marginalia

It’s been a busy old few days recently - more about that soon. Meanwhile, I’ve returned to find my mail box glutted with some wonderful examples of fu-haiku.

Back and remember some sinister act upon the part nothing
more was done at this time. Throughout soon! Amen! Said
belle solemnly. The daily friction fuming. And on the right,
this gentleman all encased i was imbued with the idea that
it would be exciting he paused before adding, your doing
? And as a as yet of having less aptitude for his new career
sad and suffering as he was, she should never.

I defy you to say that doesn’t bring a tear to your eye - the depth, the meaning, the counterpoint of nuance, and some wankerish link to a Chinese domain name - yeah, right, as if I’m clicking there… especially when there’s another fu-haiku…

Your hair. I assure you that it has not detracted tribes
mentioned at teatime. Now, anne, though as a loaf of bread
and composed of compressed wrong to be poor, anyhow. Let
us give in to that which, in the arc of a circle between
northeast i did not pay those items you put down as debts
red stones: rubies and carbuncles and garnets, herself bodily
into all the family’s interests.

Could this be better? I think not. I love the Edgar Allan Poe reference in the stunning line, ‘Your hair.’ And the ‘anne’ in lowercase - what is the meaning of lowercase - is it an indication of a child, or simply, ‘Anne, your body and your family’s interests are nothing more than carbuncles to me.’

Normal service will be resumed shortly.

Ever had that bloated feeling? Bloat - it even sounds unpleasant. As a farm kid I remember Spring and the start of the bloat season and my parents would talk about how the herd would be managed to avoid our cows falling with the condition. Essentially what happens is the cows, tired of eating hay through the winter, gorge on the lank, wet, Spring growth. Too much liquid, not enough fibre. The results are unpleasant at best, fatal at the (likely) worst. And you thought YOU had problems with gas.

Late last week I was speaking to learning of educators (what is the collective noun for educators?) and I mentioned the joys of PortableApps - portable applications. I cruised off to check out what new applications were available, or, more to the point, how my life has changed that ‘new’ applications are suddenly useful and/or interesting. I found WinDirStat - the disk usage analyser/cleanup tool. Available. For free. Liking that a lot.

Generally I’m not all that crash hot on a list of files and stats, but I can read pictures very well. Above is a ‘before’ snapshot of my hard drive, even as I write this. It won’t be like that for much longer, as the big red, blue, and green squares will be backed-up and removed shortly. They’re video files. Stuff I’d been working on, and simply forgot to remove. Gigabytes of space tied up. And here was I thinking it was the photos that were the space hogs on my laptop. The photos do take up space - they’re the turquoise mosaics half way down on the left hand side. The great thing about the software is I would’ve spent a lot of time sorting the photos, whereas the real issues - the videos - I’d forgotten about and simple would’ve ignored.

Right. Off to do some spring cleaning, hopefully the results will smell rather less than a cow with bloat…
…later that same day, the ‘after’ snapshot. I’ve dealt to the larger video files (I had no idea there were so many), and generally done a major tidy up, but no defrag as yet. The two turquoise rectangles (bottom left) are the pagefile.sys files - the swap space/virtual memory - in the above (the before) picture the same files show in the bottom right hand corner in, er, buttock pink. The peas and carrots in the top left are the Adobe Premier files - video samples, working files etc. The gold zone on the right hand side are the photos and video files of the family. My hard drive has gone from 6gb free space to 40gb free space. Hmmm, about enough space to edit video…

For a number of reasons, the last few weeks have been chaotic. We’re busy and trying to get things done - and life sometimes attacks all at once. In the middle of all of this my Aunty Joy slipped away. She’d been unwell for a long time and I’m sure in the heart of the grief there was release for everyone as well. The last time I saw Aunty Joy she was as I have ever known her. She always wore her hair in a plait over the top of her head - a bit like a halo I guess. Loud, sharp, loving, believing, welcoming, laughing, fearless - look you straight in the eye stuff. Wonderful.

