Somewhat confusingly for many, it has no leaders and no single list of demands or requests. What they do all have in common is that they are “the 99%”, a group of people (which includes you and I) who have financial concerns, largely as a result of the top 1 per cent of society who have amassed large amounts of wealth and aren’t sharing. The protestors are using the Arab Spring tactic, essentially a wave of unrest involving strikes, marches, occupations of land and use of social media to create enough unrest in a region to force extensive change—this tactic has been credited with the overthrow of three governments (Tunisia, Egypt and Libya).

Currently, protestors are occupying Zuccotti Park in Wall St, New York City. They began the occupation on 17 September, and the number of those residing in the park nightly fluctuates around the 200 mark. The occupiers have set up everything from a kitchen and medical booth to a library, have met with local apartment dwellers/owners to ensure their living arrangements don’t clash, and are daily donated enough food for the entire movement. Various websites broadcast requests to ensure the occupiers can remain safe and healthy, for example, use of washing machines and driers after rainy spells. There is talk of how to ensure the occupation doesn’t peter out throughout the fast-arriving New York winter. Occupiers are in for the long haul. Per the Arab Spring process, marches and rallies occur almost daily, and many other groups use the occupation as a springboard for their protests. On September 27, over 700 uniformed pilots protested heavy pay cuts in the wake of the recession, and even the Canadian Postal Union wrote to express full support. Occupy Wall St is a resolutely peaceful occupation, as opposed to a prolonged protest awaiting the city to meet specific demands.

Occupying Wall St was started by the website Adbusters, who per their website are “a global network of culture jammers and creatives working to change the way information flows, the way corporations wield power, and the way meaning is produced in our society.” The aim, in short, is to “end the monied corruption of our [the USA’s] democracy.” So, as the financial centre of New York, Wall St was chosen as a target to occupy. Wall St, an eight-block street, contains the New York Stock Exchange, and has historically housed four other exchanges, such as the New York Board of Trade. John Robb, of the Global Guerillas movement, writes,

“What’s the real goal of this protest? Frankly, it’s probably a recognition that the center of power in the US doesn’t reside in Washington anymore. It’s on Wall Street. This protest dispenses with the middle men (the US Government) and goes straight after the real power.”

Most importantly, Wall St symbolizes the entire financial and banking systems for most Americans. When the corporation Enron was found guilty of fraud, for example, “Wall St” was blamed despite Enron not having any headquarters near the street itself. The occupation of Wall St as a location highlights financial corruption as the thread running through all protestors’ complaints.

So what’s the point? Where is the piece of paper everyone can refer to, to tell you why this is necessary? Everyone protesting has a slightly different cause. While there is a document everyone supposedly agrees on, it isn’t published on the official Occupy Wall St site, nor is it necessarily useful to those trying to summarize the movement, as it simply lists everything from objections about the cleanliness of the water, to wars overseas, to workplace discrimination. To put it in a sentence, the protestors at Wall St are furious with the system—economic and political, which allows wealth and power to be so unevenly distributed, with catastrophic results for humans and the Earth alike. They have been put into situations which they have no control over as a result of the world as it stands. The idea of the slogan “We are the 99%” is to help with the knowledge that few of us choose our situation, and most poor people are not poor as a result of some bad choices, or any choices, they personally have made.

How did poor people get to be so poor, then? Well, in the case of the USA, remove the safety nets we New Zealanders take for granted, and add a few generations of poverty to the family line. As an example, if you get sick, your ability to get medical assistance is largely based on the amount of money which you have—in 2009, individual insurance costs averaged $4,824 annually, or $92 weekly. With no insurance, a hospital visit for a birth, broken bone or similar can cost around the $10,000 mark. The Commonwealth Fund’s 2010 survey found that 33 per cent of American adults went without needed healthcare because they couldn’t afford it, and 20 per cent were struggling to pay existing medical bills. A friend in Wellington recently visited the Accident and Emergency Medical Centre. After the taxi, doctor’s fees and medication, he was out of pocket by $160, because one of the two drugs he needed were unsubsidized. We would consider that an expensive visit, and at that price many of us would be unable to afford such care, while an American would be unsurprised and out of luck for better options. Protestors old and young have no unemployment benefit to fall back on, and left university with debt on their tails to find that previously thriving industries have no job openings.

