Third world blues

I just want to bitch today. Basically, I’m feeling rather sorry for myself. Read on, and feel a little sorry for me too:

1 – my boyfriend has accepted a job in Secunda. We were going to move in together this year, after he finished varsity and found a job (in Joburg!). Of course, fate has its fist-fucking way with me, and I’m in real pain as a result. I can’t sort out how I should act about this – try the long-distance thing (because Secunda is just far enough to have a huge impact on our relationship), or quit life here and join friends in Europe next year (right now, the preferred option).

2 – I’m in a real rut at work. For the amount my company pays me, I should be ashamed at accepting my pay cheques for the year thus far: I do precious little more than admin-type work while waiting for a meaty contract to come in. For example, I have attended tender briefing sessions, attempted to write proposals for the tenders, tried for the 50th time to finalise our new website design (still pending!) and purchase new offices (hopefully concluded tomorrow), devised an Excel training course for new recruits, and select a PR company to handle our marketing. All together now: “side-lined!” I just had a mentor lunch with a senior colleague, who is amazed that I’ve stayed on through this bout of menial labour. I left that lunch feeling like he felt I don’t have enough ambition. He’s probably right.

3 – my sister. All her hang-ups and fragility are constantly on my mind. Without me, I don’t think she’d manage. I’m not a great sister to her though, I refuse to live with her, and can’t deal with her eating disorder in a reasonable way. We just fight the whole time. Why would anyone choose to live their life in a way that is not the best they’re capable of?

4 – SA politics. I’m normally ever-positive about the country’s future, how far we’ve come considering the challenges of the past, but lately everyone’s negativity is getting me down. Jacob Zuma, and worse yet, his dreadful, ignorant, animalistic, fearsome and violent supporters, are not helping to change my attitude. I can’t stand feeling this way, I don’t know how everyone else does it quite so readily.

Enough.

Tonight I go to meet a really intelligent underprivileged kid trying to claw his way out of his circumstances, and into a top-notch foreign university. He’s hoping for mentorship from me, if I’m lucky I’ll get way more out of it than he does.

Poached!

It seems that a young female at an Italian bowling arena is a hot commodity. While I’d like to claim that my talent is prodigious, after a mere four Sundays of playing the game with grumpy old men, this is not the real reason for what happened:

In the middle of a heated game, men gesticulating wildly and arguing extremely heatedly (ensuing after I rolled quite a killer of a bowl, if I do say so myself) about the distance between our team’s closest ball to the kitty, and the opposition’s closest ball to the kitty (isn’t that what the damn yardstick/giant compass thingy is for? Why fight when you can measure? Or is that just not the Italian way?), some mysterious old man hisses at me and calls for me to come over. So, I walk on over, ready to inform him that I have a name, and it’s not “Hssssss!” He’s abrupt and abrasive, through, so I don’t get a word in edge-wise.

“Youuu! Whatsa youngk gehrl like joo doingk plehying bocce wit de old men, eh?” “I see joo, joo have style for such a youngk one, jor talents is wasted here!” “Come plehy wit us de lawn bowls, much a more civilized, no fightingk, many more a ladiez plehyingk too!” “Joo hav no fyootoor here at bocce, eh!”

After the game, he and his friend bought me drinks, we chatted (as far as Italians can actually chat rather than ‘discuss heatedly’) and they convinced me to give the more traditional English bowls a try one of these weekends (there’s a team based at the Wop club too, which is more representative of nationalities – and genders - than bocce is). So I’m considering myself poached! Oh, the glory!

On two asides:
1) Mike finally popped the question to Nan – congrats guys! Pretty please let me be a bridesmaid!
2) quote of the week: “My ass is the sexual event horizon”. From a book I bought this weekend, where a woman waxes lyrical about how anal sex brought her to find true love, and God. I plan to use this sentence this week, I love it. A bit tricky to work into general conversation, though.

The best new (mushy) blog of (peas on toast) 2005!!!

Guessed already? For those of you who didn't attend, here's the event in pics... apologies if I went overboard hiding identities with big lumo-green boxes, but hey, it's St Patrick's Day, after all....

