Ghandi & the Über–Heroes

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The day to day musings and rants of the psychowrecker: an antipodean “voice in the wilderness”, an anarchistic screech from the last remnants of the primordial forests of Gondwana Land. All voices should be heard, your journey is important. Be the Über–Hero you are capable of becoming. Individuals facilitate change within themselves; like-minded individuals facilitate revolution within society. Start from your centre of peace, good heart and good health and radiate the love.

“In the attitude of silence the soul finds the path in a clearer light, and what is elusive and deceptive resolves itself into crystal clearness. Our life is a long and arduous quest after Truth.”

“The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing, would suffice to solve most of the world's problems... ”
Mahatma Gandhi http://www.gandhiinstitute.org/

You can be on a quest for truth or for power:

(Click once to Play)

School's Out

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I didn’t make it back for a late night rendezvous with the psychowrecker: big day at school. It rained non-stop Thursday and the far north flooded, the media’s hysterical voice screamed “once in a hundred & forty years flood” but I’m thinking, ‘it won’t be the last’ because in case you hadn’t noticed, something’s up with the weather. I mean, it was hot, not tropical hot but like 23˚C and the rain just didn’t let up... all day! The high street was awash and I got wet going to and coming home from school but it was a great day never the less. And the reason it was great? Well, as mentioned in my last blog entry, we had a tutorial with Jack Yan and that was good but, as an added bonus the morning’s tutorial was taken by a guy called Mark Jackson and, simple maths tells us that, good tutorial + good tutorial = great day, regardless of what the weather is doing and how wet your clothes feel: regardless of Climate Change!

If you Google Dr Mark Jackson you realise that there are a few of them spread across the globe but this particular version works in the design department at the university I attend www.aut.ac.nz and he delivered a tutorial entitled “Technology & Culture”. Though he’s a ‘stralian, I soon forgave him when I realised we read out of the same book; only he’s at page 1042 and I’m still struggling with the first chapter. Without specifically mentioning Martin Heidegger, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Heidegger he cleverly plotted the link from Immanuel Kant, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kant through to our present day understanding of culture & technology in a way that I could only describe as “Heideggian”, though apparently it was Post Structuralism. Not once did he stumble into Sartre’s bogged mire of existentialism,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Paul_Sartre though we did spend some time discussing the relative merits of French, English and German toilets and how they provide representative metaphors of the cultures that created and use them. Check this out: “I AM THAT DOING. THE SELF IS WHAT WE DO.” This is not the petty self that dwells within the mind: this is the complete self that is observable by others and is responsible for the actions it makes. Or this: “WE ARE WHAT WE DO” and therefore we are underway, partaking of a journey of self discovery: that which we are capable of doing, ever searching for the “horizon of discovery” which, just like the actual horizon, we are never able to reach. I loved it all.

Mr Jack Yan was another kettle of fish and not at all what I expected. It is too easy to pass prior judgement upon our fellows particularly when you think you know more about them than they do about you. Jack had been described to me as shy but if this is the case there were no signs. He is charming and comedic with a voracious mind and astute business acumen and though he professes to be just an ordinary bloke his catalogue of achievements dispel this modesty. As examples check out: www.jyanet.com/consulting , http://lucire.com/ , www.jyanet.com/fonts .
Though still a young man he started his first business at the age of 14 and, as you can discover at the links above, he’s a stone gathering no moss. The online fashion magazine “lucire” has a hardcover sister available internationally (even in Romania) and, as only Midas and his progeny could, the name was chosen prior to the realization that lucire is actually a Romanian word that means ‘to glitter’. Pure serendipity (?), or does God favour the good (?), or serendipity the clever?

Jack is on the Board of Directors for the ‘Medlinge Group’, http://www.medinge.org/ a self described “high-level international think-tank on branding”, which each year for the past four, have released a list of eight names of companies that the group single out as being “brands with a conscience”. The 2007 list is:
Adnams http://www.adnams.co.uk/
Ecover http://www.ecover.com/
Fetzer Vineyards http://www.fetzer.com/
Freeplay http://www.freeplayenergy.com/
IKEA http://www.ikea.com/
RED http://www.joinred.com/
Virgin Group/Virgin Fuels http://www.virginunite.com/
Whole Foods http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/

If, like Jack and the Medlinge Group and (ahem) myself, you possess a social conscience all these companies listed above are worth supporting, remember: “WE ARE WHAT WE DO” or to put it another way, your journey counts!
But hey, it’s Friday and school’s out for the weekend!

Wet Train Rides to the City

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Some introduction, huh! Enough to put you off all ready, Dear Reader? I shall nevertheless persevere, though this morning’s entry is likely to be short given that it is 7:12 a.m. in my neck of the woods and I have a train to catch at 8:33 a.m. It’s ‘raining cats ‘n dogs’ in Aotearoa* and the televised weather report confirms it is likely to be this inclement for the rest of the day, which will make today’s commutes wet and unpleasant.

The journey from my house into University takes about 40 minutes but the train service is notoriously unreliable and it is likely to be a wet rush to my first tutorial at 10 a.m. I am however, very much looking forward to today’s activities. We are to be addressed by the renowned Jack Yan and I am interested to hear what he has to say. I had never heard of him until I started post-graduate studies this year but from all accounts and upon reading his blog http://www.jackyan.com/blog/ he is definitely someone to listen to and take note of. I'll let you know the outcome as I intend to post another entry this evening.

Until then, smile when it rains ‘cause it makes the farmers happy!

*The Maori name for New Zealand, which appropriately, translates into English as "the land of the long white cloud."

Kia ora

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Welcome. I am the psychowrecker, a name that infers a certain anarchistic nihilism (?). Possibly, but I would describe myself as neither an anarchist nor a nihilist and, though I am of reasonable intelligence, my political leanings (if they lean anywhere), lean in the direction of the “pinko left”. In fact, the name choice is more to do with idea of wrecking the mind: my mind, your mind, making me/you think, or re-think, testing established social, cultural or economic paradigms by proposing alternatives. It’s a play on words: a ‘psycho wrecker’ is somebody to avoid in dark alleys or, it could be someone who is in the habit of wrecking psychos, again, someone to avoid in dark alleys. But am I a psycho or even a wrecker and are my grandiose designs for wrecking minds likely to be consigned to the bottom of a million plus Google search result of a psychopathic neo-Nazi looking for some cheap web thrills or personal validation.

According to the Microsoft behemoth the slang terms ‘psycho’ are: an offensive term for somebody who has a psychiatric or personality disorder or, an offensive term meaning behaving in an uncontrolled and unpredictable way but according to my psychotherapist, I am neither. A psychiatric review established that I am full of internalised rage that expresses itself in bouts of severe and debilitating depression, which is probably too much information for the opening entry on a blog but the realisation that there are now millions of blogs on the web and that only a small percentage of them are actually read by persons other than the people who post them, begets me an uneasy confidence that this sort of personal revelation is likely to go completely unnoticed in the grand scheme of things. These blog entries are most likely to be records of my inner dialogue and will probably remain sacrosanct confessions to my internal god: who is by my reckoning, a woman and therefore, in the Jungian analysis of the psyche, the representative and spokesperson for my ‘anima’: she “talks quietly but carries a big stick” to misquote Teddy.

I’m sure that will do for now, so welcome, welcome me to the wide wonderful world of the blogosphere – that’s www.blogosphere.co.nz.