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Image: Archi Banal
Image: Archi Banal

SocietyMarch 30, 2023

Help Me Hera: How do I have fun?

Image: Archi Banal
Image: Archi Banal

Hera Lindsay Bird on the two distinct kinds of fun, and how to have them.

Want Hera’s help? Email your problem to helpme@thespinoff.co.nz

Help me Hera!!!!!

I am in my early 20s and for the majority of my sentient life I have considered myself a relatively stagnant person.

When I was a teenager I decided that, since I held a healthy disdain for the majority of my peers, I would adopt academia as my primary personality trait. This worked for a while (justifying singledom by saying you are “focusing on your studies” is generally well received). HOWEVER I am now on the other side of the university journey and have realised that validation through work doesn’t really align with my values. I think I would rather be a nice person that has fun! 

In pursuit of fun I have embarked on my first intimate/romantic-ish relationships of my life this year (you could call me a late bloomer). I would like to have the crazy, fun, messy, irresponsible early 20s experience that Bridget Jones/every autobiography I’ve ever read has told me to go after. I worry that I am too measured and calculated (which you may have gleaned from this email) about my life to have any crazy stories to tell the grandkids… do you have any advice on how to live my 20s to the fullest when chaos doesn’t come naturally? 

Best wishes, 

Anonymous


Dear Anonymous,

Reading your letter, I felt like a sentimental French man, eating a small but potent biscuit. 

I had almost forgotten the horror of being in your twenties – the relentless, teeth-grinding, chore-like imperative to enjoy oneself and create indelible memories and friendships you’ll always treasure. 

As a teenager, it’s easy to bask in misplaced feelings of superiority. But we must look back with fresh reverence at the simple joie de vivre and innate wisdom of the boys who spent high school setting fire to various rubbish bins and collectively buying and then eating a whole rotisserie chicken with their bare hands in the parking lot each day. May god bless and protect them. Some people are born knowing how to live, and the rest of us have to figure it out the hard way. 

You frame your question as being about identity, and what sort of person you ultimately want to be. But forget being a type of person! Forget having traits! You’ve studied hard and now you want to make some mistakes you can brag about in old age. You want to put down the Euclid and drink fermented grains in the village gazebo. You want to have fun!

In my experience, there are two distinct kinds of fun.

There is the simple, hedonistic, soul-enlivening pleasure of picking your scabs during a thunderstorm, doing laps at the local swimming pool, or writing down the numbers of beautiful trains in a special notebook. 

This is the easiest kind of fun to have. It’s the sort of fun that uplifts the spirit and fills life with an enduring sense of joy and accomplishment. I have recently become obsessed with Diamond Art Painting, a relaxing pastime enjoyed by menopausal American women who find pleasure in painstakingly rendering photorealistic scenes of firefighting professionals in miniature rhinestones. But I would highly recommend trying any hobbies or taking any classes you find interesting. You can meet a wide variety of fascinating individuals for the price of learning to reupholster a vintage chair. 

The second, more insidious kind of fun, is the kind of fun that’s mostly fun in retrospect and uncomfortable in practice, like stealing a priceless antique cow creamer from your uncle’s rival or taking psychedelics at the petting zoo then running into a former sports coach by the tarantula cage.

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Lyric Waiwiri-Smith
— Politics reporter

In high school, my friends and I had a lot of the first kind of fun. I won’t bore you with the details, but it broadly involved knowing a lot of things about German actor Klaus Kinski and coming up with anagrams. 

Looking back, this was a perfect and beautiful use of my time. But when it came to the second type of fun, I had to start from scratch. I spent a lot of my twenties forcing myself to go to parties and events I was terrified of, out of some vague sense it was character-building. Were the vast majority of these experiences fun? Probably not. But they brought me deeper into the world, and so I can only wholeheartedly recommend them.