A hand goes up as Mushy Peas admits her daily soap/crazy life blog is a nominee for the category 'Best SA blog of 2005':




Nerves get to Mushy Peas as we await the announcement of the category winner:




Which obviously, can be none other than our beloved Mushy Peas:



Ant, shrieking like a banshee, runs over for a big squishy hug:



Long after the announcements are made and dinner has been eaten and copious amounts of (free) booze have been guzzled, Ant is still proud of her flatmate, and waves somewhat twee posters for Peas. Peas rushes over to admonish her rather embarrassing companion, for showing far too much enthusiasm for the whole award. "It so like, not cool, you know, Ant!" Whatever!



As for the other people attending the ceremony, well, I wasn't paying much attention to them, as is evident by lack of accompanying photos. Safe to say that 90% of them were male IT technowizzes. Well done to you winners, too!

Tonight's festivities...

While spewing out half the contents of my body thanks to gastric flu yesterday, I made these for tonight's awards ceremony:




ps: if any of you are reading this are going to be there tonight, don't come too close, I wouldn't wish this darned ailment on my worst enemy...

Timmy

He of the subject line is one of my two closest friends, going back to high school days. We haven’t seen much of each other since mid-June last year, as he’s been in Cape Town for his internship and Mpumalanga for his community service (he’s a doctor). He’s presently in Jozi for the week, and each time I see him, I am reminded about what makes this guy cooler than most on the planet. Here’s a list:

1 – He doesn’t give a flying fuck. About most things. He just trundles along, doing what he wants to do, without being influenced in any way by anyone at any time (except for maybe me!)
2 – Without compromising on 1 above, he’s always open to suggestions of new things to try/new places to go.
3 – He ditched that bitch L so hard (twice) it almost redeemed the fact he went out with her in the first place. Here’s hoping there’s better lasses ahead for you, boy!
4 – He took on a bet with me years ago that he’d cycle from Joburg to Chad, and is still too stubborn to admit he’ll never get around to doing it (which I’m rather relieved of, else I’d owe him R1 million!)
5 – He wants a number plate like this: B*G T*M. Totally porno, tres cool.
6 – He has claimed that the coolest mode of transport would be a readymix cement truck, so he could dump his load on any vehicle behind him that pisses him off.
7 – His oddball family – Dad never says more than 2 words to anyone, just potters around; Mom taught me in primary school (before I ever met him) and thought I’d be a splendid friend with him when I met him, until I became a friend and a seemingly bad influence. She’s also adamant that Timmy is a dog’s name and he should be called “Just Tim!”. Oops. His sister, while being years younger than me, still terrifies me when I call him on his home landline and answers. She never acknowledges recognizing my voice, sounds hostile, and hollers across the house for Tim to get his damn ass to the phone now, lazy bastard!
8 – Any time you think you’ve found some really little-known gem of a book, and you think you’ve finally found reading material to recommend to him, he’s already read it, probably before he turned 10.
9 – He just bought himself a white Landrover Defender. Big, noisy, without any fancy finishes – just like him. And he intends to use the vehicle as the Good Lord intended: to explore the crater-infested roads of Africa!
10 – He’s going to make one of the best doctors around. Fact. Not only can he recall the most astoundingly obscure information which other people flounder over, he’s also totally capable with a scalpel and a needle. Just don’t ask him to replace the plaster on your broken toe. After bungling that up, he declares it’s a task only worthy of being performed by a nurse, not a doctor. (I’ve noticed that engineer boyfriends are quite adept at this task too, Timmy!).

Love you Timmy! Even though you won’t read this (which is a good thing, I don’t want it to go to your already-large head), I’m sure you know exactly why I dig you so much.

What a weekend!

Thursday: my Wop society’s GoldGlitzGlam event – a blinging party, for which I popped three Myprodols to teeter in some high heels like everyone else, and not shuffle around in (sensible) flat, open shoes for my baby toe to recover. Here’s all the female committee members’ right feet – obviously, mine is the one cladded in those fabulous gold shoes with the fake jewels on them (which actually belong to my mother).

Much schmoozing and boozing later, and we traipsed off to snooty FTV Café next door, where hot ex-Miss SA Claudia Henkel was jamming. I managed to touch her booty as I walked past, and to keep a straight face while doing it! At the end of the evening my feet were more sore from the shoes themselves than the fact that I’d squeezed a broken toe into them…

Friday: rocking out with Jen, Katharine (a girl who has had the memorable experience of telling Paris Hilton to her face “You’re fucking stupid!”) and the Gilb. Great music, great company, such a pity the fucking waiter stole R100 from the bill and we had no proof of it and had to put more money in!

