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7月29日 pee essbecause i am so full of myself, literally, i have spent the day thinking about what i wrote last night. see below.
i'm unhappy with how i worded just about all of it but couldn't possibly be bothered to rewrite it. not for a minute was i literally blowing my own trumpet regarding my dadding skills. i am a very average father who spends too long on the computer and too much time grumbling. i would like to respect my own mother and father for the hours dad spent taking us to ramps, collecting us from town, doing the skatepit run twice a weekend, endangering his house by building various ramps and letting us spend hours out there. it was in those years that the phrase 'mind the windows' was coined. the lord only knows what percentage of mum's pocket money was spent on stussy shirts, yellow suede vison street wear boots as well as countless pro decks and grab rails.
i will endeavour to make yesterday's point in a nutshell, so to speak.
* boys will do better when their dads are there
being christiani've watched one documentary and one news story this week which have literally stirred me. because of the quality of the programming in ras al khaimah i was forced to watch abc news yesterday. i use 'forced' to mean it was either watch the show or do some tidying. there was a story that appealed to we in ways enormous. it was about a canadian boy called ryan. actually i missed the introduction to this boy but the jist was clear. he felt sorry for the ugandans with their dirty water and everything. so he decided to raise money to buy wells. you can imagined how it all played out. speaking tours in schools, abc news, lemonade stands. maybe even the canadian oprah. which is not a patch on the italian opera. basically he raised heaps of money and sent it to uganda and they didn't need to walk for 20km each day for fly infested water to feed their babies. i'm not being flippant.
his parents came across as very supportive and full of delight in a way that i relate to even now as i sit next to jonah soothing himself in his rocker. i can still feel ben's tight squeeze and smile as i dropped him at play centre at hour ago. i get delight. ryan's parents were clearly his heroes. friends of his parents made arrangements for the family to go to uganda and visit ryan's penpal and see a well they named after him. you can imagine the reception. i am sure he felt happier than michael campbell did that day he rode up lambton quay surronded by his wife, emirates airline staff and ticker tape, in celebration of winning the us open. i think i was two years back. i hope i let my boys do things like that. you know, sell lemondae for ugandans.
then, last night i watched half a documentary about christian hosoi. the vert skater who went so, so high out of the top of a ramp. in his first session in the deep end of a pool, he managed to handplant, backside air and frontside ollie. as a skater he was remarkable and second only to tony hawk. i liked the way, in the documentary, that tony hawk said he invented the late grab to get airs like hosoi. he admitted he was too scrawny to push himself out of the transition as much as hosoi did. you wouldn't believe it now.
it was mentioned in this record of hosoi's skateboarding life that everywhere he skated with the old bones brigade, vision team and the others his dad was there. frank hawk was there too with tony. the world's one and two and their dad's were there. literally.
sometimes when i take ben to the park or the mountains or the pool or the ramp or mcdonald's i hope that i am not just feeding and entertaining him. i pray that i am also keeping him off drugs too. *
jonah is crying so i'm off give him a snuggle.
* i realise that hosoi ended up using fine white powders, hawk is addicted to mcdonalds and ryan, at nine years of age, probably already has a girlfriend. i don't think these things happened becasue their dads were too supportive, however.
7月26日 sunny dayswe've become people who spend money at mcdonalds. it's not the sesame bun that tempts us because we don't buy the burgers. usually just the crispy chicken fillets which, as well as containing up to 8000 calories each, possibly, are declious. my lawyer told me to say 'possibly'. the trouble is that they are deliberately situated about 15 minutes along the motorway out of dubai. so this is how it works you go to dubai. you do what you need to and as you are about to leave you remember two things: you are a family now and can't live on chocolate milk for 4 meals a day; there is always a plethora of traffic literally jamming the roads going home. they are packed as. so, in response to the first item i have to buy food for my family. and the second, well, i like to get past the other cars and onto clearer roads first so we don't eat then get stuck in traffic and not get home till it's time to shave again three days later. mcdonalds knows both these things so they built a store just past all the traffic where we have eaten up to three times in the past six weeks. it's not too expensive. ten new zealand dollars usually sees us decked out in chicken and ginger bear. it just makes us wriggle. last night we had mcdonalds for tea. i love live shows so we went to dubai to see the sesame street live show. it was awesome. there was a fear before we arrived at the mall that it might be toys r us workers dressed up in colourful suits stitched together for a fraction of the price by al mustaqbal tailors. but the soothing american accent of the mc assured me that these monsters were real. digression: i really hope they wore their costumes on the flight over. that would've been so, so cute. the show was both sweet and impossible to photograph due to quick movements, unsuitable light and the camera operator being a weirdo. i took a few (dozen) though and have already made an album for them. if you don't like fuzzy monsters, check out the album at least to see ben with our noodle tongs and jonah looking cuter than cookie monster's rolly eyes. ka kite. 7月24日 faceben decided we should paint a rainbow this afternoon. i prepared some banana milk then joined him at the craft table in his room., just by the door on the left as you go in.
