Turn your fucking phone off!

What is it with people, who in the middle of a one-on-one business interaction with you – yes, that’s right, when you’re busy talking to them, in fact, halfway through a sentence they’re busy saying – will stop mid-syllable and take a phonecall?

I mean, if it’s that important, they will leave a message and you can call them back in 15 minutes. Unless you’re a doctor, or have excused yourself before the meeting started, by saying “I’m terribly sorry, I humbly beg your forgiveness for my imminent rudeness, but I’m expecting an important call from the President of Nicaragua, and I’m forewarning you that I will have to interrupt our incredibly important meeting for a few minutes to talk to him” then, I regard you with the contempt you deserve.

The dude who came to fix my laptop yesterday committed this sin while I was demanding that he explain to me why he hadn’t replaced my laptop battery when that was one of the two repairs I had requested from the company. He had the gumption to answer the call without even excusing himself for doing so.

But this dude has nothing on the beauty therapist who unbelievably answered a call mid-way through my first-ever pedicure on Saturday. Now, the irony is that my very poor command of the Zulu language strung together a sentence from a few key words of hers “client ukufonela 20 minutes” [okay, make that 3 English words plus one Zulu word which I’ve probably got wrong anyway] that made it clear that the person on the other end of the phone got no more information out of her than if they had not got through to her at all and had left a voicemail for her to respond to, a not-so-life-threatening 20 minutes later when she “ngifonela’d” them back. Eish. Oh well, I guess I saved R20 on her tip – which she definitely would have got otherwise, she did a damn good job of it, even if I have no prior pedicure experience to compare it with.

On the weekend front, as busy as I was social butterflying it up with people I haven’t seen in a while, I still managed to spend an inordinate amount of time pining for the Gilb. I thankfully did manage to impress two former colleagues with a butternut soup that I might have initially overmarketed to them, in a ploy to ensure they accepted my dinner invitation. The last time I made this soup was about two years ago, and I even had to call up the friend who gave me the recipe originally to remind myself of it (it did live up to its expectations, though. I’m pretty confident they were bowled over by the sheer… butternuttiness of it all).

And, I made a strange foray out to ESP at 2:45am on Sunday morning, which was a surreal bad flashback to my rave days. The people were as ecstasied-up as they were back then, except… they now had some wrinkles/slightly receded hair and didn’t quite fit into tight shiny raver pants that looked so damn good on them 3 years ago. It was an oddly depressing experience, because I had to acknowledge that I’ve grown older and that this scene is well and truly behind me, and that probably no amount of drugs could make me convincingly slip back into those overwhelmingly good times and forget, even just for a few hours, that times have changed and distinctly adult pressures now weigh on me – the greatest concerns in our lives as twenty-somethings far outweigh the panic around deadlines for varsity assignments, don’t they?

This depressing thought reminds me of another one that struck me about ten years ago at a dinner party my Dad was having with twenty-odd guests. There we all were, sitting around the table, when it dawned on me that most of these adults, well beyond their thirties at that stage, still had tons of kak shit going on in their lives. Yet, no-one really cared, or worse yet, they turned a blind eye to avoid the awkwardness: as a child, people show concern for your well-being, but as an adult, you’re expected to have it all together. Sure, your closest friends will be there for you, but by and large, people will ignore your problems. I could look at each of them one by one and because of my knowledge of their personal problems (thanks to my very gossipy father) I knew that their smiles were calculated strategic expressions rather than a true reflection of their emotional states. A’s wife, seated next to him, was cheating on him with B, sitting across the table from him – and A knew it, too; C’s family was in severe financial difficulty; D’s husband was in the terminal stages of cancer; E, at the age of 37, was in love with a gay man who would never be hers; and so on and so forth. I guess you could argue that these sufferings need to be put in context of the far greater sufferings of so many people in the world, but then W.H. Auden’s words in his poem, Musee des Beaux Arts, hold so true:

"In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure"

Enough of this dreariness, I’m just rather moody right now. More positive thoughts later this week, I promise.