letters to the editor

My husband and i spent last weekend foraging through second hand stores and we stumbled across these beautiful old letters for an old printing press. They were used to create our national newspaper, so it is like having a little bit of NZ's literary history in our home.

La Clique and The Science of Sleep

A weekend of smiles. La Clique's theatre is a tent made of glass called the Spiegeltent, we sat in a booth, drank wine and watched the spectacular unfold. Beautiful, brilliant and just naughty enough to keep a cheeky smile on my face. The Science of Sleep likewise kept me grinning stupidly, reflecting on my own crazy dreams and feeling inspired to create more work which is whimsical, beautiful and intriguing.

Contemplation anxiety

Contemplating something witty and ideally, meaningful to write to introduce yourself to the world of planners is quite an intimidating task. So, i am sitting, writing, contemplating and yet still drawing a blank. I wonder if planning participation is kind of like radio participation... have you ever noticed how it is usually guys who ring up and answer questions live on the radio. I am not sure what it is that makes us females hold back but for some reason we just seem to. Maybe it is because we are too anxious being "witty and meaningful".Regardless I've been sitting and contemplating starting a blog for far too long and i finally decided that i kind of needed to get over myself and do it. So, here i am... my very own blog, I am the author and creator. So witty and meaningful is probably going to go out the door to be replaced with random murmurings and half developed thoughts. My apologies in advance. I was listening to someone much wiser than myself a few days ago and they were talking about our (humans) propensity to latch on to behaviours or ways of doing things which have experienced some measure of success. We love thinking that there is a model for success and that this can be replicated time and time again. We did it it this one time and it worked then, or my "favourite" no we tried that 5 years ago and it didn't work so since then we have been doing this and it seems to work so we are going to stick with it. It seems that we simply choose to ignore simple psychological rules which suggest that people become immune to continuous reinforcement and that intermittent reinforcement is actually what we should engage in to change behaviour. But it is far "easier" for us to rely on things that have gone before, i mean why reinvent the wheel when we already such great wheel just sitting over there gathering dust, in fact why bother changing at all.I find this one of the most frustrating arguments that i come up against in planning. It may not be this obvious, which is actually even more insidious because the behavior which perpetuates sameness is disguised under rationale which suggests that the decision has been made on carefully thought out logic. I think it is just fear... i mean who knows where a new approach, a new thought, a new imagining may actually take us.