Increase your vocabulary

My friend Ilse gave me a book to read : "Little Ice Cream Boy" by Jacques Pouw. Sounds quite innocent, doesn't it. Or maybe slightly pedo. But it is none of the two - it retells the story of of an Apartheid era assassin, now sitting in maximum security prison and serving three life sentences.
Even though the book is billed as being a novel, I understand it to be based on the life of Ferdi Barnard, who killed the academic David Webster, and was part of the Civil Co-Operation Bureau (CCB).

The book reminds me of Al Lovejoy's "Acid Alex" because both tell real-life stories about people and their actions that I could never have imagined. Both Gideon Goosen, the main character in Little Ice Cream Boy, and Alex from Acid Alex live in a world I would not be able to understand: violence, drugs, sex and rape intertwine to form the basis of their seedy existence. Life and death means nothing, it all revolves around the next hit, be it snorting coke up your nose or beating someone almost to death. Where does such violence come from?

Gideon kills a brothel-owner because he got the prossie Gideon likes pregnant. But not only does he beat him to a pulp, he empties his entire magazine into him. He flies into a rage and enjoys hurting people physically. He even tells of how killing someone is the greatest aphrodisiac.

I know this world exists, but I cannot imagine it. A world where it is normal to spend your weekend in a brothel banging under-age girls, smuggled in from who knows where, while you have a wife and kids at home. And then, Monday morning, you return to your job as a police officer , having been absolved of your crimes by chilling in the church for an hour on Sundays.

The idea of killing someone is so absurd to me. How can you? I can comprehend self-defence or it being an accident, but planning on doing it, I don't know how anyone could do that. Stalking someone like prey and then blasting them with a shotgun when they leave for work. And then just tuning around and calmly walking away. It is very strange to think people exist to whom life is not sacred.

The book was a page-turner but also very difficult because I could not relate to the main character at all : yes he comes from an abusive family, yes he has dodgy friends, but how can every choice you make be wrong. I mean, really, at some point you have to say to yourself : I choose not to fuck up my life further. At the end Gideon tells his friend to turn state witness in order to save himself. This was the only scene where he seemed human, because he is willing to sacrifice himself for his friend. But on the other hand, Goosen was going down in any case, so it probably didn't really matter.

Also, the novel vastly increased my Afrikaans dirty vocabulary:


groeps-woeps : group sex
bosbefok: people who suffer from post-traumatic stress after having fought in the Angola/Namibia border war
draadtrek : masturbate
fok-kop:  I would have thought it to be a fuck-head, but apparently its a fuck-hill
gabba: a friend
genotgrot=slymslot= well, hmm, let's say a woman's lady-parts
pomping= procreating
sif: I always took it to just mean disgusting, but it comes from syphilis. who knew?!
kleinkoppie: male sexual organ

Read the book. Not only will you be able to swear like a skewetiet spoedvark  but the story is actually quite interesting as well.


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Lessons Learned

happy birthday carol

I'm part of couchsurfing ( if you don't know what it is, check out their website here and join in :) and a few weeks ago I received a message from a young man in Brazil, Walter, who asked me and many other around the world to send him a short video with the message "Happy Birthday" for his girlfriend Carol.

Check out the result here:

Even though I look slightly spastic, I am quite happy about sharing a moment with so many people from around the world :)

Pretoria Tea Party

Today is such a rainy day that I procrastinated successfully and made myself an enormous pot of tea. Pity its heat did not reach my feet.

My grandmother showed me how to make tea since she drinks about 10 litres of the stuff per day. My urinary tract is cleansed every time I visit her because of all the tea I have to drink. I like the ritual of
tea: making it, sitting together and chatting or enjoying it while watching Oprah. When you visit people, they always offer a cup of tea. Such a friendly thing, tea.

So, here is Ouma's way of brewing the perfect cup:
Firstly boil your kettle. Only boil as much water as you'll need.
When your kettle has clicked to signal that it is done, add some hot water to your tea pot to warm it up. Swish the water around a bit until the pot feels warm. Throw the water out.
Take your teabags and stuff them into your pot. Pour hot water on them. Wait a couple of minutes.
Enjoy.

My mom just brought me another cup of tea. Vanilla with honey. Lovely :)

via geekologie

for the people who can't get the ratio right

via lovemademedoit

true story

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Lessons Learned

Don't forget to breathe

Left arm, right arm, breathe. Left arm, right arm, breathe.
There is nothing else. Just me and the water. The repetitive motion of being half submerged and half above the water makes me forget that there is a life that I should be living and things I should be doing.

Every time I come up for air, I can briefly hear techno beats and weights falling and people pounding on the imaginary pavement of the treadmill and people battling uphill and people trying to be ideal.
Every time I am submerged, there is nothing but the water.

People tend to paddle through the pool for a lap or two and then leave, thinking they did something. Perhaps they just cannot swim. I prefer lying on my back and just kicking, kicking, kicking. Kicking underwater. None of that juvenile splashing. I am a slow torpedo heading nowhere. Lane for lane. A sail boat without a captain. Just me and my thoughts, and after a while, just me and nothingness.

In water I do not exist really. There is no countdown, telling me I have to suffer for another 15.34 minutes. There is no machine asking about my age and my weight. There are no other people. There are no annoying "That's Not My Name" remixes. I like that. I like gliding without purpose. I like floating without destination. I like not feeling tired of SuperSport 1.