Westerners often fail to consider the state of the USA to be bleak because we are comparing it to the previous belief that there is a minimum level of poverty in Western society. There is perhaps a minimum level of poverty in New Zealand, but certainly not in most countries. Wealth disparity in the United States of America is the highest in the developed world, so while 13.7 per cent of Americans live on less than $15,000 a year, the top 1 per cent live on $350,000 or more. The money is there, in the country, but not remotely evenly dispersed in one of the wealthiest countries in the developed world. G. William Domhoff writes,

In the United States, wealth is highly concentrated in a relatively few hands. As of 2007, the top 1 per cent of households (the upper class) owned 34.6 per cent of all privately held wealth, and the next 19 per cent (the managerial, professional, and small business stratum) had 50.5 per cent, which means that just 20 per cent of the people owned a remarkable 85 per cent, leaving only 15 per cent of the wealth for the bottom 80 per cent (wage and salary workers). In terms of financial wealth (total net worth minus the value of one’s home), the top 1 per cent of households had an even greater share: 42.7 per cent.

Hence, for Occupy Wall St, the cries “We are the 99%” hold meaning beyond income or class level—they reflect the absence of assets, of control, of power, for the 99 per cent of the population who are affected by the economy on a daily basis, and literally do not own the country they live in.

Anyone may successfully argue that Occupy Wall St doesn’t have the answers as to how to fix the problems the movement highlights. No plan of action to change society, and the world, has been released by the movement. There are, by design, no leaders in this movement, so no single person to ask, and no fixed ideology to recommend. While the culture of a leaderless, demand-free movement is incomprehensible to many, its strength lies in these aspects. To pull power out of the hands of the top 1 per cent of society, Wall St has to lose its grip on the Government, and the lives of the bottom 99 per cent. This will require more than a few bills passed in Congress, and significant reforms in most areas of society. To do so, the cry “we are the 99%” must be heard and repeated by most of the 99 per cent, something which can only happen when those occupying Wall St, and various locations in the world, bring enough awareness to the atrocities happening in the financial sector to make our lives so different to those in the top 1 per cent.

Everyone, every single one of us has something which we do not value at all, which another one of us would be eternally grateful for. We can all make a positive difference directly to everyone in our lives in a meaningful way. Be a freegan. It’s easy.

There are layers and layers, and all you need to do is float on top. Ignore anything you’ve previously heard, ignore the label if you are uncomfortable with it. You don’t have to rifle through trash, or re-appropriate others’ possessions. Simply give things you do not need or want to people who will use them. Offer leftover dinner to your flatmate. Offer those shoes that don’t fit to your friend of the same shoe size. Two cheese graters just takes up space, but a flat without a cheese grater is really put out on occasion, so pass it on. You have this amazing potential to make so many lives seem better, easier, more comfortable, at an absolute minimum effort to you. Listen out for comments like, “We don’t have a —-” and assess how quickly and costlessly you can help. If you own something which doesn’t fit you or your lifestyle, quickly assess those around you to see if someone else would cherish it. Anything you own which you don’t actually use is better used by someone else.

If you won’t just give, loan things to people who you know always return them, or only loan things you don’t mind not getting back. If you have it, help others use it, or spend the time to teach them. If you have a friend who you don’t trust with your stuff, come over with the stuff, help them use it, and leave with it. In many cases, they’ll probably be more grateful for the help—and everyone understands nervousness about expensive belongings. Just offer the help in the format you’re comfortable, and it will be accepted or declined—no harm, no foul.

Freeganism also makes you a happier person. Did you know the people who live above me bake for me because I let them use my washing machine? I have never asked for anything in return, but they think of me often enough to turn up with hot delicious baking. At no cost to me, when I’m not using it, my washing machine is used by an entire flat of people. There is no conceivable way that I will stay at this house long enough for this $100 machine to require replacing, so what’s the harm? They’d probably just try to sneakily use it anyway, it’s stored in a communal area, and instead of spending many an hour fretting over washing machine possessiveness, I get cookies.

I think it is important to see each other as friends with a life, thoughts, feelings, and a future. It is important to care about everyone else’s future, because it’s our future too. Giving freely encourages love and empathy on both sides. It also gives us faith in people. Giving freely is a transaction where there is no fear in what is expected of us, and strength in ourselves to only give what we can. It is so rare to receive something you need, simply because someone has observed you need it. It shouldn’t be. Freeganism pulls us further away from a tit-for-tat system where we carefully measure out our love, money, and possessions to ensure we get ‘enough’ back from life. Society does not owe us anything. We are a part of society, and we owe it to ourselves to make society what we want it to be.

