my whole wide world

Tamara is feeling extravagent.
Tamara is cracked wide open.
Tamara has not been on facebook for months and suddenly she is all over it, spilling.
Tamara is swelling, surging, cresting, breaking with metaphors that potentially only surfers understand. And she's not even a surfer. Oh you don't have to be a surfer. You just have to be a partial sideline witness to...
oh bollocks. Let me just -

I am an aunty. An Onty, as they say here. My beautiful sister, of thetimesofmiranda, has made herself sacrosanct to that ordinary miracle - the giving of life.
Damn. She has pushed a small (quite big actually) live human creature ( I saw it. IT WAS HUGE. [and very cute]) through her vagina. Seriously. I am not joking. She did this. I was not there. To witness all the things she will ( I hope) blog about in due course. But bloody hell. I am not the first person to be struck dumb by this ordinary miracle. Her husband, for one, looked kind of - well - I've seen that look before. And it wasn't because the lions lost so badly to the boks. (with a face saving comeback today). He is a mensch tho. He hung in there. No fainting. They didn't have to call me. Tho I wanted them to - for what? why? no, I only. No. it was all. It happened as it should. Oh my poor mother, smsing through the night. what - how? now? what? when? Oh! oh bollocks. I answered the phone in my sleep (yes, i did eventually sleep, through my CAPS LOCK smsing to her man ARE YOU SURE I SHOULDN"T be THeRE? receiving his calm No, its ok, all good...responses and then finally, thank thank - yes, oh thank - janelle and i gmailing each other furiously should i be there should i
phew
Mark at 3;40 am its a girl - (yes I thought that, tho only this morning, before that i thought it was a he, in the bath this morning i thought it - of course its a she silly) its all ok she is its all its ok sleep now its a girl its a girl its a girl
And -
And -
I am learning new things about love.
I am.
This feeble heart of mine.

Heh heh.



Seriously though. Miranda will probably say things like - oh I know all mothers have said this before - and she will try to not be a gushing new mom who is a blogger mom who is all full of fuzziness for the babyness.

But just so that you know. And she may be mad at me because I am stealing the gap before she gets home and cozy with her laptop and can say about -

oh man.
Just so you know. She truly IS the most beautiful small piece of angel-mail that ever came to the southern hemisphere. (i can't speak for up there) She is so cute.

Assertiveness training (if that's ok with you)

"I'm doing stress management and assertiveness training next week. A corporate gig."
My sister nearly choked on her soup.
"You? Assertiveness? What did they say? Hey - you're going to do this assertiveness training next week. Without pay. And you just nodded, ok, sure.... right?"

Um. Something like that. No. I am getting paid. Really. Just that, they sold it as an assertiveness course but its not geared for that. Its a stress course. So please just - make it into an assertiveness course, whatever, just, you know, throw in a couple of extra exercises...
Er, ok. Sure, Whatever you say.

Stress management, me?
She who has been eating her lunch at 4 pm because she forgot/ didn't have time/was rushing out the house and left the lunchbox on the washing machine...
Driving and putting on lipstick in the rearview mirror because she's late but she just can't arrive looking like, well, like that.
That funny feeling of - whats that brushing up against my earlobe? Oh, its my shoulder.

Yeah. Right.
But it was fun.
Me and nine stressed employees in a training room. I made them dance, I made them meditate, I made them breathe, I made them look at the deep beliefs underlying their stressors.

It's always the same with those corporate gigs. I gird myself for a long drudge of hard work. The ennui of powerpoint and melamine desks and carpeted rooms with canned air and poor coffee. But inevitably, you get to play with an interesting bunch of real South African DNA. On this gig, there was the poor-me desperately unassertive pet-lover, grappling with big family issues. There was the balding SA version of Ricky Gervais who made sweeping comments, old South Africa style about Zulus being a war-like nation (this was somehow a stressor for him, I didn't quite get why). There was the giggly make-a-joke-out-of-everything woman who is traumatised by Joburg crime and has a desperate need to control her environment and all the people in it. The shy first-born in a family of 9 siblings (father has two wives) who feels burdened by the need to bring his dispersed family together. The just-out-of-varsity bright young thing who is just biding her time in this job. The hardened credit-controller who thinks she has no issues with assertiveness, its everyone around her who has the problem.

