the realist speaks.

A heading on the news just caught my eye.
"Rotten egg smell causes chaos in Queensland."

Chaos? I'm fascinated. What sort of chaos are we talking here? What exactly does the smell of rotten eggs make me people do?

I'm picturing cars grinding to a halt in city streets; sirens blaring, elephants smashing through shop windows. Smoke, people running, people collapsing in doorways.

It seems I have an over-active imagination. Because, apparently, 'chaos' means a few people got sick.

Hmm. Perspective is a valuable thing.

I had to remind myself of this last week. Last week, the most bleak week of the year. The week everything was grey, everything was lost, everything weighed heavy on my heart.

So it seemed.

Nobody had died. I wasn't ill. I hadn't lost anything.

Without boring anyone with the details (and to save face) it came down to the fact that something that I was hoping for didn't happen.

Pretty big deal. At the time.

I quickly found that being depressed takes a lot of energy. I was buggered. I couldn't - and didn't - do anything. I didn't want to see anyone. All I wanted to do was sit and mope and eat chocolate. And mope.

Fortunately, the novelty of being a depressed wreck wore off. The week ended, other things came up. I got over it.

If anything useful came out of the experience, it is the knowledge that even the most crap days finish at 12 midnight.

And sometimes, it is the measure of our own perspective as to how much we really suffer.

The Aussies who passed out because of a strange pong in the air were suffering. My feeling inadequate was suffering. And when we're broke, or angry at someone, or we miss out on the last muffin in the lunchroom, we're suffering.

But it's amazing what a dose of perspective can do for that suffering.

Because, on the same day, someone lost a family member to cancer. Someone else lost their job. And someone else died in a car accident.

It's okay to feel bleak over little stuff, I've realised. For a little while. But at some point, you've got to pull finger. Open your eyes. Be grateful that it's only little stuff.

And get on with living.

figuring it out

We've all been there. Some of us breeze through it; some of us get stuck; some of us take a kind of boomerang approach and return to it again and again.

But all of us, at some point, will wonder, "what should I do with my life?"

It concerns some more than others. Some people, I think, spend frustrated years searching for the 'right' answer to that question, as if our lives have no meaning otherwise. They zoom down one career path and up the next, hoping to end up in the place that they are 'meant to be'.
And perhaps getting more disoriented and confused along the way.
Others seem quite content to not think about it at all. I know a woman who has a masters degree in English and started her career as a teacher in her twenties. After her OE, she got a job at a fish factory. She is now in her mid-fifties and has been there ever since. Never married, no children; she lives at home with her mum.

Perhaps that's an extreme case, but an interesting one. Where did her ambition go? Did she ever have any?

And really, does it matter?

As kids, the "what do you want to be when you grow up?" question seems to fit in alongside learning our ABCs - mainly for the amusement of adults. If only we knew that our response would be saved up and dug out during a speech at our 21st birthday party... "When our Johnny was five, I recall he wanted to be a space monster..."

I don't think there's any particular age that this question can or should be answered. I know people nearing forty who still haven't figured it out.

At 25, I've had my fair share of I-will-never-go-there-again jobs. I've answered phones, cleaned urinals, poured Guinness, packed strawberries/asparagus/corn and assembled boxes of frozen cordon bleu and chicken nuggets. It's difficult to say which of those came out on top in the Worse Job Ever stakes.

Oddly, I did all those jobs with a (very expensive) degree under my belt.

While my future career options are now a little more palatable, I'm still nowhere near making a decision. Perhaps it will come to me in another six years, when I'm still in my current job; or perhaps when I'm backpacking around India, or blogging about my travels in Africa. Or buying frozen peas at the supermarket.

In all honesty, I don't think people care what anyone else does with their life; they're too preoccupied with their own.

So who are we answering to - ourselves, or the rest of the world?

click-a-friend

Once upon a time, friendships were formed over games of Tiggy or swapping muesli bars for yoghurt or joint homework assignments on Saving the Dolphins. It began with involved eye contact. A smile. Spoken words. A laugh or two.

