Fewer Vic grads on the dole

Things may be looking up for Victoria University students and graduates looking for work.

The number of jobs available through Student Job Search has increased over the last few months, in keeping with a national trend.

A Labour Department report shows a 9.5 per cent increase in total job vacancies advertised online in the three months to the end of March 2010.

The unemployment rate has plunged unexpectedly from more than 7 per cent to 6 per cent in the March quarter, specifically among young men.

The number of people unemployed dropped by 25,000 during the quarter, while the number of people employed grew by 22,000.

Usually in the March quarter, temporary Christmas holiday jobs and seasonal farm work fade away and unemployment increases, says Statistics NZ.

The number of skilled job vacancies in Wellington advertised online has increased by 12.7 per cent in the same period, a hopeful sign for dispirited Victoria graduates.

Victoria University graduate John Owen left university in 2009 with an LLB and a BA in Religious Studies. He found the economic climate a difficult one to graduate into: “The normal job hunting websites were pretty bereft of opportunities compared to when I was idly looking around while I was doing my degree.

“Competing with skilled people who had suffered redundancy as well as the latest crop of graduates for the few advertised positions meant it was a pretty tough market to stand out in,” he said.

While on the rise, there are still fewer jobs available to students through Student Job Search compared with this time last year.

The amount of unemployed people aged 20–24 increased by 11,000 to reach 27,400 in the year leading up to December 2009. The flow-on effect for tertiary students is increased competition, Student Job Search reports.

“There is more competition for those jobs that tertiary students would usually fill, such as part-time, casual and summer roles. Student Job Search lists jobs for tertiary students only, which helps cut down on that competition.”

Nationally, job vacancies advertised online are still below the levels seen before the recession, the Labour Department study reports.

However, the report is optimistic: “The consistent increase in advertised vacancies over the last nine months is a positive indicator that the labour market is strengthening.”

Vacancies advertised online have increased by 23.1 per cent since the recessionary low of June last year, Employment Minister Paula Bennett said in April.

“It’s a positive sign in a labour market that, while weak, is still showing signs of hope,” she said.

Student Job Search is focused on helping students gain skills, work experience, graduate career opportunities and financial freedom by giving students friendly advice, helping them find work that fits around their study, and by reducing competition around employment. You can register online at www.sjs.co.nz.

Disruption to Wellington rail services and inaccurate bus timetabling are making it difficult for Victoria University students to get to lectures on time.

Students who rely on the bus service to get to university are unhappy with the discrepancy between timetabled information and the actual arrival time of buses.

An hour at the Kelburn campus bus stop at midday on Monday 15 March saw buses often arriving between 3 and 9 minutes late.

Victoria University student Sabina Kaminski-Pritchett has missed lectures because of the unreliable service. “Often the number 18 just doesn’t show up and there have been a couple of times when I have waited and two in a row haven’t come, or come 20 minutes late—useless.”

Students are also affected by the $500 million upgrade to Wellington’s rail network that has been in process for over a year, and will not be completed for at least another.

The construction required to upgrade a rail infrastructure neglected by its previous Australian owners has caused frequent and serious disruption to the service.

In July 2009 two trains collided with steel structures that were constructed prematurely, delaying trains for thousands of passengers. In February this year a train hit an overhanging power line, affecting the service for three days and again leaving thousands of commuters stranded or late for school or work.

Less serious incidents have been frequent, with passengers reporting lengthy delays and dissatisfaction with the bus replacements.

Victoria University student Miriam Kavermann travels frequently to Masterton and is unhappy with paying the same price as a rail ticket for a bus journey that takes 30 minutes longer.“It’s fucking expensive.”

A 2009 survey of 750 Wellington residents conducted by Metlink revealed that 95 per cent of those questioned believed that reliability is the key issue for public transport users. The same survey revealed that only 54 per cent of the group found public transport in Wellington reliable.

Peter Glensor, Chair of Greater Wellington’s Transport and Access Committee, states on the Metlink website that “Major changes are underway but unfortunately they will not happen overnight. Real time information is well and truly on the way; we are about to sign a contract with a supplier to design and introduce a Real Time Information system. This will tell people, via display screens, mobile phones and the internet, when their next bus or train is actually due.”

