Ups and downs

When I went to my dad’s house the other day, my little sister walked up to my car as I pulled in to the driveway.

“Why does it say ‘help’?” She asked me, pointing to the word I’d scribbled in the condensation a few days ago.

“I was feeling sad when I wrote it,” I said with a shrug.

“But . . . why is there a smiley face beside it then?”

“Because I drew that earlier, when I was feeling happy.”

She looked at me like I was a super weirdo.

Dear Sacha

After living together for two years, we’re finally going our separate ways. It feels like not very long ago we were running around with baseball bats warning people of the impending zombie apocalypse for a class presentation. That was fun. It’s strange to think that after a hug and some almost-tears (you know, the kind that collect on your bottom eyelid but never actually fall, and eventually mysteriously disappear), it’s all over.

We’ve had our fights and annoyances, but we’ve also weathered a fair few storms together, helped each other cope with the stress and dramas of flatmates with suspected personality disorders, and we’ve stuck by one another when it felt like we had nobody else. It’s certainly felt a lot like that lately, and you were the best person to have by my side through all of that. I’ve never had a friend like you before.

Here’s a few things I will and won’t miss.

WILL MISS: The conversations. We could start chatting about something meaningless and eventually branch off into a zillion different philosophical topics, and we’d only stop talking until we realised several hours had passed. I love that we can disagree on something and have a really mature, well-rounded debate about it.

WON’T MISS: The shoes. The shoes everywhere. I wasn’t really allowed to keep shoes in the doorway as a kid, but you seem to think it’s necessary to have them there. In your defense, you’ve definitely shrunk the pile of shoes you keep by the door.

WILL MISS: The stupidity. Like chasing each other down the street in our togs with buckets of water even though we’re in our twenties.

WON’T MISS: Flooding the house. How many times have we managed that? Four times in two years? Granted, most of the time it wasn’t our fault. At least we have a well-established system now whenever it happens.

WILL MISS: Being able to grab the cat, a couple of towels, and a bottle of wine and go sit down in the gully making daisy chains.

WON’T MISS: The tissues that seem to accumulate in various places on the floor.

WILL MISS: Cooking new meals together when we had no idea how to make them, but would wing it anyway and come up with something delicious.

WON’T MISS: Your washing machine and vacuum cleaner. They’re terrible and I hate them.

WILL MISS: Sharing cool songs we found on the internet.

WON’T MISS: . . . I’ve run out of things I won’t miss.

WILL MISS: Seeing your family and your boyfriend, who has fluffy hair.

I could probably list a lot more things that I wish I didn’t have to leave behind, but I’m getting bored of the list format. I just want to say thank you for sharing these last three years with me. We’re keeping in touch, no buts about it.

Love, Melissa.

(Please take all the “won’t miss” parts as tongue in cheek. I’m probably going to start piling shoes in the doorway to feel like you’re still here . . . )

Cam

When I was ten years old we made a few big changes in our lives. Our family moved from Auckland to Tauranga, and we got our first dog. 

Cam used to belong to the people down the street. I used to walk past their house on the way to school and walk up to the fence to see him. My stepbrother would always pat him, but I was usually too afraid, because dogs were scary and Cam was a playful biter. He was still only young.

Nearly 11 years on, it’s the end of the road for Cam. Last time I saw him he seemed normal. Happy, affectionate, a little pushy for attention. Congestive heart failure struck quickly, however.

I received a text from my stepfather today, telling me Cam was sick, and would be getting put down later today. Luckily I happened to be over in Tauranga visiting my boyfriend, so I was able to go over and give the dog one last cuddle.

The change was dramatic. He almost seemed normal at first. He walked up to me and licked my face when I came through the door. His tail wagged a little. But it quickly became apparent how tired he was. Even while he was just lying on the floor, he panted as if he’d been running. His resting heart rate was about twice the speed it should have been. He used to let out a bark whenever we stopped patting him, but he’d given up on that now.

I have a lot of fond memories of Cam. When I was younger we had some family friends come to visit, and one of the boys was playfighting with me. I was screaming, as kids do, and Cam looked at the boy, put his hackles up, and started growling at him until he moved away from me.

Cam used to come over and stick his nose in my face if I cried. I’d pretend to cry sometimes, to see what he’d do. Sure enough, moments after I’d buried my face in my hands, a big, wet dog nose would push its way between my fingers. He was the sweetest, most gentle dog I’ve ever come across.

He once appropriated my little brother’s moonhopper, and thoroughly molested it. He loved that moonhopper, literally. He loved it so much, in fact, that the poor thing eventually popped.