I would like to be a killer whale. No one to hunt me since I would do the hunting. And I'd be in the water forever. Even in death I would just breathe one last time and sink away. Moreover, I could stay submerged for a lot longer. And I would be a lot more powerful. Those sharks would have nothing on me. Come on, Great White. I see you at the end of the pool. You can't hurt me. I am a killer bigger than you are.

As a killer whale, I would never have to be nice to anyone. I would never have to worry about their feelings. I would just go around killing seals and porpoises and being all gangster.

I just like water. There is nothing threatening about it. Except having to drink it.

Hail

I would really like to go to the Arctic Circle. The last time I checked a two-week cruise set you back around $25 000. So maybe in a year or 20.   

It hailed today and I got embarrassingly exited about it. 
Look at Spitzi. He has to come along.

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It's 21.30 and I'm exhausted

Perhaps I took on too much this year. Perhaps I just can do it all.
Meanwhile, this is what I'm rocking to:

So just shut the f*ck up, you're starting to piss me off.


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Take it as a sign

from the cool hunter

iLife

Sometimes I wish there was an iLife app and I were an iPhone and the application would run my world for me. It would calculate the best possible outcome of every situation, every encounter, every friendship, every relationship, every decision I would ever have to face.

It would be the ideal Life ( iLife, get it?! I feel so smart right now).

But then again, if everything is ideal, it is mediocre. There is nothing special. Everyone lives. Happily?Unhappily? No, it would be a median of joy across the board. I am moderately happy. I am content.

If you had the choice of living in a constant state of contentment for the rest of your life, or live like Sisyphus, pushing the boulder up the hill only to see it rolling down again, what would you choose?

In  "The Myth of Sisyphus", Camus asked the question that if one acknowledges how futile life actually is, should one commit suicide right then and there, because after all you have no influence over it, or accept its absurdity and push that boulder around forever.

This reminds me of the part in Olive Schreiner's "Story of an African Farm", where the hunter has fleeting sighting of the bird Truth, and spends the rest of his life searching for it, leaving the Valley of Superstition (I think it was, could be wrong here) to find it. And only when he is taking his final breaths, only after much suffering, does one feather from Truth fall on his chest.

Initially I thought, what a stupid story, but is rather beautiful.
You can get it for mahala here.

So forget the iLife app. Stupid me. Stupid idea.
Suffer people! Suffer in order to appreciate true moments of happiness in between the mediocrity of the everyday, and suffer to be able to say later on that you have truly lived.



Oh joke of the day : what is green and blue and hates gingers?



The world.

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Changes

At the gym they changed the changing rooms. The women are in the men's quarters and the men get to enjoy separate showers for a day. I don't know why they do this, but it happens about twice a year. Perhaps it is to shake things up a little. Too see how many people will walk into the wrong change-room out of habit.

So after pretending to work out and sculpt my muscles, I head back to the changing rooms. In the ladies' one, the main room is separated into segments by placing the lockers in an E shape. So if you want to, no one can see you go from sweaty to sexy. Also, there are individual showers with swing doors, so even there you are only visible as a shadow through the opaque plastic-glass. 

The men's changing rooms are vastly different : the man room is the same size as the women's room, but the lockers are all pressed to the walls, and the benches are in the middle of the room, so there is nowhere to hide. Further, the showers are basically one room with ten shower heads. It is like prison. Or my idea of showers in prison. 

So sneaked in and saw a handful of elderly ladies lounging around on the benches, showing off sagging flesh and humanity at its barest. Because I was clothes and wore a bra, I felt very superior. I discarded my clothes quietly in the farthest corner whilst draping my enormous towel around me and managed to constantly hide the middle square of my body from their view. I did this to not make them jealous, you know, I did not want them to feel bad for not looking as smoking hot as me. No, in truth, I just don't like being naked. Especially not in front of people. 

The African ladies seem to have no problem with this: they will parade around their shape, spending ages lathering on different creams and wrapping their bodies in cellophane. Then they will again spend hours sweating naked in the sauna or the steam room, sitting on the tiniest towels. 

I admire this pride : to be comfortable in one's body, to be able to walk around in the nude, unaffraid of judgement. Maybe that is the irony: in youth skin and flesh is still usually firm, but one is unsure of its attraction and thus tries to hide it. In old age one has lived enough not to care about the bodies changes, even when everything droops and gravity is proven true. 

So there I am, cloaked like Gandalf in my grey towel, shuffling stealthily to the showers, where to my surpise I only see the one room. Thank the higher powers I was the only one there, so I quickly got clean and enrobed myself in the towel again. 

When I returned to the main room, I witnessed a most positive moment : 

an older white lady, presumably in her seventies, hunched over, with short dark grey hair and a face like a boxer approached a couple of black ladies, getting dressed to go back to work. She was walking towards them in her humongous white bloomers, with sagging flesh oozing out of them . 

She then asked one of the two ladies to put cream on her back. A simple thing. The lady obliged kindly and smeared the cream all over, even massaging it in. I, with my judgement, would have been disgusted by this task, this idea of rubbing old skin and muscles to weak to hold the old lady up straight. I would have done it out of courtesy, but would have resented her for asking me to do such a task. And I would have slapped the stuff on in seconds, trying to minimise the amount of contact my hands would have with her back.    

Then I realized my arrogance and admired both women greatly : the one for embracing her body and the other for not caring what that body looked like, for being willing to perform a small task in order to provide some happiness to a stranger. They both taught me that humanity has different forms and that a mindset corrupted by Cosmopolitan and Sports Illustrated ideals of what one should look like needs to change quickly. 

So I dropped my towel.  



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