doos central

so my parents have random 'friends' to stay. its a great situation- my father offers our place as a free hotel to all the arbs they call friends but don't like at all, and then i get kicked out of my granny flat so that they can stay, and my mother spends a fortune buying food for them, and cooking all wekeend, and they offer nothing in return. nice comfy free hotel. i on the other hand, have to lug all my stuff out of my home, stay in my childhood room (with real comfy 400 year old single bed mattress), and have creeps sleep on my bed, and rummage through my stuff. its the most ridiculous situation known to mankind, but he does it ever fucking time.
so sadly, a friend of his died the other day and the funeral is today. hence reason why creep 'friend' (who they cant even stand) is here. FOR THE FUCKING WEEKEND. and creep friend has always been single and well, down right weird. but for some ungodly reason, he decided to bring his new floozy with him down to durbs, and to the funeral. yay so creep and his bitch have come to sleep on my bed. its being burnt on sunday evening, as soon as they vacate. but whats so interesting is when i went through for coffee this morning, i met creeps lady. who i instantly mistook as his mother. creep is same age as my parents, so around 60 odd. creep girlfriend is, wait for the gem, 18 years his senior- she's 78. jesus christ. and she looks it. its like having my granny over, but with her younger man?! so he's obviously been trawling the old aged homes for some lady loving. it makes me so sick, i actually want to throw up. how random. so i get the pleasure of these two fucking arbs in my house, and my bed, until sunday. god help me. think this weekend is going to involve a lot of drinking to wash away the pain and imagery, and to stay as far away from the house as is physically possible. seems like my new baby might arrive today or tomorrow, so think its road trip time. rad, that would solve all of the problems in one go. i just hope like shit the bitch doesn't die on us.

had a super fantastic, but mammothly expensive dinner last night, with wonderful company and lots of bubbly. looks like i wont be able to afford anything else for the rest of the month, but it was a good one. pity i missed the party- ive been dying to shake my arse to some good tunes, but alas, no such luck.
i have my interview today, for firm in joburg- hope like hell it works out. hope the guy doesnt mind chatting to me while my toes, fingers and legs are all crossed in hope and nerves. pity about the slighty fuzzy head thanks to that second bottle i stupidly ordered last night.

the world seems to be swirling in the wrong way, and I'm not sure what happened to make it change direction, or how to get it back on track. strange that. out of kilter. seem to be oscillating between blind panic and anxiety, boredom, numbness and euphoria. a real tornado of fun i assure you. despite it, or perhaps because of it, things are okay, and slowly but surely getting there.
i have an interview of a job i really want to get tomorrow. i hope it goes well. needless to say I'm a little nervous. fingers and toes crossed.

postponed

still no word on the arrival of my new baby. I'm getting rather sad. its horrid when you are told about really exciting news, and then you have to wait. what happened to the good old days when it was all about instant gratification and satisfaction. there were no paper work hassles and delays in childhood. the buggers. hopefully she'll come through some time this week, although already, it was meant to be yesterday. call me fickle if you will, whatever, but hell i love getting new stuff. as much as we aren't defined by our 'stuff', our material possessions and all, i still do love them. so i wait, with fingers crossed, for her to land on my door step. all will be revealed soon. ha and then its fun times all the way.

nerdhood

"What is life, but a series of inspired follies? The difficulty is to find them to do. Never lose a chance: it doesnt come everyday."
my new motto, thanks to reading george bernard shaw's pygmalion again. i have now come to terms with my needhood, and geekdom. its so obvious theres no point any more fighting it, or attempting to hide it when its fully evident in plain sight. this hit me when:

• i stayed home on friday night to have nice big supper, drinks and scrabble with my parents
  
• when i chose to reread pygmalion (and its not like every human knows the story of my fair lady)
  
