Last night the BFG showed me this interactive site set up by the band Arcade Fire: The Wilderness Downtown. It is awesome, you should try it out. You will need headphones if you are at work.

Watching it made me think of where I grew up (why will be obvious if you watch the video).

When I was in school I dreamt of getting out of Durban. I felt like the city was strangling me. Well, to be more specific, since I hardly spent any time in the city, I felt like the suburb of Westville was slowly sucking the life out of me. When I left to go to University in Cape Town, I felt like I had escaped a death sentence.

I never once missed Durban, in fact I was relieved to be leaving when holiday time was over. I never missed my family. The air in Durban choked me. I used to think I felt a darkness there, that the place was cursed. Everyone I knew had dark secrets, had something terrible happen to them. The life I lived in Cape Town was full of light and happy (wealthy) people. Sometimes I imagined that the area I grew up  in was possessed, like in the movies.

How strange that now when I think of home, my mind returns more and more to a place that I haven’t thought of as home for 12 years. A place that I couldn’t wait to escape. Now that I have had some distance, it is easier for me to remember all the good and wonderful things of my childhood. Ha actually now it seems like paradise.

One thing I love (and slightly fear) about Durban is that seething organic force of life. Durban is a place where you really are reminded of the brief and fragile existence we humans lead. You can feel the plants bursting out of the brick walls, threatening to reclaim the land at the slightest chance. In Durban you must always fight the foliage for your right to live there.

My first memory of our house when we arrived from Botswana is me bawling my eyes out because our new house terrified me. It was raining that day, of course, and there were snails and mosquitos and bugs everywhere, and everything was saturated in damp plant life. It seemed to be alive, breathing, and that really scared me. I think it never really stopped scaring me. Raw life forces are scary things.

I have always had mixed memories of Durban but for today I want a trip down memory lane to appreciate the things from my childhood that I miss, and can never get back:

• In Durban I was part of a family. All of my mom’s family lived nearbye, as did my dad’s parents.  My grandparents (mom’s side) were like my second parents. We spent all our holidays and free time all together at their place, just down the road from us. It seemed like the other end of the earth back then. Then one aunt moved to Cape Town, then I left too. Then people died. After that it all fell apart. Now we are scattered all over the world. We will never all be together for holidays again. That is incredibly sad. Family is more wonderful than you think when you are 18.
• As I said, Durban is wild. The coast can be breathtakingly beautiful and the sea is violent. There are sharks. There are snakes. The humidity is intense. You can’t escape it or the bugs that go with it. The grass grows fast like a jungle. The rain is relentless and the thunder voluble.  It’s a dangerous place. People get shot, whether in the suburbs or in the townships. It reminds you that you are alive every day.
• People there live lives that may seem small (even small-minded) to outsiders but their lives are huge in heart. They are so kind and friendly. I really miss that friendliness, that openness.
• Durban is a place where you can bring out the dark sides of life that you hid in front of other people, because Durbanites have all been there, and seen the dark side too, no matter how rich or poor they are.
• Durban is a true cultural  and racial melting pot. I won’t pretend that the different colours in that pot mix seamlessly into a unified shade, or that they ever did, but Durban slips and slides and oozes along, somehow working despite the impression that anarchy should reign. It has a lot of flaws in that regard but it is a place where you really cannot hide from it even if you try.

It’s a humble, crumbling, prejudiced, small-town place that I can’t see appealing to many outsiders. I can’t imagine ever living there again. But right now it feels like the only real place I have ever known, a place where life is unashamedly real.

I miss it so much.

Just a quick (well, I’ll try) summary of the long weekend:

