Leaving my ethics at the door - the life of a capitalist's teenage slave

I have opinions and views. I view things as just and unjust. I’m not afraid to tell people what I think. Basically I am very secure in my political views and feelings. Well that’s what I thought. Seems the capitalist were right and money does come above everything.

I was working at a massive chain store during my 7th form year and I didn’t mind it too much. I only worked Saturdays and the occasional late night Thursday, so I didn’t really have too much experience as a ‘real worker’. The fact that in a 9 hour day I only one half hour break didn’t annoy me too much. The disregard for safe working conditions didn’t faze me. The treatment of staff flew over my head. I had scored the cool job, working at the coolest shop in the city. And then came Christmas time. Now not only was I working a nine hour day, but it had increased to 10 hours, still with the same meagre break. Head office was determined to cash in on the festive season and you had to SELL SELL SELL to every single customer who walked through the door. Never mind the fact that you couldn’t justify a $150 hoodie to yourself, let alone a complete stranger. Christmas and the summer seemed to drag on for years working there, but finally it was February and I was leaving home to head off the big smoke and start uni.

Oh how wrong I was. During my year at university I had become much more familiar with the union movement. I understood workers rights and the idea of fairness. I realised that my old work was the hell and the CEO was the devil. These owners did not give two shits about the staff. They didn’t care about the customers. All they cared about was making money. They only gave staff a half hour lunch break because they didn’t have to pay them for it and they would REALLY be breaking the Labour Act if they ignored that one! Even though under they law for a nine hour day you are also intituled to 2 15mins break. BUT WAIT! These are paid 15 minute breaks, and the bosses couldn’t have staff members getting paid for having a rest! That’s crazy! What are you workers rights activists thinking about! That is a loss of money! How unproductive. Plus breaks pull staff away from the floor, and if they are not on the floor that means that there is one less person to greet a customer and force them into buying a $70 top.

And yet one year later, knowing how wrong it is. Knowing how this job goes against everything I believe in. Knowing how horrible it is. I am standing back behind the counter serving customers as if I had never left. The capitalists were right, money is the prime goal, and ethics are secondary. If I was working there for longer that 2 ½ months I would get on to them. I would shove the Labour Act right down their throats. I would join a union and entice my other workmates too, and we would have our own mini revolution. But. I need money. And kicking up a fuss means I will get less hours, which means less money. Which means for now, I am just leaving my ethics at the door. Marx would disown me if he knew.

The Motorcycle Diaries

First of all, holy shit Gael Garcia Bernal is a B A B E ! That man can be my doctor any day! Check him out! OK, I should calm down now and get onto my actual point.





(P.S. Dev, I have noticed that my page views have gone up quite a bit. Thanks for checking in and caring about what I write!)

So given that I am starting Spanish at uni next year, and have never learnt it before I thought I should spend the summer reading and watching things do to with the Spanish language. I bought Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera and 100 Years of Solitude (bonus as they appear in Rory's reading list). I have been scanning the Lonely Planet website and found the 10 best fiction novels written about Latin American states. I got the Motorcycle Diaries and Volver out from United Video! And I will learn to make Mohitos as soon as my pay come through for the rum! So basically a nice, although highly trivial Spanish basis.

So tonight was Motorcycle Diaries night. And what a night it was. If you are reading this, go. Go and get this movie out from the DVD store. It is amazing. I was always quite fond of Che, though in all honesty I didn't know much about him. Prior to the movie this is what I knew:

1. He was Argentinian
2. He was a doctor
3. He was good friends with Fidel Castro and was a leader in the Cuban revolution
4. America didn't like him and therefore shot him

That's about the limit of my knowledge. And also that thousands of people wear tops with his face on them, or have bags or posters without know what the man really did. The movie enlightened me and I learnt a few new things about this sweetheart of a man:

1. He was an asthmatic
2. He wasn't very lucky with the ladies - or his girlfriend at least
3. His bestie was Alberto

So I didn't really seem to learn that much more about the man, yet I did. I knew he was a man of and for the people and this really came out in the movie. He and his friend Alberto traveled South America, starting in Argentina and ending in Venezuela. It is through this traveling, meeting new people, having new experiences that Che develops his political standings. He connects with the people of Latin America and their hardships. He sees injustices all over the continent, particulary with the native people and this fires him up to believe that there is more to life, that people should not be treated inhumanly, that all people are worthy of a decent life.

Now I will just have to read the book the movie to further my Che knowledge. And I think i will have to call my child Ernesto. Yes. Sounds like a plan.

Sex shop

Today my friends and I went into a sex shop to buy a presant for a friend.

As embarrassing as it was to walk in there - when you got inside it was awsome! There was a couple looking for toys to spice it up a bit, there was a women trying to find a good dildo and there was us, buying a chocolate penis. I lopve how comfortable and safe you felt there, it was kinda weird!

Afterwards my friend started making fun of the women buying the dildo and it really annoyed me! I hate that there is still an issue with women and sex! WOMEN NEED SEX TOO PEOPLE! And sometimes a man doesn't always do the trick, or a women for that matter. So sometimes you have to find something that you can do yourself. I say good on her - I'm glad to see a women taking control of her sex life and not just ignoring her needs.