as we sat surrounded by sponges, painting shirts, ice cream containers with mucky water in and the rest of ben's bedroom i decided that i was glad that i bothered to spend this time.
ben's rainbow was very nice. we used sponges just like they do on the tweenies video. then we went on to free play. i painted a blue circle to get things started. i have added a brief album. two pictures of his are in there. you will notice the cheeks, hat, glasses and bottom on the first one. the second one i was out of the room for but it appears self explained.
my contrubution to the art world this afternoon consisted of slipping on the wet floor while carrying red water. a nice bow appeared on the cream wall. it did, thank god, wipe off as easily as is it would have if i were starring in an infomercial for cheap yellow dishcloths.
arohanui. 7月22日 picturesi used to think that going to the movies was not the best way to spend an evening. in fact i once told a large group of people that the ten bucks would be better spent on coffee and cake because then the two moviegoers could actually talk to each other and connect. (look at me on my soapbox!). i thought it was an antisocial way to spend an evening. that was then. now that i'm antisocial myself i don't mind watching movies. i watched one tonight. all by myself, even, proving that.... i watched a movied called 'stoked' about a former pro skater named gator. i have his autogrpah and i even vaguely remember him skating the vert in paraparaumu. to be more honest, and gator would hate me for this, i actually remember chris miller, tony magnusson and natas kaupas with more vividity. the story goes that he was a dysfunctional boy who got exceptionally rad, then grew up into a dysfunctional man and ended up in jail after pleading guilty to doing some very bad things. it was an interesting insight into the mind of a brilliantly talented person. does it take being screwed up so bad to motivate people to excel? i hope not. i still rofl thinking about what tony hawk said in the film. he was kindly extolling gator's abilities with a skateboard and even said that 'he (gator) was the one to beat' in those oldskool contests. do you get it? the gap between tony hawk's skills and the guy who came second was canyonesque. funnily enough i was talking with an australian just yesterday about what happen to some of those old skaters. business, jail or church literally swallowed a big bunch of them. that was stoked.
you see the thing about movies is that you're not allowed to talk while they are playing. i never really understood/understand why people would want to go to a movie together. to sit and not talk, i suppose. i am a talker. i love company. i'm not one who enjoys sitting in silence with others. i feel terrible when i'm too shy to say something. not sure why i'm like this. hmmm. movies also can be annoying. like when they don't end right. two recent examples in my life are last night's ' the happening' by the sixth sense guy which ended up being ... (just kidding won't spoil it!). i have also used this space to tear a strip off the latest indiana jones film. i.j. and the cradle cap of herzogovina or something. aliens, yeah, whatever.
films also do funny things to us. like the way 'jesus christ superstar' is responsible for the whole jesus is a hippy image we all can't shake. sandals. long wild hair. flairs. ben is developing a good idea about who jesus is. he likes to sing and make things up so the ol' charttopper: 1 2 3 jesus loves me, 1 2 jesus loves you; quickly became: 1 2 3 jesus loves dogs, 1 2 jesus loves frogs. now if by frogs he means all the people i think are not stupid and by dogs he means everyone else, then i believe ben has all the theology he needs. jonah, on the other hand, just gurgles as if his own cuteness sustains him.
i added pimms to my pineappletini this evening. it tasted nice in the same way bar nuts taste nice. they are there. one is peckish (thirsty). the maths does itself. all i mean is that i only drunk it because i made it. and jenny had turned one down doubting it would be potable. in passing on the pimms she not only enjoyed her drink more, she missed out on that smug feeling you get when you defy good advice.
i skated in the dark the other night and struggled only with the tricks which require the board to get back under my shoes. i also, for kicks, took a mouthful of jonah's gripe water. didn't work.
in your face, gripe water.
