“It’s one of my favorites,” I said.

“I know, right? Can you believe a girl saw it tonight and called it a sissy red?”

“She did? Why’d she do that?”

“Because she’s a bitch.”

§

I met an American from Chicago this week, and we talked about the city and the experiences of moving to New Zealand. She said, “After telling someone I’m from Chicago, I hate when they say ‘from one windy city to another’ or something else about the wind.”

20 minutes later we were standing in a circle, with strangers. Someone asks her, “So where in the states are you from?”

“Chicago,” she said.

“From one windy city to another, eh?”

If you’re moving to Wellington from Chicago, expect a lot of wind talk. Whether you like it or not, it’s where our cultures try to connect.

§

Next Friday I’m flying to Chicago for a seven week holiday. If any of my kiwi friends want something from America, let me know. I have a large suitcase.

I could only watch the surfers because I’m just a beginner. Those waves look small but they’re easily 12 feet high. I saw a man’s surfboard snap it half.

Some other remarkable memories from my three week vacation:

• a street peddler attempted to sell me tickets to a shooting range where I could fire “real guns”
• a customs official asked if I brought marmite. I asked if it was illegal, and she said, “No, I just don’t like the stuff. Yuck.”
• some Hawaiians are fat. Bigger than midwestern fat. I think their island genes compound the fatty foods
• a stranger gave me a lift, and I asked him what to see in O’ahu. He said, “I don’t know. I usually drink with my friends. It’s safer that way.” I didn’t ask
• my parents and I saw lava flow into the ocean at Volcano National Park

I mostly slept in the sun. It was so warm…

§

Thanksgiving Dinner 2008

Toasted Le Moulin baguette with:
Cream cheese & caramelised onions

Apple pie & cream
Christmas fruit mince pie

§

Catherine made everything from scratch, even the coleslaw! Here’s a photo of my adopted family in Wellington. Catherine (the chef) and Craig (the sous-chef) are on the right:

And here we are at the end of dinner, waiting for dessert:

So good! It reminded me of dutch apple pie, without the cinnamon.

Thank you so much C & C, it was superb!

“I didn’t cheer for the Yanks,” man number one said.

“I have a shirt that says the US bombs the world. I should have worn that,” man number two said.

Yea, as if the rugby players care. And that shirt is uninformative and lame. Where’s the wit?

_{1. A rugby tournament between 16 countries}

“Shorpy is a blog about old photos and what life a hundred years ago was like: How people looked and what they did for a living.”

The past looks so poor.

Swallow your filthy burger, woman!

My team is awesome, and we’re going to win. The competition starts on Saturday. Here are some details:

Can I see the event online?
The two teams will be building their websites online, and you can watch the progress on the two websites in real time. The web addresses will be announced at 9.30am on Saturday at http://www.fullcodepress.com.

The New Zealand team

• Ali Green
• Jeffrey Wegesin
• Mark Rickerby
• Peter Johnston
• Steve Dennis
• Thomas Scovell
• Zef Fugaz

Photo and video action:

• YouTube action
• FullCodePress Picasa
• FullCodePress Flickr
• FullCodePress Flickr Group

Blog action:

• FullCodePress
• CodeBlacks (our team)
• WIPA
• Max Design

Who is running the event:

• Webstock
• WIPA

24 hours without sleep! I’m going to feel like a student. Wish us luck…

“Trusting to escape scrutiny, by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory – that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood – that serpent’s eye, that charms to destroy – he plunged into war.”

George Washington, on the war with England and his responsibilities as General:

“I shall constantly bear in mind that as the sword was the last resort for the preservation of our liberties, so it ought to be the first to be laid aside when those liberties are firmly established.”

I wish more presidents were writers.

“I am,” I said. “I just paint with my left hand.”

“How interesting. Which hand do you use to shoot a gun?”

My face wrinkled. “I’m from the city. I’ve never held a gun.”

“What? What kind of man will you be if you’ve never shot a gun?”

◊

She was from Alabama. One day after she hung up the phone I said, “When you talk on the phone I can tell you’re from the South.”

She gave me a look that would corrode metal. “I speak slowly when I talk to my family,” she said.

“Right,” I said. “What’s your family like?”

“They wouldn’t care for you, not unless you can dig a hole.”

“Dig a hole? How hard can that be?”

“Why would you think it’s easy?” I walked into the yard and she handed me a shovel. I dug. It was pathetic.

◊

Digging holes, firing guns, was I missing something? I thought so, which is why leaving America was easy. To think, a few thousand years ago if someone left their family or birthplace, they would be committing suicide. But today thanks to reality t.v. and chicken nuggets, I’m still alive!

So in New Zealand, I’ve dug a few holes and shot a few bullets¹. But who cares! The most important lesson I’ve learned is about territorial vanity. I thought it was American, but it’s not. It’s everywhere.

Everyday I hear people say, “I’m from here – and you’re not. Here is better than there, because if there were better than here, I wouldn’t be here, but there.^{2 3}”

Every country in the world has its charm. They each have advantages and disadvantages, but unfortunately both America and New Zealand share the thought, “Stop complaining. If you don’t like it here, leave.”

This way of thinking is wrong to me.⁴ It does not make sense. You are digging your own grave.

And I thought I left this patriotic shit behind in America?

How I wish that were true.

<sub>1. Ironic isn’t it?
2. JAFA, the Hutt, the South Island.
3. Midwest, Texans, New York City.
4. In business, doesn’t complaining give the smart entrepenuer a competitive advantage? Why isn’t this principle applied?</sub>

The first Vonnegut book I read was Breakfast of Champions. Read it because it’s a picture book, and in the introduction he draws an asshole. It’s a good one, too. Also, in the first chapter he describes the national anthem:

There were one quadrillion nations in the Universe, but the nation Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout belonged to was the only one with a national anthem which was gibberish sprinkled with question marks.

He was born in Indiana, which gives me hope for the heartland. Recently Vonnegut spoke about democracy with Jon Stewart:

I have wanted to give Iraq a lesson in democracy, because we’ve experience with it, you know. And in democracy after 100 years you have to let your slaves go, and after 150 years you have to let your women vote, and at the beginning of democracy there’s quite a bit of genocide and ethnic cleansing, it’s quite okay.

Vonnegut said there are two kinds of writers: swoopers and bashers. Swoopers write a story quickly and bashers go one sentence at a time. In his experience, most bashers are men and most swoopers are women.

I like to swoop, then bash.

I’ve cut and pasted some of my favorite paragraphs from The New York Times’ obituary. What a person. It’s a sad day.

On the firebombing at Dresden:

The defining moment of Mr. Vonnegut’s life was the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, by Allied forces in 1945, an event he witnessed firsthand as a young prisoner of war. Thousands of civilians were killed in the raids, many of them burned to death or asphyxiated.

“The firebombing of Dresden,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote, “was a work of art.” It was, he added, “a tower of smoke and flame to commemorate the rage and heartbreak of so many who had their lives warped or ruined by the indescribable greed and vanity and cruelty of Germany.”

On kindess (he and I share the same philosophy):

To Mr. Vonnegut, the only possible redemption for the madness and apparent meaninglessness of existence was human kindness. The title character in his 1965 novel, “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, or Pearls Before Swine,” summed up his philosophy:

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”

And finally, the closing lines from his last book:

When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
“It is done.”

People did not like it here.