zeborahnz

Once upon a time there was a bus-stop four minutes' walk from my house.

Then there was an earthquake and there were no buses at all. Then they started running for part of the route but the nearest stop was ten minutes away (and my erstwhile 30-minute commute became a 2-hour commute due to omg the traffic, but that's another story). Then some many months later after various permutations of the route My bus-stop started being used again and I might have cried a little.

Then roadworks came to the street. Even before the recent "[image of a roadcone] = progress" propaganda posters went up I've always believed in the sentiment, and the challenge of trying to find a new route across the road every time I want to visit the supermarket is all part of the fun of living in a post-apocalyptic society. (Another is jumping over the semi-filled-in ditches they dig across the footpath away from every house when they're fixing the sewers. It's like playing Super Mario in a virtual reality system.) But it did put My bus-stop out of use again — at least the one I go to on the way to work; the one I get off at on the way home was unaffected.

But tonight! I was on my bus on the way home, and I pressed the buzzer and started collecting my bags. And the bus started slowing down at the lights. And I'm all, "Wtf, driver, don't you know those are flashing orange lights because of the roadworks, you don't need to stop at them!" And then the lights — wait for it — the traffic lights turned red.

So I'm all, "Zeborah, play it cool, this is just a thing traffic lights do." But, I mean, they turned red, so when we reached my bus-stop I said to the driver, "Did those traffic lights just start working today?!"

And he said, "Yeah! And I was like, where are all the roadcones?!"

Which passed me right by like it was just a figure of speech, because pff, you can't have roadworks without roadcones! That's just logic! So we said goodnight in good spirits and I hopped off the bus (carefully so as not to sprain an ankle on a pot-hole). Then, just as I was about to turn into my own street, I chanced to look back the way we'd come and I saw that the roadcones were gone.

(Okay, there are still several scattered at various spots, but it's less in the way of someone having set up roadcones to delimit roadworks, and more in the way of someone having missed picking them up. It'd be pretty easy to overlook a few bright orange cones with reflective stripes, because that sort of thing just blends into the post-apocalyptic landscape along with the "Safety is no accident" hi-vis vests: you only notice them if you're really looking for them.)

I... I think the roadworks are finished?

At least on that side of the road.

And I think that means I'm going to get My bus-stop back.

And you know what that means?

One of our straight white male MPs is going to go on the talkshow Ellen. He did give a great speech, but, um, what about the LGBT MPs and ex-MPs who also gave great speeches? And who did most of the work on the bill? Like, say, the Māori lesbian MP who submitted the bill in the first place?

So here are some speeches from the night by MPs who aren't straight white guys.

Firstly, the kōrero in which Te Ururoa Flavell (straight Māori guy) talks about about Tutanekei's hoa takatāpui Tiki, and gives more context to the history of Pākehā redefining marriage to exclude Māori customary marriage.

(Procedural notes: a lot of MPs on the evening chose to share their speaking time with someone else, and Te Ururoa was the recipient of one such five minute slot from John Banks which is why he's acknowledging "Hone Banks". He gets cut short at the end for going over his time limit which is a tremendous shame given how informative his kōrero was, but the rule seemed fairly equally enforced against Pākehā MPs doing the same. And applause is normally I gather not allowed but that rule went out the window completely for the whole evening.)



More awesome kōrero on the evening included:

Louisa Wall (Māori lesbian; submitted the bill; first name pronounced lou-issa)


Kevin Hague (gay white guy)


Tau Henare (straight Māori guy; responding to straight Māori guy Winston Peters' vile speech which I won't link to because Winston is *that* MP, you know the one, who just always.)


Mojo Mathers ((Deaf) straight white woman; bringing tears to my eyes every time I watch it)

New Zealand just passed the third and final reading of our marriage equality bill 77-44.

(I was listening by radio after, having failing to get reception for Parliament TV and failing to get sufficient bandwidth for the internet livestream, I put out a plaintive tweet asking about livestreaming audio and someone pointed me to 882AM. Oh yeah, that dusty old machine.)

After the Speaker's announcement of the result and before the tumultuous applause, a waiata was sung and harmonised upon.

This is itself probably needs explaining. Waiata are traditionally sung (among other occasions) in support of a speech. As a non-Māori New Zealander I've most often witnessed/participated when this has happened during a traditional welcoming ceremony or opening ceremony; but also after some keynotes at New Zealand library conferences; or in support of family/friends at graduation. So for this to happen was very appropriate.

But the particular waiata chosen is what really needs translation. It was Pokarekare Ana which is a song extremely widely known in New Zealand, you may well even have heard it overseas, so it might just seem a bit twee if you don't know anything about it. And it's about a famous heterosexual love story, so if you know a little bit about it you might think that in this context, um, what?

But the reason this song was perfect for the occasion was because earlier in the evening, speaking in support of the bill, Te Ururoa Flavell referred to another part of this story of Hinemoa and Tutanekai - to the part where after Tutanekai married Hinemoa, his hoa takatāpui Tiki grieved for losing him. Te Ururoa pointed out that people complaining about this bill seeking to "redefine marriage" need to be aware that, in New Zealand, marriage was redefined way back in the 19th century by colonialism.

A lot of people, throughout the evening, pointed out that there's still a lot of work to do for justice and equality. But this was a great step, in so many ways.

[For reference, words I had to redact from this post given I'm attempting to translate here: Pākehā; kōrero; pōwhiri; marae; tautoko; Aotearoa; ahakoa he iti he pounamu.]

Apologies in advance for another boring post. The short version is: eating food is good for you.

I did get over the worst of the laryngitis thing a good while back; was only off work a few days. (Things that ended up really helping the cough: the experimentally-proven warm moist air; keeping hydrated; cough suppressant; and salbutamol. I keep forgetting that when it comes to anything to do with my lungs, salbutamol is almost always going to immediately improve the situation.)