These changes will be welcomed by Sabrina Kaminski-Pritchett. “Obviously a girl doesn’t want to WALK up and ruddy up her complexion!”

If you use public transport and find yourself sitting at the bus stop during an exam, you need to get in contact with your Faculty Student Administration Office. If you miss an in-class test you need to contact your course coordinator. Contact details for the individual faculties are online at www.vuw.ac.nz.

When I was a little girl, I quite fancied the idea of becoming a nun. I thought the nuns looked like pretty little penguins in their habits, and liked the idea of pottering about in an abbey garden, minding the lambs and tending the vegetable patch.

I suppose I gave up on the idea when puberty hit. Suddenly boys seemed more important than piety, and life became complicated by the pursuit of that sweet little thing we call the orgasm.

I’ll never forget my first one. I awoke from what I can only assume was a sexy dream to find that a strange and rather wonderful sensation was flooding through my body. It was as if my vagina was giving me a gentle reprimand, saying “Jules, look what I can do. Look what you’ve been missing.”

By this time, the boys in my class had been dicussing masturbation explicitly for months. If everything they said was true, I was sharing a classroom with fifteen fully-fledged porn addicts. Masturbation seemed to dominate their thoughts, and as they couldn’t exactly do it right there in Social Studies, they settled for regaling us with detailed accounts of their solo sexual adventures. Strangely, us girls kept quiet. I like to think that this was because we had a bit of an edge on the maturity front, rather than because we were restricted by old-school notions of female propriety.

Our discretion didn’t last long. Flash forward a few years, and the talk of the common room was this cool new thing called sex. I ended up giving it a go just to see what all the fuss was about. I was bitterly dissapointed at my findings—he had evidently never heard of foreplay, and in his years of studying the vagina online, he seemd to have failed to notice the prescence of a clitoris. Still, I don’t pretend that I was particularly good myself—I imagine that my bemusement at the whole situation rather took away from the passion of the moment.

I’ve since enjoyed a rather healthy sex life, until now that is. I am currently in a period of imposed celibacy, enforced by my fractured spine, which tells me off for far less althletic movements than those required during sex. In a moment of sheer desperation, I called my boyfriend for a round of good old fashioned phone sex. Unfortunately, it went a little like this:

Him: What are you doing?
Me: I’m sitting on the couch, reading. What are you doing?
Him: I’m sitting on the bed with my laptop.
Me: Are you looking at porn?
Him: Nah, I’m studying up on Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation. What are you wearing?
Me: Oh, it’s super cold so I’ve popped my dad’s old jumper over my pyjamas. You?
Him: Just jeans and a tee-shirt. Are you wearing underwear?
Me: Yup. You?
Him: Yeah. Umm. Are you touching yourself?
Me: No! My dad is in the next room and could come in any minute! You?
Him: No, but I am finding Baudrillard very stimulating.
Me: Do you have an erection?
Him: Intellectually stimulating, Juliet.
Me: Oh.

Okay, so we’re not phone sex people. If I’m honest, I knew that it would never work. I call a spade a spade and a vagina a vagina, and euphemism are an essential part of phone sex. I could never bring myself to say, in the words of Kate Winslet, “I’m aching for your big purple-headed womb ferret”. Text sex is even less appealing to me. I hate text language, making it a rather labourious process, and one with far too much room for misunderstanding.

Me: Ur sexy. Im lyng n bd thnkng bout u x
Him: I don’t know what you just said. ‘I’m lying in bed with a bout of flu’?
Me: You have the flu? I’m sorry to hear that!

Sigh, I seem to have exhausted my options. Maybe I’ll enter a convent over summer. Who needs sex anyway? If The Sound of Music is anything to go by, there’s plenty of fun to be had without it.