Saturday: After a painful, early start to the day, things started looking up when I went to my boyfriend’s house for lunch, and everyone else eventually stopped hanging around, and we sat down to watch – finally – the good porno he bought for us a few weeks’ back. Not even 10 minutes into it, his brother returns after his date cancelled his evening arrangements. Out of sheet frustration at the fact we never get time to spend along (and I will concede, perhaps greater frustration at missing the potential dirty sex after the porno), I went home. I decided that drinking a lot of whiskey and scrubbing the bathroom clean simultaneously would help. After passing out on my bed, the door buzzer rings, and I realize it’s time to go to the ball held in honour of my Dad’s birthday. Fuck! I let the Gilb into the flat – and for some reason he doesn’t realize that I’m falling all over the place as boozy as I am at this point – smear on some make-up, take another three Myprodols, and reinsert my feet into those smashing shoes. To enjoy my amusement at this potentially droll event, I also dragged two good doctor friends, Timmy and Marc, along. The ball was held at my Dad’s uber-wealthy friend’s house (yes, 17 bedrooms!) and we all so like a good party quaffing Dom Perignon on the cliffs overlooking the average masses…

Anyway, we arrive at this little shindig, and I decide to start talking shop to some of the very corporate types present. On three occasions, I get asked for my business card, and on three occasions I reply: “Terribly shhhhorry! – hic! – I shheeeem to have run – hic! - out of cards – perhapssshhh I can write my detailsshhh on yourssshh? Hic!” Of course, all three politely agreed, and I got ink all over my fingers as testimony. My mother was really furious with me, and kept poking me in the ribs and hissing “You’re totally pissed, aren’t you?” I emphatically denied this, of course. So, we have dinner, we do a little dancing (forced the Gilb to ask my Mom for a slowdance – it was so sweet!), and then that most dangerous of all territories – the speeches. You’d have to know my Dad to understand how he always manages to say the most excruciatingly embarrassing things, but this little incident will give you good insight. While thanking all his close friends for joining him at his birthday celebration, he decides to thank all my friends too “…. And to those soon-to-be-eminent gentlemen, Doctors Pikor (correct pronunciation of surname) and Hauptshleim (not even close).” Cringe and die. And then “…and to my future son-in-law, (insert my boyfriend’s name here, but with extreme over-Afrikaansification of his surname).” Um, if there was ever a way to curse your daughter’s long-term relationship with her boyfriend, then pronouncing this in public – when marriage is not a discussion that has ever entered our conversation before – is a sure way to doom things. The Gilb took it relatively well though, so big relief all round.

Sunday: Even more painful waking up experience, followed by a good Sunday’s activities, and rounded off with the porno flick last night (and yes, all that naturally follows from watching a decent porno flick with your boyfriend). Peas walked into the lounge at one point after rumbling around in the kitchen, and caught our guilty frozen stares like deers caught in headlights. Do I have a nascent porn problem or something?

Anyhow, to end this terribly long post, I’m going to show you what my broken baby toe looks like, in the hope of garnering far more sympathy. The Gilb’s sympathetic response was “Haha! It looks like Fat Bastard!”

Peace, (making) love and tolerance

What with all the recent paranoia around ‘anonymous’ blogs being readily found on glorious Google, I thought I’d google my blog name and see what turned up. Not surprisingly, most links were related to that rather popular blogging flatmate of mine, Peas. However, there was this little pearler there too:


First off,I don't come here to defend capitalism or socialism. Most (if not all) of you "free-thinkers" (that all seem to believe the exact same fucking thing) that are bitching about how much they fucking hate capitalism are from capitalist nations! So tell me if you hate capitalism so much why don't you GET THE FUCK OUT. Nobody wants you here and few people will stop you from going off to live in some third world ant-colony-type fuckhole country like fucking Cuba. You're the ones sitting there in your nice little suburban house which you were only granted because of capitalism working so well for the majority for a long ass time. You're ungrateful spoiled little bastards who are mad because you're fucking neighbor got a new pool after working hard for it and you didn't because you were to busy sitting on your fucking whiny little bitch ass complaining about how much you fucking hate the land you are living in. Will one of you please fucking explain to me how you can hate capitalism so much yet still take all the benefits of it like you're fucking entitled to them? You people make me fucking sick. You're like those fucking poor ass black people who always bitch about how much the white man keeps them down yet they still take their fucking welfare check payed for by the same white man who keeps them down. ONE OF YOU FUCKING EXPLAIN!AND DON'T JUST START BITCHING THAT I AM SOME RIGHT WINGER WHO CAN'T UNDERSTAND BECAUSE I'M FUCKING BRAIN WASHED BY THE SYSTEM OR SOME OTHER BULLSHIT RESPONSE! Real thought out awnsers I'll read and acknowledge, but if all you can do in response is insult me it just shows how truly god damned childish you are.

