Blair Corban – New Plymouth / Auckland CBD
“I’m in Auckland for uni, but that’s where all my family is, and all my friends. New Plymouth is home.
Last year my grandfather died of bowel cancer, and my dad had recently did like a charity marathon, and he had like this Go Fund Me thing up, and I donated like $10 to it from my really small bank account. So I thought that was pretty cool, just to help my dad out and show some love to Granddad.
He was a classic Kiwi bloke. Like, didn’t show many feelings and stuff. He was an avid hunter and loved his dogs. He was hard case, but he was like one of the nicest people I ever met. He was great. I kind of learned that it’s not bad to show emotions when you’re in that situation. You’ve also got to be strong for your family and, so I thought that was good like, when to show emotions and when not to.
There’s a lot of stuff goes in the background, so it’s good to talk to each other and keep up to date and have dinner with each other. Sit at the table. I don’t know. I’m a very social person so I’m always talking to someone talking to someone somehow, whether it be on like, the internet or friends in like, public. So I always try and keep social and chatting with people, and getting out of the house every now and then.
Growing up as a ginger I always experienced discrimination as a kid, you learned to deal with it I guess, or I did. Not everyone does, but I learned to laugh along with it and joke to myself about it, but yeah you see it in, you see around. It’s not a hidden thing. I think having like a more diverse range of events with different cultures. Like, in New Plymouth we have a festival called WOMAD, which is, stands for World Of Music And Dance, and it’s like you have all these different cultures from all over the world come, and they play their music and you eat all these different cultures food. In here you see, there’s lots of events in Auckland, but they’re a lot of like mono-cultural events and stuff like that.
It would be cool to see a range of cultural identities in an event. It would be better too, like it seems a lot, very segregated at the moment. It would be good to just like be all in one area and talking to each other and mingling and mixing. When I was younger it was a bit worse, but I don’t know. They’d make jokes like, carrot-head and stuff like that, and there was shows like Summer Heights High which increased it, but I don’t know. It’s like when you’re younger it’s a bit more of a deal, but as you grow up you kind of learn to tease yourself, I don’t know, to stop them from teasing you, I guess, so like it wasn’t that bad. Not everyone’s perfect. Everyone’s awesome in their own way, so it’s good to have a laugh every now and then. I don’t know. I guess, just be happy. Smile. Laugh.”