I love these courses. They are exhausting. But there's something very rewarding about working with the raw matter of peoples' problems, stresses and organisational miscomforts. And trying to release some of that stuff, and forge new pathways. A two day course is a pathetic amount of time to do this, of course, and next time, I'll politely say that I think it might be better if they tailor the course towards proper assertiveness exercises, instead of asking us to make the shoe fit, magically. If that's ok with them, of course.

Out of Office Autoreplies

My dear friend JC (you know who you are) recently introduced me to McSweeneys, that fantastic writing project/community, with their breathstopping beautiful periodical books. Where have they been all my life? In their own words,

"McSweeney's Quarterly Concern publishes on a roughly quarterly schedule, and we try to make each issue very different from the last. One issue came in a box, one was Icelandic, and one looks like a pile of mail. In all, we give you groundbreaking fiction and much more."

Straying from my task of hammering out a script ( I loathe writing to deadline it makes me cross and rebellious), I wandered onto the site and found these out of office autoreplies. by Jim Stallard.

I love them. And what a cunning and elegant way to disappear for a while, which is precisely where my fantasies have been this morning.

Let's see...
I will be at my desk from 5pm until 6pm daily, while you are stuck in traffic.

I will be out of the office until September when the weather improves. Please direct urgent enquiries to my therapist.

Students, I will not be responding to any more emails this month. I have already invoiced for the hours we spent together.

I will be out of the office indefinately until I become a successful fiction writer.

I have forsworn email, blogging, twittering and facebooking until further notice. Its a bet I have with my husband and a lot of money is at stake. Please don't tempt me.

I will be spending this week at the bottom of a well in the hope it makes me as good a writer as Murakami. You may send small folded paper aeroplanes down but please only do it at midday. Food parcels also welcome.

I will be by the bear cage at Joburg zoo for the remainder of this week. No sudden movements.

What's your out of office autoreply this week?

In the meantime

As you may or may not be aware, the purpose of Fleeing Muses was to create a song to beckon those long skirted ladies back to a place where I could hear them. I needed to seduce them, to make a leafy grotto where they might feel at home. A fireside where they could warm their toes and voices, sipping wine and teasing frogs and crickets with their song until their friends joined them. So that stories could begin to waft around me once more.

Well, for now at least, the libations have worked. Thanks to your generous participation in the endeavour, I might add. Your comments have been like compost, and I'm really grateful for that.

The channels are open it seems, and this time its a steady flow. Read all about the project I'm working on, its called Paydirt, and its a ... hmm, well for now I'm calling it a sort of immorality play about Joburg. Its a space to have fun. It opens in Grahamstown at the National Festival of the Arts in about a months time.

So please do pop over and share in the excitement.

The Other Side

You will forgive me.

I know you will.

I simply need some space.


The wedding, and all its attendant stories...it's just too fresh, too intimate, too close. For here, you know?


I had put so much on hold ("I'm too busy now, I'll do it after the wedding")
It stacked up against me, like the Odds.

And then I got the Odds. Tumbling down on top of me. (and everyone near me).

That to-do list grew teeth and a long, scaly tail. It lashed me.

Having so dutifully trained myself in the art of saying Yes, it seemed I had caught it like a swiney fever.

Tamara, will you supervise extra students?
YES!
Tamara, will you re-write this course for us?
I WILL!
By Friday?
YES!
(fool! you can't do that!) spake the sense voice. But sense-voice was in brackets. And smaller font.
Tamara, remember that proposal you promised us...
YES!
Can we have it this week?
YES!
Tamara, we start rehearsing our Grahamstown play this week, you know that don't you?
YES!

