Raven – Te Atatū Peninsula
“Mostly every night I eat with my dad and my boyfriend. We just have chicken meal and we watch movies together. We do it almost every night. I think it’s nice. I like it.
It’s pretty healthy, to be honest. It’s just chicken and broccoli and it’s just stir-fried. It’s not much, but I enjoy it. My mum does rowing every night, so she’s down at the docks just around the corner. She just rows and then she comes home around eight.
I like to play Pokémon Go. It’s just harmless fun. You go around and just catch Pokémon. It gets you out as well. So, it’s like, I was just going to get food for tonight for the stir-fry, and I just thought I’d play Pokémon while I was at it.
On the Peninsula so far, it is pretty safe, because the community area is quite central. I feel like if most places were like that, if we had the central area, then it feels like we all come together, instead of just kind of picketing around. I don’t know. I feel like people who like to play games, they definitely connect a lot more, because everybody is now outside together playing Pokémon Go. But it has died down a bit – I have to say, personally when I walk around I like to just smile at people when I walk past them. Maybe for other people there might be a disconnect, but personally I don’t feel that.
Me and my boyfriend live it my parents. It’s ok. I like it. He gets along with my parents quite well. It’s just temporary until I’m able to find a job personally, but it’s quite expensive finding a place just for two people though. So right now we’re just hanging out with my parents.
It’s really hard to find a job in the performing arts where you go straight in to being paid, because they do like to see that you have some experience on your belt already. So a lot of the job opportunities that are the best and the easiest to pick up is voluntary work, but it’s hard to do that when you need to eat and live and pay rent, and stuff like that. So, it is very hard to find constant paying jobs, until you’ve done it for about three years, and I’m up to my second year. It’s just, buying a house is just out of it for now, but renting is quite expensive, especially in the main Peninsula area, because it’s quite nice.
So every place you’d want with two bedrooms or something, would be about $400-$500, which is hard to do if you’re on about $15 an hour, you’re only making around $600, and if you want to live by yourself that’s $500 gone and $100 to feed yourself and I guess try to do stuff you like to do. So it’s quite hard, so it’s nice to have my parents. I don’t really know what to say about it, but it’s scary. I think that’s the word. I think it’s scary because you don’t know what you want to do, and then you kind of have to take a job you may not like just to be able to live somewhere. It’s sacrifices really. I think that’s the word.
I think New Zealand’s got a good sense of humanity. We’re quite helpful, but it is scary to see that some people believe that other people are more important and stuff like that. It is scary, but I’m quite grateful to live in New Zealand where we are really quite open. It really depends on the person, because when Pokémon Go was quite a bit thing you’d see people run past and be like, oh there’s Clefairy over there, and you just see a bunch of people who really enjoy the game running to one area, involved in this little community.
There’s going to be people who don’t understand it, and I think that’s where the disconnect comes from. It’s like, not everybody enjoys the same things, but there’s always going to be times when you like different things, like music and stuff. It’s just it’s a disconnect in the sense of, you may not enjoy it, but this group does. That’s what I feel. It might be a generation thing as well, with the phones and the kids always on them and stuff, but I don’t know; I feel like for my community and people my age, it’s quite connecting.
