It would be nice, wouldn't it? I mean, wouldn't it make life easier? If you could just whip out your little id card and say, well, actually I'm allowed to be staring vacantly out the window. See, here's my licence.
I wonder, would it entitle you to some form of legal protection. Or at least a support network. Like the medical associations. The Chiropractic Association. We all get together once a month and discuss similes, exchange rhymes. Or would be even be able to organise ourselves enough to demand a basic wage for poets... hmm. prolly not.
Would it make you feel a little less guilty about being in bed at 9 on a friday morning in winter with a laptop and the electric blanket on? Or wandering randomly around shopping malls staring and staring "through the bars of the rhyme" and wondering and wandering?
I wonder, what would it take to get your licence revoked? The overuse of cliches? A slightly too obvious appropriation of someone else's clever image? "I'm sorry maam, that's just one too many split infinitives. You're over the limit. We're going to have to endorse your licence."
I mean, could it help you to actually get away with pushing a slightly sad pun as far as I am trying to, right now?
Friday, June 13, 2008
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
actually, you did promise me a rose garden
Aaah, relationships. You gotta love em. How sweetly we imagine our lives together. When its early days and our dreams are still blushing and we are still wrapped in promise like buds.
If, like me, you forget to get married, coz it's just not important and who needs a piece of paper anyway, there comes a day when the go-luckyhappy days suddenly smack you from behind and you think oh Shhhheeeeit, where did all the time go?
So you sort of airily propose to the boy during the news one evening and he says, oh, yeah, ok, organise it then.
When you've been through so damn much together including two unsuccessful break-ups that you've learned that the grass on this side is actually waaaayy greener than the grass over there.
When you've taught each other to love, to talk, to cook, to be grown ups, navigate without maps and find g-spots, e-spots, f-spots and picnic spots.
And now you finally have a veggie patch to call your own, and two cats in the yard.
Aah, how wild the future used to be. How we would travel, garden, strut and shop. How famous we would be. How our dreams would swell like cumulo-nimbus in the high-veld skies. And now you look at me and you think i want more. You think "its not enough for her." You think you've come short.
I wanted to write you a love letter. I wanted to tell you -
I never wanted the damn rose garden. I'm happy with the spinach, darling, and that handsome lavender at the front step.
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
the tunnel and the egg
I'm running a nursery for tiny little pink hairless creative projects.
Throughout my childhood it was my sister who was the nurturing one when it came to taking in orphan creatures. My attention span lasted as long as the pull of the next chapter of my book. I was more interested in the adventures of Dick, George and Timothy the Dog. [Aaah, that George, who was 'almost as good as a boy'. I think I fancied that George. but this is another story]. Miranda, on the other hand, could wake up at hourly intervals throughout the night to feed some see-through pink squidget that couldn't even squawk. The squirrels, the mice, the tiny birds with their stumpy wings. Many of them didn't even last long enough to get hair, feathers or a personality. But she persisted. The milk in the eye dropper, the pro-nutro mush when they got a bit older.
And the heartache. Many mornings she woke up to a small corpse in the shoebox next to the bed. Or worse, the almighty Fang, our domestic cat plucked them right off her shoulder. Her anguished cries might have caught my focus for a minute or two, she may have got a grunt of sympathy for me before I was back in Narnia, or Nancy Drew land. But sure enough a week or two later, it was "oh, sweeeeeeeet" and another little fuzz-less mite was getting the glass dropper treatment. And every now and then, one would make it through to adulthood and what a fine companion she would then have. I'm thinking of the bigger ones of course - the cuddly porcupine, the hotbodied warthogs, or frenetic banded mongoose.
I feel a bit like that now. I have at least 6 proposals for theatre or book projects that will happen if I can just get the universal teat full enough for one of them to grow a bit of fur. Aaah, that teat.
A friend in Cape Town said that he admired fundraisers because they divert global funds to humanity's highest and noblest ideals. Mmm, lovely thought. And then there's Shri Shri Ravi Shankir, the Art of Living guru's famous response to one of his participants who asked "But where will the money come from?" when they were discussing a new project. He looked at her with his benificent smile and said "From wherever it is at the moment!"