• We went to the sea! The Dorset coast to be precise.
• The weather was amazing (mostly).
• I went batshit insane. And not in a good way. It lasted from Thursday through to Saturday.
• Full moon+ mercury retrograde + hormonal imbalance = difficulties. You know when you can no longer cope in a situation you freak out and lash out? I couldn’t cope with tying  a shoelace. I nearly burst into tears at the prospect of going for a tiny stroll along the coastal path.
• I couldn’t focuse on anything happening in the world. I was in the clouds. Time slowed down for me. I couldn’t control my body. I couldn’t make it do what I wanted. I moved like a snail because I couldn’t make my limbs go any faster.
• My brain felt like it was very far away, controlling my body like a puppet, only it was watching TV and not paying any attention to what was happening to me.
• Remembering the above, BFG took me climbing. I though I was going to die. At one point I felt like I was outside of my body and honestly didn’t know how to move my body in order to go where I needed to go. I cannot describe how awful it was.
• I retired to a grassy bank and lay in the sun for the rest of the afternoon while the BFG self-belayed himself up climbing routes. Thank goodness he is so self-sufficient.
• the madness lifted on Sunday and I was able to deal with walks. Lots of walks. And icecream. And kayaking.  Even some climbing. Much relief.
• We had a fire! Our first campfire in the UK, after 7 years. It doesn’t seem to be as common here as in SA, where it is just another way of breathing. The campsites here are often insanely crowded so it could be dangerous to have fires. But at this campsite a guy drove round selling wood (he was South African… that explains everything) and every tent had a little fire going. We were all so happy. I think a fire speaks to our primal sense of comfort.  I didn’t realise how much I  missed them.
• I had a great weekend but I have to say I scared even myself. I don’t like feeling that way. It is just awful. I like to have control over my body and my mind. I didn’t have much control over either on Saturday. I did get into this intense introspective state, which was interesting, but on the whole, I prefer sanity.
• I bame the moon. Lunacy is an apt word.

I may be wrong, but I think my brain and body are alerting me to the fact that I may need a holiday.

I’m sure I have mentioned before that I seem to survive three months between holidays before my enthusiasm for and ability to be motivated by work wane. When I start spending too long fooling around on Facebook, and staring at my mail, checking every 5 minutes to see if I have a new one, then I know I am starting to flag.

It doesn’t have to be an overseas holiday, but in the UK people do often go overseas for their holidays, because, well, if you lived here you would know why. They usually go to Europe but seeing as I find getting a Schengen visa a nightmare  I usually go a bit further abroad.

My last holiday was in January! Unless you count random days off to do driving tests. I certainly do not.

I have noticed that it is harder and harder for me to get up for work each day, and much harder for me to concentrate for more than two seconds. Everything bores me now. No motivation to even move.

Don’t get me wrong, I still love my little mutants dearly, and often dream about them on the train and at night (really). They are really cute, you should see them. And although it can be a bit monotonous, creating plant hairstyles is still a good creative outlet.

And now that I have got the hang of it, my job as plant matchmaker and in vitro fertiliser (yes I facilitate plant nookie. I help them make their babies.I act like the wind, or the bees. Or the semen. Eeuw.) is fairly fulfilling. After all I am creating my own mini mutants by hand. I am like their god. Even more so because a few weeks after they give birth, I slaughter the parents in one fell swoop.

She giveth and she taketh away.

And I do still sing the Waka Waka (mentally) when I see the little white strips of joy that mean I have made a succesful DNA fragment (see, like the god of DNA ).

I really am in an omnipotent position over here in the lab.  Not many people have an army of their own mutant worshippers. And I don’t even have to wear the safety glasses any more. Well I do, but I just don’t. I’m on strike. As is everyone in the building. I am waiting for a stern email, which we shall obey for two weeks, and then go back to doing what we did before. Using the safety glasses as alicebands.

I don’t know what I am complaining about. Sometimes I think I am going insane, but really I’m fine, probably I don’t even need a holiday at all. Me and my mutants. Just hanging out in the lab. Oh and the flies.

Gotta go style some mutants now. You know, the usual humdrum day.

What will you do today?

Someone left work at 2pm on Friday to go and do DIY and housework in preparation for guests. This led me to think – of course – about myself and whether this would be normal behaviour in South Africa, and somehow, with the help of Google, which led me from Communism to gay adoption, I ended up thinking about bringing up kids.

ERK?!

Before you think I must be getting all broody and whatnot now that I am oooold, think again. I am not broody at all. But I do think about having children sometimes, more in a business planning kind of way. Is it feasible, is it affordable (is it ever?), is it advisable for a woman with a family history of mental illness and plenty of it herself? Is it advisable for a woman who feels that if she had been through what her own mother has survived, that she would be dead from grief? Could it be the worst mistake of her life?