And Fox-lox said: “Come along with me, and I will show you the way.” But Fox-lox took them into the fox’s hole, and he and his young ones soon ate up poor Chicken-licken, Hen-len, Cock-lock, Duck-luck, Drake-lake, Goose-loose, Ganderdander,and Turkey-lurkey; and they never saw the King to tell him that the sky had fallen.

The unfortunate demise of Chicken-licken was my favourite bedtime tale when I was a kid. For those of you who haven’t read it, it’s a story about a chicken who decides that the sky must be falling when an acorn lands on his head. He wanders about the forest, gathering a group of friends to help him make the journey to tell the King. A fox eats them before they get there. The end.

This sick little story taught little Juliet Buckler some very important lessons. Firstly, it taught me not to jump to fucking stupid conclusions. Chances are, the sky isn’t falling—it’s probably just an acorn. Secondly, it taught me not to be naive enough to trust a hungry fox—or anyone, really. Thirdly, and most importantly, it taught me that shit happens. Life isn’t all Harry Potter defeats Dumbledore and has three cute kids with Ginny. Sometimes things go super wrong.

Five weeks ago I arrived in Christchurch to visit my parents for a week. Four weeks ago I fell into a big hole and broke my back. Two weeks ago I had some hip bone and metal grafted onto my spine. Today I went to the mall and bought some cute socks (irrelevant, but jolly).

There are definite perks in my situation. I had to quit uni and can’t work, so the government is paying me to sit about all day, chain-smoking and reading pornographic historical fiction. I don’t even have to stand up in the shower anymore—they gave me a stool. They also gave me an odd little contraption that looks like a bionic arm to save me bending down to pick things up. I mainly use it to dangle my underwear in front of my mother’s face as she tries to do the dishes.

I’ve accepted the fact that my life is going to be a bit shit for a while. The last twenty-one years have been relatively incident free, so I figure that it’s my turn for a bit of hardship. The thing that is getting tedious, though, is the insistence of my well-wishers on telling me twenty times each day how lucky I am.

It could’ve been a hell of a lot worse, sure. Give me a few weeks and I’ll be breakdancing again, sans wheelchair. In fact, I spent last night drinking wine in bed with old friends—I can’t be that ill. But as far as I’m concerned, falling into a hole mid-wee, knickers down, isn’t a stroke of luck. Winning $2 from an instant Kiwi is good luck. Being asked the only essay question you studied for is good luck. Not falling into the hole is good luck.

It’s cute, I guess, this blind positivity, this obsession with happy endings. It’s like everyone wants reassurance that I like having a broken back, that I consider myself quite lucky to have been given the opportunity to learn traits like patience and compassion.

I don’t, overall, like having a broken back. I do, however, like to grumble about it. Everybody likes to grumble. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t be so obsessed about talking about the weather. We wouldn’t have funerals. We wouldn’t go to work hungover. In fact, I bet if we didn’t like complaining so much people wouldn’t go to work at all.

But the one time I get something really juicy to complain about, an excuse to wince and moan every time I make the slightest movement, people aren’t letting me. Instead, they look at me with these wide, expecting eyes until I crack and say something like “Yeah, I’m so lucky. Like, I could’ve broken my arms too.”

I’ll bet that Chicken-licken, Hen-len, Cock-lock, Duck-luck, Drake-lake, Goose-loose, Ganderdander,and Turkey-lurkey complained and protested as they saw their friends being savaged and eaten. And who could blame them?

At least it was a quick death, I guess.

I’ve been working on my grumpy look for years. I wrinkle my nose, pout, and frown so hard that my eyebrows obstruct my vision. I wedge earphones into my ears, blasting music that I don’t even like. I get absorbed in dark little fantasies, imagining that the bus I’m on suddenly explodes, or that anthrax starts snowing down from the ceiling of my lecture theatre. I look, in my mind, rather like a thoroughly disgruntled troll.

“That’s a big book.” Oh God. A slimy-haired businessman is sliding into the seat next to me. The bus is half empty! I grimace; “Sure is, I’ve got a test in ten minutes and I’ve really got to finish this play.” I shuffle as far away from him as I can and get back to my book. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I see him peering at the cover. Here we go again. “Shakespeare” he says. I don’t reply. “Shakespeare” he says again, a little louder. I narrow my eyes and say “Yup”.