Watch a bunch of five-year-olds in a room together and you'll recognise the old way of making friends.

Kids of that age have no preconceptions when it comes to making friends. Usually, they decide who they like best - be it because they were nice to them at lunchtime, or because they brought a really cool toy to Show and Tell - they strike up a friendship, and that's that. Simple.

These days, all one needs to do is click 'Add As Friend' on Facebook and - voila -

you are now friends with Joe Bloggs.

I was watching over my sister's shoulder the other day as she logged into her Facebook page. A Friend Request had come up.

Interestingly, the request came from a person who had been my best friend at Intermediate. I think she and my sister had spoken, oh maybe twice... and that was 12 years ago.

Nevertheless, she and my sister are now 'friends'.

Looking through the profiles on my own Facebook account, I note that several people have 400+ friends. Four hundred people? I can barely name four hundred people I am acquainted with, let alone am friends with. Perhaps that says more about me than them, but I'm still willing to bet that fewer than 30 of those four hundred people will stop in the street for a chat should they pass each other by.

Now, making friends is as easy as online shopping.

Perhaps it's that the concept of 'friend' has changed. Nowadays, a friend isn't necessarily someone you'd have a coffee with or call on the phone if you're having a bad day. A friend can be someone you met once at a party, or who sold you a book on the internet, or perhaps just someone who knows someone you know who sold THEM a book on the internet.

Once we head into the big wide world, we suddenly find ourselves without the means of easy social interaction of the school playground or classroom. We still crave that interaction; almost as much as we want people to know we are still popular and still liked by other human beings.

Hence, click-a-friend.

So what happens when the thread holding us - and all our four hundred-plus Facebook friends and Trademe friends and Oldfriends and Bebo friends - breaks? When the internet collapses beneath the weight of too many Farmville requests and Join This Group suggestions and godknowswhat applications?


If it weren't for the internet, how many friends do any of us really have? When Telecom fails, will Joe Bloggs call you on the phone instead?

money, money, money...

"I'm a big fan of money. I like it, I use it, I have a little. I keep it in a jar on top of my refrigerator. I'd like to put more in that jar. That's where you come in."

I'm not a big fan of Adam Sandler, but his voice (as Robbie Hart in the Wedding Singer) came to me as I searched - fruitlessly - on Trademe for a replacement iPod for less than $20. (yes, I'm still grieving).

His words also come to me when I'm searching for special deals on holidays/petrol/clothes/music/wine. Anything, really - as long as I'm paying less than I normally would, I'm winning.

Money. That's what I want.

While I can't claim to have ever been poverty-stricken, I'm no stranger to finding my cupboards bare following a poorly-timed over-indulgence with my eftpos card. I've been known to live off carrots or silverbeet for days at a time (for reasons other than my own weird experimentation with vegetarianism) and, despite the fact I have been an 'adult' for some years now, there are still times when paying the bills requires a call to my dear Ma and Pa. Shameful.

I can blame the recession; I blame my non-lucrative career path; I can blame my student loan; I can blame the windowed envelopes that cruelly appear in my letterbox more often than should be considered fair. (note: red wine and chocolate are up there with oxygen and water and therefore do not count as financial burdens).

Burdens aside, I can't help but admit that I have always been - and probably always will be - poor. Even when I was earning a relatively decent wage (working for a certain call centre that shall remain nameless) and paying minimal bills, my bank balance seemed to hover around zero more frequently than not. Whatever it was I needed, I had to have - and then lamented not having more.

These days, I depend on automatic payments to keep my money in a safe place (under the bed does not work). Because, while getting rid of $100 over the counter in Portmans takes but a relatively painfree swipe of an eftpos card, the act of actually transferring a monetary sum from one bank account to another hurts. Don't ask me why - maybe it's something to do with seeing numbers drop before my eyes and not having something tangible (i.e, red wine/chocolate/new hot-off-the-catwalk boots) to replace it.