• i was in bed before 12 pm every night this weekend
  
• spent most of my time in the kitchen as baked up a fury of millions of muffins, snacks, cakes 3 course meals etc (in celebration of father's birthday)
• im still at university, and this is now, i realised in horror, my sixth year there
  
• and today turned down drinks with a friend, for rooibos tea gathering instead, as am detox no drinking health meg this week.

sjoe. thats a whole bunch dork right there. im not embaressed to say it anymore; it makes me happy. so here's to celebrating nerds, geeks and dorks alike. woop woop to us. my new baby arrives tomorrow, and im simply too excited.

thoughts

"I was through with getting caught up in other people's messes. I'd already dug a hole in the back yard and buried everything that needed to be buried in it. Nobody could ever dig it up again."
reading murakami again, and liked the description of burying issues and complications.
got some great news and things to look forward to shortly, will share more once they are official, but hopefully things are on the up and up.

leave dead horse

the tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians says that when you discover you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. our government employs far more advanced strategies, such as:

• buying stronger whip
• changing riders
• threatening the horse
• appointing a committee to study the horse
• arranging to visit other countries to see how others ride dead horses
• lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included
• re-classifying the dead horse as 'living-impaired'
• hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse
• harnessing several dead horses together to increase the speed
• providing additional funding and/or training to increase the dead horse's performance
• doing a productivity study to see if lighter rider improves the dead horse's performance
• declaring that, as the dead horse does not have to be fed, it is less costly and therefore contributes substantially more to the bottom line of the economy than do some other horses
• rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses
• promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position.

from the 'business day' yesterday. too funny, too appropriate for the state of current political affairs.

rubbish

"They were striking the set of a play, a humble, one-handed domestic drama, without permission from the cast. They started in what she called her sewing room- his old room. She was never coming back, she no longer knew what knitting was, but wrapping up her scores of needles, her thousand patterns, a baby’s half-finished yellow shawl, to give them away to strangers was to banish her from the living. They worked quickly, almost in a frenzy. She’s not dead, Henry kept telling himself. But her life, all lives, seemed tenuous when he saw how quickly, with what ease, all the trappings, all the fine details of a lifetime could be packed and scattered, or junked. Objects became junk as soon as they're were separated from their owner and their pasts- without her, her old tea cosy was repellent, with its faded farmhouse motif and pale brown stains on cheap fabric, and stuffing that was pathetically thin. As the shelves and drawers emptied, and the boxes and bags filled, he saw that no one owned anything really. It’s all rented, or borrowed. Our possessions will outlast us, we’ll desert them in the end. They worked all days, and put out twenty-three bags for the dustmen." Saturday. Ian mcewan.

its strange, certain days a realisation like this makes me smile; the knowledge that we are totally unconnected and never tied to anything is ultimately empowering and freeing, as it means we can do or be anything or go anywhere, without possessions or rubbish to hamper your way. however, at other times, its this realisation that makes me cry; that ultimately we own nothing, and can leave or disappear leaving nothing of permanence behind. simply pack up my things, and i no longer exist. strange how we are determined by things. its the stuff around me that marks that I'm still here; not me, but the crap I've accumulated over my life. similarly without me, the toys or things fail to make proper sense, or to have a context; they revert to simply being stuff, no history or meaning. strange, i can move on and get new things, as one does at each different phase in one's life, and my things can have new owners and new contexts as i shed them, but its right now, within this context, that we are both defined by the other, and help to give meaning, sense and context to each other. i didn't sleep last night, and so had a lot of time to think of this all, and life and all those big things, hence being so ridiculously over emotional and philosophical at this hour of a Tuesday morning. my car is in for service today, so I'm working from home again; a thing I've actually grown to not enjoy, as i seem never be able to get out of this place, i just get stuck here. and the banging and hammering from the neighbours doesn't help much either. i may just steal daddy's car (borrowed for the day) and run away somewhere nice for the afternoon. think thats a better option, and will allow for happier relaxation and escape. sounds good.