“Do you know that Shakespeare invented the word ‘lonely’?” he asks, poor sod. I feel a little guilty as I slam the book closed, push past him, and move into a spare seat two rows ahead.

The test goes okay. I’m on the bus home, in a slightly better mood this time. I can’t help looking at the man sitting opposite me. He looks like a crazy scientist, with a thick white beard that rivals Dumbledore’s (yeah, I know him).

He smiles, leans forward, and says “Do you know that the universe is expanding at a speed that is faster than the speed of light?” I was right! He tells me that he works as a hydraulic technician. Sounds impressive. He looks chuffed as I show vague interest and ask for more information. “I fix buses,” he says.

He talks to me about space from the bus station to the basin reserve. I can’t work out whether he’s actually making sense or if he’s using fake words to try to impress me. I literally have no idea what he’s saying, and I’m starting to get annoyed. My nods become less enthusiastic, and I end up staring out of the window. I’m pretty sure that he’s oblivious to the fact that I’m no longer listening.

“Do you like Star Trek?” he asks, making his space talk seem somewhat less reliable. “No,” I say, trying as hard as I can to look like a kid who can smell something disagreeable. Undeterred, he proceeds to summarise the entire storyline for me, unaware that his babbling is falling on deaf ears.

Despite my best efforts to appear sociopathic, there is something about me that seems to invite odd people to vomit strange words all over me. I have friends who like getting into long conversations with total strangers, but I don’t understand why. Chances are, if a person is so lonely that they try to strike up a conversation with a stranger at a bus stop, there is some-thing seriously wrong with them.

Bollocks to this happy clappy, let’s be nice to everyone business. I’m trying to have a cigarette in peace.

I broke my back last week. I wish I had broken it doing something cool, like falling out of a plane and narrowly escaping death, or rescuing septuplets from a burning building, but I didn’t. I fell in a big hole, actually. It’s been a shitty week, but I’m past the worst. This came, incidentally, when I realised after a bathroom trip that my boyfriend was going to have to pull my underwear up for me.

I don’t know if it’s the morphine, but over the last few days I have seen some light in my situation. See, for the next two months, I am to don a silver back brace, one that makes me look rather like a turtle with its shell on the wrong way. Being in so much pain has taken my grumpy look to a whole new level—I can snarl harder than I ever could before, and I’m pretty much permanently frowning. On top of all of this, I’m pretty sure sponge baths aren’t as thorough as showering, and I haven’t looked in a mirror for a week. I can’t see many whackos approaching me now I’m an angry, smelly, indestructible ninja turtle.

Oh God, I’m one of them. A smelly hag wearing a bullet proof vest, my knickers at my ankles. I hope someone on the bus will talk to me. I’m so lonely.

If justice is a glass of milk, then revenge is a Singapore Sling—sweet, poisonous, and best served cold. Sure, justice is sweet, but revenge is sweeter.

I had my first taste of revenge at a very early age. Tiffany Marshall was a first class bitch; pure evil in the form of a little freckled five-year-old. So evil, in fact, that she broke the unsaid, though widely understood playground rule; that you never take advantage of a girl hanging from the monkey bars. There I was, my leggings (oh, the nineties) around my ankles, exposed to the taunting eyes of my classmates. To seek justice would have involved reliving my story to my teacher and parents, which I was not about to do. No, I had to act alone, and it had to hurt.

I waited a couple of weeks, my resentment towards her growing as fast as the list of my cruel, bottom-related nicknames. Blind-man’s Bluff is a game of trust, foolish girl. “Keep walking,” I cackled, as I saw her disappear over a ledge into a bush, meters below. I’ll bet she still has a bump on her head.

