Posts by Lucy Stewart
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Up Front: Where You From?, in reply to Islander,
Mainly because I was working out at Avalon as a director-producer trainee, and working in a building I disliked, and travelling on trains I disliked, and going back quite late most evenings to a flat which had ginourmously high ceilings that seemed to condense all the traffic noise from The Terrace right into my bedroom-livingroom…
See, there's your problem; you weren't working in Wellington, you were working in the Hutt. Otherwise known as "the only two cities in New Zealand no-one will ever admit to being from".
No, absolute truth.
They sell clam juice in the supermarkets here. I...don't get it.
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Up Front: Where You From?, in reply to Megan Wegan,
I'm trying to slow down, I swear!
No, no, I prefer the New Zealand approach. It doesn't induce impatience.
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Up Front: Where You From?, in reply to Emma Hart,
When I arrived in 1990 it was already firmly ‘uni’: I never heard it called anything else./q>
The 1993 AA Accomodation Guide had a list of Kiwi vocab in the front for confused tourists, which included "varsity". I was really bemused when I got there twelve years later and no-one called it that. Which possibly tells you more about where I take my language cues from than the development of New Zealand English.
<q>Indeed. New Zealanders speak notoriously fast and it’s getting faster.
One place this is really noticeable is podcasts and radio; I find American podcasts much more difficult to listen intently to than Kiwi or even British ones, because they go so slowly (and are, in consequence, often very significantly longer.)
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Up until about, oh, six months ago, I was from Wellington. I'd cop to having spent six years in Christchurch, but "Wellington" was what I got them to put in my Fulbright blurb; it was where I'd grown up, where my family and closest friends were. It's certainly where I hope to move back to, when we finally make it back to NZ.
And then there was an earthquake, and then there was another one, and it turned out that I'm from Christchurch, but I grew up in Wellington. It's just that no-one told me. That might not be the case if I wasn't overseas, I think, or if the quakes hadn't happened; but it turns out that half your memories of the last six years turning into rubble, when you're half-way around the world, can make you be from a place like nothing else.
Apart from the times when I'm from London, like yesterday, when a visiting scientist told us we all needed to think hard about what we'd be doing in five years when America was bankrupt and I said "Go home" and he said "But there are riots on the streets of London, too!" and I said "...okay?"
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Hard News: An excellent evening in Newtown, in reply to Russell Brown,
And then afterwards sensually reached down to be all lover-man … yow. Cold bath, apparently.
A male acquaintance of mine once went to the toilet shortly after making curry with extra-hot chilli powder from Moshim's, without washing his hands first. The other big mistake, which I have made, is taking out contacts. Just....don't.
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I tend to look ominous and say "Trust me, you really don't want to know!"
When I show up in a doctor's office and they start with "how are you?", I usually have to suppress a strong urge to say really inappropriate things, like "Isn't that what you're here to tell me?". (Sometimes I don't suppress it.) Not to mention a number of less world-event-informed fellow students, who have also fallen afoul of that question in the last couple of weeks...
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Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
If you really want to take that to the reductio ad absurdum, the billions of human beings living at the rim of the Pacific basin are "in the wrong place". Don't know about you, but I haven't got anywhere else to go.
What's the matter with the lovely volcanic field you're living in?
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Hard News: The First Draft, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
I believe that's the amount of the cheese that makes up the moon that is influencing the earth's crust.
More prosaically, some people (including scientists) like to talk about earthquakes in terms of explosive power, so I suspect "kilotons" is meant as in "nuclear bomb yield".
Why they feel the need to relate earthquakes to nukes, I have no idea. Similar things happen with asteroids. It all seems a bit pointless to me, but I guess "ten million trillion calories" (or whatever number you'd need to encompass the vast amounts of energy involved) doesn't have quite the same impact and would mostly make people think of fast food. Or perhaps cheesecake.
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Hard News: The First Draft, in reply to Andrew M,
Their work has been superb, and accessible to those offshore through podcasts and streaming audio. Well done, Radio New Zealand.
The first thing we did when the tweets started coming through was bring up NatRad on my laptop. And the moment I knew it was real was when Hewitt Humphrey started the 2pm news bulletin with "There has been a 6.3 magnitude earthquake in Christchurch..." That was when it got hard.
(Seriously, if aliens ever invade, I won't believe it until I hear the pips go and Hewitt Humphrey or Catriona McLeod or Nicola Wright lead the hourly news with it.)
Unlike pretty much all of the TV coverage - not that I'm not grateful we managed to get TV3's live stream right afterwards onto our TV, but should we really have to do it through a Australian newspaper website showing a live stream of ABC showing TV3?
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Speaking of rebuilding, I just got back from a Fulbright conference in New Orleans (I have never been so glad to lay eyes on fellow Kiwis in my life, let me tell you) during which we toured the lower Ninth Ward, one of the most devastated areas of the city, to look at the work of the Make it Right foundation in building new homes.
A couple of things about the tour struck me; firstly, how much of it was still empty, five and a half years on - just street after street of empty lots and bare concrete plinths where houses had been. That was less than encouraging. The second was learning about the foundation's policy of tracking down and offering homes to former residents who'd left after Katrina. They were trying to rebuild the community, not just the infrastructure. I certainly hope that we can see some of the same foresight - to build something unique, and new, and suited to the landscape, and to build it for the people who were there before.
What I also hope, however, is that it's the government that displays that foresight - the Make it Right foundation is doing good things, but ultimately it exists because a celebrity took a liking to the place, and I think we can do better than that. We should do better than that.