7月20日 jack in the boxone of the best things about living in the uae is that events never cease to surprise. i felt the same once in pokhara, nepal when i was walking to school while thinking of my brother stephen (on this occassion). i was chatting to him in my mind telling him that after nearly five months in the country i'd begun to get used to the place and was feeling nice and settled. this was a real revealation for me as we'd seen some weird things. crazy squared. like the five foot women carrying baby buffalo on their backs. honest. or the brilliant looking sidhu men in kathmandu. just google sidhu (images). actually don't. i just did and it was useless. try this. i was telling stephen this when a person walked past me pulling a cart with a small wooden cage on top. in the cage was a pig or possibly more than one. it was a nice surprise and i probably laughed inside and thanked God for allowing me to see the world. in a different way, it's the same here. i was doing something i really enjoy the other day. collecting a friend from dubai airport. we had just left the carpark and, as you may know, before you get back onto the main road before turning onto the highway to ras al khaimah, there is a medium sized area of grass. i glanced across and noticed a man had parked his donkey and was in prayer position. what? parked his donkey? i probably laughed inside and thanked God for allowing me to see the world. actually i lol-ed and told chris why. thanks to the kindness of our friends we have just spent about a week house sitting in dubai. it gave us a change of scenery and the chance to look after some dogs and visit some places we'd wanted to visit for a while. the house was close to the famous ibn battuta mall. as part of the current dubai shopping festival they were holding the kids olympics in the mall near the cinemas. naturally we signed ben up for the sorting activity. basically i handed him coloured balls before he ran off and put them in the same coloured buckets a few metres away. or in the case of ben: perform a dance like it wasn't a race, smile like he knew something we all didn't and laugh and entertain the crowd before placing balls in buckets. his demonstration of how delightful he is did add time to his score but he stil came in second place and won many things. toys, vouchers, toys... in fact about $200 worth of prizes and a medal for his efforts. well done ben! if that wasn't enough, the stars of sesame street are coming to dubai to do a show which we'll go and see on friday. awesome. 7月10日 the listto say it was warm outside today would be like saying that the pope is a little iffy about condoms. it was literally hot. when one's sweat doesn't hang around long enough to even consider cooling one's forehead and ben gets up from the picnic blanket and starts walking around the sandy environ we happen to be in at dinner time tonight looking for water like some kind of stranded beluga, we must be unanimous. i spend more time wondering whether i'll have milk or juice to act as inner sweat than i do even sleeping these days. we certainly miss not indulging in our usual annual catch up with family and friends this year. days are being whiled with these activities: swimming, drinking, sleeping, tv watching, going to dubai and in one particular case crying and pooping.
i admitted to a friend once that i pretty much see the population in terms of people who are stupid and those who are not. now you needn't care because there are only about four names on the not unstupid list. the rest of you are lovely. stupidity, as we all know, can be funny. like the time your boss really thought.... and so on.
i should tell you that i was delighted this week. i give ben a note in his snackbox when he goes to playcentre. early this week i wrote one which read 'daddy's special boy' with a smily face. (the 'paper' was made of elephant poo and bought by us in pinnewala near kandy near colombo). when i went to collect daddy's special boy, his teacher, miss iris, told me how ben had gone around telling the other children 'benjamin daddy's special boy'. if i wasn't such a wuss, i would have let myself lose a tear or two. that moment is irreplaceable. ben fetched the note out of his bag and showed me with a smile like the moon.
i will tuck my tail next week as we spend some time housesitting in dubai. my tail will be hidden away as i make use of the aforeslandered skatepark just ten or so minutes from where we will stay.
i could keep writing but i haven't even thought of a title or what wisdom you can't do without.
anyway, happy birthday beth bramwell-cooke. 7月4日 tiepit has come to my attention that the words that i type here have been read by at least three people. different people. not just thalia checking back two more times to see if my spelling has self corrected. shucks. 7月1日 count downif it wasn't the school hols i would have shaved by now. like you, in the holidays one of the first routines i literally through out the window is the sunday-tuesday-thursday shaving routine. i'm all over the place. couldn't tell you when my last shave was. might have been even three days ago. since my first shave at eight years old i have been a reluctant shaver. not that i want a visible beard, or could even manage one. i just don't like doing it. it is uncomfortable, usually rough and seldom produces the results pictured on the box. when i say my first shave i obviously mean the first time i lathered up the soap, placed it around my facial features then wiped it off with one of mums flannel clothes that would sit, for weeks sometimes, over the edge of that baby blue bath that provides a warmer welcome to wellington than the harbour and aro street themselves. for the next seven weeks i can shave as little as i like. i am on holiday. school is out and the temperature is in. the mid forties. it's nice to be together just the four of us. bumming about. having the tv on, the blocks out the burp cloth handy. you know.
anyway, what i wanted to write about was a repsonse to a magazine article i read on www.stuff.co.nz the other day. it listed ten of what somebody thought were the strangest places to sleep, on earth (or something unprovable like that) i wanted to create my own. actually i get a head start becasue i have bedded down in one of the places they suggested although i wouldn't have added it if they hadn't :
10. a converted prison in ljubljana. (i spelt that right first time, by the way). kind of cool but just small rooms with good internet. i wonder how much they had been converted.