I watched in horror and admiration as a friend of mine served a long, cool glass of revenge to a party-crasher in her house this weekend. A stranger had stepped in front of poor Isobel as she passed into the kitchen, looking her up and down, his eyes lingering a little too long on her chest, before purring “that’s a fiiine piece of ass”. Who says that? Isobel let out an indignant grunt and pushed her way past, willing to let this one slide. Undeterred by Isobel’s coolness, or perhaps mistaking her grunt for one of sexual frustration, the said stranger decided that it was time to get a little more physical. He grabbed her bottom.

I do hate having my bottom grabbed. My reaction is usually to give the offending male a good old-fashioned kick in the shins, but Isobel had a better idea—she got pissy, literally. She stormed to the bathroom, peed in a glass, and left it on the windowsill to cool. “Would you like a drink?”

See, there are some situations in which justice does not suffice. This guy needed to learn his lesson, before his slimy little fingers pinched any other innocent Wellingtonian bottoms. I hope that every time he reaches out for a little feel, he tastes Isobel’s urine at the back of his throat.

Vengeful? Yes. Always.

My boyfriend’s first taste of revenge highlights the reason that same-sex schools should be disestablished, involving, as one would expect, a pie, a porno, and a tampon. A poor boy left a half-eaten pie on the table as he went off to take a phone call at his house, and Kim, always the opportunist, decided that it was time to take punitive action. He put a tomato sauce-stained tampon in the boy’s pie, and waited for the boy to take a bite. When to boy pulled the (seemingly blood-stained) tampon out of his mouth Kim, to add insult to injury, informed him that he had found it in his mother’s bedside rubbish bin. “In my defence,” he says, “my victim had once played a porn video (in which a man stuck his entire head into some poor girl’s vagina) to our fourth-form geography class when the relief teacher failed to turn up.” Boys.

When my flatmate Daniel got turned down by a girl who he had asked to the school dance, he took a rather unusual course of action, deciding to punish her rather than woo her. He climbed on the science block roof, armed with a video camera and a bag of frozen rats that he had stolen from the science department. As his friend filmed, he tied the rats up with string and lowered them onto his crush’s head. How could she have refused such a gentleman?

I’ve never been much good at maths, but my mother did at least make sure that I understand the most useful equations: Wrong + Wrong = Right, and Eye=Eye, Tooth=Tooth. She explained the concepts to me as she told me about being rejected whilst on a date with a man called Steven. Grabbing his arm, she wrestled the watch off his wrist and dunked it straight into his pint of beer.

“There’s an old proverb,” she said. “Revenge is a dish which people of taste prefer to eat cold.”

Correction: In my last article, I accidently wrote that “the word ‘fuck’ officially appeared first in a poem written around 1500, way before the Bible was written”. It should, of course, have read; “the word ‘fuck’ officially appeared first in a poem written around 1500, way after the Bible was written”. The Bible is, like, super old. I have apologised to the author (J.K. Rowling), and would apologise to God, except that I’m not so sure that He even exists.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
—Philip Larkin, 1971.

I’m quite lucky, I think, in that my parents’ most major fuck-up was sorted out pretty much as soon as I hit nursery school. I was a cute little kid—before my chubby stage hit I was blonde, pigtailed and blue-eyed. Detracting slightly from my angelic appearance, however, was the fact that by the time I was four, I was expertly using just about every mummy-effing swear word in the book.

My parents forgot, somewhere along the way, to tell us kids that it’s not socially acceptable to mutter “fuck it” if you hit a snake during a game of Snakes and Ladders. So, after four years of living in a profane household, I was (not literally, of course) “fuck”-ing and “shit”-ting all over the place.

They were smart, those Bermudian nursery school teachers. Every time I swore, a cake of soap would be held out in front of me until I poked my tongue out and gave it a tiny, reluctant lick. This technique seems a little dated, unkind even, but I swear that every time I “fuck” or “shit” these days I get a faint taste of soap in the back of my mouth. Again, please do not take me literally here.

I’m no longer confronted with a bar of soap when I curse, but I have noticed that a few students seem to have taken offence to the occasional coarseness of the writing in this magazine. I swear as naturally, and almost as frequently, as I breathe, so I’ve decided it’s about time I sit down and have a good think about what I’m actually saying when I use the word ‘fuck’.