When we were kids we used to absolutely live for the family assaults on the drains on my Grandparent’s farm. The drains were home to the native freshwater lobster - koura - ‘crawlies’ we called them. Aunty Joy would be front and centre, in the drains and grabbing the crawlies with her bare hands, and flipping them into the kerosene tins we used as buckets. Bare hands. I still have a thing about dealing with crawlies with a net let alone my bare hands. I know, I know, harden up. We’d cook the crawlies, peel the now red shells off, and enjoy the succulent flesh with fresh brown bread and butter. I can remember the absolute pleasure Joy took in the simple (but fabulous) food.

Later in life there would’ve been a good chance engaging with the police if I’d had another of Joy’s measures of gin. Great gins and tonics, ice, fresh lemons. But heavens, the generous measures had to be carefully managed if you were planning to drive at some stage.

Aunty Joy was part of my learning to drive. She took on the responsibility of caring for my Bedstafar after Bedstamor died. We used to drive down to visit them and I did thousands of kilometers of highway driving before I got anywhere near a driving test. As a result, when I got to the test stage it was literally ‘drive around the block, hmmm, I can see you’ve done this before, here’s the licence’.

Aunty Joy worked a friesian cow farm, and as a kid I spent time with her and her family as they exhibited their prize winning cows. I found it all kind of strange as we had never exhibited/contested with our cows (I was a seriously city kid by then too). I can remember feeling that our cows were kind of like family, and you don’t go showing your family like that. Well, I know, some families do; but we didn’t. I learned some things about judging cows, however, I was to blow any credibility in this respect with Aunty Joy later when I dared enquire about getting the wonderful black and white hides for floor mats - a kind of kiwi zebra skin mat. Looking back I don’t know what I was thinking - perhaps it was the gin.

Last week there was a major power cut here in Wellington - even the Beehive had its electricity nipped. I thought at the time as I scampered down the endless flights of stairs to get out of my building, probably Joy getting a last statement. She’d have laughed loudly at the pricking of the balloons of stuck-up politicians and inflated bureaucrats. I can remember the intense arguments over politics at pretty much any family gathering. Oh boy. Head for the hills. Aunty Joy had an opinion and had absolutely no compunction in articulating it clearly and loudly. She was of the generation of Sonja Davies - Bread and Roses, and the Labour Party could not have lost a more staunch and consistent member. I believe Aunty Joy genuinely saw the Party as a champion for the rights of people - workers - the common kiwi. She certainly had the heart and strength for it and if every person was as staunch in these things we’d have a rather different distribution of resources in New Zealand.

Finally, for this commentary, mention of Aunty Joy cannot go by without her faith in action. I’ve mentioned her Labour Party affiliation, however Aunty Joy welcomed people, young people in particular, into her heart and home. I’m willing to bet that at her funeral there’d be more than a few people who’d been supported in their youth by words and deeds from Aunty Joy. Pivotal to Aunty Joy was her strong faith - her engagement with the Lutheran Church community in Palmerston North will be missed - truly the passing of a legend. I was unable to attend her funeral. I can imagine it though - in my mind I can hear (and she would’ve loved) the old Lutheran hymns - What a friend we have in Jesus and the like. Her passing has left a much bigger gap in my heart than I would ever have guessed, and yet I’m glad too. Last night when I was listening to a cd and heard a rendition of ‘What a Wonderful World‘ - it’s kind of our family’s theme at these times - I felt sure Aunty Joy was reunited with her Arthur, and all was as it should be.

How to take a trip and never have to leave the farm. Dates me - and possibly you too, if you remember the Jim Stafford song about the Wildwood Weed. No, I haven’t been exploring the apparent joys of having a sack of seeds, or buds (now just stop that, you rascals), instead I have been offline, reading and writing up the first draft of my study proposal. It feels not too bad, however I’m torn between thinking I haven’t done enough (seven pages) while think I’ve done too much (two pages was the request). But what to cut out? And will that damage my chances? Is too much likely to damage my chances?

It’s giving me the freak out, no doubt. I think I might compromise and trim down the seven pages to two pages of elegant simplicity, and then send both documents. Or maybe, attach the rest as an appendix. Or do more research and expand it out to - say - a succinct 20 (or so) pages. I believe Einstein’s doctoral thesis was about a dozen pages, pretty much based on what happens in a cup of very hot tea. S’true.