But if I'm to buy that new iPod (not a Touch, mind - I can't afford that) or visit India's fair shores again, then it's carrots and silverbeet for a few more years yet.

Of course, the cupboard is never bare at mum and dad's...

when the ambulances have gone.

It's an eerie place, the edge of a state highway.

It's a place littered with McDonald's cups and split rubbish bags and beer bottles, with broken tarseal and wild blackberry and possum carcasses. It's a place not often tread by human feet; certainly not by the leather-bound feet of myself, armed with camera and notebook.

Today I stood on the edge of State Highway 27, calmly swapping my wide-angle camera lens for a zoom so I could get a better shot of the carnage spread across the road.

It's the silence and stillness that haunted me first. The 100kph buzz of cars and trucks had been diverted down another road. All that remained on that stretch of highway was sirens in the distance, flashing red and blue lights and a wrecked car covered with a tarpaulin.

It wasn't until later, as I picked my way back over the roadside rubbish (I remember a yellowing phonebook and a glossy packet of cigarettes) that one of the officers told me someone had died.

An eerie, empty feeling.

Oddly, it was my morbid curiosity for these situations as a kid that is in part to blame for where I was today. I grew up on a farm on the same highway and, whenever cars ploughed through our front fence (fairly regularly in the winter) I'd dig out the binoculars and jump on my BMX and go for a gawk.

Perhaps I was a weird, morbid kid.

But, shocking as today's fatal was - and as any accident is - we still want to know about it.

These days, I go as a reporter, not a rubber-necker; I get in and get out again as soon as possible. Most of the time, there's nothing major to report. A mishap with a power pole, a scrape in the car park, a bumper-to-bumper.

It's still news, even if the cars usually suffer more than the people.

Other than the purposes of satisfying our (shared) curiosity for the morbid side of life, I'd like to think there's some good in my having to stand on the roadside today.

Driving back to Tirau down that same highway tonight, with the image of that orange tarpaulin over crumpled metal still fresh in my mind, I found myself holding back from over-taking the slow truck ahead of me. A few hours earlier I wouldn't have thought twice about it.

And, as I watched a sleek sedan defy an oncoming truck to pass six cars in a row, I hoped the driver would be reading the newspaper.

coming home.

Like most high school kids, I wanted to leave my home town the minute I put down my pen at the end of my last Bursary exam.
During those years, references to our harmless little town usually revolved around the words "hole", "dump", or even "Hell".
Such is teenage angst.
True to our word, most of us did leave immediately, pursuing university degrees or travel or jobs in other, 'better' towns or cities. Anywhere but here, we said.

And now, most of us are back.

Walking down the street now, I am as likely to pass someone I went to school with as if I am actually back on school grounds. The guy at the gym, the girl at the supermarket checkout, the couple pushing a baby's pram down the main street. Physique isn't all that has changed with growing up; somewhere along the way, we changed our minds about Matamata.

So, were we wrong?

It's true that Matamata has changed as well. As much respect I have for the place now, I am sure it actually was something of a hole at some point. In the five years after I left, Matamata gained a shiny new New World, a McDonalds, Robert Harris and several swanky boutique-y style shops. Lord of the Rings helped; the tourist interest in the few remaining Hobbit holes is yet to wane. In fact, the next movie 'The Hobbit' will only bring more hordes of fantasy enthusiasts clambering to have their photo taken with the Gollum statue in the centre of town.

Still, as fancy as Matamata has become, I think there's some truth to "Home Sweet Home", and the old addage, "you don't know what you've got til it's gone".

I don't mind admitting that while my cold, draughty bedroom in my first Wellington flat spoke volumes (albeit barely audible over the howling wind) about freedom and indepedence, it lacked something that couldn't be posted in one of my mum's care packages.

Familiarity.

And so, like others in my year who lamented our lack of a cinema/night club/coffee bar, I've learned to appreciate that bigger isn't always better. That there is comfort in knowing the person who just vaccinated your dog is a friend of your parents and that the lady doing the wine tastings at the supermarket knows your favourite red.