‘Fuck’ has always been my favourite profanity, mainly because of its versatility.

“Fuckety fuck! The fucking fucker’s fucked!” is a kick-ass way of saying ‘Oh dear, the bloody idiot is in big trouble’. The word ‘fuck’ literally means, according to the OED, ‘an act of sexual intercourse’. There’s no reason that us new-age kids should be offended or affronted by someone exclaiming the word “sex”, even those who think it’s sacred (like me, Dad).

Of course, there’s more to it than that. Whilst when we say “I fucked John Smith last night” it means “I had sex with John Smith last night”, ‘fucked’ is also used to imply that something is destroyed or defiled; “My computer is fucked”. As Wiki-too-lazy-to-actually-research-pedia points out, linking sex and destruction is bad. Bad and ridiculous. But now we enter that age-old debate about whether the prolific usage of the word ‘fuck’ is enough for us to justifiably say that its meaning is no longer offensive. I am absolutely in the ‘don’t use the word gay as an insult’ boat, but I am a keen advocate of the word ‘fuck’. It is less offensive to me because our society does not so overtly objectify people who have sex; in fact, most of us are pretty fond of it.

Some people don’t like words like ‘fuck’ for religious reasons, but for you guys, I’ve found a loophole. Sure, the Bible makes it quite obvious that cursing is wrong—Peter 3:10 declares, “For, whoever would love life and see good days must keep his tongue from evil and his lips from deceitful speech”. Everyone in cyberspace, however, seems to agree that the word ‘fuck’ officially appeared first in a poem written around 1500, way before the Bible was written. So it totally doesn’t count.

Offensiveness and literal meanings aside, boy does a good ‘fuck’ feel great. The harsh ‘k’ sound at the end has a kick to it that ‘golly’ will never have, and the naughty feeling it gives me when I use it in a public place reminds me of the days when I would sneak out at night to meet my friends at the local park.

Fuck it. ‘Fuck’ is a fucking great word. And shitting fuck, ‘shit’ is too. Urgh. Soap. I have to stop—my saliva is starting to lather.

Gaydar:
n—informal humorous
the putative ability to recognise that a person is homosexual intuitively or by means of very slight indications.

Slight indications? Shit, then I guess alarm bells should have sounded as soon as I saw his bedroom. A red feather boa framed the Cabaret poster on his wall, and there was a little pile of fashion books on his bedside table. We got up and straightened our hair together. It was as if he was screaming at me, “Juliet, I’m gay but I don’t want to tell you. JUST LOOK AROUND”.

I fell in crush with Lou on my first day at my new high school. The dean’s address was lost on me—all I could hear were Lou’s snarky witticisms and my own loud, pervy internal monologue.

We went to a pretty crappy school. Big, scary boys would light the rubbish bins on fire most lunchtimes, and girls would actually smoke in the bathrooms (a cliché act of rebellion that I had previously only seen in trashy teen films). In short, Cashmere High School was not the place to come out.

Luka was in the closet, and I quite happily climbed in with him. And bloody hell did we have fun in there. We missed six weeks worth of classes that year, mostly because we were at my house watching Sailor Moon. When we were in class, we were unbearable. We would roll around the floor in the back of the class, alternating baby talk with raunchy sex noises. We had matching t‑shirts, and more catch phrases than NCEA credits. The relationship ran its course, and a few months later I met a new boy, Henry.

I guess alarm bells should have sounded when I saw The Male Nude on top of a stack of books on his bedside table. Still my gaydar didn’t bleep. No, it stayed quite silent until the very day that Henry and Luka started dating. It’s always weird to see your ex-boyfriend with a new partner. It’s always lovely to see two friends fall in love. Seeing two of your ex-boyfriends falling in love is like someone fucking you slightly too hard—great, if a little painful.

Having good gaydar isn’t the ability to determine somebody’s sexual preference from a person’s tastes and actions. If we ruled out every Wellington boy who conforms to banal gay stereotypes, there wouldn’t be many fish left in the sea.