I hate that it is commonly overlooked, women need sexual releases too!

Michael Laws

Michael Laws. I have no idea how that man got elected and then re-elected as mayor of wHanguanui, let alone be elected as a Member of Parliament! Once again we have another example of a filthy Tory trying to ruin this country!

This time he believes that we should let the 'underclass' be voluntarily sterilised and give them $10,000 for it. Because clearly beneificeries and the 'underclass' contribute nothing at all to society, but are just a drain on our society. Laws doesn't want to have to pay high taxes to fund the dole for parents who kill their kids!

iswatgjsigjOIFJAI! He makes me sick! He's such an asshole. Honestly, who does he think he is! This is so draconian and imperialist! Instead of coming up with idiotic policy ideas why doesn't he actually come up with some legitimate ideas about raising the living standard in this country.

I wish Law's mother got sterilised - we would have all been better off.

Rory Gilmore's reading list

There are hundreds of different copies of Rory Gilmore's reading list, but this one seems comprehensive enough. One of my life goals, to read all of the books on it!

A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
The Advetures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay - Michael Chabon
An American Tradgedy - Theodore Dreiser
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl - Anne Frank
A Passage to India - E.M Forster
A Separate Peace - John Knowles
A Tree Grows In Brooklyn - Betty Smith
Autobiography of a Face - Lucy Grealy
The Awakening - Kate Chopin

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress - Dai Sijie
Bee Season - Myla Goldberg
Bel Canto - Ann Patchett
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Beloved - Toni Morrison
The Bielski Brothers - Peter Duff
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
Brick Lane - Monica Ali

The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
The Code of the Woodsters - P.G Wodehouse
Complete Tales and Poems - Edgar Allan Poe
The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
Cousin Bette - Honore De Balzac
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

David Copperfeild - Charles Dickens
Death of a Salesmen - Arthur Miller
De Burgos - Julia De Burgos
The Devil in The White City - Erik Larson
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hide Robert - Louis Stevenson

Ella Minnow Pea - Mark Dunn
Emma - Jane Austen
Empire Falls - Richard Russo
Ethan Frome - Edith Wharton
Extravagance - Gary Krist

Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World - Greg Critser
The Five People You Meet in Heaven - Mitch Albom
Flowers of Algerhon - Daniel Keyes
The Fortress of Solitude - Jonathan Lethem
The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand
Frankenstein - Mary Shelley

Galapagos - Kurt Vonnegut
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy
Hamlet - William Shakespeare
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
Holidays on Ice - David Sedaris
How the Light Gets In - M.J Hylano
How to Breathe Underwater - Julie Orringer
The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Victor Hugo

Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
The Jungle - Upton Sinclair
Just a Couple of Days - Tony Vigorito

The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
The Kitchen Boy - Robert Alexander

Life of Pi - Yann Martel
Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
The Lottery: and Other Stories - Shirley Jackson
The Lovely Bones - Alice Seabold

The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgaov
The Meaning of Consuelo - Judith Ortiz Cofer
Me Talk Pretty One - David Sedaris
The Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka
Middlesex - Jeffery Eugenides
My Life in Orange - Tim Guest
My Sister’s Keeper - Jodi Picoult

The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
The Namesake - Jhumpa Lahiri
The Nanny Diaries - Emma Mc Laughlin and Nicola Kraus
Nervous System J- an Lars Jensen
Night - Elie Wiesel

Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
Old School - Tobias Wolff
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest - Ken Kesey
On the Road - Jack Kerouac
The Opposite of Fate - Amy Tan
Oracle Night - Paul Auster
Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood

The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
The Polysyllabic Spree - Nick Hornby
The Portable Dorothy Parker - Dorothy Parker
Property - Valerie Martin
Pygmalion - George Bernard Shaw

Quattrocento - James McKean

The Razor’s Edge - W. Somerset Maugham
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books -Azar Nafisi
The Red Tent - Anita Diamant
Rescuing Patty Hearst - Virgina Holman

Sacred Time - Ursula Hegi
The Sacred Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Secret Life of Bees - Sue Monk Kidd
The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemmingway
Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
Sybil - Flora Schreiber
The Story of My Life - Helen Keller
Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia De Burgos - Julia De Burgos
Speak, Memory - Vladimir Nabokov
Siddartha - Hermann Hesse
Seabiscuit: An American Legend - Laura Hillenbraha
The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Stiff: The Curious Lives of the Human Cadavers - Mary Roach
The Song of Names - Norman Lebrecht
Songbook - Nick Hornby
The Song Reader - Lisa Tuckor

Time and Again - Jack Finney
The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters - Elisabeth Robinson
Truth and Beauty - Ann Patchett

Uncle Tom’s Cabin Harriet - Beecher Stowe
Unless - Carol Sheilds

Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

When the Emperor Was Divine - Julie Otsuka
Wicked: The Life Times of the Wicked Witch of the West - Gregory Maguire

1984 George Orwell

Happy Sufferage day!