However it has been lingering on, unhelped by a Bonus!Rhinovirus of about ten days ago. So have got a tad tired, and the housework's suffered accordingly, and similarly grocery shopping and the will to cook, and thus haven't been eating properly, and thus have been lacking energy, and so on and so forth.

Until Sunday I piked out of my ordinary commitments--

(Meaning: I missed the bus to church, attempted to walk instead, realised my blood sugar was way low so stopped at a grocery to buy breakfast, wasn't able to eat it all, made it to my parents' house and sat on the couch for several hours; then phoned friends to cancel my normal Sunday evening visit, and went home to sleep for several more hours. After which--)

--made myself buy groceries and cooked with them. I also cooked and ate food on Monday and today, and also along the way got some more extra sleep; and then today, by complete random happenstance, minor items of housework have started achieving themselves.

(Possibly it helped that if I didn't do the laundry soon I was going to have to raid my go-bag for clean underwear.)

So I think I might possibly be getting functionally better, albeit with the occasional coughing fit (eg tilting my head back to drink the last drops is contraindicated because it stretches the throat and coughing) and singing two or three tones lower than normal. Planning to book annual leave for this Friday just to solidify this whole healthiness thing.

So a week or so ago I caught this bug off my mother. (My mother, who's had it for three weeks or so, in turn blames the dust from roadworks repairing sewerage pipes.) For the first week it was rather genteel, involving only a persistent productive cough and no other symptoms. At all. It was actually quite weird, but nice, because I didn't *feel* sick.

On Friday the coughs got too much for me to stay at work; and yesterday I went to the doctor who diagnosed laryngitis by a) the time-honoured method of translating symptoms into Greek and calling it a diagnosis, combined with b) what everyone else has. She wrote me a prescription for antibiotics-if-I-get-desperate, on the grounds that although it's probably not a bacteria I seem like a sensible white middle-class person who didn't walk in demanding antibiotics so can be trusted not to abuse the privilege. Also while it's airborne, as public health menaces go that ship's already sailed so I can go to work as long as I feel well enough and work doesn't mind.

This sounded good to me because while my work sensibly provides infinite sick leave and I'm a fan of sitting on my couch with my cat, there's a meeting I *really really* want to go to this morning.

So of course I spent large proportions of last night:
a) attempting in vain to suppress a persistent, nonproductive, side-splitting, lung-hacking cough;
b) attempting to figure out how to stop this cough in order to sleep and/or survive the night;
c) attempting to find a practical implementation of my solution;

and a regretfully small proportion of the night:
d) sleeping.

Also I eventually woke up this morning with the more classic symptom of laryngitis, to wit, not exactly being able to talk, per se.

Anyway, here are the results of my medical engineering experiments, because while my research was not strictly publicly funded, I'm a firm believer in open access.

Hypothesis A: The cough is induced by irritation in the bronchi, and if I can soothe the irritation with ice water then the cough will be suppressed and I can go to sleep.

Methodology: Subject sucked on and occasionally chewed ice cubes.

Results: Even more coughing, omg, seriously, if you have strong religious beliefs about how the proper place of lungs and stomach contents is inside the body then don't do this. I did actually manage to keep everything in its proper place but it was a near call and I painfully strained a rib muscle of some sort before I managed to stumble hacking out of bed and to the location of my second experiment.

Hypothesis B: Cold bad ergo warmth good.

Methodology: Subject took a hot shower with the fan turned off so that the bathroom steamed up.

Results: Inhaling steam good. The cough mostly went away. The hot water also felt nice on my strained rib muscle. Unfortunately once I came out of the bathroom again the cough resumed.

Hypothesis C: Lungs are clearly super-sensitive so need a constant stream of warm, moist air.

Methodology: Having discarded, for practical reasons, the idea of trying to sleep in the shower, bath, or a hypothetical Linwood all-night sauna, subject boiled the jug and nuked a wheatpack for her ribs. Subject then spent the next six hours working out the best way to sleep safely with a bowl of boiling water in one's bed and periodically waking up (the water having cooled enough to retrigger the hacking cough) and going back to the kitchen to reboil the jug.

Results: I think I got almost four hours of sleep in three batches? Not bad, all considered. Anyway my eventual method was to lie on my side on pillows, with next to the pillows a large plastic bowl containing a smaller metal bowl of boiling water, and my head and the bowl covered with my polar fleece poncho, aka 'blankie'.

At one point I added some eucalyptus oil; I don't think this either helped or hurted.

A damp towel nuked for a minute provided near-instant relief while waiting for water to boil. But it cooled quicker than a bowl of water so wasn't by itself a good solution.

Conclusion: If you see or hear someone coughing, run as fast as you can in the other direction. Apparently this thing is going around.

I passed through town late this morning and saw families going in for the memorial service, and hugs between friends, and old rubble and brand new buildings, and everywhere flowers in roadcones.

When I cut some lilies from my garden to take to the roadworks at the end of my street, their stems wept.


"Road cones on Cashel Street" by Christchurch City Libraries, on Flickr; licensed Creative Commons BY-NC-SA

Maakah (2 Samuel 3:3 and identically 1 Chronicles 3:2) is the daughter of Talmai king of Geshur. "Geshur and Maakah" are a people subdued by but not driven out by Israel back in the day, so they continue to live in the country and apparently keep on having a king; 'Maakah' appears to be a not uncommon personal name.

When this Maakah marries David, then, it's probably (like I suspect Ahinoam of Jezreel) for political reasons; probably shortly after he returns from exile to be crowned king of Judah. She gives birth to his third son Absolom, and to an ill-fated daughter Tamar, about whom more another week.