A person with good gaydar does, however, at least need to understand that not everyone they meet wants to have sex with them. This is where I run into problems. As a deeply narcissistic girl, every time I am approached by anyone of the opposite sex, I assume that they are as in love with me as I am myself.

Trouble is, they very rarely are. They’re talking to me because they want a cigarette. They’re talking to me because they want to know if they have a chance with my hot friend. They’re talking to me because they mistook me for someone they know and feel awkward just walking away. They’re talking to me because I’m right there when their ex-girlfriend walks in. And yet, time and time again, I end up flirting outrageously with a lost cause, whether it’s a boy who is in love with my ex-boyfriend, a boy who is in love with himself, or a boy who is just standing next to me to make himself look taller.

I remember a friend of mine exclaiming once, “I’ve never been dumped”, a proclamation that was not well received by us other mere mortals in the room. Being rejected or dumped is bad for the self-esteem, but it does keep my brobdingnagian ego in check. My mother told me once that I’m destined to be left at the altar. But hey, after a few more years of hitting on the wrong men, at least it won’t be much of a surprise.

The landfills are overflowing. The hole in the ozone layer is getting bigger. Let’s talk about clothes.

So I fell in love with a dress last week. I’m talking true love. I love this dress more than I love Harry Potter. I love this dress more than I loved my pet rabbit Christmas (RIP). Hell, I love this dress more than I love my own mother. I can’t have the bloody dress, of course—the left sleeve costs as much as my booklist three times over. But this hasn’t stopped me visiting it every day, obsessively thinking about it, and telling everyone I know about it. I was put on this earth to wear that dress. It is perfection.

My mother and I had a long conversation about ‘the dress’ over dinner, as my father and the boyfriend exchanged bemused glances. My mother quickly wiped the smug grim off poor Kim’s face when she asked, “So, you would have asked Juliet out if she was wearing a big old hole-ridden polar-fleece?” He should, of course, have chimed in with something like “Of course I would have—even though I had barely talked to her I could tell that she was a nice young woman”, but he couldn’t seem to get the words out. “I guess not”, was his supremely smooth reply.

I admire his honesty. You see, to admit that we judge people on the basis of what they wear is to expose ourselves as shallow. Surely the only function of clothes should be to protect us from the weather? But why, then, do I ache for that dress? Why have I been dreaming of that autumny metallic print ever since I laid eyes on it? Why have I been considering a one-night Vivian Street excursion in order to get the money together to buy it?

It’s not that I think I’ll be happier wearing it. It’s not that I think it will make me feel more confident, sexier. No, it’s envy that I’m after. I want to walk into a party and see my friend’s eyes narrow in desperate longing. I want to meet the Queen on the street and make her look down at her own shabby outfit in disgust. Good Lord, I need that dress.
So I’m shallow, judgemental, and can sometimes develop slightly unnatural feelings for a garment. I’m not the first, you know. History has proven that life is more fun in pretty dresses. Look back at the Puritans, closing the theatres and bashing all of the fun out of life in their heavy black garb. I’d rather be a superficial twit in a beautiful Elizabethan dress than live the dreary life they led. And Marie Antoinette! She threw sequins in the face of poverty and politics, and lived a full and happy life (until her head fell off). Princess Di is another royal example of the importance of a good wardrobe, as a woman remembered as much for her outfits as… wait… what else did she do?

My mother is proof that we never grow out of this tendency to place rather too much importance on the way we dress. A couple of months before I saw ‘the dress’, she came across ‘the coat’. It is a bloody lovely coat—complete with enough blue velvet, ruffles and tiers to satisfy even the most ostentatious drama teacher. But of course the coat alone wasn’t enough. Next came the broch to pin on the coat. Then the burgundy boots to wear with the coat. I think by the end of the spree my father was just relieved that she didn’t decide to repaint the entire house in a coat-complimentary colour scheme.

Even my father, as much as he pretends not to, takes pleasure in clothes. He goes for a sort of mobster look, complete with trilby hats and leather jackets. I remember visiting Costume Cave to pick out a dress for my 21st, and being surprised to see him disappear into the changing rooms with a pale blue suit and pink sequined bow-tie. It’s always the quiet ones.

