Up Front by Emma Hart

The markers of last year's English exams said choice of text film, novel, play, poem or short story is critical to students' success, but many teachers are making poor choices. Level 1 markers said they were concerned that lots of poems and short stories studied were "of a disturbing or brutal nature".

Films that produced good marks included The Piano, Billy Elliot and Gallipoli, while Shakespeare and classics such as Catcher in the Rye and Lord of the Flies produced good answers in the novel exams.

More modern books such as Tomorrow When the War Began and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night, also gave good scope but Level 2 students struggled to get top marks studying blockbuster movies Bend It Like Beckham and The Matrix trilogy.

I mean, honestly, what are these teachers thinking, choosing these texts? This isn't a Robin Williams movie you know, it's not about being cool and hip and in with the kids. It’s about giving them the tools they need to pass exams.

I blame this new crop of trendy liberal young teachers. Everyone knows art students should take a few years between finishing university and starting teaching – time for their blood alcohol levels to drop and the disillusionment to set in. Next thing you know they'll be letting the kids choose their own texts to write on and wittering about 'engagement' and 'developing a love of reading'. How's that going to benefit them in the real world? Can you imagine trying to get a raise on the basis of your love of reading? Fastest way to the Artists' Dole if you ask me.

And nobody thinks about the markers, do they? A quarter of all kids wrote on the Shawshank Redemption. I had to watch it. The Shawshank Redemption! How can that possibly be suitable? It's only fourteen years old, and it's got Morgan bloody Freeman in it. What's next, Nurse Betty?

Except it wouldn’t be, would it, because that's not horrible enough. No, you want to 'engage' these kids, we'd better show them Se7en. This taste for dark, nasty, violent texts is just disturbing, and it has to be discouraged. We need a return to the good old days of set texts when the Ministry for Enabling Kids to Pass Exams got to choose their books for them. Good, wholesome, uplifting books like The Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies and Brave New World.

Forget movies, that's like giving the lazy little bastards credit for watching television. Plays were good enough for us. Send them back to the Bard. But the original texts, not that Baz Luhrman depravity. Quite how he managed to turn Romeo and Juliet into something full of sex and violence is beyond me.

These kids think they can write essays on anything now. Just the other day I was marking a paper where a student was talking about the intersection of racism, sexism and homophobia, the prejudices of immigrant communities, and a conclusion where a young girl defers a sexual relationship with an older man in order to further her career, and it turned out she was talking about Bend it Like Beckham. Ridiculous. If she wanted to blather on about pop culture like it actually matters she should wait until university like everybody else.

Well, we've done what we can to stop the rot. We've put together a couple of lists: texts that enable students to give successful answers, and text that lead to less successful answers. We all know, after all, that it's the quality of the texts that matters, not the ability of the students. So just remember, kids, if your teacher says you can write on The Matrix Trilogy, they’re not cool. They hate you and they want you to fail.

Consider yourself warned.

One of the great things about modern elections is the way voters can have so much more direct access to the candidates. These days, anyone can mail out a candidate survey and know they're going to get some kind of response. Much to my disappointment however, it seems nobody is asking the really tough questions. So here they are, the questions nobody else thought to ask. My candidate survey.

1/ Should stupid people be allowed to vote? If so, who should they vote for?

2/ If you were secretly an Arab terrorist, what would be the first policy you’d enact on taking office?

3/ Trevor Mallard and a Hector's Dolphin are stuck in set nets. You only have time to save one of them. Why is it the dolphin?

4/ All the current leaders of New Zealand's political parties are on a plane. It crashes into the Andes with no hope of rescue for weeks. Whose delicious corspe do you save for last?

5/ You are holding a dinner party for famous New Zealand political and historical personages. Who do you seat next to Graham Capill?

6/ John Key: hot or not?

7/ If you had to ban one race from entering New Zealand, which one would it be and why?

8/ Which gay MP would you least like to have babysit your children?

9/ What do you think your party could do to most degrade the quality of life of people on the Domestic Purposes Benefit?

10/ On taking power, which bureaucrats would you sack? Please provide names and addresses.

11/ What was the dumbest thing you’ve said in the last six months and what the hell were you thinking?

12/ Whose vote are you most interested in buying? Why isn't it mine?

The U.S. elections have shown the importance of being in touch with the common man. Let's see which common men you've recently touched.

13/ Without going outside to check, what make is your ministerial car?

14/ How many houses do you own? Bonus question for Labour candidates: how many houses does Marian Hobbes own?