The best advice I have if chaos doesn’t come naturally, is to seek out people that are more fun than you. Some people have freakishly vast natural reserves of charisma, like my dentist. I always look forward to getting a filling because I get to hear some frankly insane story about the time he got sanctioned by PETA for parachuting into a school fair dressed as Santa with a live monkey strapped to his chest. I honestly don’t know whether people like this are born or made. In the spirit of investigative journalism, I asked my most constitutionally fun friend, Mitch Marks, what her secret is. She said there were two vital components to having fun, the first of which is: “having a complete disregard for consequences” and the second is saying yes to things “without being thespian about it.”

I think ultimately, this spirit of reckless optimism is key. 

I recently read a beautiful article by Helen Garner about happiness. She says in her old age, she has come to understand happiness as one of these fleeting, paradoxical, uncooperative things which is futile to strive towards. Instead, she has chosen to focus her remaining attention on “small, random stabs of extreme interestingness.”

O Helen Garner lock me in an antique rabbit hutch and rattle the cage. How right and true. Happiness is fleeting. But there are interesting things everywhere. 

I love that you chose Bridget Jones as your figurehead. As far as I can recall, not a single fun thing has ever happened to her. She’s a tragic Don Quixote, tilting at handsome windmills, and constantly undergoing a barrage of mundane and self-inflicted humiliations. But what transforms and uplifts this Knausgaardian litany of suffering into a joyful romp is Bridget’s character. In short: Bridget Jones is what makes Bridget Jones fun.

So my advice is to go forth in the spirit of Bridget. With misplaced optimism, morbid curiosity and a robust sense of humour. 

Say yes to things, in a non-thespian way.

Go where you’re invited, unless it’s to Hell.

Accept and reciprocate invitations.

Try as many new things as possible (unless likely to result in psychological or bodily harm).

And above all, when joy isn’t possible, take refuge in what is interesting.

Wishing you the very best of luck!

Want Hera’s help? Email your problem to helpme@thespinoff.co.nz

Keep going!
The image is of the sky in Auckland at the protest against the anti-trans activist on March 26, 2023. There are ballons in the colours in the colour of the trans pride flag in the bottom right corner and smoke of the same colour above the clouds
Image: Troy Rawhiti-Connell

OPINIONSocietyMarch 30, 2023

On protest and the limits of empathy

The image is of the sky in Auckland at the protest against the anti-trans activist on March 26, 2023. There are ballons in the colours in the colour of the trans pride flag in the bottom right corner and smoke of the same colour above the clouds
Image: Troy Rawhiti-Connell

I thought, perhaps naively, that trans people having the right to exist and the right to protest was something we could all agree on, writes Madeleine Chapman.

When a wasp makes its way into my home, I gently shoo it out, sometimes with great effort. I don’t like wasps and I really don’t want to be stung by one, but I have no interest in harming them. I’ve been taught this from a young age, nudging wētā out of wet logs and sweeping weevils from the entryway. 

Years ago, when I was a student and rode a motorbike, a wasp flew into my jacket while I was on the motorway and stung me on the collarbone. I flinched and swerved a little in my lane, but had nowhere to pull over. A moment later, it stung me again on my chest. Then again. Trying not to veer into the cars on either side of me and still going 100km/h, I took one hand off the handlebars and pounded my chest until I felt the wasp crunch against my sternum. 

When I finally managed to safely pull over and open my jacket, the wasp fell out and, incredibly, flew away. I stood there with a swollen and bruised chest and shuddered at what would have happened if it had kept stinging me.

Seeing the number of people who are this week suggesting that trans people and their allies should have simply ignored Posie Parker when she was in New Zealand makes me think of that wasp.

“They played right into her hands,” said Heather du-Plessis Allan in the Herald. Tracy Watkins wrote in the Sunday Star Times of the “pro-trans lobby” in a piece headlined “Outrage was the winner in ‘Posie Parker’ chaos”. The CEO of Diversity Works, the national body for workplace diversity, equity and inclusion, Maretha Smit, wrote despairingly on LinkedIn that “we have not managed to engage the hearts and minds of those who are still figuring out where they stand on these issues”. There were many calls for empathy and understanding in the face of disagreement.