This is the one song I think anyone, perhaps even me, could sing in karaoke. But strangely (perhaps luckily) I don’t think I have ever heard it - karaoke-wise, I mean. Go-warn, you know you wanna; sing along to perhaps the best Stones sing along song ever…

I am in the process of negotiating for some further study. It’s a bit of scary process - getting started in study again will mean changes about how I spend my money, my time, and perhaps most fundamental of all, the study will - as ever before - change the way I think, forever. That can be both liberating and frightening at the same time. Overwhelming even. Whenever I mention undertaking more study, friends and family always ask me, ‘Why?’, and ‘When are you going to finish studying?’. People used ask me when was I going to grow up. The answer, of course, is: NEVER!!!

I digress. Walking down Lambton Quay in the sun at lunchtime today, I was thinking about the biblical story of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32). I remembered a key concept was that the prodigal son went off to some interesting foreign parts and squandered his inheritance. His snipe-y brother stayed home, and well, I guess, didn’t get his inheritance until later.

I started to wonder about nature of the inheritance (and the squandering of it). It occurred to me that the prodigal son actually took his share of the inheritance, and invested it in education. Sure, being hungry enough that pig swill seems attractive isn’t the easiest lesson, but it probably leads to a thoroughly unforgettable education nevertheless. I bet it changed how he spent his money, his time, and perhaps most fundamental of all, changed the way he thought, forever. His older brother, peeved at the welcome his father put on for the graduate, missed the point entirely.

So, here I am, with further study in my sights. What is my inheritance, and how and what exactly am I going to squander? It occurred to me that the one inheritance I do have is my collected culture - values, attitudes, knowledge, and stories unique to me, passed on from my parents. I have the intellectual abilities and genetic inheritance, courtesy of countless generations of ancestors who didn’t expect me to show up in some unimaginable future, but I like to think they selected mates with the pragmatic intention of producing the best, next, generation. I guess there might’ve been some ‘whoa, look at that hottie’ thrown in as well.

And this is my best reason for studying. No, not the hottie, but because I can. Because I have to. Because if I don’t I’d be like the prodigal’s snipe-y brother - I’d be squandering my inheritance if I didn’t study. All the efforts, the sacrifices, the pain, the adventures, the happiness, sadness, decisions good and bad - the sum of everything that my ancestors have done to put me here would be in vain. Standing on the shoulders of my ancestors, I have to study. Have to. Because I can, therefore I should. I must.

No pressure. None at all.

Tidying up some of my papers, decluttering the past, I found a handwritten note (in my hand writing)…

The road to monkey heaven is

a) paved
b) littered
c) barricaded with good intentions

While I’ve really liked finding the various ‘message in a bottle’ that I’ve some how sent to the future me, some of them are very mysterious, and I wonder if I’ve just found them too soon - that they were planned to be read by the more advanced me. Or maybe just unexpected marginalia from the past.

I don’t understand why New Zealand has this on-going issue with literacy. I have an opinion or two, but I don’t understand it.

My parents learned to read and write using a slate. I still have my grandmother’s school exercise books that she wrote when she was 8-10. There’s a message there - learning has been valued in my family for generations - or the books wouldn’t have been saved. As an aside it speaks volumes for the quality of paper in those days. Mum and Dad taught me to read and write before I went to school - I wrote and made drawings in the white space in newspapers, and on the brown paper groceries were wrapped in in those days. There wasn’t a whole lot of money in our house. I learned more words at school (the teacher used flash cards) and I was able to access more books. Dad cherished books, and would read us comics (yay) and articles from the newspaper (somehow not the same). We were given books as gifts. My parents never attended high school, however my siblings and I can all read and write. Our children (and their children) can also read and write. Could there be a gene for it?

Over the years tens of thousands (if not millions) of dollars have been spent (wasted?) on literacy. And the issue is still here - worse now than ever. I don’t have the figures to substantiate the worsened condition, however, I offer that if, after the investment, the issue exists at all then the issue has worsened. I am concerned that literacy may have become resistant to the financial drugs that have been applied.