9. on the floor of the gorakhpur to delhi overnight train. having sat on the roof on a bus from nepali border for long enough to need another shave we were ready to not line up for tickets. unfortunatley there were approximately half a million people at the gorakhpur station and we needed a ticket or were in for a wait that would have tested ghandis patience. so i pushed to the front of the queue and bought a ticket that allowed us on the train. we we fined another three dollars, EACH, for having the wrong ticket, once we had settled. anyway, the sun went down and so did we. we slept on the floor. a kind family allowed us to store our luggage under their beds. really, it was good of them. so we slept on the floor. for hours and hours and when the train came to a stop at about the time we were due in delhi i couldn't believe that our final trip in india was to be the first to arrive on time. looking out the window revealled that we were like the titanic. halfway. in lucknow. although poetic, the phrase 'you're in luck now you're in lucknow' could not be further from the truth if it was at the back of that queue i skipped in gorakhpur. we must have made it to delhi eventually because i remember buying puppets and chips there.
8. sams gully. basically down a bushy bank somewhere in karori. matthew will remember. we went there a few times. made bivvies. ate something, possibly, and stayed up talking the usual bollocks that fourteen year old boys do. those weekends were gross, actually. i have a memory of an old skateboard on a bonfire. i recall trying to rip the trucks off before it became our stove.
7. three quarters sleepover. after a ridiculously disproportionate amount of time spent planning, getting paperwork from the council, blah, blah... we took the youth group to makara beach in wellington for what was really a lovely evening on the sand with a fire and a collection of what was to become the the finest people i know. when it was ten oclock, say, we made our way back to the church house and slept. i remember a weird bedtime story being told. something about the oldest lady in the world perchance? someone will let me know. it was a great evening. nice in the best use of the word. for us anyway. it was a while later that i learned there'd been a fatality on the road out shortly after we'd left and a near riot involving the police and even a helicopter. that we made it out and avoided all this with so many young people is enough to make me belive in angles or God himself. was a nice night. for us.
6. nasa vegas hotel in bangkok. dark rooms. big rooms. just dark. weird. not suitable for the five nights we stayed there with an eighteen month old wee boy. still. it was cheap as heck and nice and close to the airport. my worst hotel decision. ever. staff were lovely though. oh well.
5. a tent in fort william, scotland. we went to scotland. we wanted to go cheap so we camped in fort william. it was september so we thought we were safe enough on the weather. we had a tent that might have slept one of us comfortably but we both decided to sleep in it with our luggage as it was as wet as it was that last night we had in varanasi when the windows were blowing open and shut like in a haunted house and the rain followed. it rained. jenny was sick. and we were squashed. i think it was only three nights though. actually that was a lovely holiday. i sadly hung my phone up on someone for the first time ever, in fort william. we couldn't make sense of each others accents so there was no chance of finding out when our bus would leave. i explained what i was about to do and with the shame of any of us in that 'no pants on at school dream' i hung up. poor girl. sorry.
4. the endeavour. becasue i am such a terrific teacher i once organised for some teaching assistants to help children in whitby, who were in my class, produce some actually very attractive artwork related to the arrival of the replica of james cook's endeavour from, i think, perth. it arrived in whitby to the usual welcome of fireworks, seagulls and my landlord in a his boat 'strumpet'. the children's work, according to the judges, was beautiful so we all won a night on the boat. we had to rise early to do some watch duty but most of the night was spent drinking cider with ruth and then sleeping in a hammock about a span from the celing. it was really enjoyable. the atmosphere, the rope bed the thankless parents. not looking at mr. clarkson in particular.
3. germany. twice i have sat in a bus from london to budapest. once i even sat on the bus back again. i must have slept and it might have been in germany.
2. the thar desert. it's in india and close to pakistan. the border was ponted out to us. this story deserves a book in itself to include the details of the guide, the camels and the good funness that was that trip. seriously, i'd go back tomorrow if i wasn't going to dubai. i won't write the whole book here, simply list the names of some of the chapters: where is my camel going?; bungali; no power no shower no curry no worry no money no honey; colourless holi; goats and the parables; etc.
1. under jenny's bed. i know that doesn't sound exciting and it wasn't. it was weird though. we were in the gmc hospital in ajman. ben had gone from being minutes to hours old and we needed to sleep. there was only just a bed for jenny. i was not leaving my family and the private room we had budgeted for was not available. so where was i to sleep? under jenny's bed in a ward of six post pregnant ladies. i actually slept okay. was knackered from a long day previous. it was the best night of my life. i was a dad.
so, although i listed ten places i had slept that were weird you are probably thinking: well, only three or four are actually worth typing up and he really should stop posting at 11ishpm - clearly; nathan gray would have a list of about eighteen and they would all be awesome and typoless.
i will add some photos shortly. the next ones i take will be when i'm thirty three. |
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