Below my feet

Today is Heritage Day. Or Braai (= barbecue) Day, if you'd rather remember what is being advertised. I hope we share a greater heritage than just knowing how to stand around a fire and grill meat. I really don't get the appeal of braaing all the time. The drinking and sitting around and getting together with friends, yes, sure. But standing around in smoke and having to cater to everyone's desires regarding how they want their steal done and not burning anything? No. Thanks. No no. My cousin showed me once, and once was enough. Here is one situation where I'll gladly accept the stereotypical female role and make salads in the kitchen. With a cocktail, away from the smoke and heat.

I don't know what my heritage is. Celebrating Christmas on the 24th and not on the 25th? Knowing how to make Spätzle (well, knowing to find the cookbook) and melktert (again, the Kook en Geniet)? Is it burning in the sun today because I have the same skin as ancestors that got off some boat 300 years ago? Well, the other ancestry arrived here in the 1950s, so I'm guessing both genetic halves did not adapt well to an African sun. Or I should just learn to wear sunscreen, as Mary Schmich suggested. Wear it like a damn dress.

If one's heritage is connected to where one comes from, what has it become in an age where culture is simultaneously global and local? Maybe the desire to be a puzzle piece that fits rather than the one lost somewhere along the way is stupid. Maybe having different strands mixed is better than having specific roots.
Over the past 48hours I have read too much about web kids and Generation Net and our displacement and how we are everywhere and nowhere and how the Internet has made us dumber and how the sky is vanishing. I'm not sure where it is disappearing to, but apparently it is.

During our walk today it pretty much stayed where it was. Bright blue, above us. A perfect surface for the sun to cast its skin-burning rays from.