Anonymity can be lonely. And, really, there's no place like home.

Perhaps not for good, but for now.

Someone said to me today, "I see that Tiger Woods is ----"

I didn't hear the rest of the sentence because my brain shut off.

Tiger Woods' affair, Lindsay Lohan's tattoo, Brangelina's latest hand-picked infant - it all leaves me cold. I don't care. I simply. do. not. care.

I once had a flatmate who craved celebrity gossip. Our flat was littered with the faces of the aforementioned and a thousand other Somebodies who were regularly plastered all over OK! and Hello! and New Weekly magazines. Cameron Diaz and Drew Barrymore gaped up at us from the coffee table; Owen Wilson's giant nose greeted us in the toilet. Those magazines were the backdrop to my uni years and probably ate up hours that should have spent studying or writing essays.

Unfortunately, although my knowledge of who wore what at the Oscars and the latest "baby belly" spotting was excellent, it didn't fair well when it came to relaying the finer details of punishment in modern society in my third-year Criminology exams.

These days, the only time my fingers are guilty of turning the pages of New Idea or suchlike are if I'm in a hospital waiting room or at the hairdressers.

I have no craving for Hollywood gossip. In fact, I find it somewhat satisfying that I no longer recognise some celebrities. While I'm a long way from the bliss of being able to say, "Paris who?" I find that my social standing in the world has not suffered for not knowing where Jennifer Aniston bought her earrings.

In fact, having more or less freed myself from a constant barrage of flawless American stick insects has probably added a few years to my life. Not to mention saved a few braincells.

So, if Tiger Woods heads the 6 'o clock news again this week, I'll be reaching for the remote and seeking out an otherwise untainted form of news. The newsletter in the Hubbards cereal box, perhaps.

after video killed the radio stars

About a month ago, I lost a dear friend. A friend who had rarely left my side for nearly three years; a friend who accompanied me every day to and from work, who never failed to light up my day, didn't mind my off-key singing or bad driving... and fitted into my handbag.

Yes, I admit it. I was deeply attached to my iPod and I am still grieving its loss.

The death of said iPod was nothing short of dramatic. For the last two years, I have battled with a cheap made-in-China, bought-on-Trademe transmitter whose function has steadily declined. Frequent wrestling with the dodgy fuses and cheap plastic casing was its undoing; on Doomsday, the wires had actually come free and lodged themselves deep within the carpet on the floor of my car. I lack any sort of patience for malfunctioning technology; I shoved the mess aside (iPod still attached) stuck a CD in and drove home.

If the drive had been any longer than 15 minutes, my iPod wouldn't have been the only charred occupant in my car. In any case, by the time I reached home my sleek silver-faced companion was little more than a skin-blistering lump of grey metal.

I think my grief was less about the loss of 20gb worth of music (thankfully preserved by my computer). It wasn't really even facing the cost of forking out for a replacement between bills, my next warrant of fitness, petrol, food, new shoes, wine... a new iPod is quite a long way down the list.

No, the real tragedy was realising how attached I had become to 140 grams worth of metal and buttons.

I could argue it was a matter of convenience. My iPod was significantly easier to lug around than six bulky CD cases; not to mention safer (changing CDs whilst driving is something I do not endorse).

It's not even about having something that everyone has. Keeping up with the Cool Kids. Ipods are almost outdated now anyway - everyone I know has an iPhone.

If I'm honest, I think it was the fact that I could show I had music. And that I could have that music anywhere, anytime. Music I loved, music I hated, music I didn't care for one way or another. Song after song, album after album; every artist I had ever heard of and some I hadn't. Twenty gigabites of sound I had spent years collecting. I don't even know what a gigabite is. All I knew was that I had a lot of music, and that meant I was Knowledgeable. I had Taste.

Without the iPod, I am shamefully reduced to nothing but six CD cases of (mostly) burned CDs. My true identity is revealed. To real collectors of music, I am a fake. An imposter. I am no longer able to hide behind the satifying click-click of a scrolling menu and a illuminated screen.

