My New Special Interest

I have a new special interest.

I've come to realize this is the first special interest I've had post Australia; and all the other things in-between that I believed were special interests were actually NOT special interests (see next post)

I'm not sure how to name it actually.

Technically we could say it's New Zealand.  But I don't want to, because it's very much not like my Australia obsession.

It's very different.

With Australia, it felt spiritual (and I still very often believe it is/was).  And I was obsessed with all of it—the land, the map of it, the history, the government, the people, the animals, etc.  I wanted to live there.  And "want" seems like an insufficient word for how I was feeling.  

With New Zealand, it's mostly the music and the language...and the Taika Waititi/Jemaine Clement filmmaking ventures.

It's kind of jumped around.

It started with us watching Legion and Tim and I both thinking that Jemaine Clement looked familar.  We IMDb'd and I saw/realized he was the singer of one of my favorite songs ("Shiny"); had major involvement in What We Do in the Shadows, and was part of Flight of the Conchords.  

We decided we should next watch Flight of the Conchords.  It was something we had both vaguely heard about though the years and had an ongoing sort of interest in watching it....someday.  Or at least that's how I felt about it. 

I had a very normal level of liking for the show during the first season and maybe for most of the second.  Then at some moment, somehow, I went from liking to obsessively loving.

After watching Flight of the Conchords, I had us rewatching What We Do in the Shadows, because A) Didn't realize Jemaine Clement was one of the stars since I hadn't been too aware of his existence prior to watching Legion  B) I couldn't remember what actually happened in the movie.

Then I had us re-watching the episodes of the TV show that had cameos of Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement.

We next watched Our Flag Means Death.  Or maybe we watched that before What We Do in the Shadows?  I'm not entirely sure.

I loved  OFMD. I think it's the most romantic show I've seen in a long time.  I don't often have intense shipping-feelings these days. But with that, I did.  

Through doing decent IMDb research, I learned about the existence of Wellington Paranormal.  I find it odd that as people who watch and love What We Do in the Shadows, we hadn't realized the show existed.  Is this mostly about our ignorance? Not enough marketing?  Or just the over-abundance of content out there?

Anyway, we watched that too and very much enjoyed it.  

Meanwhile and after, I started diving into the music side of things. And with that, one thing kept leading to another thing and then another thing.

For example, through reading a bit about Brett McKenzie, I learned about the Wellington International Ukulele Orchestra and started listening to their music on Spotify. Also I listened to the Flight of the Conchords charity song, "Feel Inside (And Stuff Like that)".   Both of these things led me to learning about Brooke Fraser.  

I listened to McKenzie's new not-funny album and loved that.  Plus, I was delightfully surprised to learn he wrote the Muppet songs.  I never had much of an interest in seeing The Muppets Most Wanted but now have been loving the music.

I especially love the demo songs and really want to know if Brett McKenzie is doing all the different voices on the song.  If anyone knows the answer to that, please share your knowledge with me.

I listened to Jemaine Clement sing on the Rio soundtrack and learned he played the Cockatoo.  I think MAYBE in the past I was a bit bigoted against him. Because during my very steep obsessed-with-Australia years, I vaguely remember feeling cheated that the Australian bird was played by someone not actually from Australia.  It's not that I was some kind of purist.  I watched many Aussie TV shows and movies with Kiwi actors.  But I think probably the one thing that made me feel motivated to watch Rio was the Australian character.

Also while going down the Jemaine Clement music rabbit hole,  I ended up listening to the albums from the children's TV show Kiri and Lou.

Shit. The songs from that are SO deep and relatable.  It's very cathartic but sometimes also painful.  

I learned that the writer of the songs from that is Don McGlashan.  I've listened to some of his other music.  

Okay...then on a separate branch.

Meanwhile....

I became quite obsessed with learning te reo Māori.

I think one of my signs that a special interest is going to be a major one is I have some sort of resistance to it.  This happened here.

A few months back I had bought a lifetime account to the Drops language App.  I was using it to learn French, Danish, and Hebrew.  My plan was to do little bits of French and Danish and a lot of Hebrew.

And then I had this sudden strong desire to learn te reo Māori.  I resisted, because I felt I was already learning enough languages. Plus, I think there was the whole special-interest resistance thing that I mentioned above.  (Also I had worries about cultural appropriation which I think was actually racist and ignorant of me...I might go into that in a future post)

I gave in a little and made a rule.  Along with the music people mentioned above, I had also added a few Māori songs to my Spotify playlist.  My rule was that if Spotify Shuffle chose to play a Māori song for me; then I could do a te reo Māori session on Drops.  

