Thanksgiving

I know it's a few days overdue but here's my first ever Thanksgiving post in honour of one the best holidays I've ever heard of.

Brief Politically Incorrect History Lesson: Thanksgiving is a North American tradition which takes place on the 3rd Thursday in November every year (in the US at least) during which time people gather with family to consume copious amounts of food and remind themselves what it is in their lives that they are grateful for. This is supposedly modeled after a meal the first English pilgrims had with the native Americans before murdering them and stealing most of their homeland for their own but we wont go too far into that right now.
End of Lesson.

I spent my Thanksgiving with a group of people I consider to be family and enjoyed a delicious meal consisting mostly of mashed potatoes and turkey on my part while watching the worst Green Bay Packers game I have yet witnessed in my 3 seasons as a fan. It was a wonderful occasion all around.

Now that I have the formalities covered it's time for what I really came here to write about today. So what am I thankful for? I think a better question would be: what am I not thankful for?

I am thankful for all of my friends and family (both blood and honorary). I am thankful for everyone whose life I have made an impact on and for everyone who has ever made an impact on mine. I am thankful for everything that has brought me to where I am today and for everything that is yet to happen to me to carry me through to the next great adventure in my life. I am thankful for my ability to think, write and play music, things which have been critical to my life so far and that I hope will continue to be at the core of my existence. I am thankful for things as they were, things as they are and things as they will be. These are the things that I am thankful for and while thanksgiving reminds me to consciously say thank you for them, these are the things I am grateful for every day. These are the things that pull me out of bed every morning and push me in the direction of my dreams.

I love Thanksgiving because it reminds us of who we really are, the great things we have in our lives, and the great people we are blessed to be able to share in the lives of. The sad side of Thanksgiving is that like every other holiday, its meaning tends to get lost in the acts of overeating and worrying about the Christmas season. While I'm not one to push religion upon anyone I do believe that the greatest good that comes from organised religion is that through prayer it reminds us to say thank you and appreciate what we have.

As we head into December and Christmas approaches I hope that we all remember in all of the hustle and bustle to say thank you for what we have and enjoy the holiday season with our families instead of trampling each other in Black Friday sales or stressing about money issues.

Don't just let Thanksgiving pass you by, make every day thanksgiving and remember the positives in your life. There are many, and they always outweigh the negatives...always!

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays everyone!

On Turning 20

On October 12, 1993, a child was born in the city of Palmerston North, New Zealand. Some 20 years later, that same child sits at a computer keyboard, updating his blog and reflecting upon two decades of life on this crazy planet.

It's hard not to get emotional thinking that my teen years are over and realising that the next 10 years of my life are going to pretty much be whatever I choose to make of them. I'd be lying if I said that there weren't times in my life where I questioned whether I'd even make it this far but here I am, 20 years old, where I want to be, pursuing what I love.

I don't feel much different in any particular respect having hit the end of my 2nd decade of life. Nothing much has changed yet; I still eat breakfast far less often than I probably should, I still put my pants on one leg at a time and I still have a lot of things I'm trying to figure out.

I guess the biggest difference is my outlook on things to come. Everyone has a hard time growing up. It's awkward learning things by trial and error, there are some things we have to experience multiple times to get the lesson out of it and it sucks having to deal with that while going through dramatic physical and emotional developmental changes.

As a no-longer-teen-ager I feel like I am better equipped to deal with the lessons life throws at me. I don't have as much of the blind teen angst any more. I don't have the stress of learning to juggle sports, school and band schedules. I've been through enough interpersonal relationships to have a fair idea of how to treat someone, how I should be treated and what to do when things aren't right.That said, I make no claim to having everything figured out. I just think that I have a much better set of coping strategies for when things do go to shit than I had at 13 or 15 or even 18.

I'm hopeful that my 20s will be my best decade yet and that when I write my "On Turning 30" post in ten years I'll have a much bigger readership and a long list of accomplishments to reflect on. Who knows, by then maybe my children will be reading this, wondering what their crazy father is on about because they'll be too young to have any kind of perspective on any of this stuff yet. I'd be okay with that.

For now, I'm young enough to have my whole life ahead of me and old enough to do something about it. Here's to living outside the comfort zone, taking giant leaps of faith and looking back with a smile. I'm proud of who I am, I'm proud of how I got to being who I am and I wouldn't trade the last 20 years of my life for anything. May the crazy ride continue.

Photo by Will Myers on Unsplash

Back From Unofficial Hiatus

So it's confession time for me.

Are you ready for it?

Are you sure?

Okay, well here it comes...

I haven't written for a very long time. If I had to offer a rough guess, I'd say I probably haven't written a post here in 5 months. If you really want, you can check that for me and let me know how accurate my brain's in-built concept of time is. There's a reason that I haven't written in so long and it is this: I very seriously considered killing this blog.