We can be superficial creatures, us humans, and sometimes it’s fun to just own it. I admit that I probably worry about what to wear more than I worry about climate change. I confess that I think more about the merits of sequins than I think about the state this world is in. But if there is anyone on campus who can prove that they never even notice what people are wearing, come to the Salient office. You’ve won a $100 shopping spree at the shop of your choice.

I am a complete failure. I’ve known it for years, ever since the very first day I entered the adult world (kindergarten). I presented my self-portrait to my teacher, expecting her to exclaim in my mother’s voice, “Juliet, I just don’t know where you get it from. I’m so proud!”, when she instead offered a rather harsh critique, suggesting that I should, in future, include a torso in my representations of the human form. I thought about trying to explain to her the subtleties of abstraction, but instead I took it in my stride. A bad review is a bad review.

Over the years, the taste of failure has become as familiar to me as the taste of toothpaste. I was that girl who always shrieked and froze when she was a metre away from the high-jump bar. I was that girl who only made the B netball team when there were only enough players for two teams. I was that girl who listened to the pretty adjudicator coo “You’re all winners”, as she handed out certificates to the three other people in the school speech competitions.

I learned early on that there is no point in ‘reaching for the stars’. I’ll inevitably fail to reach them—I even failed to grow to an average height.

Over the holidays I decided to give up smoking. My friends snorted when I told them—they didn’t believe for a second that I would succeed. ‘Humph’, I thought to myself, ‘I’ll show them’. And I did. I showed them that they were right. I’m a failure.

This time though, I’m not sure I wanted to succeed. Some people like chocolate, others coffee, others wine. I like smoking. Is that really so wrong?

According to the general public in New Zealand, yes. Bloody sanctimonious gits. I sat down for dinner recently with my mother’s friends, when one of them turned to me and said “You’re a lovely girl, but you stink of smoke.” I thought it was rude to tell anyone that they stink of anything over dinner, but it seems my terrible habit justified this harsh little outburst.

Do these people think that we don’t understand the dangers of smoking? Do they think that their comments will inspire us to run to the bathrooms in tears to flush away our terrible habit? I doubt it. In fact, I think they’d be rather put out if we did, as they’d then have to look for other ways to assert their moral superiority.

There is only one thing worse than sanctimonious non-smokers—quitters. My brother has recently joined this traitorous group. Last night, as I whinged piteously to him about having the flu, he managed to slip in “Oh, being sick is a great opportunity to give up smoking”. Prat.

It is almost impossible to enjoy a cigarette these days without being confronted with a gruesome image of a decomposing lung or a stupid anti-smoking catch phrase. Those ‘trendy’ anti-smoking advertisements at bus stops are so inflammatory that every time I see one I want to smoke my entire packet of cigarettes at once. If I see another failed musician pose under the quote “It’s just a turn-off eh” I will hunt him down and smoke his penis.

At least we smokers rally together. I ran into my high school drama teacher last time I was in Christchurch. A keen smoker, she patted me on the head when she saw that the nasty pictures on my packet of B&H were covered up with holographic kitten stickers.

Of course, I don’t believe that smokers should be allowed to jeopardise the health of others, and so I support the smoking ban in bars, restaurants, and public places. But this nonsense about making parks smoke-free? Fascism. Next we’ll be rounded up and marched into reservations, where we’ll be forced to wear placards stating our preferred brand and daily tobacco intake.

It has been, for me, one of those years that has really made me think about my own mortality. A number of family friends have passed away, struck down unexpectedly and prematurely. I realise that smoking has terrible consequences on one’s health, but really, death is random. I’d rather go like my grandmother—cleaning a pub, fag in hand, than die at the end of a long life of smug self-deprivation.

So maybe I’m not a complete and utter failure? At least I manage, sometimes ten times a day, to blow smoke in the face of social prejudice.

Each year in New Zealand, about 24,000 non-smokers die of non-smoking related illnesses. I, for one, am determined to never become one of those statistics.