15/ Who is your favourite New Zealand band? Prove it by posting a youtube clip of you singing one of their songs.

16/ Name three prominent New Zealand bloggers. Which one would you most like to punch in the face?

17/ How much did a one kilo block of Anchor cheese cost at Pak 'n' Save Moorhouse Ave last Tuesday?

There is a prize (and by 'a prize' I mean 'kudos') for getting the answer to question 7 correct (and by 'correct' I mean 'the same as mine').

I've always liked tattoos. I guess because I knew a few guys with tattoos growing up, I've never had that expectation that they must be dangerous meat-heads. It wasn’t something I ever had to learn. That I knew nice guys with tats, and bastards without them, wasn't surprising, it just was.

Chicks with tats, on the other hand, were skanks.

Still, as a teenager, I sort of vaguely wanted a tattoo. The main reason I never got one was that I thought people would decide I was just doing it for the attention, rather than for myself. Getting a tattoo at sixteen would have been try-hard.

Now I'm old, and I find as I get older that I increasingly don't give a stuff what other people think of me. The only person whose opinion I take any notice of is my partner, and this might be because he agrees with me a lot. Apparently it’s just safer that way.

He certainly agreed that I should get a tattoo. Back in April, we were sitting in the hot pools in Hanmer people-watching, and noting that there was a lot of ink around. I was really impressed by the guy whose back looked like an illustration from the Tale of Genji. I expressed a vague longing, and Partner surprised me with his vehement enthusiasm for the idea.

Apparently chicks with tats are kind of hot.

I knew that I wanted a tattoo, and I even knew what I wanted it to be of. What I needed was encouragement enough to break the shackles of my Presbyterian up-bringing and not see it as a stupid frivolous waste of money.

I've just been writing a beginner's guide to getting a tattoo, and it got me thinking about it all over again. I had no idea where to go, where I could get a proficient and clean tattoo or how much it was going to cost me. A bad tattoo is like having a shitty haircut for the rest of your life.

Fortunately for me, I was still in touch with a bunch of slightly disreputable people to ask for advice, and there was even a consensus: Naith at absolution. So I went in to check the place out and make an appointment, and something very odd happened.

When I was at uni, 'we' used to refer to 'other people' as Normals. We could spot Normals by the way they dressed and spoke, and by the way they looked at us sideways like we were weird and possibly contagious. I wasn't really aware of it at the time, but we were just as snobby towards the Normals as they were towards us.

When I walked into the tattoo parlour, the guy behind the counter looked at me like I was a Normal, and maybe I’d got lost somewhere on the way to pick my kids up from soccer. I didn’t belong. Being a life-long sufferer of Oppositional Defiant Disorder, I made the appointment anyway. I did go away feeling just a little worried that I was trying to be something that I wasn't any more, that I'd just got too old for this stuff.

Once I was booked in, that's when I started worrying about the pain. What if it hurt like going to the dentist, and I got sooky? What if it hurt like some other things hurt and I enjoyed it too much?

Much to my surprise, the actual tattooing experience was a delight, and one I recommend enthusiastically to other people. Any other people, pretty much randomly. Do it, it's great! My tattooist was friendly, helpful and open. Due to what I call the Christchurch Effect, this complete stranger turned out to be the good friend of a good friend of a good friend of mine. He's also the only person I've ever had get mildly annoyed that one of my breasts kept getting in his way. Every now and then he'd get completely absorbed in what he was doing and absently try to shove it sideways.

I’ve had no negative feedback on my tattoo at all, though we'll see what happens in summer when it's out and about more. Only one of my friends was brave enough to suggest that I was having some kind of mid-life crisis. It was particularly courageous of that individual, because I keep having to resist the temptation to nuke any argument with him by saying 'oh yeah? well you're boffing a choir-boy'. My elderly mother was delighted. "I’ve always wanted to get a tattoo myself," she told me, "to surprise the undertaker". My daughter is fascinated, full of questions, and obviously quietly thinking about getting one herself. I'm grateful for the restriction that stops her getting one until she's eighteen: not because I don’t want her to get a tattoo, but because I don’t want her to get a stupid tattoo.

The only real problem I have is that I now really, really want more tats. I don't know where or what of, nor can I really justify the expense, but I've gone ink-mad. So gratify me vicariously. I want to hear stories about tattoos or people's reaction to tattoos. I want to see pictures of tats. And I want to know what you guys think about social stigma around ink: does it still exist, and is it different for men and women?