If there's a lesson in this, I don't want to hear it. I can afford neither a new iPod nor 'real' CDs. And I refuse to fill my car with blank-faced CDs covered in sloppy handwriting.

So, until either Santa comes through or I win Lotto, I am back to how they did it in the good old days; Radio New Zealand and my own vocal chords.

And driving solo.

attention reader's!

Perhaps it's the industry I work in; perhaps it's the fact that my mum was a schoolteacher. Or, perhaps it's that I'm a pedantic lunatic with nothing better to do.

But when someone jams an apostrophe where it shouldn't be, I want to scratch my eyeballs out and scream with rage and pain and sheer frustration.

Why, oh why, can't anybody get it right these days? There seems to be an urgency, a desperate yearning to thrust that tiny mark into a word whenever an 's' appears. And, considering how often the English language is beaten down into almost code form for the sake of faster, easier communication, it makes no sense that anybody would take the time to ADD another character.

And yet, I could put money on coming across at least one monstrosity every day:

"Boat's for hire" (a sign in Tapu)
"Closed on Monday's" (outside a certain cafe in Matamata)
"I saw you're sister in the weekend!" (on Facebook)


Right - let's go back to primary school.

A textbook will tell you that an apostrophe is either used to signify an omitted letter or letters from a word, or to signify possession.

One doesn't have to be a geek or even good at English to get the damn thing right.

But I'm not about to turn this rant into a lesson in grammar. That's what teachers are paid for. Obviously, though, not paid enough; it seems learning how to punctuate correctly has neatly slipped off the school curriculum.

Perhaps it's not all the fault of teachers. Ignorance of the apostrophe - along with correct spelling - has been exacerabated by modern forms of communication. Which isn't going to go away in a hurry. Which, to the anguish of geeks like myself, means the English language is only going to be twisted further and further out of shape.

And now, to add insult to injury, it seems even journalists - the last hope we have of preserving true English - are now falling prey to "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em"...

when disaster strikes...

We Kiwis are a funny bunch.
News breaks of a tsunami on its way and a bunch of us head to the beach for a nosy.

Some take surfboards.

Idiots, the rest of us say, shaking our heads.

But what did the rest of us do?

When Civil Defence told those living on the East Coast to start gathering bottles of water, tinned food and clothing and head inland, how many listened? How many threw off the duvet covers, screamed at their sleeping partner to start packing, and ran through the house collecting their non-waterproof treasures before heading for the hills?

At home in Tirau, some 50 minutes from the nearest coast, I got out of bed and ran. And ran home again. Like I do every morning. I actually forgot about the tsunami alert until I was eating breakfast. By then, warnings about a "massive wall of water" had been downgraded to "waves measuring 20cm high".

Hardly worth getting out of bed for.

To be fair, most people were probably still snoring soundly when that first news bulletin hit the airwaves. It was Sunday, after all. The rest, I suppose, either yawned and made a cup of tea, or cracked a few eggs into the frying pan, or just changed channels.

She'll be right, we said.

It makes me wonder: how would the average Kiwi cope in the face of real disaster? We seem to hear about some part of the world devastated by tsunami, earthquake, bush fire, terrorist attack every few weeks now. And sure, we've had our share of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions in the past, but nothing compared to Haiti or Chile or even the Aussie bushfires. Events where 'she'll be right' wouldn't quite cut it.

It just doesn't seem quite real.

And, to be honest, every time another disaster strikes, our memories of the preceeding one fade a little more quickly. We hear the numbers of dead and injured and missing, and we despair; then we forget.

Like Fredd Dagg said, "we don't know how lucky we are, mate."

But maybe there's something to be said for living in the moment. Sure, we can sympathise with those whose lives are torn apart and we can fill our basements with tinned baked beans and decks of playing cards in preparation for Doomsday. We can practise fire drills and earthquake drills and build ourselves a bomb shelter complete with flush toilet and home theatre system.