And - no-one warned me. That somehow, post-wedding, hubby and I would not so much wallow in blissful marital tranquillity as take the opportunity to Sort Through Our Issues. Once and for all. At high volume. Well, at least the passion is still there after 13 years of cohabitation. Of course, he had his reasons. (see above). Sense-voice outsourced itself to someone who cares. Sjoe, but a girl can hang on to her old issues if she tries, ne? And fight for them! Anyway, its over now, and peace has returned to the valley.

Baby steps, and I have managed to
a) clear the decks
b) remind myself of The Power of No (apologies to Mr Tolle)
c) forgive myself for not having sorted through over 1000 wedding photos
d) forgive myself for not having written up all the wedding anecdotes in champagne-witty prose
e) go to another friend's wedding in the Eastern Cape (a lekker skop it was too)
f) start the script for a certain extremely exciting project... a production called Paydirt. It's about being a Joburger. It premieres in Grahamstown at the National Festival of the Arts in a month. And we are blogging the whole thing here. Woooohooooooooo!!!

I'm back. Wedding stories must wait, I just can't put them here now, not yet. I need Distance. I need Assimilation. I know you understand. I just know it.

I am trying to learn something you see. I am trying to take things one at a time. I am trying to learn that the ability to multi-task is not equivalent to worthiness.

Oh look. Now I've gone and burned the supper.

bad headweather

Unseasonally severe head weather has interrupted our broadcasts. Random electric storms, hail, occasional patches of heavy fog and isolated incidents of flooding have displaced thousands of scheduled activities.

We resume service when calm returns to the hood. the head.

It was a dark and misty night

Being the perceptive readers you are, you will understand that if I now begin to spin tales of What Went Wrong, this is no reflection of me as a person somewhat prone to the half empty school of life. Nor is it proof that I have an obsessive tendency to hark back on regret and imperfection. Oh no. It is merely evidence of the fact that a good story is all about What Went Wrong. No one (really) needs hear the endless oohs and ahs of how wonderful it all was.

Truly, it was all splendid, and all was as it should be. But drama is not built on those details. Drama is about expectations thwarted, old schoolfriends biting down on old bitternesses, perfect plans being lanced by the fierce needle of, well, life, really. Drama is about the fly in the ointment, winking at you as it flaps its last oily flap. Drama is about breaking down a quarter of the way up the mountain on twos-day night and there's not a thing you can do about it. And lets face it, its drama you want, right?

You see, there was no margin for error. My to-dos seemed to bulk out and bristle at me every time I ticked one of them off. They'd just re-assemble themselves, multiplying, grinning, grasping at me. I'd slay one, and they'd breed. My notebook was full. The excel sheet long since abandoned. My house full of well meaning relatives who really wanted to help, if only I had time to sit for five minutes and think of a task for them. Or somehow, download the contents of my head into a verbal form that someone outside my head could understand.

And then I got a very bad hangover. Ha. I make it sound like someone mailed it to me in the post. Truly, my Pakistani Malawian Bridesmaid schoolfriend who now lives in the genteel countryside of Great Britain somewhere did a fabulous job of organising me a fine hen night. (I know. Apparently that's what it is called.) All was as it should be. Guffaw inducing gifts, my dear mates around one table, too much Cava. It was good. And like so many before us, we thought that More would make it Better. And it didn't. It made me lose my phone in my friend's couch and not know where it was the next day. It made me thirsty and barely able to concentrate for my very early hair appointment the next morning. It made me lose a day. That was Wednesday. Threesday. In the later part of that day, I fetched my mother-in-law-to-be from the airport. After dry retching in a toilet in Newtown, waiting for T to get to work (late) so that I could get my phone from her (do you have any idea how important your phone is on Threesday?), after remembering with faint horror that I had smoked a cigarette last night. After sitting in the bank for hours because I realised I had actually left my bank card in the machine the day before and, miraculously, someone had handed it in. I still got to the airport. I also fetched the wonderful P, a friend from Cape Town who was to be one of several wonderful wedding elves.