Much like sexuality and race, gender is only a sensitive topic for a minority of people—those directly affected by it. Cisgendered people are born identifying with the sex they are born with, so if your genitals naturally match the gender you think you are, you are cisgendered. As an uncomfortable compromise in this article, I will simply refer to cisgendered or non-cisgendered people, avoiding terms like transsexual or genderqueer as they may offend some non-cisgendered! Even the closest friends and relatives of a non-cisgendered person (someone who wasn’t born identifying with the sexual organs they were born with) can find talking gender a veritible minefield, after the long, intense discussions about how to refer to their nearest and dearest. The complaint I frequently heard during research was that every person not only has a preferred way to refer to their gender, but in many cases they pushed their definitions on everyone else—that is, there is no hard and fast rule, at all, when it comes to how, when and where to ask who is what!
Surely, many of you are thinking; gender lines are drawn with males on one side, females on the other, and a hazy gray line in between, just to cover our bases. Well, unfortunately, not at all. John Money, a somewhat controversial expert in the field of gender, writes,

In popularized and scientifically debased usage, sex is what you are biologically; gender is what you become socially; gender identity is your own sense or conviction of maleness or femaleness; and gender role is the cultural stereotype of what is masculine and feminine.

So, your sex is defined by your genitalia and chromosomes, gender is more socially/culturally defined, and one’s gender identity is what the individual feels they are. Even sex can be hotly debated. Some people have ambiguous genitalia, genitals which aren’t definitively male or female. Some people have chromosomes which do not match their genitalia! Some further redefine sex, citing brain chemistry. It’s all quite messy, and irrelevant to what is estimated at 99 out of 100 people. But that one person in a hundred who earns the badge of ‘different,’ well, that one person is in for a hard life, often from birth. It’s not their fault.

cisgendered (physically and mentally, entirely male or female) have to find a way to function in a society where even the toilets tell us we are male, female or physically disabled. Part of this requires fitting into the language of “he” “she” or “it,” and answering the uncomfortable “so what are you” question. Now, there are ways around gendered words. There is a small but relevant movement online to use gender neutral pronouns for not only non-cisgendered, but also objects, online personas, robots and nongendered characters. Normalising gender neutral pronouns, such as ne/nem/nir (ne laughed, I called nem, nir eyes gleam, that is nirs) may make huge inroads into normalising non-cisgendered people. Gender neutral pronouns enable everyone to avoid awkward situations, where no one has to confront the gender question within minutes of meeting (as a cisgendered woman who is regularly attributed masculine descriptors, I’d certainly appreciate it). So, picking a brand of gender neutral pronouns (there are six ‘commonly used’ different sets for English), and integrating them into everyday use may help.

Why is normalising, and finding an appropriate way to approach a noncisgendered person important? If estimates are correct, and around 1 per cent of the population is non-cisgendered, you’re looking at 210 non cisgendered in the Victoria University student population, 5000 in Wellington as a whole. While cisgendered people are the majority, being non-cisgendered is not that unusual, and our language needs to reflect this important minority. If you know how to interact with someone without causing embarassment and anger on one/both sides, then life becomes much easier. Interacting with someone visibly different does not become such an uncomfortable affair, and it is easier to give an otherwise normal conversation some much deserved normality.

At the same time, if a noncisgendered person feels that they are, say, female, they have probably fought so many battles on their sexuality that referring to them in a gender neutral sense may be incredibly hurtful. You simply do not know how someone ideally wants to be treated until stepping out of line. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is as much genuine confusion, misunderstandings, and arguments within non-cisgendered, non-heterosexual communities as there is within society as a whole.

When it comes down to it, any kind of label, whether accurate in our eyes or not, may offend, even if (as I found out the hard way), the label is ‘cisgendered’ and applied to those who haven’t given their sex a second thought. Perhaps equally unsurprisingly, we all mistakenly mistreat each other in a variety of ways when we first meet them, so pick the path of least resistance, and if you know they are non-cisgendered, don’t be afraid to politely ask. There is an enormous difference between asking someone ‘what’ they are, and asking them how to refer to them. Commonly, the answer will be “call me by my name,” which gramatically can be a bit hard at first but well worth the respect and smiles you get in return. “Labels are strange to me. “Transgender” feels weird enough coming out of my mouth, let alone something as abrasively in-your-face as “genderqueer.” Ultimately, the only label that I’m truly comfortable with is “Me”.”(genderfork.com)

The only truly positive way to move forward, and the most common request, is that non-cisgendered people are just allowed to exist without another battle. Working out how to talk to people is enough to push some people back into angry, intentional ignorance. The joy of being treated as the gender one wishes to be perceived as is great, but when actually engaging in conversation, leaving gender entirely out of it and talking to a non-cisgendered person as a real live, normal, human being who isn’t defined by gender is even better.