I'm not, as has been pointed out before, much of a chick. Any sentence that begins with 'women like' is probably going to end with me saying 'you what?'. When it comes to Mother's Day, the family will be set when they can work out what it is that's the exact opposite of fluffy slippers and a book recommended by Oprah. I don't like chocolate or ice cream or hating Keira Knightly. I regard a Women's Lifestyle Expo as the kind of thing that would leave me in desperate need of a beer and a fag after about fifteen minutes.

And I don't get shoes.

I've always hated shoes. It's possible I was savaged by a shoe as a child and I've blocked out the memory, leaving only a lingering morbid dislike of footwear. Whatever the reason, the chief glory of spring for me is the ability to once again go barefoot. Freedom from the tyranny of footwear is totally worth all the dodging of broken glass and weird smears of unidentifiable 'stuff' on the footpath.

As a result, I have the sort of feet you get from thirty-odd years of going barefoot – the sort of feet beloved by the Khmer Rouge. They're broad and flat and peasanty, and I don't care. For a while my party trick was shoving pins into my feet – you had a good centimetre of callus before you even hit skin, let alone any kind of responsive nerve ending.

As I've grown older, I've started to notice something very odd. Other people look at what people are wearing on their feet. People look at me funny for not wearing shoes, and some – and I mean at a 'strangers in the supermarket checkout queue' level – will make comments about my feet. Sometimes they'll even make those comments to me. I particularly love the remarks about hygiene, as if the soles of my frequently-washed feet are in some way inherently dirtier than the bottoms of their shoes.

I've also had to sign waivers on occasion, declaring that I won’t sue the movie theatre should I slash open my delicate little bare sole on a particularly vicious piece of popcorn. That's not even slightly weird compared to the apparent requirement for me to wear shoes while flying. I struggle to conceive of the kind of accident I could have involving an airplane where shoes would be of any protective value. Still, the next time I'm required to dig through my luggage for safety reasons, I want to be able to pull out a pair of these. (Why yes, there is no length I will not go to in the cause of sarcasm. Try me.)

My mother is particularly bugged by my habit of digging over the vegetable garden in bare feet. When I was little, she gave me a book of cautionary stories for children which featured a story where a girl was digging her garden in bare feet, and put a fork through her foot. Unfortunately from a 'correcting behaviour' standpoint, the explicit moral of the story was that this had happened because she was gardening on the Sabbath, instead of holding it sacred by not working (and cooking her family a huge roast and then washing all the dishes instead). Rather than making me wear shoes for safety, this just entrenched my suspicion that God was a Vindictive Bastard

I’m slowly learning that noticing feet is normal. Not at this level, there’s nothing normal about that, but my total inability to notice people below mid-calf is apparently kind of weird. Ugg boots, platforms with fish in them, clown shoes – I promise you, I won't notice. Never in my life has the phrase 'what a pretty shoe' gone through my head, let alone made it all the way out of my mouth.

And it's not that I don’t care about clothes. I like clothes. I like hippy skirts, jeans that come all the way up to my waist, and bras that push my breasts together instead of tucking them discreetly into my armpits. I'll get all dressed up for an evening out, jewellery and hair and makeup, and then get all depressed when I realise I have to put something on my feet or I'll look weird.

My total loathing of shoes, and the discarding of them at the first possible opportunity, is I'm sure in no way related to either my current protracted bout of bronchitis, or my on-going hip problems. When my physiotherapist suggested corrective insoles for my non-existent shoes, I just stopped going to my physiotherapist. And yes, it has been suggested that I’m in need of the kind of therapy that doesn’t start with 'physio'.

I was in the supermarket the other day, and a woman looked at me a couple of times, then furtively scurried over. "I just want to say," she said, "how nice it is to see someone in bare feet. I'm from Auckland, and you never see people in Christchurch with bare feet". I was very sweet and thanked her, instead of suggesting it was either to stop people spotting the webbed toes from the in-breeding, or to protect us from the debris from the constantly-exploding P labs.

Let her find that out the hard way.

When I first wrote for Public Address, I talked about difference. I said "the heavy shit can wait for another occasion, and get here on merit". Since then, apart from a tendency to laud porn and smut up the cleanest threads I've been very samey. Despite a reluctance to look like a total drama queen, however, it seems to be time to dance like Tze Ming’s watching. Merit is still up for debate.