Such a pleasant, thought-provoking little piece of literature, isn’t it? God bless the Americans, eh? He (and it can only be a ‘he’, I’m afraid) goes by the name FuckChina. And I don’t think he’s talking about a friend he has a gay crush on, either. Of course, if he’d mentioned sunny SA as a third world-ant-colony-type fuckhole country, then I’d have been really pissed.

Anyhow, I’ve realised with some horror that all the while my flatmate was nominated for a blog award, I never congratulated her where I should have, first: right here on my blog! So: good luck Peas, your competition are all going to be mushed (couldn’t resist it)! I’m going to start working on some posters this weekend for next week’s award ceremony – you’re going to be thoroughly embarrassed you invited me along! Mmmmmwwaaaaahhhh!

And, in other news: purple turned to… whatever colour is representative of non-sexual furstration and non-fnu bruising. Got a full ‘stuffing’ last night! Woohoo!

Purple – the colour of sexual frustration and sexual violence

Last night, I was horny as hell. And, in what is becoming a frightening routine, my boyfriend left our flat early – again – too tired to perform his manly duties before heading home for bed!

Compounding this frustrating scenario was the fact that even my supposedly-abstaining flatmate, Peas, got some last night. So, the only thing left for a lady to do in this situation is take the matter into her own hands.

And boy did I. Unfortunately, perhaps with too much vim and vigour. When I went to pee this morning, I discovered upon wiping myself, that I was a little tender from the excessive activity last night. And now I wonder how much enjoyment will be gained from tonight’s sexual activities (which will happen, last night I made the Gilb swear we’d have sex tonight) – how long does fnu bruise take to disappear?

Thought for the day

It dawned on me yesterday that, with the advent of personalised number plates in SA, cunning marketers have found another way to advertise their (usually tacky) products. The enlightenment came as a Mercedes SLK crawled past me in a traffic jam, emblazoned with ‘FTV Café’ on its plates. In the past I have seen ‘Teazers’ (along with stickers of naked women on his Lamborghini’s lights – what the hell was the dick thinking?), and ‘Danny K’ and ‘Felicia’ – brands of the human kind are not immune, it would seem.

The second thought that has crossed my mind in the past 24 hours, is that my broken toe will prevent me from wearing anything remotely resembling a decent shoe for the next few weeks. Trying to dress up smart for a tender presentation this morning, I smashed three Myprodols in my face, but still could not put the stubborn left foot into a heeled shoe. And what am I to do about my swish cocktail function on Thursday, or the ball on Saturday? Walk around with the lesser mortals in slip slops?! Nooooooooooooo…..

One of those weeks….

…..where you want to curl up in bed and cry all day long. Last Monday, in a very short space of time, I was informed (in order of occurrence and importance) that:

1) Engi’s sister, TK had died from a drug overdose in a hotel room
2) My poor family dog was on his death bed – seemingly from being poisoned/kicked hard – now we know that it was a rare bacterial infection he contracted
3) My toe was broken

So, you’ll pardon me for not posting sooner. Today, a week later, and I am happier to report that my dog is recovering, my toe will eventually recover, and that hopefully poor TK’s family are in the process of recovering from the loss of their sister/daughter and the relentless media coverage of it.

Since January 1st, I’ve been bombarded with unhappy news from my friends and family, as though there has been a grief virus infecting all those dear to me. The collective toll now stands at the loss of two parents, one sister, one sister’s sanity, almost a dog, almost a friend in another dreadful car accident, a robbery, two relationships.

When I broke my toe, the maddening pain was rapidly replaced with an overwhelming sense of relief – that maybe this final, very tangible pain that I had experienced directly (as opposed to happening to someone I care for) had broken the curse, that a dark malevolent cloud had finally dispersed, and my beloved ones could be happy again.

To broken toes, and better months ahead…