Back in Orange, 2nd of December

‘Home’, Aro Valley, Wellington

Okay, here we go. This feels weird, really weird. Don’t get me wrong, I have written in English before. I finished two theses (thesises?) in English, it has been the language that Alex and I have talked in for as long as we know each other and I enjoy writing some diary pieces and letters to friend Oli in English too. I am comfortable in the language and I know my way around expressing the way I feel and think, next to having learned some very fancy words from the daily crossword here in Wellington. Well then, why would it be hard for me to write a blog in another language? When looking at the facts, it really should not be. But it is, and I believe that the challenge still lies in practice. Even though I now speak English near fluently, this has not always been the case. When I write in English, my attention is captured by the language itself more than the thought that I am trying to express. This constant, rational process makes it hard to express my stream of consciousness as it is. Of course, that is also influenced a lot by the fact that this stream is mostly in Dutch and I am translating as I type. My flow is, yet, nowhere to be found. This will be a fun challenge though and I hope that my - undoubtedly endlessly many - bilingual readers can tell me whether I sound very different in the two. I am looking forward. But for now, I will struggle along to your entertainment.

As you may have noticed, I am still in Aro Valley after these few weeks (Okay a bit more, I have been putting off writing this blog). What has happened to the nomadic travel-blogger you have come to know and love? How come I am still stuck in one place instead of going with the wind (There’s a lot of wind here) and seeing where it brings me? Well honestly, it’s just quite comfortable here and it has been interesting to see what changes and what does not. I am again sitting at Aro Bake, having just finished my flat white and doing the crossword with Austin, Cait and Dan. My place of residence is the same, although I have now moved to the very comfortable bed in the living room. Still, I wear Cait’s clothes everyday and enjoy how suave I look in them. 

At the same time, things do change. They do not change in the very obvious way in which they did before, where every day was different and I almost did not sleep in the same bed two nights in a row. The differences are more subtle now, but just as noticeable when you know where to look for them. I recognize people now, around Aro Valley, and I stop to talk with them about menial things. When I drive, I don’t need my navigation (Okay like half the time I do, but it counts) to get home and walking back from the city, I even took a shortcut one day. It can be hard to notice these distinctions and find the value in them as much as we can find the value in big changes that are easier to spot. When we have a stiff balace with little differences in our routine, we start to approach this as our baseline and there is more room to notice. German philosopher Immanuel Kant lived a structured lifestyle, to the point where he would take the same walk every day and never left the city Königsberg where he was born. Nevertheless, his philosophy is part of the foundation that one of the biggest philosophical movements of Western Europe was built on. In “Tender is the Night”, F. Scott Fitzgerald writes about an American psychologist who settles down in Zurich for his work. It reads “…, he felt like a toy-maker rather than like the tornado, who had hurried through the old red buildings of Hopkins, … Yet he had decided to remain another two years in Zurich, for he did not underestimate the value of toy-making, of infinite precision, of infinite patience.” It’s not that I compare myself to Kant or even to the protagonist in Fitzgerald’s book, but relatively to before, I am a bit of a toy-maker in Wellington.

When I came to Wellington, my goal was to settle down for a while and get to know the city and its people. That has gone very well as you might have understood from my enthusiasm. My other idea was to find work and earn some money to keep on living and traveling. This became a more pressing point when Dutch governmental institute DUO realized I was still collecting my student loans after not studying for a few months and made me pay back their money. I do not think they would be open for my compelling argument that traveling is a way of studying life and so I just complacently transferred the money. With the need to devise a plan to make money, a lot went through my head. What are my skills and experiences, I asked myself. Looking back at the past four years of my life, I have spent a lot of time on improving myself in various ways. One ability clearly stood apart from the pack. It was obvious, my best way to make money, my path to the big bucks, could only go one way. And so, I picked up pursuing my career once again. I became a garbage man.

When I walked into the office of temp agency OneStaff in Petone, near Wellington, I laughed at myself just for the bizarreness of the situation. In dress pants and a shirt (I just had this on, I did not actually change) and on my best behavior (didn’t need to change that either, I know), I told the agent there that I did in fact have some experience running rubbish. It took about five hours for me to transition from sitting at my laptop and looking for jobs in my pajamas to finishing the interview and my induction test for Waste Management New Zealand. Not only that, but I was also asked if I could start work the next day. At 7:30 AM. I said yes, worked 33 hours in the following three days and now I am a recognized employee with a three-day work week. The job comes with perks like inside knowledge on all the fish and chips shops around Wellington, a great new hat and a really tanned left forearm as that is my window arm. Pretty hard to beat.

Every day that I work, I get up at 5 in the morning and get in my car by 5:20 (ish). Then I drive to work in about 20 minutes and have a cup of tea, before getting in the truck. The following 10 to 12 hours are spent sitting in a truck and sporadically stepping out to collect a bin full of cardboard or plastic and dumping it in the back of said truck. Whilst this process is repeated, Steve enlightens me on his life, the area that we drive in and where he grew up in and his views on life. I have to say, most of these views are at least in one way something I disagree with. Still, it seems important to me to understand someone like Steve and I have been making an effort to do so, I’ll try to share this with you too. Now why are you gonna spend your time reading about a racist Kiwi bloke and why am I gonna spend mine writing this story? I’ve spent the last four years in a city full of university students, about my age (ok mostly a bit older maybe) and it’s easy to get lost in the idea that the whole world is like that. So to make an effort to step out of that and see who is in one of the trucks and cars you pass by without realizing there is anyone in them, let me tell you about Steve. Also, I drive around the country with this guy for about 35 hours a week so I might as well get to know him. Without further ado.