well done

this is the second mention in the last week of my brother's work with avant car guard. first was full picture and write up in the sunday times last week, and now this on their most recent show in cape town, which apparently went really well. makes me proud.

new beginnings are slow

its a whole new day, a whole new leaf, and hopefully a slightly altered and improved meg shortly. I'm back on massive detox this week, as have been abusing my system far too much; drinking should be a pleasure, not like me a national pastime. also just been eating crap, so its time to clean out the system, look after my poor ailing little temple i call my collection of organs and limbs and get back on track. I'm determined this time to treat my body with respect, and hopefully all the imbalances that have been increasingly evident (no sleeping, constant exhaustion, in some cases total system failure) will start to realign themselves and give me peace. so its fruit and veg, herbal teas and no crap (ie baked goods, especially complex carbs like bread and pasta, meat or dairy) for this week, and then slowly i'll reintroduce the healthier options of the above excluded one at a time. it does wonders, having done this super strictness before, but it is challenging and takes constant management and commitment; something like determination and will power have never been my strong points.
that wonderful healthy focus, and all that being said, its mercury wine week at suncoast this week, and already we're all making plans. I've been meaning to go for ages, just pity it would have to fall on this week wouldn't it. what if i have a break from the nazi detox for just one night? no crap eating, just wine binge? surely there's a little leeway? and so the rubber armed resolve begins. bugger, and its only monday morning.

happinesses

i bought the prettiest little dress in the world yesterday. it hurt my bank account way more than i should have allowed, as now it means no gym contract, no yoga classes and probably no petrol in my car for the rest of the month, but i simply couldnt have left it lonely and by itself on the shop rack. it would have been too sad without me to fill it. and that would have meant someone else would own it, something i think i would have regretted for a long time. so even if owning it means staying at home a lot more, and dancing around my flat in it, it will be worth it. as those little red rose petals are going to keep me smiling for a while. the joys of retail therapy (with just enough money to afford it).
there is lots of work scheduled for this weekend and coming times. i need to do it, if only for my mental health and stress levels to be sorted out and put into place. im starting to freak out a little about it all, so need to change the idea that work is a bad thing in my head. if it means being free, calmer and able to move on, then so be it. there are exciting things ahead to act as motivation, particularly travel and good job offers, so things are looking up and up. let the deamons bugger off and throw myself into it all.

The fishmonger is a polite, studious man who treats his customers as members of an exclusive branch of the landed gentry. He wraps each species of fish in several pages of a newspaper. This is the kind of question henry likes to put to himself when he was a schoolboy: what are the chances of this particular fish, from that shoal, off that continental shelf ending up in the pages, no, on this page of this copy of the Daily Mirror? Something just short of infinity to one. The random ordering of the world, the unimaginable odds against any particular condition, still please him. Even as a child, and especially after aberfan, he never believed in fate or providence, or the future being made by someone in the sky. Instead, at every instant, a trillion trillion possible futures; the pickiness of pure chance and physical laws seemed like freedom from the scheming of a gloomy god.
ian mcewan. saturday

too much of a good thing, is an even better thing.
all i seem to have done lately is be surrounded by great friends, with laughter abounding.
never, ever a bad thing. grins from ear to ear.

my bad

okay so i take the last rant back partially. got a phone call as soon as i wrote all of that, to say that june's money should be in my account today. yay. so i can live off two grand for the next couple of months, before they sort the rest out. hell, at least its cash. and it will help to displace the moths that live in my wallet. things are looking brighter all of a sudden. and traditional friday-afternoon-leave-work-early drinks are on schedule, as well as the excitement of being taken out to a big curry dinner tonight.
here's to good times over the weekend. somewhere in between all of this i perhaps should fit some work into the equation?! me thinks maybe not. hah.

bugger them all.