Of course. So lets see, the wish list. There's the Great Walk. To get all the local and international organisations that work for causes like human trafficking, child slavery, etc etc, and do a long walk from Ujiji to Bagamoyo (the slave caravan route of old), culminating in a street carnival at the Bagamoyo arts festival, where each organisation has its own float, and then there's and a performance of Susi and Chuma, a half play I'm writing about Livingstone's loyal friends and pall bearers and their long walk to Bagamoyo...
Then there's the Zambezi play - a visual spectacular with puppets and physical theatre that tells the tale of a girl's journey down the Zambezi from source to ocean...
Then of course there's the play I've just finished writing. Anyone want to sponsor a production of the first ever bush memory mystery play?
Oh and don't forget the children's story, the organisational development self-help book, the Atlantis project - a movie about women who believe they are reincarnated scientists from Atlantis come to save the planet...
Last but not least there's the Inanna myth contemporary opera, this one on its way to a stage near you by, oh I don't know, around 2011...
Now of course, more pressing than ever, a new one - workshops on xenophobia for reintegration programmes in Cape Town and Joburg...
No, ideas are not the problem. Capitalism is. And the uncanny lack of patrons knocking at my door. Damn.
Writing proposals is a curious activity. Its writing the fiction of fiction. A document describing a document that doesn't yet exist, but will, if you (o esteemed producer/corporate social responsibility officer /gatekeeper of public funds) can just bear to part with the $10 000 needed to make it all happen.
Its like hatching crocodiles. Another activity Miranda was far better at than I. All these fierce little lives waiting inside the shell for the squeaks which cue them to start busting out. One squeak wakes up the next which wakes up the next. Squeak squawk from the first little slippery leathery beast. Hold your breath. Silence. Wait. Then a quiver from the shell next door and that one starts to press his shell-breaking tooth against his eggshell walls. Next thing there's a whole seething squawking slippery mass of baby crocodiles nudging and snapping and squirming, blissfully unaware of a future date when their sexy skins will house crisp dollar bills and elegant Italian feet.
But for every writhing snapper there's a silent egg. A dud that didn't squirm or squeak or wake up. And in the wild only one or two of those hatchlings will actually end up as a big old ten-foot lazy eyed croc basking on a sandbank provoking reptilian shudders in the back of a tourist brain.
So here's to the one that makes it. And here's to the hope that if many make it, they don't all hatch at once, coz that's gonna be some mean-ass feeding we'll have to do.
Anyone know of a professional egg-sitter I can borrow for a while?
Throughout my childhood it was my sister who was the nurturing one when it came to taking in orphan creatures. My attention span lasted as long as the pull of the next chapter of my book. I was more interested in the adventures of Dick, George and Timothy the Dog. [Aaah, that George, who was 'almost as good as a boy'. I think I fancied that George. but this is another story]. Miranda, on the other hand, could wake up at hourly intervals throughout the night to feed some see-through pink squidget that couldn't even squawk. The squirrels, the mice, the tiny birds with their stumpy wings. Many of them didn't even last long enough to get hair, feathers or a personality. But she persisted. The milk in the eye dropper, the pro-nutro mush when they got a bit older.
And the heartache. Many mornings she woke up to a small corpse in the shoebox next to the bed. Or worse, the almighty Fang, our domestic cat plucked them right off her shoulder. Her anguished cries might have caught my focus for a minute or two, she may have got a grunt of sympathy for me before I was back in Narnia, or Nancy Drew land. But sure enough a week or two later, it was "oh, sweeeeeeeet" and another little fuzz-less mite was getting the glass dropper treatment. And every now and then, one would make it through to adulthood and what a fine companion she would then have. I'm thinking of the bigger ones of course - the cuddly porcupine, the hotbodied warthogs, or frenetic banded mongoose.
I feel a bit like that now. I have at least 6 proposals for theatre or book projects that will happen if I can just get the universal teat full enough for one of them to grow a bit of fur. Aaah, that teat.
A friend in Cape Town said that he admired fundraisers because they divert global funds to humanity's highest and noblest ideals. Mmm, lovely thought. And then there's Shri Shri Ravi Shankir, the Art of Living guru's famous response to one of his participants who asked "But where will the money come from?" when they were discussing a new project. He looked at her with his benificent smile and said "From wherever it is at the moment!"