So I think about it in a logistical way now and then. And I was thinking about the logistics of bringing up kids here in the UK.

I tend to vacillate between thinking there are hardly any cultural differences between my own white South African life and British life, to thinking there is a black hole of difference that can never be crossed.

I don’t have that many friends, and most of them are not even British, so my understanding of friendship protocol is a bit hazy at best. I spend most of my time trying to understand the basics of interaction with Spanish, Chilean, Chinese, and Polish people to name a few. But from what I understand of the British way, things are more formal here than in South Africa.

In SA from what I experienced, guests were pretty much welcome whenever and wherever, so long as they fitted in with the household and didn’t mind whatever chaos might be going on at the time. Of course things in South Africa are much easier in this regard because many people have domestic servants.

Here you usually need a formal invitation to go to someone’s house because they are going to be cleaning and preparing like mad the day before. They take hosting very seriously here. Everything needs to be spotless and perfect. My family and friends in SA were way more casual. As in: just park there on the couch, if you want anything, the kitchen is over there, please excuse the mess.

So I can just imagine me and the BFG (both oddball freaks to the extreme) hosting some British kiddies, little Timmy or little Bessie (my understanding of British children stems from Enid Blyton), sending them off to play lego with a sandwich or a cookie, and getting sued by their parents for child neglect or something. Is it obligatory to cook a meal for child visitors here? Must they be supervised? I just don’t know how kid playdates work here! I forsee a terrifying mine field of cultural faux pas.

So far I have come up with the following scenarios:

1) It would be better to bring up kids in SA – BFG and I know how things work there

2) It would be disastrous to bring up kids in Britain – we would make mistakes daily and humiliate our kids with our countless cultural and social failings.

3) It would be disastrous to bring up kids in SA – BFG and I have NO idea how things work there. We know how things were in our own families, but we are both oddball freaks and have no idea how normal social interaction happens, especially in a larney place like Cape Town. They have Standards down there. Cape Town is very different to ole Durbs. Durbs had a Standard once, but the Durbanites forgot it out in the garden and it got swallowed by the foliage in all that fecund humidity.

4) It would be better to bring up kids in Britain – we can pull the foreigner card. We shall be excused of everything forever more because of being ignorant immigrants.

And my final conclusion to this mental exercise:

5a) It doesn’t make any bloody difference where in the world we bring up our hypothetical kids so long as we love them and retain a HUGE sense of humour to deal with the daily idiotic faux pas that we shall commit. And make them we shall. For we are both oddball freaks.

We will definitely fit into the category of “very embarassing ballies, best left at home”.

5b) an evening with Google is  an adventure. You never know where it will take you.

Friday. Why does that word sound like a sigh of relief? Sigh-day?

I have decided to be horribly self-indulgent and kind of copy cyber-sass’s ‘20 things about me’, even though I have made so many lists about me on this blog that I might be taking self-obsession to new levels. I thought her list was kind of funky. I’m just, you know, practicing for when I am famous and the world wants to know what I eat for breakfast.

Toast.

20 arbitrary things you might or might not know about me:

1. I was a twin in my mommy’s tummy. Not identical. Apparently my twin was a boy but, erm, it appears there was only room in there for one of us from quite early on. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to have a twin brother.
2. I was a shit hot speller at school, had an excellent vocabulary and was the top times tabler. Now I can barely remember how to spell without a spell checker and cannot even do basic mental maths. Suceeding at school is a measure of absolutely nothing.
3. I did well academically at school but all I wanted was to be good at a sport. I wanted to be a gymnast. Sadly ability did not match desire.
4. I manage stress really well, I am good at being calm and carrying on. However I seem to have a disability where if I even get a tiny bit nervous, I have no control over my coordination. Hence why I keep failing the driving test, and couldn’t be a gymnast.
5. I really really like to read. I spent all my school summers reading, sometimes three (small) books a day.
6. I really wish I could use my talent for reading like a demon in a profession somehow.
7. I don’t feel comfortable around spiders. Ok they scare the crap out of me. No rational reason. Too many legs for one creature to need.
8. I had all kinds of eating disorders when I was young but now I love food dearly and panic when I am hungry. Don’t get between me and the food, m’kay?
9. I still have a residual disorder where I can’t stop eating something until it is all gone. Food calls to me. So the BFG and I never ever buy in bulk and we never keep yummy things in the house. We are both ravenous monsters.
10. I almost never have a strong opinion about anything. I always try to see things from many angles. Always see the grey. This makes me a highly annoying person to be with because if you have a problem I immediately see the other side, even if I don’t feel strongly either way.
11. I love dassies, hamsters, rabbits and chinchillas. All rodents really.
12. No matter how much I love the above, that love will never come close to how much my sister loves them furry creatures.
13. I  am exactly like my dad and this scares the crap out of me.
14. I am very passive-aggressive.
15. I have no sense of direction.
16. If there is someone in the room who is not having a good time, it is impossible for me to have a good time.
17. I don’t understand how the world works and where I fit in it. I think I never will. It makes life interesting I guess.
18. I cannot sew to save my life. We were forced to do home economics at school and sew a bag. To me, sewing a bag was like  flying to the moon. I got 40% for my bag, and I spent months, MONTHS trying to perfect it.
19. I am not able to deal with things like hair and makeup. I just don’t know what to do or how to do it. I am an appearance cripple.
20. I spend way too much time on the internet.

Mwah. Love you all. Thank you, thank you. Bye now (royal wave).

I failed my driving test for the second time yesterday, and am feeling a bit crap still so I’m trying to write something that will cheer me up.

The BFG! Always a happy topic. It’s amazing how much we are still learning about our relationship, even after 10 years together. Neither of us are big into fighting, but there were times in the past where he would do something annoying and I would go on and be ratty about it, or when he would get grumpy with me. But that hardly ever seems to happen these days.

Nowadays we just laugh at each other. Somehow when he gets grumpy with me I find it hysterical. And then he laughs too. Or when I shit on him for something he usually just teases me or makes a joke and we both laugh. It’s a much better way to deal with things. And we are both so batty that there is plenty to laugh about.

Case in point, last year some time we had a broken tap. I really don’t understand plumbing in the UK, but all the taps here are shit. They all leak and the plumbers never seem to be able to fix them. Anyway this one broke so that it couldn’t switch off and gushed full blast. So we had to switch the water off at the mains. Our flat is managed by an agency so we had to wait nearly a month for their plumber to come back from holiday. Which was fun. Not. We had to switch the water back on to shower, and tried to collect the water from the gushing tap and put it into the bath so we could use it to flush the toilet and wash the dishes when the water was off again.

So finally the plumber came and replaced the tap. Within days the new tap was threatening a repeat performance, it wasn’t closing properly, it was leaking and threatening to break. So I placed a moratorium on the tap. No one was to use the tap ever. It was hence a decorative feature.

But BFG had trouble with this. He liked to use the bathroom tap, because the kitchen tap has… issues. Sigh. The kitchen tap goes full blast when you turn it on and you and the kitchen get covered with water. It’s a little violent. And he won’t drink from the hot taps.

Every single day it was “has somebody been using that tap again, it’s leaking”, and “Stop using that EFFING tap”. But training a boy is hard. Very hard. This went on for months. Until I cracked. I took the plastic measuring cup I use for baking, wrote ‘NO!’ on it in permanent marker, and put it over the tap. Then waited for the hysterical laughter coming from the bathroom.  It lies there still, nearly a year later.

Evidence:

The tap has never been used since.  Dont let anyone ever tell you a boy can’t be trained. Just be creative.

Somebody’s been playing with mommy’s make up box again, hasn’t he?

Right, I read 3/4 of a Twilight book- the first one- (it was my sister’s. I just thought I should clarify that) and watched 10 minutes of the third movie. Also I read the wikipaedia summary. Do I get some kind of badge that says I belong to society like a normal person now?

I have to say, while it is not my bag at all, if I was about 11-15 I would probably be hot for this vampire stuff. I mean, in my day all we had was Sweet Valley High. Twilight is heaps better than SVH. Like, there are only 4 Twilight books.

I think it is important to keep up with the crazes and fevers that take over the world, otherwise you never know what the crap people are going on about. You become a social pariah. Like for instance I read all the Harry Potter books to see what the fuss was all about. Still don’t get it. Never will. But at least I know who Dumbledore is, and can succeed at Trivial Pursuit.