I soon dropped that rule and added te reo Māori to my list of daily languages.  And it soon went from: I will do one session a day to: I will try to do many many sessions a day; plus listen to lots of music; plus watch learning videos on YouTube, and download other te reo Māori apps.

I also ended up adding another language to my daily sessions.  Because at some point, Tim asked if Hawaiian was similar to te reo Māori.  I decided the best way to figure that out is to start learning Hawaiian as well.  

In awhile, I'm going to temporarily drop French or Danish and start learning Samoan too. Because I'd like to see the similarities and differences there as well.  

This post has taken much up much more space and time than I wanted.  But in the future, I might do a post listing the apps and YouTube channels I've been using.  It will mostly be about the channels, because although I have downloaded four or five apps, I'm only using one for now.  (I mean besides Drops).  

If you are a person who, like me, has no Māori background and isn't in or from New Zealand, but you're learning te reo Māori, I'd love to hear from you.  And if that doesn't apply to you, I'd still love to hear from you.  IF you're not a bot advertising something.  If you're a lonely bot just wanting to talk...I'm here for that.

I still have more to say, although this is getting long. Sorry.

I probably don't want to go to New Zealand.  Ironically, Tim brought up the idea a few weeks before we watched Flight of the Conchords.  He told me Jack had mentioned going. I probably said something like, I hope you guys have fun.  Meaning I shall stay happily back at home.

My OCD has gotten worse through the years.  That along with my fear of vomiting and general travel anxiety has made long-long-haul traveling a no for me.

I had told Tim and Jack that they're going to have to do the via-west-coast international traveling without me, including Oceania, East Asia, and South East Asia.

I feel Europe is the farthest I can manage.  And even with that, I made things difficult. I managed to get to Copenhagen but had us spending a night in Boston and stopping in Iceland.

If time was not an issue, I would have us spend time in California; time in Hawaii, and then fly to New Zealand.  But I would feel weird about not going to Australia.  I would feel like I'm committing a huge, huge awful betrayal of my past self.

I guess if time was very much not an issue, we could do this super long trip where we spend time in California, Hawaii, New Zealand, and Australia.  I'd also maybe add in various South Pacific Islands.  

For now, though, we're talking about using our DVC points to go to Hawaii.  

So though I can't point to a manu in Aotearoa, I can do so in Hawaii.

I also don't want the anxiety and pressure of trying out my teo reo Māori abilities on actual people.  During some of my Instagram Zionism adventures, I ended up talking to a Māori Zionist.  I was about to type Kia Ora to him and suddenly started to panic...worrying that I didn't know how to spell it right.  Even though I've seen it written out a zillion times.  

So I think I'm just going to go through life using the language to talk to apps and...mostly just to myself.

I talk to myself all the time. It's lovely doing it in a second language.  

The last thing I want to talk about is that I at first thought it was very funny that I ended up becoming obsessed with New Zealand. 

There has actually been worse bigotry than the Rio thing.  For example, there was a brief time that I had this intense but sadly short term friendship with a woman in Australia. Though I thought she was wonderful and imagined I loved her (in a platonic way), I was a bit disappointed that she was actually from New Zealand and not only that, loved her home country much more than Australia.  (It's not why our friendship faded away, though)

I also found it quite hilarious that I jumped from one Oceania country to another. Though if it had been a direct jump, it would have been much less funny.  It would have felt more like an extension rather than the universe playing a joke.  

It's probably much less funny to other people.

Anyway, now...it also brings me comfort and joy, because there are a lot of connections between Australia and New Zealand, including with music and TV/film.   

I've often very much missed being obsessed with Australia. And New Zealand is helping to reconnect me.  

Though besides the NZ path, I also frequently reconnect with Australia via Neighbours...which I watch religiously.  And I very much enjoy listening to the Weird Crap in Australia podcast.

Speaking of podcasts, I also listen to The Wellington Paranormal Podcast.  Which shit...gives more to ramble about.  

Going back to the traveling issue....

I did have a tiny bit of me opening up to the idea of traveling to New Zealand...maybe with the help of lots of therapy and meds.

But today I was listening to the WP podcast and Mike Minogue told a terrifying story of getting food poisoning in Shanghai and vomiting copiously on the airplane. Vomit on airplanes is one of my biggest fears in life. And it's the main reason I don't want to do long flights. I want to avoid using airplane bathrooms, because I'm afraid there's going to be vomit cooties in there.  

Okay if that wasn't bad enough...I'm reading Jannette McCurdy's beautiful, amazing, wonderful book.  And today I read the chapter with her doing bulimia on the airplane.  I think it was fourteen times?

I feel that all this today is the universe telling me my ass doesn't belong on an airplane heading to New Zealand.