Of course. So lets see, the wish list. There's the Great Walk. To get all the local and international organisations that work for causes like human trafficking, child slavery, etc etc, and do a long walk from Ujiji to Bagamoyo (the slave caravan route of old), culminating in a street carnival at the Bagamoyo arts festival, where each organisation has its own float, and then there's and a performance of Susi and Chuma, a half play I'm writing about Livingstone's loyal friends and pall bearers and their long walk to Bagamoyo...
Then there's the Zambezi play - a visual spectacular with puppets and physical theatre that tells the tale of a girl's journey down the Zambezi from source to ocean...
Then of course there's the play I've just finished writing. Anyone want to sponsor a production of the first ever bush memory mystery play?
Oh and don't forget the children's story, the organisational development self-help book, the Atlantis project - a movie about women who believe they are reincarnated scientists from Atlantis come to save the planet...
Last but not least there's the Inanna myth contemporary opera, this one on its way to a stage near you by, oh I don't know, around 2011...
Now of course, more pressing than ever, a new one - workshops on xenophobia for reintegration programmes in Cape Town and Joburg...
No, ideas are not the problem. Capitalism is. And the uncanny lack of patrons knocking at my door. Damn.
Writing proposals is a curious activity. Its writing the fiction of fiction. A document describing a document that doesn't yet exist, but will, if you (o esteemed producer/corporate social responsibility officer /gatekeeper of public funds) can just bear to part with the $10 000 needed to make it all happen.
Its like hatching crocodiles. Another activity Miranda was far better at than I. All these fierce little lives waiting inside the shell for the squeaks which cue them to start busting out. One squeak wakes up the next which wakes up the next. Squeak squawk from the first little slippery leathery beast. Hold your breath. Silence. Wait. Then a quiver from the shell next door and that one starts to press his shell-breaking tooth against his eggshell walls. Next thing there's a whole seething squawking slippery mass of baby crocodiles nudging and snapping and squirming, blissfully unaware of a future date when their sexy skins will house crisp dollar bills and elegant Italian feet.
But for every writhing snapper there's a silent egg. A dud that didn't squirm or squeak or wake up. And in the wild only one or two of those hatchlings will actually end up as a big old ten-foot lazy eyed croc basking on a sandbank provoking reptilian shudders in the back of a tourist brain.
So here's to the one that makes it. And here's to the hope that if many make it, they don't all hatch at once, coz that's gonna be some mean-ass feeding we'll have to do.
Anyone know of a professional egg-sitter I can borrow for a while?
Sunday, June 8, 2008
southeaster
When i left cape town in 2002 people were aghast that i could even consider exchanging the mountain for the minedumps.
Trying to cheer me up, a friend's husband said - "they say its not that bad." (in joburg, he meant).
"There's, um.. there's a lot of benefits. Like... the absence of the south easter."
For a long time after i left cape town i would get spatial memories that would revisit randomly. I often get these. in the morning sitting meditation - a sudden rush, i'm beamed to a certain section of street in mowbray. why that particular street corner, i can't tell. Or a moment outside the baxter theatre, stepping on acorns. always sudden and mundane memories, never the splendour of the mountain, the magnificent talking rocks of Llandudno (they do talk, they ooooze, those rocks, you must just listen carefully. they have a lot to say). just the memory of a gaaitjie's call outside chippies in obz. or a wet stink near the station, those steps up on the civic centre side as you go towards the taxi rank. Being blown down strand street with my sister, where we literally had to hold on to the poles coz the south easter was blowing so hard we couldn't be upright.
Ok some of those memories are more dramatic. The particularly inclement august of 2002, i was driving the red hilux while B was in Joburg as a migrant labourer and I faced down two magnificent storms all on my own. One, i drove right into after a late shift at the fancy restaurant - 2 am and bone ache weary but i had to get home. As i hit the M5 the sky was whipping itself up into histrionics. Even in the hilux which usually felt like a tank, i was vulnerable and scared as vasco da bloody gama in his wooden ship. Bushes on the roadside churning, and i didn't know whether to pull off and wait or drive on through it.