Pumpkin, Beetroot, potato and cottage cheese pie

So I had all of the above ingredients, with a hefty helping of pastry from Cafe Mamba, a cafe in the CBD that seem to love me enough to donate rad stuff to the family now and then. I don’t like cottage cheese. I don’t use cottage cheese. It was inexplicably in the fridge, so I figured why not add it to stuff and hope for the best.

• 1 beetroot, cut into 2cm cubes
• ¼ pumpkin, cut into 2cm cubes
• 1tbsp cinnamon
• 1tbsp salt
• 1tbsp ginger
• 2tbsp oil

Toss the above together and roast until fully cooked. Put into a blender with a 250g container of cottage cheese, pepper, and salt to taste. It will taste odd, and rich. Like it would taste good in exceptionally small quantities.

• 5 small potatoes, cut into 2cm cubes
• About 300g savoury pastry (the stuff I get is flaky and not really designed for pies, but tastes so much better)

Boil the potatoes until just tender, and mix into the pumpkin/beet puree. Roll out the pastry to about 3mm thick, and use it to line a pie dish. Save a bit to chuck on top. Add the potato mix on top of the pastry, then the last bit of pastry on top, and cook at 180 degrees until the pastry on top is browned and the sides of the pie pastry are starting to crisp.

The pie filling will be bright red and eating it will mess with your head a bit, because it looks like a sweet pie. Enjoy

We’ve all heard the stories of how a business degree didn’t mean that Jimmy had a step ahead in his new job, or how the law graduate still had no working idea of how the law applied. Bachelor of Arts has started to become synonymous with ‘career-less’ to many. On top of this, we have entrepreneurs who barely scraped through primary school, sitting on top of their game—Steve Jobs from Apple dropped out of university, and New Zealand’s second most popular website, TradeMe, was set up entirely by a dropout. So why university at all? Do we need it? Isn’t life, these days, about the connections we have to those already in our chosen lines of business?

Well, frankly, university will only get us so far. Even qualifications which seemingly guaranteed work are failing to deliver—in the United States last year, 87.4 per cent of law graduates had any sort of job nine months after graduation, 11 per cent of which were only part-time. Having university qualifications won’t necessarily protect your job from cuts, nor will it necessarily push you ahead in the field—common feedback from jobseeking graduates is that employers are asking for industry experience, not simply a degree. Most degrees—BA, BSc especially, do not exactly funnel one into a specific, eagerly await jobs.

Once we have a job, having a tertiary qualification will improve our starting rate and average income level. OECD data also shows that holding a tertiary qualification will reduce the income gap between men and women—that is, with a degree, a woman is more likely to earn a similar amount to a similarly qualified man, whereas without tertiary qualifications, women earn on average around 30 per cent less. (To some extent, this disparity is a result of 30-44 year old women working part time.) Women specifically are financially better off with a degree than without, as women in the labour market are typically valued less than men. It seems that the more vulnerable a person is, the more likely they are to be discriminated against, and the better their odds of success with a degree.

New Zealand, however, has some uncomfortable statistics when it comes to jobseekers with tertiary qualifications. In comparison with much of the developed world, our qualified jobseekers start on rates similar to the unqualified, and do not catch up to where they globally should be for quite some time. Many jobseekers feel they are overqualified—their qualifications and experience are much greater than those required for positions advertised. Furthermore, employers can be uncomfortable with hiring someone who will quickly want more money and possibly be trying to hike up the corporate ladder quickly.

But what about the Steve Jobs of the world? Those who have little more than a focus, and drive to succeed? Well, do you have a million dollar idea, and the drive to see it through? Go on, try it. Try to go to university with this passionate idea sitting in the back of your mind, buzzing away while you try to write assignments. Put your spare money towards making it work. Don’t have such an idea? Perhaps you should stay at university. One of the reasons that such a drive to succeed is so important, is that not going to university or having similar mentoring and assistance means that there is a whole lot of learning which needs to be done. One cannot simply buy a license to print money—running a business is potholed with legal obligations, loopholes, and problems. Caring about your business enough to go the extra mile and dot all of the ‘i’s is the difference between the Serepisoses and the Forbeses of this world- cutting corners and ignorance will only get you so far, and a lifetime is a long time to deal with mistakes. Relevant university degrees will ensure that you have a depth and breadth of knowledge about your chosen subject, as opposed to cherrypicking the interesting parts and ignoring others which in reality are rather vital.