Initially, I created this as a way to document my adventures and experiences as an exchange student and in the year that followed my exchange. The intention there came in three parts. I wanted to create a collection of my own thoughts and experiences for my own future reference and so that I could have a hope of showing anyone might have wondered, a glimmer of what being an exchange student was, is and continues to be for me. Secondly, I wanted to provide somewhat of a resource for other exchangers in the hope that through reading about me, they might be better equipped to cope with their own roller coaster experiences or at least feel a little less alone. Also, and this is probably the weakest of my three major motives, I wanted my friends and family to be able to keep in touch with what I was doing when I lacked the time or inclination to communicate with them regularly.

Today, as I write my first new NZ Blackhawk blog post in 5-ish months, I do so for two reasons. I am no longer an active exchange student, in so far as I completed my exchange and survived the re-assimilation process into New Zealand culture and life. As such I do not write this blog any more for the benefit of other exchange students. I write this to keep anyone who is interested in knowing what I'm up to in the loop. I write this also because I'm now at an incredibly exciting time in my life and I want to remember as much as I can as vividly as possible.

With that said, I'm going to use the rest of this post to go through some significant events of the last few months and hopefully get you caught up on exactly where I'm at.

In June, I had the wonderful experience of traveling to Washington DC with my best friend Beckett. We made somewhat of a road-trip out of it and over 4 or 5 days we made it to and from Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin to DC with the main focus of the trip being to watch a football (soccer) game between the USA and Germany.

Along the way we visited National Mall, became well acquainted with the DC metro system and found an interesting little cigar shop somewhere near Chinatown. We also made an unexpected and never to be repeated trip into Gary, Indiana and later accidentally drove to Michigan. I had the presence of mind to take a camera with us and documented parts of the trip over a 3 video series which you can watch here:

In early July I also had the good fortune of being able to venture away from Wisconsin with another trip to Copper Harbor, this time to celebrate the 4th of July. During that trip, I got to experience Copper Harbor at the height of its busy season, full of tourons (what the locals call the tourists). For such a tiny town they put on a stunning fireworks display, very nearly on as grand a scale as the Guy Fawkes show put on by the city of Wellington every year (Wellington is bigger than Madison while Copper Harbor has somewhere around 50 permanent residents).

Aside from those two trips, I was introduced quite by accident to an interesting school here. It's a Media school with a really cool video and motion graphics programme. In one visit it got me excited and energised enough to apply for a change of status in order to attend. So as soon as the USCIS approves my change of status request (which I filed on August 27) I'll be attending school at Madison Media Institute studying towards an Associate's Degree in Video and Motion Graphics. I'm excited to study videography and learn more about the technical side of film and video production.

That covers the main plot points of the last 5 months of my life and concludes the return from an unannounced and unintended hiatus from blogging. I shall endeavor to write a new post somewhere in between bi-monthly and monthly from this point on.

Photo by MILKOVÍ on Unsplash

Return To Wisconsin

After somewhere between 10 and 11 of the hardest months of my life, I decided that my best option was to return to Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin to visit all of the people and things I've missed so much since last June. As a result of this decision, I scheduled an appointment with the US consulate in order to obtain a 6 month visitor visa, booked flights from Auckland through to Chicago via San Francisco and skipped the country I've come to loathe.

I've been back in Fort for a little over a month now and the experience so far has been a mixed bag. It's fantastic seeing everyone again and being able to hang out with the friends I'd been missing so much but I've been horrendously busy virtually since I touched down. I've barely had time to touch base with New Zealand, as far as I can gather they're not falling apart without me.

I've been roped into playing guitar for the showchoir band for the end of year jazz di pasta show that they perform in which involves me being at the high school every day and before that I was singing with the chamber choir because they're low on men this year. I also helped out behind the scenes as a crew member for this years spring play which was "Noises Off." My ex-girlfriend was one of the stage managers and things between us have been pretty volatile since I've been back so that was an interesting one.

Right now I'm helping Kathy Ihde (who was my AFS liasion person) move into her home for the next 6 months in Copper Harbor, Michigan. We came up earlier this week (7 and a half hour drive) with a packed car and trailer full of things to make her new house more accomodating. It's awesome being right by a different part of Lake Superior and seeing the UP (Upper Peninsula) for the first time ever. I'll be staying with her husband Jeff for the remainder of my time here while she lives and works up in Copper Harbor.

I've been doing a little bit of creative writing recently but not as much as I'd like to be so I'm hoping to make time for that in coming weeks. I'm also hoping to keep my youtube channel going with fresh videos on a regular (hoping for weekly) basis, I just went up to 50 subscribers this week so I'm pretty excited about that venture. I've got a trip to DC planned in a couple of weeks with my best friend Beckett to see the US play Germany in a soccer match which I'm looking forward to.

I definitely made the right call with coming back to Wisconsin when I did. Things in New Zealand were going nowhere for me and I was getting more and more frustrated with my situation. This trip has restored a lot of my ambition and life goals that I was ready to give up on and I'm excited to see what happens in the next few months.