Another night - I was spoiling for a fight with the elements and deliberately drove out into a monster storm. the rain on the road swirling like mosquito nets caught in a demon ceiling fan. I love the way something in you responds to the sky on a night like that. Come and get it!! Whatcha lookin at mr raincloud? and oh how you are humbled. seconds into driving up boyes drive my windscreen got such a thrashing i couldn't see a damn thing and the one thing i really couldn't do was turn around. without hurtling down a precipice.
From the relative tranquillity of a highveld winter, even though its bone breaking frosty some mornings, its easy to long for a cape storm. and from the warmth of my cousins's gorgeous bed right now i'm loving the sound of that pummeling wind. aaah, bring it on.
All my ranting and raving about hospitality the last weeks, i realise I'm better at giving it than receiving it. I loathe asking for lifts and being reliant on people. but everyone has been so kind, feeding and lifting me. and wine really does taste better in cape town, i can safely say i've done enough tests to establish a broad range of results. oh, except the control tests. umm.
People come here for the wine, the mountain, the penguins, robben island, clifton, oh there's so much to do. Me, i like the weather. And maybe as the global climate brews its menopausal changes, we can consider weather tourism as the next big thing. Cyclones in cypress, brow blisters in botswana, wild winds in the western seas. Bring your own titanium umbrella, your teflon anorak. Don't forget your snorkle.
Well its late and tomorrow its mine dumps instead of this sculpted bit of rock exerting its magic pull (which i've discovered is much improved if you just rehydrate and keep drinking water!).
thank you so much my cape town hosts. when the wind blows you north, you are most welcome.
x
Trying to cheer me up, a friend's husband said - "they say its not that bad." (in joburg, he meant).
"There's, um.. there's a lot of benefits. Like... the absence of the south easter."
For a long time after i left cape town i would get spatial memories that would revisit randomly. I often get these. in the morning sitting meditation - a sudden rush, i'm beamed to a certain section of street in mowbray. why that particular street corner, i can't tell. Or a moment outside the baxter theatre, stepping on acorns. always sudden and mundane memories, never the splendour of the mountain, the magnificent talking rocks of Llandudno (they do talk, they ooooze, those rocks, you must just listen carefully. they have a lot to say). just the memory of a gaaitjie's call outside chippies in obz. or a wet stink near the station, those steps up on the civic centre side as you go towards the taxi rank. Being blown down strand street with my sister, where we literally had to hold on to the poles coz the south easter was blowing so hard we couldn't be upright.
Ok some of those memories are more dramatic. The particularly inclement august of 2002, i was driving the red hilux while B was in Joburg as a migrant labourer and I faced down two magnificent storms all on my own. One, i drove right into after a late shift at the fancy restaurant - 2 am and bone ache weary but i had to get home. As i hit the M5 the sky was whipping itself up into histrionics. Even in the hilux which usually felt like a tank, i was vulnerable and scared as vasco da bloody gama in his wooden ship. Bushes on the roadside churning, and i didn't know whether to pull off and wait or drive on through it.
Another night - I was spoiling for a fight with the elements and deliberately drove out into a monster storm. the rain on the road swirling like mosquito nets caught in a demon ceiling fan. I love the way something in you responds to the sky on a night like that. Come and get it!! Whatcha lookin at mr raincloud? and oh how you are humbled. seconds into driving up boyes drive my windscreen got such a thrashing i couldn't see a damn thing and the one thing i really couldn't do was turn around. without hurtling down a precipice.
From the relative tranquillity of a highveld winter, even though its bone breaking frosty some mornings, its easy to long for a cape storm. and from the warmth of my cousins's gorgeous bed right now i'm loving the sound of that pummeling wind. aaah, bring it on.
All my ranting and raving about hospitality the last weeks, i realise I'm better at giving it than receiving it. I loathe asking for lifts and being reliant on people. but everyone has been so kind, feeding and lifting me. and wine really does taste better in cape town, i can safely say i've done enough tests to establish a broad range of results. oh, except the control tests. umm.
People come here for the wine, the mountain, the penguins, robben island, clifton, oh there's so much to do. Me, i like the weather. And maybe as the global climate brews its menopausal changes, we can consider weather tourism as the next big thing. Cyclones in cypress, brow blisters in botswana, wild winds in the western seas. Bring your own titanium umbrella, your teflon anorak. Don't forget your snorkle.