So on Thursday, the pressure was not only on it was unfeasible. The Plan was that on Thursday, mother and sister were to travel ahead in the slow Pajero, and we (bridesmaid and P and I) were to follow behind, leave my non 4x4 vehicle in Dullstroom and proceed together up the hill, with luggage and wine and mattresses and other very important bits and pieces. So that on Friday we would have the luxury of waking early, setting up the lanterns, picking some wild flowers, transferring the final playlists from computer to ipod, and just generally soaking up the marvels of the place we chose as our nuptual spot. Well.

A midday leaving would have been (just) feasible. But due to the lost Wednesday, and the fact that I still had ridiculous amounts of last minute emails to send, and B and I still had a last minute meeting with lawyer that morning, Thursday just didn't manage to make herself long enough for us. She tried. We actually were on the road before the bad traffic hour. But that didn't matter, because a truck had lost its load on the outskirts of town, and we waited. and waited. and waited. Tearing at my clutch in static traffic. And I won't tell you how fast I drove to get to Dullstroom because my mom is reading this, but when we finally got to her, in her patient Paj, it was late. Dark, late. No time for five intrepid women to be heading up a dark hill on a rocky road with a heavy load. But hey. Stubbornness is what we are made of, us Carr girls, and there were three of us. So off we went. In the valiant Paj.

We got over the railway tracks. Up the first bit of rutted nastiness. Up onto the stony section. And the Paj she coughed once, stalled and - that was it. Alternator. An old illness.

About 9, the moon is still high and perky. I phone Jacob the farm manager to see if he can bring the tractor down to tow us. Fine, in theory. But he is currently at the bottom of the hill and must walk up, to get the tractor to bring to us. This will add two hours. So we do the sensible thing - find the duvets, the bedding, the screw-top wine bottles. Its cold. we sip. we sleep.

Jacob arrives, in a tractor with no lights. The once-perky moon is slipping away and the hills are exhaling a soft, icy breath. The tractor can tow us, a bit. Slowly. I walk next to it with the torch, and easily keep apace. Its going to be slow work. Mom's windows are all misted up, she has to trust the pool of light that is my torch. But then there's a steep bit of road and big loose rocks, and just no way that the tractor will do it. We're too heavy. Jacob can't help. We must walk.

So, we grab the food we can - a couple of shopping packets in front of the car.. We can only find one torch, because everything was so hastily packed. Off we go.

Its 9km from the bottom of the hill to the farm, but in the dark and after the sleep, I have no sense of how far we are. We are a patient, strong lot of girls, really we are. My Ma, who's developing a bit of a nasty cough, my 6-month pregnant sister, my bridesmaid with bad shoes, and the silent stoic P, who recently did the Rwenzoris and doesn't have a complaint in her body. Except, did I mention that we are all pretty hungry, coz we ate badly that day, it being the day it was...

I don't know what time it was when we set out. But I do remember the moment we couldn't see the moon any more, when it sank below the last gleaming hill and the deep silence got dark. And we had our cellphones and a torch. And we trudged.

And trudged.

And at some point I thought of Xerxes and his crazy campaigns of war, pouring endless resources into a no-win ego-hole... we shall overcome. And I thought of British grit. And I thought of my grandfather, the walker. And I thought what on earth for?

But mostly we didn't think much, except (everynowandthen) about a Nice Cup of Tea and a crackling fire. Well, I did.

And then, as we reached the top, the part where the road splits and the one you have to take is the less travelled one, and its hard to spot - the mist came up. Like when you're a kid and they blindfold you and spin you around, and then you suddenly have no idea which way is left, right, up, down. The world just throws a cloth over your head and you have no idea which way to turn. And you're on a mountain and there's no moon and you know there are cliffs that you could tumble down...



It was 2 am when Tonglen opened her warm crackling loins for us (yip, that's what it felt like). And the aga was lit, and we had tea and we made heated up tinned sweetcorn and chickpeas and tomato salsa and I realised that the heavy item in the packet I had been carrying was not rice as I had thought but sugar. and we hadn't brought the bread.

And we slept soooo well.