As short a time as ten years ago, one could get a bank loan and take the plunge towards developing million-dollar ideas. Today’s economy, when no credit is as bad as bad credit, many people simply cannot afford to take the risk. While University is expensive, you come out of it with something you will hold for the rest of your life—education, and formal qualifications. While repaying your student loan is a daunting task, every figure I could find showed that the increased income from those qualifications translated to about a 10-15 per cent return on the investment of those years and that expense.

If embarking on a trip up an existing corporate ladder, personal connections may mean much more than a degree. But if you don’t have those connections, the best place to make them is at university, where you are studying alongside the new generation’s greats. You are daily crossing paths with hundreds of students, and any one of them may positively impact your world in ten years (best to not piss a lot of people off). Your lecturers and tutors often still have a hold in the professional world, and people talk. You may get just the right foothold, having spent a few years picking the brain of your future employer’s friends—your tutors and lecturers.

All success involves learning. We can’t start with ignorance and succeed without advancing beyond ignorance. Perhaps evaluating how and why we learn is the first step into becoming successful, as university is not the ideal learning structure for many. If university is not your thing, then look for another way to keep improving as a person and supporting yourself. Most entrepreneurs know that they will never work ‘for’ someone, but rather want to succeed on their own terms. Succeeding without a mentor, again, requires a significant amount of self motivated learning—something we can all learn from our university education. There’s no right answer as to what we, individually, should do. But graduating into a supermarket job, to eventually make something of yourself, is still better than dropping out into a supermarket job, and hoping for the future.

It has a large number of variants, but the generalised term is CBT or CT (Cognitive Therapy). This article focuses on this umbrella concept as a whole rather than any one specific variant.

The focus of CBT is on the client’s beliefs, and how they apply those beliefs to events in their life. Essentially, the therapist aims to ensure the client’s actions and beliefs are optimally healthy—the person does not engage in ‘dysfunctional’ thinking. Dysfunctional thinking occurs when the beliefs you hold about the world distort reality, are unsupported by the evidence available to you or cause you to harm yourself/others, or feel distressed and immobilised. Dysfunctional thinking in general is seen to occur as a reaction to events in one’s life, as a part of the ABC model (see insert).

During therapy, which is generally given a static timeframe of 3-12 months, the therapist and client will work together in an attempt to change the client’s beliefs, in the view that those beliefs are the mitigating factor in the client’s problems. The therapist will give the client ‘homework’ and much of the therapy will in fact be self-directed—the client will attempt to address the situations in which they have trouble as they occur, outside of therapy, with the mental/emotional tools given by the therapist.

CBT has similar rates of success as with other forms of therapy. It does not seem to reduce the risk of relapse in psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. What it does seem, from an outsiders’ perspective, to be useful for is for relatively minor personality problems which may cause anxiety or depression.

It interests me that the perspective of most of those who practise CBT compared to those who practise other forms of therapy, CBT has a unique perspective by focussing on beliefs. Surely other forms of therapy also examine the beliefs underlying events, and discuss how and why the clients acted in a given situation. As a result of the popularity of, and diversion of psychiatric funding into CBT, it has attracted some criticism as there is little data suggesting it is more effective than other forms of therapy. Indeed, there is arguably little data suggesting any one form of therapy is more effective than others, but rather going to therapy is more effective than not going to therapy! Most studies examining CBT compare CBT to taking psychiatric drugs for treatment, and in those cases CBT often will resolve the issue, and much faster than the drugs, when it comes to mood or anxiety disorders. So, while CBT may not be leagues ahead of other forms of therapy, it is still an effective form of therapy.

All in all, CBT does seem to be a very direct method of dealing with personal problems, if those problems are based on one’s beliefs. Because it involves very seemingly cold interpretations of how and why the client acts the way they do, coupled with treating the client’s life as a lesson they can give homework for, it may well be too direct for many people.

The ABC model of Cognitive
Behaviour Therapy

A: Activating event: A friend passed me in the street without acknowledging me
B: Beliefs about A: He’s ignoring me. He doesn’t like me
I am unacceptable as a friend, so must be worthless as a person
For me to be happy and feel worthwhile, people must like me
C: Consequence: Emotionally hurt and depressed. Behaviour changes to avoid people generally
‘A’ does not cause ‘C,’ but triggers off ‘B’ which in turn causes ‘C.’ ‘C’ may also then become the ‘A’ of another ABC model (e.g. the person may infer, from their avoidance of people, that they are weak (‘B’) and put themselves down (‘C’). CBT is heavily focused on intercepting beliefs at point B to affect point C

Dr Sketchy Wellington is monthly and hosted by Mighty Mighty. For $12/$14, anyone can come in and experience a wealth of colour, models and atmosphere with a sketch book in hand. The talented Wellington scene brings a variety to the table, with costumers and dancers doing their thing to avoid mere traditional poses, and some pictures are simply breathtaking. Rachel Rouge began Dr Sketchy Wellington in 2009, and will be retiring in October of this year.