He’s caused his fair share of trouble too, though. We had a quad bike at our old house that he loved to run behind, and he’d get irrationally excited whenever he heard it start up. One day Nana was over to visit, and was standing in the gateway when someone started up the bike. Sam was through that gateway like a shot, and we all got a shock to see Nana lying on the gravel, having been knocked over by an overenthusiastic dog.

Another time one of our rabbits escaped, and Cam rolled her halfway down the driveway with his nose before Mum managed to grab him.

Cam was never the dog I expected to go first. I thought we still had a few good years left in him yet. I just hope where he’s going has all the moonhoppers he could ever hope for.

Good dog.

Sharing pain

I don’t have much to say about this, except that it really gets you thinking. I’ve never had any self-harm inclinations, but I thought this was an interesting point of view on the situation.

Beginnings

I’m the type of person who likes to think the best of people.

In some ways, I’m an optimist. I want to like everybody I meet, and I struggle to deal with it if I find they’re an unlikable person. If somebody turns on me, I’m quick to forgive, and I don’t give up on a friendship easily.

Tensions have been high with a number of people lately and I’ve had trouble hanging on to that optimist side of myself. In all areas it’s been an exhausting year.

Classwork has been piled on like there’s no tomorrow, someone I considered to be one of my best friends threw a tantrum and walked out of my life without so much as a backwards glance, and I’ve just barely been scraping by financially. This year has been both  fantastic and horrible – I can actually say for once ‘it was the best of times, it was the worst of times’.

I’m still learning to let things go. I’m still learning not to care about narrow-minded people. It’s a tricky thing to manage. The hardest thing I’ve found this year is having people develop a misguided opinion of me and my personal views, and start to spread that opinion around like a disease.

When somebody wrongs me, I go through a process. For a while, I feel sad, maybe even in shock. After about a week, I start feeling angrier, and a few days after that, I stop caring. It suddenly hits me: they don’t matter any more. A friend that can turn their back on me without bothering to talk about what’s wrong? I don’t need someone like that in my life. Eventually I realise it would have been a toxic friendship anyway.

My flatmate deals differently when someone hurts her. She skips all the sad parts and immediately adopts the ‘screw you’ attitude. That being said, I think the sadness catches up to her when she least expects it.

Anyway, it’s been a hard year. I’ve finished my degree (bar one assignment I have to send in by the end of the week, let’s not jinx it), and I’m ready to join the real world.

A new start is exactly what I need.

Broken bones in various languages

My boyfriend has just broken is ankle.

I’m still a teensy bit unclear how exactly he managed it, because this is how he explained it over text:

“Tightening up some bolts we undo when shimming an Isuzu, and my swivel sheared in 2 and I fell down awkward as.”

Everything before “I fell down” might is well be written in Icelandic or Ukrainian or some other obscure language nobody knows how to speak. However, what I’m gathering is that the injury happened in the falling down part.

Now I am sad because I’m all the way over in Hamilton and he’s in Tauranga and I can’t take care of him, and all I want to do is unleash my inner mother hen and pamper him like he has never been pampered before.

I need to fix him.

Viral OCD poem that you have to see

If you, like me, are a frequent trawler of the internet, you may have already seen this viral video of a man with OCD describing a relationship he had while dealing with his illness, but if you haven’t, I suggest you watch it.

Neil Hilborn wrote the poem back in 2011, but performed it at a competition in June this year. Someone shared a video of it on Reddit, and from there, everything went crazy. This copy of the video has been viewed close to three million times.

For those of you who can’t, or don’t want to watch the video, here’s some of my favourite quotes from the poem. (You really should watch it though, because the passion with which he performs it and the way he uses repetition to emphasize his tics is nothing short of stunning.) These don’t lead on to each other, they’re just parts that I’ve pulled from the video.

“The first time I saw her, everything in my mind went quiet. All the tics, all the constantly refreshing images just disappeared. When you have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, you don’t really get quiet moments.

I asked her out six times in 30 seconds. She said yes after the third one but none of them felt right so I had to keep going.

When we moved in together she said she felt safe, like no one would ever rob us because I definitely locked the door 18 times.

She told me that she shouldn’t have let me get so attached to her, that this whole thing was a mistake. But how can it be a mistake that I don’t have to wash my hands after I touched her?

Now I just think about who else is kissing her. I can’t breathe, because he only kisses her once. He doesn’t care if it’s perfect.”

And possibly the most telling part?

“I want her back so bad, I leave the door unlocked. I leave the lights on.”

Lickety split

It’s my last day here at Stuff. I can’t figure out if my internship went quickly or slowly, and I can’t figure out how I feel about leaving.

