ThirdCultureChick

Girl

2008-11-17T01:45:00.000-08:00

Success!!

I woke up this morning to a call from Eliza, the manager at this cute new arty/jewellery place in town. Apparently I impressed both her and the owner, Noel, enough to be offered a job there over the summer!

My training starts tomorrow, and I'll probably be rostered into my first shift by the end of the week. I'm uber excited! Tomorrow, I'm off to buy new shoes, and possibly a new skirt. This week is shaping up to be rather a busy one. The day after tomorrow, I'm shadowing a lawyer- a *real* lawyer- for a day, visiting criminals and so on. Once again, uber, uber excited!!

Tomorrow afternoon, the Boy and I are going costume shopping- and no, not of the kinky variety, unfortunately. Our friend Nick is throwing a seriously late post-exam halloween party this Saturday night. I'm going as hippie/sixties or seventies (haven't decided yet) Barbie. I don't really care much for hippies or Barbies, but I recently bought this gorgeous multi-coloured, diamond-patterened shift dress ($10 down from $30 at Pagani) and I'm dying to take it out for a spin.

In other news, I made chocolate this weekend! Every Christmas, I make my special white chocolate, cranberry and pistachio chocolate. It's my standard Christmas gift to all of my nearest and dearest. In keeping with the cooking theme, in the past week, I've also made a pumpkin curry, a vegetable stir-fry, and a vegetarian pasta sauce, all from scratch.

So far so good, with this summer, fingers crossed more goals are scored-I'm actually starting to feel like 'Girl' from Citizen Girl!

The little things in life

2008-11-11T03:30:00.000-08:00

My last two days in Hoboville have been much better than expected. A few successes to report, friends-wise:

1) After the Jurisprudence exam, I went to the City (and I use the term 'city' loosely) with two people I'd never hung out before. Liz was an acquaintance up until now, and Ashwin -in my opinion- was an over-ambitious, egotistical sleaze. We had overpriced gourmet pizzas for lunch, followed by three hours of intense window shopping and a lot of laughs. I do have to say though that hanging out with these two really opened my eyes to what I'd been missing out on by limiting myself.

However, the real success was earlier today when Liz texted me asking to play tennis. Score!

2) Andrew, one of the ginger-haired identical twins in our class, who I sometimes talk to, but yet again is a mere acquaintance, gave me his number and made plans to watch the cricket together over the summer. Score again!!

3) The hottest boy (or so I've been told. I only have eyes for the Boyfriend!) in our class, who'd been ignoring me all week, totally had a cool conversation with me online tonight. We talked about nothing much, but I think I've made a connection.

4) Summer. She's smitten with the Boyfriend. My strategy is to become her friend and pull the carpet from under her. Cheeky, but less bitchy than the other plans I had in mind. The friend part seems to be working. We talked about Star Wars and Hoboville. She laughed a lot.

Jobwise:

1) I put my goals into motion and applied to about fifty jobs. I got my first (of many, I hope) phone calls today, offering to meet me for an interview. The job itself isn't too exciting- it's a marketing gig, you pretty much go around malls advertising whatever product they give you. But I need the money...and the self-esteem!

And tomorrow morning, the Boyfriend's coming down to take me home, I'm far too excited to sleep!

On Liberty

2008-11-09T20:11:00.000-08:00

I'm done!!!

I had my last exam this morning (Jurisprudence) and now I'm done with exams and university and academia for FOUR whole months!!

These holidays I plan to:
1) Find a job
2) Learn to play the piano
3) Throw a kick ass Christmas party
4) Make my yearly cranberry and macadamia white chocolates for the nearest and dearest
5) Make Christmas desserts
6) Go biking
7) Start a collection for the City Mission or some other such needy organization
8) Take photos
9) Find a permanent volunteer position
10) Read as many books as possible on the Whitcoulls Top 100 list

I'm excited!

Third Culture's on top!

2008-11-05T23:09:00.000-08:00

Yay for Obama!

But I have to say, I'm a little cynical about all the hype. I have to wonder, what really makes a person 'black'. Obama is biracial, not African-American. So to put it another way, he's as black as his white. So if you call him black, you can also call him white right?

And what would happen if someone took a swab of GWB's DNA and happened to find that he was 1/16th African-American? Would he be renamed the first black President retrospectively?

Perhaps the world is prematurely celebrating Change.

I think I'll wait til a poor, disadvantaged African-American kid from the Bronx grows up to be President of the USA.

Til then I'll just celebrate the fact that I have more in common with Obama than most people in America do.

He's a Third Culture Kid too!

A Drink In Time...

2008-11-03T22:23:00.000-08:00

Reflecting over the past year over curly fries and Diet Coke with my friend Shirley, I came to the conclusion that this year might possibly have been a pile of social waste.

Living away from home, in a new city, with new people, you'd think I would've gotten blind drunk every night and pimped myself out to every man, woman and dog on the street. But apparently not. Friend count for the year: 3.562-ish. I didn't realise I was quite that tragic. All this time I'd been under the impression that I'd made a lot of friends this year. I'm not exactly socially inept, I talk to everyone, I'm generally a nice person. I assumed that was enough.

But Shirley did have a point. I'd spent every weekend running back and forth between cities to go visit the Boyfriend. When I wasn't visiting the Boyfriend, I was engrossed in keeping up with my 5 Law papers. When I wasn't doing those things, I'd be doing lunch/coffee/intense gossip-cum-bitching sessions with Shirley and Nina (2 out of the 3.562 new friends I'd made). Moral of the story: out of sight, out of mind.

Moreover, she brought up the very valid point that 'to integrate with Kiwis is to drink with Kiwis'. We came to the fobbish conclusion that it was a 'New Zealand thing'. But it's true. Friendships here are made of drunken memories that are an oxymoron in themselves. Especially in Hoboville (where I currently live). Leaving the sophisticated folk back home in Auckland, I wasn't aware how immersed in middle New Zealand I would be this year.

So my goal for summer? Drink more.