Well its late and tomorrow its mine dumps instead of this sculpted bit of rock exerting its magic pull (which i've discovered is much improved if you just rehydrate and keep drinking water!).
thank you so much my cape town hosts. when the wind blows you north, you are most welcome.
x
Thursday, June 5, 2008
Addictions
I'm having a very full week in Cape Town, so nothing new from these fingers ... this may be cheating, to post an old piece like this, but its something I wrote when I was last living here (some years ago) and it still feels relevant. It was published on planet waves, one of my favourite sites. http://www.planetwaves.net. It's part of a bigger series of pieces of speculative fictions.
Here goes then:
Addictions
Addictions creep in on us like ants in the night. Red ants which give the signal to bite only when they have the body covered. We used to put ash from the fire around our house at night, to seal ourselves off from the red ants. But now it is years later, and I understand that we invited them in. They came to us to show us, how we were. How our gin cravings and our next cigarette cravings choke us in the night. I don’t want to wait, for some stranger to approve the scripts I write before they are shown to the world. We don’t want to wait, for the black jacketed white men of the world to hear us, and pull us through their paradigms. We know the world is dying. We can hear it in our coffee cups in the morning. We can hear it in the crackle of our cigarettes. We know that we don’t want to be smokers. But we want the next cigarette. Like the CEO who knows, he doesn’t want his children to inherit a charcoal world. But he wants the next deal. He wants it bad, like the red ants want our blood in the night. My dreams eat me. I see my river, choked with plastic bags. I see the paper, reamed and jacketed, trees shredded and refined into black and white environmental reports that doom our forests, our rivers, our stormy skies. Or those other skies, that seem to have no storm, no fight left in them. Crops, swindled by rain that was supposed to come from somewhere further north, only it can’t come from there any more, because the trees that were there have given up the fight. I reach for another puff of a tobacco wish fulfillment, and know that all across the peninsular, and further upwards into the desert lands and beyond, cars fart their defeated sighs, factories squeeze diseased feces into the night. And conscience attacks all at once, like red ants in the dark I see the children’s dreams, their words being neatly sewn up by the voices of their elders, who have left them no hope to speak out. No hope of being heard. The image of elephants running, one of the saddest sights of the world. Elephants running with their tails shrunk against their sphincters. Knowing the suffocation of a constricted landscape. Sighing their deep infra sound sighs, hearing throttle engines and mistaking that sound for the throb of machine guns. In the south they are waiting for thunder. For the comfort of the rains their grandmothers had. When it comes, their crops shudder to the ground, gone. In the north, the rains don’t seem to stop. The weather doesn’t play along, in the capitalist game show. Wishes don’t turn to water. Water can’t be wasted. So even tears don’t come, and parents console themselves that at least the children have stopped crying. In the middle of the night, a marketing manager for Coca Cola chokes on his tie in his dream. He sees how tons of water are mixed, every day with tons of sugar, and how that sugar was made by thirsty reeds pulling water from the earth’s secret savings. He wakes in the night, thirsty from the wine of the night before. He stumbles from his bed as his wife is sleeping, he turns on the tap, and water flows from it, soothing his mouth and his smoking brain. He goes back to sleep, and in the morning his coffee tastes the same again. As he gets into his car to get to work, he notices for the first time the small shrub next to his car. How beautiful it is, with perfect independent leaves. He remembers how he felt when he saw his daughter’s small fingers for the first time. He makes a note to find out what species it is. How it got there. How it continues to exist, so miraculously, while he ploughs through traffic. At work he is consoled: his company is launching a new social responsibility programme to alleviate poverty and provide education for young people. Reaching into the community. This is what makes it worthwhile, staying where he is. Providing meaning in his day. By the time he comes home in the evening, and his wife is distant, and his son’s asthma seems to have improved, he knows, he knows that he is making a difference. He’ll give up smoking soon. He can see it is doing no good. He is ok, we are all doing ok, he tells her. We are doing ok.
