u/GGAllinPartridge

Kia ora!

I got married earlier this year and my best man and his fiancée were absolute heroes. I'd like to surprise them with a restaurant voucher but I'm in the wrong end of the country to have any local info.

They're around central Auckland, and I'm hoping to find a place nearby that a $200 voucher would cover a pretty nice dinner. Being good at catering to peanut/legume/soy allergies would be a bonus.

What local spots would you recommend? Thanks in advance!

I just finished reading Catch-22 after years of telling myself I'd get around to it eventually, and loved it. I feel like so many books are 50 pages too long for their own good, but somehow every single one of Catch-22's 500 pages of circular storytelling felt worthwhile. The start was absurdly funny, by the end it was absurdly tragic.

The tragedy of war wasn't a surprising theme, but I was caught off guard by some of the depictions of regular misfit human misery among it.

The Chaplain stands out, as an honest earnest man doing his best to do right by the people around him, but it's all futile. He misses his wife and kids and worries he's forgetting their faces. His friendliness and good intentions are no match for the cruel vanity of some of his colleagues.

Major Major is one of the humourous parts that people often point to ("Some men a born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them. With Major Major, it had been all three.") but the poor bugger lives a miserable lonely existence through no fault of his own. He does everything he's supposed to do growing up, and people hate him for it. He's forced into a rank he's not equipped for just because it made for funny paperwork in a faraway office. He almost makes his first friends playing basketball, until Colonel Cathcart shows up and promotes him to a position that makes them resent him. He hides himself away and essentially vanishes from the story.

There's the plight of all the impoverished Romans they run into on leave. The soldiers treat Rome as debauched playground, but Yossarian's last walk through the city showed what a nightmare the place really was.

It's all just so fucking sad. I hate Colonel Cathcart, Aarfy, Milo. I loved the book. What a read.

I'm in my fourth year of high school teaching. The first few years are always crunch time, but I'm gradually getting some balance back, so now I can finally get back to my hobbies!

Go for a run? No thanks.
Got to the gym? Hmm.
Play guitar? Sing? Nah I sound terrible.
Get back to drawing? Wow that looks bad.
Play video games? I guess that'll pass the time.
Pick up something new? Like what?

I know, I know, "A ladder climbed once can be climbed twice." I probably just need time and a bit of effort to feel good again. It's just hard to go back to the things you once loved and struggle to find what you loved about them. It's hard to be bad at something you used to be good at, or start from scratch with something new when you're not even sure what you enjoy any more.

How do you fill your cup when you get the chance to be something other than a teacher?

I recently read Faces in the Water, by Janet Frame, and every other page had some beautiful heartbreaking passage I wanted to underline and come back to later. It was a library book, so I didn't, but I'm considering getting my own copy to re-read and annotate. It's a fictionalised account of Frame's real-life experiences in Seacliff Lunatic Asylum during the 1940s. The whole book is swept along in a feeling of helplessness and loss in captivating language. Here are a couple that really stuck with me:

"I did not know my own identity. I was burgled of body and hung in the sky like a woman of straw."

"There is no past or future. Using tenses to divide time is like making chalk marks on water."

"And the days passed, packing and piling themselves together like sheets of absorbent material, deadening the sound of our lives, even to ourselves, so that perhaps if a tomorrow ever came it would not hear us; its new days would bury us, in its own name; we would be like people entombed when the rescuers, walking about in the dark waving lanterns and calling to us, eventually give up because no one answers them; sometimes they dig and find the victims dead."

What book had you scribbling in the margins and underlining passages and copying out quotes to come back to later?