Blog Love?

Blog love is being bandied about willy nilly so rather than contribute to the noise . . . here's my 2 cents:
 Follow my blog with bloglovin

Media Explosion at Pike River Mine

It is virtually impossible to say anything about the Pike River Mine incident without sounding patronising, trite, clichéd or a combination of all three.  Twenty-nine men are buried 1500 metres underground.  Immediate rescue impossible.  As the hours haul themselves around the clock, brows furrow and greyness sets heavily into the eyes of friends and families.  Hope beds itself in for a long haul.

In reality there is little more to be said, and yet there would be barely a soul to say nothing.  That is a sure indicator of the deep shock these kinds of tragedies hammer home.  Even the most reticent are compelled to utter, to mimic even, in order to speak of "unspeakable things".  People, previously unknown to pray, miraculously begin to offer prayers.  News reporters, as if by reflex, ask passersby: “How are you feeling?”

There is a time when words become empty tokens, expulsions of breath with no force of meaning.  They tread close to becoming unintended insults, unwanted injuries.  Perhaps that time is much closer to the event when sympathy, prayers and sorrow do not require the gesture of speech to be shared.  Such time rather for “the news” to step back, watch and listen.  Pike River is not a media explosion.  It is the everyday lives of ordinary people being played out against the background of something awful.

The Girl in HR

They rarely play a straight bat but they are ubiquitous so you have to take notice when the TV news tell you that the job market is getting tough.  It’s getting harder for people who already have jobs, more difficult for those looking for jobs, and damn near impossible for older people in the workforce to stay there.  Nobody needs TV to tell us what's going on, but there is an uncomfortable comfort in media confirmation of our less favourable fears.

They say, that if you have a job, you’ll be working longer hours.  They say that if you don’t have a job, you’ll be spending longer trying to get one.  If you’re around the age of 40 and looking for a change of direction . . . good luck with that.  If you’re over fifty looking for something new, forget about it.  No matter how much of a "silver fox" you think you are, you’ll be pushing it all sideways and upwards to get your CV past the girls in HR.  If you're not sexy, get on welfare.

Employment is yet another one of those vital social organs, those sphinx-like edifices, being rapidly dissolved by the desert storm of adolescent vanity.  At least so it would seem from the perspective of job seekers.   It must be galling for an experienced senior professional to have their CV vetted, their credentials picked over, their remaining career years held dangling in the magnificently sculpted fingernails of the girl in HR.

The Moleskeine Effect

The Moleskine has an illustrious history as the notebook of choice for some of history’s great artists and writers.  The "nameless black notebooks" fell into obscurity until 1997 when the new owners of the old company cranked up their marketing machine and put them back out on the bookshelves.  Moleskine are a “family of notebooks, diaries, and city guides”.  They're subject to high quality control standards such as “traction test, weigh check, glue and ink examination, cover thickness measure, rubber band resistance control”.  What do they do exactly?  Nothing.

Despite their relative passivity in the act of creation, they have become a defining accessory of the urbane and innately “creative”.  Fair enough.  Dressed in its beautifully cut black leather jacket, the Moleskine does cut a handsome figure.  It is well proportioned, stupidly expensive and its mythology goes almost so far as to suggest that the notebook itself is the source of creativity.  But the Moleskine reality is a story of aspiration and posture.  A Moleskine can be high self-parody, an empty briefcase at a ruthless job interview.  If it was a person, it may be a recent resident of Ponsonby or Grey Lynn.

I've only owned one Moleskine.  I love the look and feel, its black leather European-ness, its modern classicisms.  I’ve had it three years and most of its 180 pages remain blank.  I'm scared to soil it with my scrawl.  Weighing in at forty dollars, it felt too precious to write anything in.  So I didn’t.  By contrast, the humble 1B5 exercise book, at 70 cents for 80 pages, offered far more scope for experimentation.  For the price of one Moleskine, I could buy 57 1B5s, a whopping 4,560 pages.  Pound for pound, there is simply no contest.  In my book, the 1B5 closes the chapter on this creativity myth and calls out Moleskine “the anti-creative”.

Devoutly Non-Mormon

Church College is the well-known Mormon secondary school at Templeview, just outside of Hamilton.  The school and the community are a story well worth telling for many reasons, too many to list here.  I taught there as a devoutly NON-Mormon student teacher almost ten years ago.  I was overwhelmed by their fellowship, the friendship that was extended to me and also by their easy acceptance of my own beliefs.  It felt good to be called “Brother” by complete strangers, students and staff alike.  It was a nice departure from the more stentorian “Mr.” or “Sir”.

In spite of my devout non-mormonism, there were one or two folk who, in great humour, would test the depth of my convictions.  Brother McTavish asked me if I’d like to teach full-time at the school.  “Sure,” I replied “but I’m not a Mormon.”  He assured me that wouldn’t be a problem. “When do you want to get baptised?  I’ll put the call in.”  Knowing that the school preferred it’s male staff members to be married men, I informed him that I was still unattached.  “No worries!  We’ll find you a woman, get you married, not a problem!”  It was a tempting offer, but I managed to resist.

Brother Chase, the school maintenance man, was well into his seventies but with an almost supernatural youth.  “I’ve been married almost fifty years boy.  You marry the right woman, it’s beautiful man, beautiful, paradise!  It's just like living in heaven.”  And if you marry the wrong one?  “Oh, marry the wrong one?  You might as well go shoot yourself.”

The Church authorities in Salt Lake City Utah have since closed the school down.  The buildings are still there, a little older, a little sadder, a little more-grey looking.  There is a stillness around the campus, a resigned type of quiet that I don’t recall.  It’s possible that I was an easy target for conversion, but even as a devout non-mormon with a deep love for coffee, I miss the place greatly and the sense of community I experienced there.  I remember it with great affection.