Here goes then:
Addictions
Addictions creep in on us like ants in the night. Red ants which give the signal to bite only when they have the body covered. We used to put ash from the fire around our house at night, to seal ourselves off from the red ants. But now it is years later, and I understand that we invited them in. They came to us to show us, how we were. How our gin cravings and our next cigarette cravings choke us in the night. I don’t want to wait, for some stranger to approve the scripts I write before they are shown to the world. We don’t want to wait, for the black jacketed white men of the world to hear us, and pull us through their paradigms. We know the world is dying. We can hear it in our coffee cups in the morning. We can hear it in the crackle of our cigarettes. We know that we don’t want to be smokers. But we want the next cigarette. Like the CEO who knows, he doesn’t want his children to inherit a charcoal world. But he wants the next deal. He wants it bad, like the red ants want our blood in the night. My dreams eat me. I see my river, choked with plastic bags. I see the paper, reamed and jacketed, trees shredded and refined into black and white environmental reports that doom our forests, our rivers, our stormy skies. Or those other skies, that seem to have no storm, no fight left in them. Crops, swindled by rain that was supposed to come from somewhere further north, only it can’t come from there any more, because the trees that were there have given up the fight. I reach for another puff of a tobacco wish fulfillment, and know that all across the peninsular, and further upwards into the desert lands and beyond, cars fart their defeated sighs, factories squeeze diseased feces into the night. And conscience attacks all at once, like red ants in the dark I see the children’s dreams, their words being neatly sewn up by the voices of their elders, who have left them no hope to speak out. No hope of being heard. The image of elephants running, one of the saddest sights of the world. Elephants running with their tails shrunk against their sphincters. Knowing the suffocation of a constricted landscape. Sighing their deep infra sound sighs, hearing throttle engines and mistaking that sound for the throb of machine guns. In the south they are waiting for thunder. For the comfort of the rains their grandmothers had. When it comes, their crops shudder to the ground, gone. In the north, the rains don’t seem to stop. The weather doesn’t play along, in the capitalist game show. Wishes don’t turn to water. Water can’t be wasted. So even tears don’t come, and parents console themselves that at least the children have stopped crying. In the middle of the night, a marketing manager for Coca Cola chokes on his tie in his dream. He sees how tons of water are mixed, every day with tons of sugar, and how that sugar was made by thirsty reeds pulling water from the earth’s secret savings. He wakes in the night, thirsty from the wine of the night before. He stumbles from his bed as his wife is sleeping, he turns on the tap, and water flows from it, soothing his mouth and his smoking brain. He goes back to sleep, and in the morning his coffee tastes the same again. As he gets into his car to get to work, he notices for the first time the small shrub next to his car. How beautiful it is, with perfect independent leaves. He remembers how he felt when he saw his daughter’s small fingers for the first time. He makes a note to find out what species it is. How it got there. How it continues to exist, so miraculously, while he ploughs through traffic. At work he is consoled: his company is launching a new social responsibility programme to alleviate poverty and provide education for young people. Reaching into the community. This is what makes it worthwhile, staying where he is. Providing meaning in his day. By the time he comes home in the evening, and his wife is distant, and his son’s asthma seems to have improved, he knows, he knows that he is making a difference. He’ll give up smoking soon. He can see it is doing no good. He is ok, we are all doing ok, he tells her. We are doing ok.
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
its the mountain, mama
Have you noticed how some people always need an alibi to excuse the work they have done?
"I'm sorry its all I could manage - there's so much going on at the moment"
"I'm really not coping at the moment - i should have spent more time on this - please understand..."
"I'm afraid I haven't quite cracked it, but...take a look and, of course I can make any changes..."
the implication always being that the work done is not quite up to scratch. that it could've been better, if not for x, y and z. which all conspired to keep you from your best.
hmm. Some people.
Why can't the work just be what it is - you did what you could with the circumstances being what they are. It might withstand criticism, it might improve with a bit of tweaking - but its the best you did and that is simply good enough.
some people, i tell you.
like the ones who say "i hardly touched my books" before the exam but they always get a first class pass anyway.
or the actress who says, "oh no, you weren't at last night's show were you? I was so off last night."
eish. those people.