To all New Zealand women,

Today, 116 years ago, New Zealand women were finally given the right to vote. New Zealand was the first country to have universal suffrage, and for that we should be proud. Since 1893 women have come a far way. Elizabeth McCombs was the first women in Parliament in 1933, and the number has been rising ever since (mainly anyway). Women were able to freely work outside the home without being socially shunned. New Zealand has had 2 female Prime Minsters, our last Governor General was female, our current Chief Justice, Dame Sian Ellis is a female and the number of females is increasing in high ranking jobs and in leadership positions. Women have secure property rights in divorce, can seek abortion if they wish and can even get civil - unioned to other women! Oh how sweet our life is. But in reality, it is not.

Women are still not equal in this country. Women are still treated as second class citizens! I don't care who says women are treated equally in this country. THEY ARE NOT! Women only make up 33% of the legislature, yet they make up 51% of the population. In the current government only 8 out of the 28 ministers are female! For a western country, for a country where all citizens are ment to be equal, for a country that thinks they are ahead of the pack, we are far behind! This current economic crisis shows the country just how little women are valued in this current government. In the last 3 months alone 15,000 women have lost their jobs. 2/3 of all people made redundant are women. This Wednesday in Parliament Labour's Women Affairs spokesperson, Sue Moroney asked Women's Affairs Minister Pansy Wong what she was doing to create more jobs for women. She said she was building a cycleway. A cycleway! What the fuck Wong, how is that helping NZ women! Why don't you start doing some actual work for once!

"That is a pathetic response on the eve of Women's Suffrage Day and a clear admission from the Minister that she has sat back and done nothing," said Sue Moroney. "This Government has failed women twice-over in tough economic times - not only have they consigned them to the jobless scrap heap by their inaction on job creation, but they have also stopped pay equity in its tracks in an attempt to prevent women in paid employment from getting fair pay.

Pay equity is another thing that is pissing me off. Why are NZ women paid 12% less for the same work as men! It is soooooooo ridiculous in this day and age that this gender pay gap even exists. By the end of their first year of work, women are on average paid 4% less than their male counterparts and within 5 years are paid 14% less. I hope, though I doubt, Pansy Wong listens to the 15,808 people who signed Sue Moroney's Pay Equity petition, being tabled in the house on Tuesday. I hope that she re-instates pay equity investigations. Women deserve it. This country deserves it. After all Wong said just yesterday is a press release that the:

Elimination of violence against women, tackling the pay gap - which has been stalled at 12 percent since 2001 - and the promotion of women in leadership are three priorities of the Ministry that will honour the spirit of the Suffrage movement for the benefit of all New Zealand women.

So why doesn't she get active and actually work towards them!

On Liberty

So I have to do an essay of John Stuart Mill's contreversial 'On Liberty' for uni. GAH! This book is giving me a headache, and I haven't even read it. Which is bad in itself. Instead, I'm just reading critiques of it. Damn 1840's language is hard to understand.

"Explain the freedoms John Stuart Mill defended in On Liberty. What freedoms did he not defend and why?"

I thought it sounded quite simple, but turns out it is harder than it looks!

Oh well, we must keep on keeping on!


(Update: I ended up getting an A+ on this assignment!)

Jane Eyre

I'm trying so so so so so hard to get into it.

But its just not working.

I hate it when you build up such HUGE expectations of something and it fails to deliver.

Like Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince movie.

But I won't even get started on that!

But, I shall persevere.

I'm sure in the end Mr Rochester will save Jane in some dramatic, romantic way, and they will stay together.

Also, whats up with the crazy wife locked in the attic!?!?!??!

Perfect

I was reading the good old Waikato Times yesterday, where an opinion piece caught my attention, written by Richard Swainson, about the Section 59 referendum.

It sums the whole thing up beautifully for me;

"Essentially those in favour of the forthcoming referendum are denying children equal protection under the law, singling out the most vulnerable sector of society as being uniquely deserving of corporal punishment"

Perfect!

Michael Jackson

Today Michael Jackson died.

All over Twitter and Facebook is R.I.P MJ and what not.

Who actually still cares about him? Given he did a lot more the music industry. But everyone knew he was crazy.

There are people who have died for a lot less. Yes it was a shock, but 15,000 children also died today, from preventable diseases and malnutrition.

Put it into perspective damn it!

Referendum on s.59

"Should a smack as part of good parental correction be a criminal offence in New Zealand?"

Imma vote yes.

There are several reasons why I am going to vote yes;

• It is supported by child advocates such as Barnardos, Plunket, UNICEF, Save The Children and Women's Refuge
• The bill was created to stop the excuse of using reasonable force in child assault cases
• To protect children from assault
• It supports positive parenting
• For the sake of Nia Glassie, the Kahui twins and other New Zealand children that have been murdered
• I'm going to vote yes because it is the right thing to do, violence should never be the answer

The level of child abuse in New Zealand is disgusting. Children are the most vulnerable members of our society and we should be doing everything we can to protect them!

The bill still allows for a light smack as part of child correction. But it is overwhelmingly common that a smack is always the first answer to treating a problem. Other steps aren't always used.

I urge any New Zealand out there, reading this blog to please check out www.voteyes.co.nz

Do it for our kids.