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.