What does it really signify though, the alibi? that everything you ever do is not perfect, that if it wasn't for circumstances you would just be so much better, at everything. life gets in the way of perfection. so you can never just be - good enough. but isn't there an inverted arrogance in this?
isn't the implication - "i'm actually much better than this, just that you are not getting to see it [right now, because of x, y and z]".
huh. some people.
I don't consider myself a designer anymore. its been at least 3 years since my last professional job. I'm rusty. my drawings are as stiff as my neglected hamstrings. I'm feeling so damn full of self questioning and "i could've but..." I don't trust myself to make the right decisions on this job. Quite honestly, I'd rather be doing things I do better.
But I do have an alibi. It's cape town. Its that damn mountain. I casually mentioned that since I stepped off the plane I got a couple of notches stupider, and my brain feels like its got a hazy fuzz around it. Like i forgot to eat lunch. That feeling. The one that makes you drive like a doos and not be able to do simple arithmetic. or spell it, for that matter. The cousin says its a known phenomenon and that when she goes to Joburg she's definitely more switched on. That the mountain's magnetism keeps everyone slightly fuzzy.
There you go. that's why.
Normally i would do a very good design job. you know, back in my day i was quite a hotshot. i made killer sets. I used to get all the jobs in Grahamstown, you know, back when i was the er, only designer there. If it wasn't for this damn mountain and the fact that i'm so rusty, i would kick this job's ass. I would.
It's just that -
Eish, I tell you. Some people.
"I'm sorry its all I could manage - there's so much going on at the moment"
"I'm really not coping at the moment - i should have spent more time on this - please understand..."
"I'm afraid I haven't quite cracked it, but...take a look and, of course I can make any changes..."
the implication always being that the work done is not quite up to scratch. that it could've been better, if not for x, y and z. which all conspired to keep you from your best.
hmm. Some people.
Why can't the work just be what it is - you did what you could with the circumstances being what they are. It might withstand criticism, it might improve with a bit of tweaking - but its the best you did and that is simply good enough.
some people, i tell you.
like the ones who say "i hardly touched my books" before the exam but they always get a first class pass anyway.
or the actress who says, "oh no, you weren't at last night's show were you? I was so off last night."
eish. those people.
What does it really signify though, the alibi? that everything you ever do is not perfect, that if it wasn't for circumstances you would just be so much better, at everything. life gets in the way of perfection. so you can never just be - good enough. but isn't there an inverted arrogance in this?
isn't the implication - "i'm actually much better than this, just that you are not getting to see it [right now, because of x, y and z]".
huh. some people.
I don't consider myself a designer anymore. its been at least 3 years since my last professional job. I'm rusty. my drawings are as stiff as my neglected hamstrings. I'm feeling so damn full of self questioning and "i could've but..." I don't trust myself to make the right decisions on this job. Quite honestly, I'd rather be doing things I do better.
But I do have an alibi. It's cape town. Its that damn mountain. I casually mentioned that since I stepped off the plane I got a couple of notches stupider, and my brain feels like its got a hazy fuzz around it. Like i forgot to eat lunch. That feeling. The one that makes you drive like a doos and not be able to do simple arithmetic. or spell it, for that matter. The cousin says its a known phenomenon and that when she goes to Joburg she's definitely more switched on. That the mountain's magnetism keeps everyone slightly fuzzy.
There you go. that's why.
Normally i would do a very good design job. you know, back in my day i was quite a hotshot. i made killer sets. I used to get all the jobs in Grahamstown, you know, back when i was the er, only designer there. If it wasn't for this damn mountain and the fact that i'm so rusty, i would kick this job's ass. I would.
It's just that -
Eish, I tell you. Some people.
Monday, June 2, 2008
postcard
I'm in Cape Town for the week. I'll be staying with my dear cuz as of tonight, on her incredibly comfortable bed with her magnificent view. I'll be creating the set for a play that Yvette is directing for the festival. hmmm. A bit daunted by this as I am very rusty with design stuff. Ah weell.
so i may post dribs and drabs but not sure what my schedule will allow.
last night kind P put me up, which was a strain for her I know coz her dog was ailing. Badly. But lots of liver and water and he seems to have turned the corner in the night.
she also has a pretty impressive view.
thanks P!
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