When I was sixteen my boyfriend tried to kill me. Not very hard, but when I tell this story people tend to look at me like I'm crazy, which tips me off that it might not be normal. Obviously, in order to tell this story names have to be changed to protect the everybody. In doing this, I've picked up on Jolisa's excellent suggestion that more people should be named after inanimate objects.

We were doing school sport one day when someone pointed out that there were a couple of big leather-clad guys leaning on their motorbikes watching us. It turned out one of them was Table, a guy I’d gone out with briefly in 3rd form before leaving him for his best friend Pickles. Anyway, one thing led to another and next morning I'm in the Deputy Head’s office getting a bollocking for smoking and riding on the back of a bike while in school uniform. Lesson? Always carry a change a clothes.

Turns out Table has these three friends, and they're all very close. Table's friend Standard Lamp is tall, wiry, pony-tailed, covered in tattoos and one of the sweetest and most selfless people I've ever met. They're friends with two brothers, Crawdad and Catfish.

After I've been going out with Table about a month, Crawdad and Catfish's parents go on holiday, and the rest of us basically move into their house. My mum knows where I am, I'm still going to school, but I've basically become a sort of combination mum and girlfriend for this bunch of guys. A murlfriend, if you will.

Table loves me. He cooks me dinner, teaches me how to use a butterfly knife and play Strip Poleconomy (not at the same time). He may wear a lot of black leather and look like a brunette Billy Idol, and he might have a tendency to be overly aggressive and have flashes of violent rage, but I know him. He's fiercely loyal, devoted to his Mum, and he loves the theatre. He's bright and frustrated. He's not coping very well with the death of his last girlfriend or getting kicked out of the army for getting caught with drugs. (He says he was framed. I say that'd be a hell of a coincidence.) He and Standard Lamp are Prospects for the Road Knights.

Me, I'm falling in love with Catfish. He sings and plays guitar – mostly he does Elvis covers down at the Bowling Club, but there's talk of a recording contract. He's got this little dimply smile like a human version of John Barrowman. He's got me listening to Randy Travis and liking it.

There comes a day we're briefly alone in the hallway, he reaches for a cupboard behind me, and suddenly we're playing Bobbing for Tonsils. Then he says something to me that I shan't repeat, as its awesome power as a flawless pick-up line makes it too dangerous to release on an unsuspecting public. An interruption prevents us setting a new land-speed record for trousers.

Things get very tense. Aware I'm slipping away from him, Table asks me to marry him. I tell him we have to break up. He presses me. Whatever's wrong he can fix it. I admit I'm in love with someone else. He says he'll share. I refuse. He asks who it is. I won't tell him, on the grounds that if I do, he'll kill Catfish. I leave.

A couple of weeks later I run into Catfish in the chippy. He tells me he took about an hour of listening to Table talk about me and this mysterious guy before he couldn't take it any more. He's said to him, listen, we have to talk, but first you have to drink this rigger. Then he’s told him.

Table got up, walked out of the house and down the road. Catfish followed him, and sat with him at the top of the Ben Venue cliffs in the freezing dark for four hours so he wouldn’t jump.

I extract the salient fact from this story, which is that a guy who'll do that for a friend isn’t going to have sex with me.

About a week later I get a call from Table asking me to go round to his place. He sounds weird. When he lets me in he's wearing cammo gear and sunnies and carrying a loaded crossbow. I figure I'm not leaving in a hurry.

So I sit down and he holds the crossbow to my head and talks to me. He's had a fight with the boys, and if they don't like him any more what's the point. They're his life, everything's wrong and nothing will make it right. Not once does he mention he knows about me and Catfish.

Gradually it dawns on me that he thinks this is the only way he can get anyone to listen to him. And I can do that, I can listen to him and let him let himself be talked down. I'm not scared. I'm annoyed, because I did the right thing and didn't have any Catfish and I'm still being punished for it anyway. I'm a little apprehensive that Table's going to make me have sex with him before he'll let me go.

But I do talk him down and the crossbow gets too heavy to keep holding to my head and he lets me go home. I run all the way, crawl into bed and bawl my eyes out. I tell absolutely no-one. That was 1988. I spoke about this for the first time in 2004.

This is sixteen to me. When people talk about teenagers as if they're children this is what I think about. When they demonise hoodie-wearers I get myself all in a tangle. People used to judge Table as dangerous and stupid because of the way he dressed, and he was a sweet guy who was just a bit fucked up. I argue this, and my partner says 'wait a minute, isn't that the guy who tried to kill you?'. And all I can do is shrug and say 'yeah, but not hard'.