Really I just like to read, so reading dubious books is no great tax.

Twitter was another thing I thought I should “do” to participate in wordly culture. I can’t say I totally got that one either, but I did get horribly addicted nevertheless and had to go a severe cold turkey. And thank god I did because I found out my boss signed up. It’s bad enough he is my Facebook friend, never mind having him lurking on Twitter as well. Luckily he doesn’t “get” Twitter at all, and never uses Facebook. Which would be great except for the fact that everyone else in the office seems to be on Facebook all the time and they tell him what I write.

Does nobody do any work around here?

I managed to turn 30 without a midlife crisis… so far.

I must say my life is not how I imagined it would be back in the days of yore. Most kids imagine 30 to be over the hill.

Being 30 meant responsibility and admin and mature things like Rooibos and mortgages and fear and babies. So far I don’t have any of those except the fear, although I have strangely started adapting to Rooibos.

I also assumed that by the time I was 30 I would have done something. Something special, some big career move, or some kind of achievement. I just assumed that my life would be all kinds of awesome, a hell of a lot better than it was then.

Ja, well.  I can’t say that the last 10 years were anything like how I vaguely imagined. No one ever told me how bloody difficult it would be just to stay alive this long. Frik. It was hard enough just surviving, never mind doing something special.

I would like to say that I always tried my best. But I didn’t always try my best. Sometimes I took the easy way out, and made excuses, and pretended not to notice, or looked away, and did what was convenient, or best for me, and sometimes I lied.

Sometimes I was an emotional coward and said terrible things about people, and hurt people, and cried in a bathroom stall til I couldn’t breath. Sometimes I wished someone else would die. Sometimes I treated the people who loved me the most the worst,and put myself first.

Ok make that often.

I could say that I have had the guts to admit it and face my weaknesses head on. But there have been times when I haven’t had the guts for that, too.

Other times I was brave or kind, or at least swallowed my words, and sometimes I laughed til my ears throbbed. Sometimes, I was ok.

I didn’t achieve anything at all that my youthful self would be impressed by. She would be disappointed. But then she had no idea what it took to get here.

All I can really say is,

I’m still here.

I’m quite proud of that.

Nutella is unequivo-vo-zela-(oops got distracted)-cally the most evil thing ever to be created by man. Something that good can only mean bad news.

How can a person be expected to eat this stuff for breakfast? Breakfast?! If I ate that for breakfast I would scale the walls and then pass out in a sugar-induced coma. Never mind breakfast, I have self control issues.

Me + a spoon = no nutella left in half an hour.

Whoever invented Nutella needs to have a serious sit-down to reevaluate his priorities in life, because he has made the life of at least one person way too difficult.

I‘m in a pretty weird mental space at the moment. Well, for ‘weird’, substitute bad.

I don’t want to scare people out there in the interwebs, so before I go into the details, don’t worry about me. I’m not looking for words of comfort or sympathy, I just feel like writing about it because that’s what I do on my blog. Actually I’m doing quite well, in terms of general life.

So firstly there is the fear. It won’t leave me. A general fear for my future, and the accompanying sense of dismay as I have the conviction that things are going to turn out badly. If I thought I had suffered until now, I should get ready for much worse as I get older. Fear that I have made terrible career decisions, fear that I will end up in the same situation as my parents, no money, no way of making money, debts. And I have made terrible career decisions.

Then there is the sense of hopelessness. I think whenever I have felt bad before, I felt bad for a time, or a moment. But something clicked in me a while ago, something registered, something broke. It will never end. The bad things will never ever end. I need to accept that things are probably just going to get harder and harder with time. This is based on the evidence I have around me.

It was a weird sensation, when I accepted this. Like I have lost everything, including the will to carry on. But I do anyway. I have to. I don’t know if there can be anything worse than this feeling. Although it is strangely liberating to see the very bottom of hope. I’m still alive I guess, still ticking on. Things are good for now, and although I no longer have hope, at least I can cope. And be happy in the moments when I am coping.

I really have to live from day to day. If I look any further than one day, what I see might make me want to stay in bed.

So ja, I am pretty happy now, today. Life is good.  I just am so fucking scared of tomorrow.