to be paranoid. And when a friend gives me a ride home and expresses horror that I'd think to walk a two-minute stretch along a river road between the bus-stop and my own street; or when a friend suggests that I should spend a quarter-hour busride sans laptop for fear I might get mugged in town; I just don't want to live in the world they live in.
And I don't think I have to. I walk through the night believing, because it never occurs to me otherwise, that I'm perfectly safe -- just as the five of us walked into the concert believing, because it didn't occur to us otherwise, that we had every right to be there. Of course, confidence isn't everything, and maybe someday I will get mugged or raped or murdered or whatever. But chances are slim, and I absolutely refuse to curtail my life for fear of it. But I didn't tell the boyfriend that I also use the laptop when sitting at the bus-stop in my own suburb, in an area the police recently targeted to try and cut down burglaries.
My friends' parents were annoyed that the stagehands didn't wear gloves to move the pianos around and thus smeared fingerprints all over the Steinway. Despite this, Mozart was beautiful. There's a shape I want to try out one day for introducing characters at the start of a story, and I've come up with a trope to describe the Perfect Orchestral Performance, if I ever write about an orchestral performance in a slightly surreal mode.