On the one hand, I’m going to miss the people, the work, my grandparents, and my grandparents’ lovely, warm house. On the other hand, I want to see my friends again, and, although I sound like a nerd for saying this, I’m looking forward to class. And, of course, I’ll be closer to my Sam, and will no longer be an eight hour drive from him.

So I feel torn at the moment.

It’ll be strange not hearing the mystery office sneezer let out a high-pitched, yelpy sneeze every single day. I’ve now been informed of who she is, so I suppose there is no longer a mystery at all.

I probably won’t miss the constant uncertainty about whether or not what I just felt was an earthquake. There was another one today that was very short, but just gave the office a quick shake up, like a half-hearted salad toss. I won’t miss that.

Tomorrow my kitten and I shall begin the long drive home.

Hamilton.

Homelton.

Emotional investments

I’ll admit, when I read the news that Cory Monteith had been found dead in his hotel room, I clapped my hand to my mouth in shock and thought – hoped – for a moment that it wasn’t true.

I’m sitting here still trying to wrap my head around the fact, and feeling a little bit guilty about how sad it’s made me. I mean, I never knew him, I didn’t have some kind of mad, celebrity crush on him. What reason do I have to feel sad about the passing of a celebrity I never even met, when other people around the world die every single day? The death toll from the train explosion in Quebec has risen to 33, and a third person has died from the plane crash in San Francisco. A one year old boy named Atreyu Taylor-Matene died in Auckland on Friday from head injuries. These are awful, horrific things to be happening, and while I feel a twinge of sadness for it all, it’s difficult for me to mourn those deaths. What makes them any different from Cory Monteith?

When a celebrity dies and the world goes into shock, pictures usually start circulating on the internet showing starving African children and a caption along the lines of: “one person dies, the whole world mourns. Millions die, nobody cares.” It’s sad, but it’s true, and I wonder what makes us so invested in the life of a star that their death takes precedence over those who die every day in much worse ways.

The reason, I believe, is that – particularly with television and movie stars – we watch them so much and see them acting and being somebody that we start to feel like we know them, even though they’re simply putting on a mask. We see them slip into a role and become somebody else, and that somebody else has emotions and fears and dreams, and we’re sitting here in front of our TV screens rooting for them. We start to love who they pretend to be.

When the actor dies, the character dies too. Sure, you can replace them sometimes, but it won’t ever be the same. Nobody can be that character in the same way, and you won’t connect with the new actor in the exact same way.

Despite all the ridicule it receives, and all its cheesiness, I actually enjoy Glee. I liked Finn and I was always hoping he’d end up with Rachel. I wanted things to work out and I wanted that happy ending for them. Now there’s no Finn anymore, and while this makes me horribly guilty to admit, that makes me pretty sad, because now we’ll never see what would’ve happened.

So that’s what I think it is. I think that we become emotionally invested in a celebrity’s life because we see them lay their character’s soul bare. I’m sure there’s a whole raft of other reasons it upsets so many people when a celebrity dies, but this is one that occurred to me while I asked myself why Cory Monteith mattered more than a stranger in a plane crash.

 

Distances and fonder hearts

Goodbyes with my boyfriend have always been hard for me, especially because they don’t often seem hard for him.

The first time I had to say goodbye to him was the night before I moved to a different city to start my degree. Coincidentally, it was Valentine’s day, so we killed two birds with one stone and went out for dinner and a movie to celebrate the day and also make the most of the last day we had together. I wasn’t going far away, it’s only about an hour and a half drive between Tauranga and Hamilton, but leaving him behind was a big step for me.

The first time I ever told him I loved him was that night. You could say that it was just the teenager in me speaking – we’d only been together about five months at that point – but considering that it’s coming on three years now and I have never stopped feeling in love with him, I think it’s safe to say that it wasn’t just the declaration of an infatuated 18 year old.

Sam dropped me home and I burst into tears as I hugged him goodbye. I was going to an unfamiliar city, not knowing a single soul, and I didn’t know when I’d see him next. All my insecurities came out and walloped me over the head.

Today I had to say goodbye to him again. It’s not a big deal, it’s only for a little while, but I’m going down to Wellington for several weeks for an internship. It’ll be the farthest Sam and I have been away from each other since we got together. I thought I’d have to go for a month without seeing him, but he mentioned the other day that he’d come visit me one weekend while I was there.

Considering that he works full time all week and until midday on Saturdays, that would mean he’d reach Wellington at about dinnertime on Saturday, and then have to leave around lunchtime the next day to get back to Tauranga at a reasonable hour. I told him this, and that he’d only be seeing me for a day, effectively.

“Why are you complaining?” he replied. “You’re not the one who’s going to be doing the driving.”

I felt pretty warm and fuzzy after that.