August Week 84 2016

Well, this week kind of sucked. Monday morning Michael and I went outside to drive the very expensive camera equipment I had been borrowing for my project back to the University only to find that our car, along with said equipment and numerous other personal belongings, was gone. The police were wonderfully helpful and kind (finding the car, miraculously with camera but nothing else, within a few hours of us reporting it stolen), as were the people we talked to about our insurance (helping us to figure out what was covered and where we were going to take the car for repairs as it’s not drivable in its current state).

I try to maintain an honest but positive tone in these blogs because that’s how I try to live my life, but I think it might be time for a little rant: If there was any ambiguity about how I feel about my school, let me clear that up right now. They’re seriously the worst. When my car got stolen, I immediately sent an email to the school notifying them of the whole incident because of the camera that had been locked in the trunk. Over the course of the day I received several responses stating in no uncertain terms all of the different ways this was totally my fault. These are people who I have worked with personally many times over the last year and a half, during which time I have never had an issue with returning items on time and in pristine condition. I knew I would be held responsible for the camera, but I didn’t realize that being robbed meant that I didn’t even deserve a, “so sorry to hear that.” My advisor at least gave me a, “wow, that sucks,” in response to an email informing her that my project had been stolen, but then proceeded to tell me that I can’t move my critique back more than a week, and that I really can’t afford to lose even that much time so I need to figure something out. Maybe I’m the crazy one here, but even if you have never been robbed in your life, couldn’t you still assume that it’s a pretty miserable experience? That maybe this isn’t the time to continually add more stress to a person’s life? To put this in perspective; my car got stolen, meaning that Michael didn’t know how he was going to go to work, my final MFA project and all project materials are gone, we spent two entire days constantly talking to police and insurance, we both had to miss work to go to the police station on the outskirts of town without a car, and by far the most stressful part of this whole ordeal has been the stream of emails from people who are specifically paid to help me through my masters degree. Phew, rant over. On a lighter note it sounds like our car had quite the adventure. It was seen by police sometime in the middle of the night going the wrong way down the motorway and was used in a number of robberies.

Luckily the other people in my and Michael’s lives have been very helpful, supportive, and sweet about the whole situation. On Thursday I had my first regular (weekly) class at Hot Yoga Auckland, and it went great! I’m really loving the vibe of this new studio. On Friday Michael surprised me with a pizza party and movie at Academy Cinemas in celebration of the fifth anniversary of our first date! On that date we saw Terminator 2, so every year on August 19th we’ve watched it again (I guess we celebrated a couple weeks early this year). He had invited some of our friends to watch it with us over a month ago, so I guess it was just good timing that it happened to come at the end of a particularly crappy week. Saturday we saw our last festival film, “The Red Turtle,” then hung out with our flat mates. On Sunday we went to the grand opening of a yoga studio started by the woman who’s running my current training. It was beautiful and the snacks were delicious.