Venus Starr will be taking the reins of Dr Sketchy, with big boots to fill. Starr has over six years of circus performance under her belt from the Circus Trust in Miramar, in addition to lengthy stints teaching and performing worldwide on the burlesque and circus scene. Among her talents, she can do aerial silks, hula, and swinging trapeze, which she enjoys bringing to Burlesque in Wellington. She aims to bring a more circus-style feel to performances in Wellington, avoiding mere ‘striptease’ style shows for full, high calibre burlesque shows, often combining talents such as aerial silks, pole, or hula. In addition to this, in a moment of boredom when pregnant, the high energy Starr formed the monthly event Carousel Cabaret to remain active when unable to perform in the Wellington burlesque scene.

One of the best things about the Wellington burlesque scene, and Venus in particular, is that she knows most performers well enough to push the boundaries. Venus knows her performers’ limits and can tailor each session to each performer, and vice versa. Wellington Dr Sketchy artists are becoming well known for drawing more detailed, beautiful pictures owing to each performer’s ability to hold poses for five to seven minutes, as opposed to one or two. Combining this with a passion for extending the common view of burlesque as simply striptease, shows at Mighty Mighty combine a range of concepts appealing to increasing numbers of Wellingtonians. Rachel Rouge has organised her final Dr Sketchy to be Zombie themed, ending with the symbolic killing of Rouge by Starr, as she takes the spotlight.

Venus’ monthly Burlesque show, Carousel Cabaret, is a work of art combining traditional Burlesque with more circus-style entertainment, with a healthy dose of comedy. It is next held at Garden Bar at 7pm, August 26.

The next Dr Sketchy will be held at Mighty Mighty, from 4-7pm on Friday 12 August 2011.

Firstly, accept that your hair will need bleach. I’d say bleach it about 2 shades lighter than your hair colour, and no more unless going white. Why? Because you have to deal with upkeep and regrowth – if you lighten it any more, it will only take 2 weeks before your hair is obviously in need of dyeing, and dyeing that often is bad for it and completely unnecessary.

If your hair is naturally black, or you don’t take the above advice, consider dyeing patches instead of the whole head – e.g. the middle section in a band from above your ear to just below it, or dyeing your hair a tamer colour all over, then dyeing patches of extreme colour over the top in big sections.

Try to choose colour based on the assumption it will be about two shades darker than it looks in tube. Yes, your hair will lighten to the colour it appears in-tube, but it will do so unevenly and by the time that happens, it’ll need a re-dye. You will need about 1/4 of a tube left over, so if you have a lot of hair, you may need more tubes than initially assumed.

Bleach can be any blonde hair dye. For your extreme dye, I’d recommend one of:

Fudge - my favourite, especially because if you get rained on in town the colour doesn’t run all over your clothes! But their red selection is a bit crap, in my opinion. Also, Fudge doesn’t fade too badly and I’ve used it years at a time with no unpleasantness.
Directions - Stay out of the rain. Really wicked colours and probably best looking if you really keep on top of upkeep. But after 8 months or so of use, the colour didn’t hold well anymore, so I personally won’t touch it. Also, this one will rub off on clothes/bedding.
Special Effects – I’d say avoid rain, but it isn’t too bad. Can be pretty cruel to anything the dye touches in terms of removal. Colours are pretty cool. Fades pretty heavily the first week or so, which can be a pain if you really thought through your colour and got it ‘just right’.

If you have an inside day or can wear a big hat, start the process. You need at least 6hrs with colour dye in your hair. This is a long time. Consider covering your bed in towels and letting it dye overnight. 

1. Bleach hair. Look at shade. Accept your hair colour will not be magically lighter than this shade!

2. Moisturise with an especially oily moisturiser around your hairline, over ears, down back of neck.

3. Apply dye. If doing more than one colour, think through your order of dyeing. I do it all at once, but can only get away with this because I don’t do dissimilar colours.

4. Put hair in a comfortable position and wrap with gladwrap, leave about an hour, then after this unless sleeping you can usually comb and style hair, wipe off excess barrier cream and go about a day which doesn’t involve people touching your hair.