Technology doesn’t appear to have offered any sort of wonder drug either. I’m old enough to remember when Sesame Street first aired on New Zealand tv. I recall the clapping of hands from the teaching community that - at last - we were going to see a new generation of bright, clean, literate kids in schools. Not that there’s anything wrong with hand clapping, or freshly scrubbed youngsters with reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic skills. A little later we had the Spanish component of the drug removed, and the Maori upgrade applied. And I think this was a good thing too - reaches further into our national heart and spirit.

I became involved with teaching when I discovered one of my work mates (aged in his early twenties) couldn’t read and write sufficiently well to be able to withdraw $70 from the bank. He’d had to run back and forth between a couple of branches, withdrawing $10 at a time…

I can understand people arriving in New Zealand needing assistance with practical New Zealand English. I have worked with students who’re highly educated in their own country and context - an electrical engineer with a Masters degree from Taiwan, a high court lawyer from India, a business executive from Japan, an architect from Iran, a vet with a double doctorate from Yugoslavia, and others. They didn’t have any literacy issues - they did have English issues.

When I began learning how to help people learn I was told that ‘If the student hasn’t learned, the teacher hasn’t taught’.

I’ve often writhed with this when I’ve had students come back with less than stellar performances, leaving me wondering what else I could’ve, should’ve done. I’ve spent many an hour outside of the classroom building better resources, tuning my writing, reading texts to improve my practice - whatever I could come up with to try to get the seed to germinate and grow for the student(s) concerned.

I can remember talking to a daunting ‘guru’ who somewhat pointedly let me know it was my post-colonial attitude that caused me to blame the victims. At the end of our conversation I think we wanted me to feel guilty for every education malaise in New Zealand since the arrival of humans. Not that he had any solutions either, although I suspect he would’ve been very adept at dealing with any surplus funding.

On the one hand I don’t understand why New Zealand has any literacy issues, and on the other hand I don’t understand where the money has gone. Recently I’ve spoken to a number of people expressing my incomprehension that the issue is still with us. Not one had any better answer. Oddly, no one mentioned needing more money, or more technology. Today I finally had an inspiration. Saying “If the student hasn’t learned, the teacher hasn’t taught’ is tantamount to saying, ‘If the patient succumbs, the doctor hasn’t practiced medicine’.

Tonight, to celebrate our wedding anniversary, I made mushroom soup from genuine field mushrooms (instead of those pale imitations from the supermarket), and sourdough bread. And, yes, I made the bread too. Served hot enough to melt the butter, fresh from the oven; crusty and aromatic with yeasts. Life is good. It was a bit like having everyone around for dinner, even though we dined alone.

How so? I made the starter for the sourdough from kefir from a culture given to me by our neighbour who was given the culture from some Dutch people back in the late 1940s - the culture has been nurtured for some 60(+) years. I made the starter, and then made the bread - without recipes - just based on seeing Mum make bread, my intuition, and trust that it´d work out right. I made a test loaf yesterday and Mum was keen to sample it. She thought it was very good. Marica´s folks had been over for lunch and they gave my dough the once over to see it was ok. The mushrooms came as a combination - raw ones from our friend Taffy, and some my sister Gillian had cooked for us. It felt really great that so many people had helped put together the meal - even if all I did was cook it. I´ve seen it said that it takes a village to raise a child - I think that is probably very true, however, it takes a village to support a marriage, and a village to put food on your table as well. People, who need people.

Over the years I’ve had many jobs. Some of them have been great (like my current role) and others have been pretty good, and, thankfully, only a very few have been hideous. Normally it’s not the job per se, rather the management or my colleagues that have made the job as it was. I have have the privilege of working with some amazing people - I’ve learned a great deal from these generous spirits - often themselves working under difficult conditions.

I’ve lost count of the jobs I’ve had, and even moreso of the jobs I’ve applied for and not got - I know for a fact that there’s been hundreds. Very frequently I’ve been gutted to miss out on the jobs I’ve applied for, and then I’ve found out later that it was a lucky escape. Recently, while tidying up some of the back corners of my life, I found this particular response letter. I’d kept it (I’m guessing) from the late 1980s. The Mill is still in business, by the way, apparently language skills are not a tipping point requirement for selling booze in Wanganui. I’m not in the ‘hospitality’ business any more, but I have been wondering if the guy who signed (name removed because I can) this triumph of communication is the manager, or maybe the owner now.