Schrodinger's Cat

rainy weekend

I went to court yesterday, got all dressed up in my navy blue pinstripe suit which I bought for gigs. I had to look on the internet to find out how to tie a tie. I went to see the morning’s indictable hearings where jail sentences of 1-3 years were handed out. The cases included:

• A 23 year old guy who had escaped from police custody after going into a “tinny house”, demanding drugs and attacking the people there when they said there weren’t any (it wasn’t clear whether it actually was a tinny house). The occupants fled so he stole some Playstation games. He was arrested but escaped from the police station, stole a courier van and was on the run for 37 days - some of his friends are going to be angry at him as they're getting charged with harbouring.

• A 37 year old who burgled houses because the voices in his head told him to. He would wander into properties and if caught would claim to be looking for lemons. This actually happened at my flat a few months ago, so maybe it was the same guy. Newtown was one of his areas. Lucky I was there so nothing got taken.

• A 44 year old who had only had two years without a conviction (one of which was spent in jail) since 1976. He seemed to pretty much have no life, except for a daughter who he greatly missed.

In all it was kind of depressing to watch, especially with the lawyers joking about it all beforehand. The same people just keep coming back so for many the prison system is worse than useless in terms of rehabilitating them.
In the afternoon I went to the Pacific Architecture Colloquium at Te Papa to get a Pacific cultural story. A lot of it went over my head, I’ll have to talk to the organizers on Monday to get a fairly general sort of piece.

Next week’s full on with another day at court, having to go out to Porirua for a council meeting, another committee meeting in Wellington, anti-racism forum at parliament, have to somehow come up with a Maori cultural story, and also a script to hand in to Radio NZ on Wednesday.

The script is something I can do over the weekend, and I also need to start reading up for my Treaty of Waitangi assignment. It’s a busy week but by the end of it I should have done the bulk of the work for the journalism diploma – so just have to try and get shorthand up to speed and get ready for the final assessments. And there’s also my piece of investigative journalism which can be a good challenge for September.

It’s recently occurred to me that I’ll have to leave Wellington soon. That’s OK, Wellington’s a good town but there’s something oppressive about it in summer and the arts scene winds down a bit with people away. Going to work on a provincial newspaper is a common path for journalism graduates – if I go to a small town it’d have to be somewhere on the coast. I could go tramping and do creative writing, play my guitar, concentrate on getting music out through the internet, it’d be alright. If I could have a girlfriend I’d be pretty much happy. I just applied for a public awareness job with DOC in Christchurch which goes til June – that’d be great and I’m actually quite well qualified for it by now.

Another good option would be move up the Kapiti coast and work part-time on the newspaper and part-time on the conservation project – except that’s just a scenario I came up with, whether the newspaper has any vacancies is another question.

I’ve been feeling a bit down for the last few days, probably all the deadline pressure + not enough exercise. And I’ve been getting nosebleeds. I had a quiet Friday night, read a book in one sitting (Clandestine in Chile by Gabriel Garcia Marquez – about 100 pages), had a bath, went to bed early. I realized around 9pm that I’d missed a gig at Photospace that I was meaning to go to. Oh well, too late to worry about it now. I see a swim this afternoon in my near future. And maybe I’ll get around to seeing Farenheit 9/11. And work on my script. Sounds like a plan.

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Posted by fiffdimension at August 21, 2004 11:21 AM | TrackBack