5. After a good 6+ hrs, shower and wash it all out- the water may never run completely clear but make sure as much residue as possible is out of your hair.
 
Upkeep

Don’t wash your hair daily, it’s so bad for it. Try weekly, or every 3-4 days.
When washing hair, use as cool water as you can stand.
When showering and not washing hair, wear a shower cap. This makes an enormous difference.
Add dye to your conditioner bottle. Somewhere between a quarter and a fifth of your conditioner should be dye.
Use leave-in conditioner or do similar lovely things to your hair so it stays healthy.
Look at the back of your head to determine if your hair is fading too much, not the front, as the back/sides fade much faster.
Redye every 3-5 weeks. You should be good enough at looking after your hair because of regrowth, not because of colour fade.
Treat different colour sections separately in everything you do to avoid muddying colours.

Once you know how to do it, it’s easy. It’s just learning how to make small changes.

Justice is actually much easier for students to organise than it may seem. The legal system in New Zealand is set up so as to avoid lawyers and courts wherever possible—the Disputes Tribunal, the Tenancy Tribunal (relating to renting/flatting), and the Employment Relations Authority. All of these hold minimal fees for the applicant—for example, it costs $20.44 for most applications to the Tenancy Tribunal—so many people are able to access those services.

A common complaint from the legal community is that many students haven’t quite realised that life can be unfair. If it isn’t a formal agreement, you may not have a leg to stand on. If it isn’t explicit, there’s wriggle room, and in interactions with landlords or employers, wriggle room will not be found but rather used as a matter of fact—that’s why it’s there. As a student, the best way to ensure financially viable justice is to ensure that you know your rights from the get-go. Enter into contracts fully aware of the consequences—for example, work out exactly what, when and how purchases are to be paid off, and the overall amount of interest you will be paying. Sit on the phone with a calculator and ask for the bank to confirm your calculations. Put bill paying cut-off dates into your cellphone, including credit cards, and learn about minimum repayments.

In an issue involving a contract—be it tenancy, employment or otherwise—the other party is likely to know what is reasonable, what will be considered a breach of contract, and what is fair. If they don’t, it’s likely that they will back down once they do. Importantly, students especially are better able to find success without taking the matter further, by accepting a healthy locus of control over their lives.

Locus of control is a personality variable related to how much people believe their lives are under their own control. Those who are said to possess internal locus of control believe they determine what happens to them and that they can change or influence the course of events. Others said to have external locus of control feel that the cause and control of events in their lives lie outside their abilities, and attribute what happens to them to the external environment. (Pinto et al, 2004.)

This attitude is even more important when it comes to borrowing and spending, as individuals are more likely to take responsibility for their decisions and think about their future in respect of pressing decisions. Students, especially, while readjusting to a new lifestyle, need to see their actions and responses as those intimately affecting the outcome of a tense legal situation. Prior to reaching the courts, it is all down to being gracious, careful and firm with words. Once it reaches the courts, the opposite occurs—anything said right up until the courtroom will be considered, so agreeing to anything or making unnecessarily harsh demands or expectations will not work in your favour unless they really are terms you are willing to stick to.

What we as students are less likely to have access to is the time or advice that will make claims through the courts worth it. Some governmental advisory phone lines are able to provide general advice, but you are unlikely to receive feedback on your specific claim beyond either “it’s worth following up” or “you probably don’t have a claim”. Often disputes are based on technicalities, and those technicalities are unlikely to be covered in such advisory phone calls, so while they are able to tell you parts of the law, they may still be unhelpful.

So, let’s assume that you have contacted the relevant authorities for advice and you wish to take someone to court. How do you know that it’s all worth it, assuming you have the time to invest into this particular cause? Get legal advice. Despite the fact that you will not need a lawyer for any of the initial courses of action, seeking legal advice will make it less likely that you waste your time. There is the law, and then there is how the law is applied. There are key things to mention when attempting to invoke the law, or show that the law is on your side, and unless you have significant experience in those fields, you might omit key facts completely. For instance, one of the key determiners in whether an individual is still an occupant of a house is whether or not they have keys to the house—when flatting, often keys aren’t handed over in the first place, but if an ex-flatmate is still holding a key, they are likely to still be liable for rent. Would
you have mentioned that if you didn’t know to?