They’re all correct in that there was tension at the protest and there were brief moments when things got physical from both sides, which I don’t endorse. I myself received a good shove from behind from Parker’s security as they cleared a path to the rotunda, and my naive first thought was that someone must have tripped and fallen into me. The jostling was unsurprising because, after all, it was a protest. Protests have very, very rarely been without conflict. People were protesting for their right to live without the spread of hate-filled rhetoric in their backyard so, as you’d expect, their emotions ran high. And as far as protests go, it ultimately was uneventful. Right now in France, streets are quite literally on fire at the prospect of the retirement age being raised from 62 to 64.

The overriding argument of the aforementioned three (and many others) is that the way to engage with those who don’t share your views is through civil discussion, not “outrage” or “cancel culture”. And I agree, when we are talking to our relatives, neighbours, colleagues, friends and random internet strangers who are equally willing to engage in constructive dialogue. But what these calls for empathy and kindness have done is conflate Posie Parker, who even other “gender critical” activists have distanced themselves from because of her extreme views, with your high school friend who watched one too many Youtube videos about Hillary Clinton in 2016.

It is disappointing for me to see how many of my media colleagues have approached this whole saga as an even debate where one side overpowered another, rather than a community’s fight to be seen as valid members of society. People can have their own conflicting thoughts on, say, where transgender athletes might fit into the current Olympics framework. But I thought, perhaps naively again, that trans people having the right to exist and the right to protest was something we could all agree on. A collective show of empathy, you could say. 

a sign reads "trans rights are humans rights" at the trans support rally in Albert Park. A tree stands in the background against a bright blue sky
Protesters at Auckland’s Albert Park on Saturday morning. (Photo: Anna Rawhiti-Connell)

The purpose of Saturday’s protest was to be peaceful and legal but also extremely loud. That was the whole point, clearly written on the tin, because some of the things Parker says (namely: denying the existence of trans women by insisting that they are men) are harmful. This was not a protest of people disagreeing with what Parker said or not liking what Parker said. These were people who felt their lives and the lives of their loved ones would be made demonstrably worse if they didn’t do something.

So they yelled. Louder than Parker could speak. And she left. It’s an effective protest tactic, but it doesn’t mean that the same approach would be taken with every person who asks a genuine question to their neighbour about how some areas of society might function differently when everyone is living as their true selves. 

I can confidently say that every single person present at the various support rallies over the weekend has had at least one awkward conversation with someone they know about trans (or queer, or any ethnic minority) rights. Those conversations are ongoing and require a lot more empathy and patience than most people realise. The Springbok Tour protests of ‘81 weren’t the beginning and end of Apartheid discussions in New Zealand. They were protests with a specific aim (to stop an event), just like this one. And just like this one, they made a lot of people angry who now hold different views after being made to talk about the lived reality of others at home/work/school.

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Madeleine Chapman
— Editor

Posie Parker is not someone who wants to have those sorts of conversations. When someone’s stance includes conspiracy theories that billionaires are funding a pro-trans movement (as said on RNZ last week), they’re not wanting a civil discussion. Parker is not providing a helpful foundation from which to have these talks as a country either. She wanted to come in, sting and leave. And thousands set out to lessen that sting, even if it meant hurting themselves (by now having to read handfuls of cisgendered people, whose lives are not impacted by the ideas Parker spreads, determining on national platforms that actually it was all a bit much).

I still shoo away wasps and other creatures when they come inside the house. Sometimes I’m lazy and ask my partner to put them out in the garden where they’ll be happier. Most of the time they’re just an annoying buzz that can and should be ignored. Trans people are already at greater risk of being victims of violence and are, in general, at the sticky end of most wellbeing statistics. They are eternally riding bikes on the motorway, where an annoying buzz can quickly turn deadly, while the rest of us watch from a safe distance, asking for more empathy. 

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