Steve is a 61 years old man, he is a born Kiwi and grew up around Wellington in a valley of suburbs called the Hutt Valley. He is white, a bit shorter than me, and - especially considering his age - in good shape. His parents were both addicted to alcohol at some point and Steve told me that he considered himself an alcoholic too at many stages of his life. However, in the past 16 years he has not drunk a drop of alcohol. He likes to talk about all the women he has slept with, but I am not too sure what part of these stories is true as he tells them less as he gets more comfortable with my presence. After dropping the booze Steve rebounded into spending money and he now has a counsellor that monitors his spending, and he works 65+ hours to make ends meet at the moment. He was also married for about 17 years, to the mother of his only son. He has not been together with her for at least a decade and a half and does not speak to his ex-wife anymore, but his son still lives with him. This son has been an alcoholic, addicted to meth and a thief because of it and Steve got him through that. Now he also has a grandson, who is 8 years old and lives with his mother. In his own words, Steve just wants the country to be a good place for his grandson to grow up in. Although this is a noble motivation, it comes with some questionable views in my opinion.

According to my driver, there are just too many people in the country and there should not be. This fuels the conservative ideas that Steve has, like wishing that all people of a different nationality than Kiwi or European would go back to their home countries. Also, Steve is a man with a strong will and this results in him not empathizing very well with others that do not solve what he sees as problems with an easy solution, like being overweight. Thinking of people around him does not go very far, but quickly turns into annoyance turns into anger. The opposite of compassion, whatever the word for that is. What was surprising for me, was the fact that he acknowledges his anger problems. He is aware that it comes from something deeper, but is unable or unwilling of more than very slight changes in this aspect. After shouting bad language out of his window to someone blocking our pathway, he showed genuine remorse for his actions. If this was because of the morality of his actions or the consequences it could have for his job, I do not know. Merely, I nodded at the comment that I should back him up when asked about the situation and hoped it would not come up again, which it hasn’t. There’s enough moral dilemmas for a boy my age, I would prefer not to have to pick between my driver’s job and justice.

That’s Steve, in two paragraphs. Flatty Jason asked me if I thought Steve was a good person. I would not say he is, but what defines a good person? We are all formed by our upbringings, our surroundings, our history. Where is the free will, where is the choice between being good and bad? As a reader, you may have been empathizing with Steve in the first paragraph I wrote about him and almost triggered or distressed by the second. At least, I hope this may have been the case. Is it the actions, the racism, the anger that he shows and does not contain or is there something to be said for the intention and the love for his family and his country where it all comes from? When you figure it out, please let me know. (If you’d prefer to send a longer response or go into more discussion, feel free to e-mail me too. That’s on [email protected], although I do not think I would reach anyone with my blog that does not know me well enough to have my e-mail.) What determines if we are good or bad, and what is our own say in this? For my own sake to stay sane with Steve - and for the noble cause of finding the answer to these questions for mankind of course - I will stay interested in people and I hope to share that with you too.

To get back into lighter subjects, let me share with you my best jokes on the topic of my profession that I have thought of whilst driving in the truck:
“Why did Maarten become such a good garbage man? He picks things up quickly.”
“What did the company say when Maarten did not pick up their trash for a week? Where have you bin man?” (Okay this one is not even mine but it’s funny)
“What did Maarten say when the cardboard bin overflowed and everything fell out into the sea? How waste-ful.”
As I was also doing this job last year, it may happen that I have used one of these jokes twice by now. If that was the case, I would like to apologize for recycling my puns.

To end off on a wholesome note, a story about my Sunday night. Today is the second day of December and, as you may or may not know, on the 28th of November it was Thanksgiving day in America. On the 27th of November, we realized this together with the fact that American flatty Austin would be out of his home country for it. That seemed enough reason to celebrate what seems like quite a fun tradition and on the 1st of December we celebrated Friendsgiving, as it was quickly called. (This seems a bit of a weird name, when you think about it, as giving thanks seems a lot more fun than giving away your friends.) We ate a nut roast, mashed potato with gravy (by yours truly, indeed), sweet potato roast, couscous salad (not quite thanksgiving food, but still real good), and pumpkin pie for desert. We even got blessed with some strong wind and grey sky for the Northern hemisphere November feel. The tradition that comes with all this food, next to the food itself, is that there is a round where everyone says what they are thankful for. Everyone seemed to have the same opinion on this, the city with its people that have been so accepting. (No one mentioned the gravy, dear diary.) That may sound cliché, but ever so true. Exactly a month ago I arrived in Wellington and I am so happy I did. On that happy note I will end my ridiculously long English blog post: I am very grateful for the people that let me into their midst without ever meeting me before and for what feels like a family that so quickly became close to me. And for the gravy.

With love,

Maarten