There are also specific aspects of how the law is applied that you are unlikely to know unless you have some form of legal knowledge. Informal conversations with lawyers, or anyone who has been in formal situations, may be helpful, but you need to know details specific to your personal circumstances. In conclusion: spend some time with a lawyer, and try to find out how to get legal advice with the smallest amount of cost to you. When it comes to the law, you need to accept that there is a certain amount of either time or money that you will need to spend, and if you have no money, you better have a whole lot of time to spend on your case.

So, how does one get justice as a student? Really, it is more about knowing the world we live in and trying to avoid situations where we are unable to invoke the law. Part of this is ensuring we don’t get into disputes where we have also breached contracts or broken the law—it’s easy to say that something is unfair before considering how we brought it on ourselves. Weigh up the pros and cons of different courses of action, and get as much legal advice as possible—preferably, before it’s really necessary.

Halls of residence, it seems, are great as they give you a safety net so you can’t stray too far, and there are (albeit minor) consequences for your actions. The concept of ‘party free’ floors was laughed at, as well as the idea of studying with the people who lived with you. Maybe halls aren’t the real world just yet, but all in one year many people are leaving home, learning how to feed, clothe and budget for themselves, study relatively unassisted, and act like an adult, so halls overall seem like a good way to test the water. Complaints ranged from terrible food to not fully meshing with the other people, but all times were a hazy warm memory—so it doesn’t seem like anyone really regretted living there.

“Halfway through the year, when things started to get boring, Rory invented this awesome drinking game where we all sat in the dark, not talking, and drinking beer. Once you’d drunk all six beers, you got up and quietly left the room.”

Flatting, especially with people you don’t already know, seems to be a mixed bag. Staying on the same wavelength as one’s flatmates, especially if they aren’t also first year, can be hard during exam time. Also, living with a load of first years that come from relatively privileged backgrounds can be a recipe for disaster.

Also, taking responsibility for bills and bond can be hard—one person compared it to herding cats. In this sense, flatting in first-year and coming out alive seems to be a good achievement, which is likely to lend itself to a better second year.

“I moved into a flat with randoms—living in a flat itself was a positive experience (apart from being broke, but that was fun itself in a way). However, I also failed everything at uni and only went to one of my exams… so maybe I’d change the part where I went “FREEDOM! BOOZING!! FUCK STUDY!!!”… but then again, maybe I wouldn’t.”

The priorities we all set ourselves when pushed out into the big wide world are a bit laughable now. How about the 19-year-old who wanted to live alone, and slept under his jacket in a powerless house to do so? One poor fool choose to buy town shoes instead of furniture, and had not one, but two girls leave his bedroom laughing hysterically at the sleeping bag on the floor.

The first thing I heard about was all the causes my parents had never filled me in on. The worst was the meat industry, and how they treat their animals. So I became a vegetarian, trying to be a vegan, but because I had no idea which foods contained animal products, and which didn’t, I ended up eating kebabs and hot chips for months
Some people never left home at all, and all they needed to do was work out how to lie to StudyLink to ensure they received money to waste. The combination of more free time, clean clothes and hot dinners often meant more free time for depravity. Many who took this option were glad of the ability to actually focus on study, and ease into the adult world, while some felt pushed into the option by parents who may have even moved city to keep them in the family home!

The opposite seemed more common, however, when both StudyLink and parents left some students out in the cold.

“I’m not going to go into details here but suffice to say that taking abandoned, half-eaten burgers that you didn’t buy from BK and giving them to Blanket Man would be offering him more support than I saw from my father for a good long while. But StudyLink, in their ineffable wisdom, felt that I was unworthy of support. I had at this point lost 11 kg because I was eating only free ice cream twice a day.”

The balance between cheering for freedom and accepting an 18-year-old is still a bit immature to be on their own seemed like a hard line for parents to fathom, especially when basic life skills were never fully taught. Budgeting seemed to be something that was done until one reached their last $5, and the choice between alcohol and food on the weekend was a relatively common one.

“If I had tomato sauce and rice, I had a meal. Sometimes I’d even have cheese. If I was too hungry, I’d go to bed early.”

Overall, the best thing we all took from first-year was that no matter how bad it got, it was such an experience that changing it isn’t something we’d want to do. The combination of learning about so many things at once in such a socially different year means that everyone follows such a steep learning curve that the year is inevitably worth it.

“I once went to a party and ended up resting my head on size G boobs while making out with my best friend and watching a bearded man in a dress recite Dr Seuss. It caused a lot of repercussions but that night will forever be in my brain and I will never want it out of there.”

Inter-hostel rivalry, finding that your roommate has stolen all of your green tea, and learning what mould is are nothing compared to being bored and stable in a clean flat when no-one is home.