goddammmmmmmmmmmmmm.
just went to sort out the issue of well overdue payment with the secretary of our department, and oh wow, how nice, she hadn't bother to let me know that my salary hasn't been put through yet. so now they owe me for half of JUNE and July still. ridiculous. so for the last month I've been living on air. real fun. and she didn't even let me know that it hadn't been put through at all. this system is such bullshit. so now i have to go into debt again, simply because they haven't bothered to contact me, or put through the claim forms. thanks to the nice hole of employment that is the university.
on the up side, here is to going away this weekend again, and it being the third weekend in a row that I'm not in town. i like it. also to being the wife, as it seems to have major perks, like weekends away, and rad concerts. heh. benefits.

theyre a handful

she was a woman who gave her life to housework, to the kind of daily routines of polishing, dusting, vacuuming and tidying that were once common, and these days are only undertaken by patients with obsessive compulsive disorders. every day, while Henry was a school, she spring-cleaned her house, she drew her deepest satisfactions from a tray of well-roasted beef, the sheen on a nest of tables, a pile of ironed candy-striped sheets folded in smooth slabs, a larder of neat provisions...the invisible sides, the obverse, the underneath and the insides of everything were clean. the oven and its racks were scrubbed after every use. order and cleanliness were the outward expression of an unspoken ideal of love. a book he was reading would be back in the hallway shelf upstairs as soon as he put it aside. the morning paper could be in the dustbin by lunchtime. the empty milk bottles she put out for collection were as clean as her cutlery. to every item, its drawer and shelf or hook, including her various aprons, and her yellow rubber gloves held by a clothes peg, hanging near the egg-shaped egg-timer.

ian mcewan, saturday

that is the best description of how it is living with my mother, that i have ever come across. its a strange world, as though the film crew from architectural digest is going to pop around any second and shoot the place, or test her house on its cleanliness levels. its real fun being around OCDs i can tell you.

more thesis grumbles

"the last stages of thesis writing can often be the most demanding and difficult. you may have lost your initial enthusiasm for the project, may be somewhat bored with it, may want to start working on other research initiatives, and maybe you just want to have a bit of a social and family life back again. if you are feeling this way, take heart- many others have gone through the same stage, and have nevertheless successfully completed their theses. at this stage it is common to struggle to summon the last spurt of academic energy needed to finish.
take comfort in the unassailable truth that the sooner you get to work, the sooner the whole thesis will be done. no fairies come during the night and write the chapter for you- only you can."

this 'how to complete your thesis book' is making me laugh. you mean the fairies aren't true? goddamn that's what i've been holding out for all this time!

new days

so i awoke early this morning. for a change. for once i didn't end up snoozing for hours, battling the joy of sleep with the stupid but constant interruptions of the various, multiple alarms i set for myself. I'm a bad waker it seems. but this morning was good. and productive. and I'm alert and awake. good start to new week, and new life. i say new life, which sounds rather over dramatic and all, but it is you see. things are changing. its healthy lifestyles, dedicated working, and generally looking after myself more than i have been of late. less of the late night boozing meg, and more of the healthy, fit, toned and getting some sleep meg. its been a crazy time; a brilliant thing, as i feel like all I've done lately is giggle, laugh, and be surrounded by lovelinesses. but its taking its toll; not only on the physical and mental, but on this major thing called thesis. which is in desperate need of just getting kicked in the arse, and completed once and for all. its so close i can taste the glory.
so new week and new focus is a good thing. i need more structure and work ethic and all that good serious stuff to balance my life again; its been priority fun time, which isn't meant to last all the time. there are new incentives too, just to add cherries on the cake. a full time offer made on my current job, better money, more responsibility and interesting research options etc, all of which will only happen once dissertation done. that's the deal. so its a little bit more of hard slog, and then I'll never have to look at it again. a nice option. a happy option. its been hijacking my life for too long now. so yay, here's to its completion, downfall, and then subsequent burning. woop woop.

real pretty

she takes some amazing shots. this one was simply too beautiful. story time magic.