The Hobbit Premiere

I meant to get onto writing about the premiere of "The Hobbit" a while ago but shortly after typing up my Sydney posts my 6 and a half month long distance relationship sadly came to an end. Right after that Christmas also happened and my family decided to be awful to me. All in all it's been a pretty crushing couple of months and I haven't felt like writing anything aside from a couple of poems. I guess this post means that I'm slightly on the mend which is a nice thought.

The first thing I'm going to do is give you a brief overview of the pre-premiere hype that went on in the city, starting with the airport and moving on to the central stuff.

Wellington as the capital of New Zealand was "officially" renamed "The Middle of Middle Earth" much to the amusement of locals such as myself. In accordance with this theme, the airport had a few displays to aid the authenticity of this claim. 

A giant Gollum statue was crafted and suspended from the ceiling of the cafeteria in an effort to terrorise all diners in the vicinity. As if the sheer size and realistic detail on this sculpture weren't freaky enough, it was set up alongside dangling bubbles with a fish grasped tightly in its gruesome hand. I'm not sure I would have wanted to lunch beneath a hungry Gollum on the prowl for fresh meat but I was happy to appreciate the craftsmanship nonetheless.

Aside from Gollum fishing in the dining area upstairs, the good people at Wellington Airport also decided to deck out their baggage claim area on the ground floor. The conveyor belt that the bags come out on had various decorations around it to give the whole area the appearance of a hobbit-hole. Along the raised centre of the conveyor belt where ordinarily there would be a variety of advertisements were windows with backlit pictures of Ian McKellen's Gandalf, Martin Freeman's Bilbo Baggins and various dwarves designed to give the feel of looking into their dinner party at Bilbo's hobbit-hole home.

Moving away from the airport and closer to town, the Embassy cinema also had their own giant Hobbit-themed sculpture. The Embassy was one of two central cinema's to screen the premiere, is a historic cinema that has kept it's vintage feel throughout its years of operation and is generally regarded as the best cinema in Wellington. Atop the facade at the entrance to the cinema, an enormous Gandalf sculpture was painstakingly hoisted to eventually stand at the door to Bilbo's hobbit-hole. The hole was adorned with a multitude of grass skirts apparently imported from The Phillipines to give the appearance of overgrown grass coverage around the "entrance".

Next to the embassy, a wonderful canvas poster was put up on a large building which had a landscape shot of "Middle Earth" with a condensed representation of Wellington (including such landmarks as the beehive) as the centrepiece, sticking with the incredibly cheesy theme of the capital city as not only the middle of New Zealand but as the middle of Middle Earth itself.

The only other notable themed attraction I can recall was a valiant effort by the Starbucks on Courtenay Place who created a scene on the outside of their shop using the same easily removable window paint as is often seen on shop windows around Christmas time. The scene included a hobbit-hole and a number of cute furry creatures adorning the top and surrounding grassy mound.

Moving on to the day of the premiere itself, town was an absolute madhouse. I went in early with friends to attempt to cash in on the crowds by performing around the waterfront area. It was a hellishly hot November day with virtually no wind and after a couple of hours and not making all that much money with the guitar we decided to join the masses along Courtenay Place.

We got there a good two hours before the stars were due to walk the red carpet and there was barely a free spot to stand in.  The surrounding streets were jam packed with people either waiting in place for the celebrities to turn up or attempting to wade through the human sea. The only free spot we could find was on the corner of Courtenay Place (the street that the stars were walking down) and a side street. It was an okay vantage point and probably the best we could have found without getting there 5 hours early.

After a long wait in the heat (which I do not deal with well) we were just about ready to abandon our mission especially since the programme appeared to be running about half an hour behind schedule. Finally, the man I was there to see came down the red carpet and I managed to squeeze out a "MR FRODO!" in all my excitement. We also saw a well dressed Cate Blanchett before we decided that we had really only come to see Elijah Wood and returned to our playing along the waterfront. I should mention that we briefly saw Andy Serkis as well but I've seen him before and thus wasn't overly excited about him (sorry Andy).

Luckily for us, a lot of other people decided to make an early departure and we cashed in pretty nicely on the crowd of people that opted to take the waterfront route back to wherever they were parked, so carting my freakin' heavy guitar case around town in hideous heat was worth it in the end.

Basically, Wellington city went crazy with the premiere of "The Hobbit" and with all of the celebrations and cheesy "Middle of Middle Earth" hubbub proved that with our movie-making hub image (thanks largely to Sir Peter Jackson and Weta Studios) we are committed to becoming as much like Hollywood as possible. While that may come across like a dig, I quite like the feel of tinsel-town as a flashy place where magic is made, it gives tourists something to marvel at and locals something to laugh at, a win-win really.

The premiere gave us something to be proud of as New Zealanders and more specifically as Wellingtonians, resulted in some awesome art instalments and enabled me to see Elijah Wood, who I may one day marry or abduct (same thing, really). On top of that I came out of it slightly richer in the monetary sense, which always feels good.

I've no idea what my next post will be about, we'll see what happens.