But, in the end, if a freak wave or a cyclone is on its way, there's sweet Fanny Adams we can do about it. It's gonna happen, whether we're 'ready' or not. The best we can do it is live each day as it comes.

And maybe have a surfboard on hand.

running out of excuses

I'm rarely described as an emotional sort of person.

But on Friday night, as I sprinted down the home straight towards the bellowing crowd at the Matamata Domain, I did feel something of the warm fuzzies.

Not just because the Tower Run was finally over and I hadn't a) died, or b) come last, or c) repeated my primary school performance of crying bitterly at the finish line because I was too tired and slow and all my friends had finished ages ago.

It was something to do with being a part of a community event; one that I'll admit I never would have dreamt of doing otherwise. I've lived in Matamata most of my life and have had friends who have run the Tower Run religiously in the past, but not being a 'runner' myself, I laughed off any notion of joining them. Seven kilometres? Stuff that. What is the fun - or point - of running somewhere; much less trying to beat a bunch of other people on the way?

I suppose my dislike for public sporting events stems from my memories of school sport as a kid. I hated PE. I hated netball. At the Hinuera school cross country - and worse, the inter-school cross country - I would invariably come dead last, stumbling and gasping my way towards the finish line while teachers called out encouraging things like, "good girl... not far now... oh, you're doing so well!"

I was not sporty. I was a nerd. I spent my primary school days in the library or under a tree reading Enid Blyton. And, despite growing up on a farm and running all over it with my brother and sister, I did not perform well when it came to running races or playing sport.

But, after packing on a few kilos at university (I blame stodgy hostel food and cheap wine) I packed myself off the to the gym and slowly developed quite a love affair with fitness. After finishing my degree, I even did an Outward Bound course and ran a half-marathon; something that would have been quite beyond the comprehension of my dumpy 10-year-old self. Now, I run or work out nearly every day.

Still, getting fit on your own is one thing; comparing your ability to other people - especially people you have to face at work - is quite another. It took a bit of coaxing from my colleagues to convince me to join the team for this year's Tower Run. Even then, as the day drew nearer, I admit there was a tiny hope that I'd trip over a shoelace and break my leg or contract the latest form of swine flu and find myself bed-ridden.

But as I dragged my weary body away from the time-keepers after crossing the finish line on Friday, it wasn't just the big sloppy "9" marked on my hand in vivid that had me eurphoic. It was the fact I'd done it; I'd broken down a wall of "I can't" and replaced with a "wow - I damn well can."

Cheesy? Totally. Inspiring? Maybe.

And apparently, the Hamilton Round the Lake race is in three weeks' time...

introducing: that girl from the Chronicle

And so begins my first blog.

Actually, this is but one in a long line of blogs I have begun - and abandoned - over the last few years. Like many millions of others out there, I have previously been drawn in by the novelty of seeing my ramblings published online, only to lose interest after the third or fourth post. Why? Laziness, most probably. Or simply not enough to say.

I realise this confession will not instill much faith in my readers. But this blog, I feel, will be different. Working at the Matamata Chronicle means I spend much of my day chasing news, interviewing people, taking photographs and writing stories. Newspaper writing calls for certain rules and a certain kind of style; which, depending on the content, can be fairly strict. Personal opinion is a definite no-no.

Blogging, on the other hand, is (quite literally) another story. No rules, no guidelines, no expectations. Just whatever you feel like writing about. For a journalist - however big or small a fish they are in the media world - that can be almost cathartic.

My reasons for creating "In Katie's Words" are far from selfish, though. Over the past year, we at the Matamata Chronicle have worked hard to get closer to our readers. Through our Facebook site, we have discovered a whole new way of connecting with our community. And now, through this blog, I want to step that up.

"In Katie's Words" will be my own online column: the thoughts, musings and observations of a born-and-bred Matamata lass. I promise to keep it light; after all, the less time I have to spend in front of a computer, the better.

So. Here's to my latest venture into Matamata's online community - and to introducing you to the other side of "that girl from the Chronicle."