homeless

It's 01h31 am in a quiet Arcadia. The relative silence is a shock on one's system - there are no vuvuzelas to be heard, or prostitutes screaming at a customer. I just woke up from the third nightmare I've had this week, one where I'm held hostage on a farm. The nightmares I've been having the last couple of months are quite diverse, not recurring in the sense of the same narrative but perhaps similar in terms of plot - I am always in South Africa, I am always in a potentially violent situation, the dream never ends with me escaping from it. Since the hijacking I have truly tried to not be afraid in places I would have been unafraid before, it's been a year since it happened and I have no specific traumatic memories of that day. It happened, was over very quickly, and I managed to exit the scene relatively unscathed.

Yet the residue is potent - The only times I wish I were rather a man are the times I suddenly realize how often I judge a certain space for its rape possibilities. Another instance - driving down leafy Brooks street last week, a stone's throw from campus, I suddenly wondered whether my frail heart could ever endure raising children in this country.

It's such a bloody cliche, but the hijackers didn't only take my car that day, and my copy of Moeder, vertel my tog, they also took any sense of security I still had left after being bombarded daily with the news of what had befallen other people here, grim newspaper headings pasted on street lights that are (again) not working.

since I've been gone

in the last two months I -

wrote a research proposal for my mini-dissertation, which is now officially about Heidegger's notion of being-towards-death in the work of Michael Haneke.

hated the Confederation Cup and started hating 2010 in anticipation of the stupid drivers parking all over our Arcadian curbs, and blowing their bloody vuvuzelas at all hours of the night, and closing every bloody road I can possibly take to campus.

embarked on an entirely new chapter in the scary eating habits of my vegetarian bywoner, when I found meat-free polony in the fridge.

submitted an application for a Fulbright scholarship, and didn't get it.

wrote three exams - one on Laura Mulvey's Visual pleasure and Narrative cinema, and the history of art history and cultural studies. another on feminist analysis and the proliferation of academic theories within postmodern discourse. and another on postcolonial readings of tourist literature and advertisements, the political implications of space and place, and the textuality of public space and mestisz culture. which means that at the moment i'm all theoried out.

basically ate chicken salad every night for two months straight.

got my degree.

made public the news of the new (but not) paramour.

did a presentation on Marlene Dumas' work Faceless and Julia Kristeva's notion of the abject -



almost finished the second draft of my script! and decided to postpone shooting till early 2010.

applied for a grant to finish this documentary (yes people, still not finished)

invigilated many many hours, donning my strict-but-hot tutor look.

had many conversations with Die Kollega about our disillusionment with this time of our lives.

wrote a paper about recreational slumming and the Hotel 224.

marked 200 first year papers, wading my way through the use of words such as patriarchists.

realized how comforting I find WWE and any programmes with an entirely black cast, especially Muvhango.

allowed my house to get very dirty.

got assigned one of the country's experts on Heidegger as my study leader, which is starting to freak me out.

read a lot about complex systems and artificial life, and realized that when it comes to science, it really is clear that I stopped taking it in St.7.

wrote a paper on Noel Carroll.

and then - conceptualised, shot and edited a 45-minute documentary about three armblanke families living in a whites only-compound just outside the city. while i'd made a film before this was the first time I handled the camera myself. I finished it yesterday morning, after almost ninety hours of editing.

now I'm ready for a drink.

post script: and also! my pc crashed! so all of you who've mailed me in the past, please do so again - i've lost all your addresses. gm and ej, please mail me too; yours are lost as well.

tuesday, late afternoon

Your family did not eat cake. This frightened me. All I knew was cake; my mother believed in cake the way others believe in hope or love or any of those abstract absurdities people call on in a time of crisis. In our house there was always cake in various different stages of gestation, cake recipes pasted on the fridge, leftover tubs of icing sugar frozen for future use, trails of crumbs everywhere. There were chocolate truffle cakes and fruity carrot cakes topped with cream cheese, polenta and orange cakes and custard slices and cranberry-studded biscotti and pannetone and panforte, vanilla cakes drizzled with pure white icing and topped with little silver balls. Cake was where I'd come from.

You were taking me to the house you had grown up in, and for once I could not arrive with a cake. I panicked, eventually baking a bread, a large white loaf with thousands of poppy seeds on top. The night I unwrapped it in your mother's clean kitchen there were poppy seeds cascading all over the floor but the bread was met with a cheer. It seemed like I could still be the girl who bakes.

Now you are not here, and there are days the distance overwhelms me. On these days I bake. Today I will take a warm tray of dense brownies from the oven, dark and intense and comforting. I will pack them away in an old tin, out of reach of the ants and roaches that share my kitchen, and I will eat them slowly, sustenance for these complex times.

deep in da nite

Late on Friday night I get the following sms from a number I'm not familiar with -

U r jst so wndfl swty n i lyk d way u do thngs i jst grant u a veri wndfl nyt n kp it dic way.

Two hours later there are four missed calls from the number, and a voice mail box full of messages where no one is speaking.

Can't I at least have a literate stalker?

ter viering van verswarende omstandighede

*

You said, this
doesn't happen so quick
I must remind you of someone

No,
though I am seduced
by this light, and
frantic arguments
on the porch,
I ain't subtle
you run rings
round me

but this quietness
white dress long legs
arguing your body
away from me

and I with all the hunger
I didn't know I had

-Michael Ondaatje, from The Cinnamon Peeler

oh happy day

Today has been one of those all-original unproductive days, days I am at times especially prone to when deadlines are looming. Apart from writing a paragraph for an assignment on Marlene Dumas, an hour or so playing around with a camera on campus and the baking of a carrot cake I have little to show for the day. Except that I just stumbled onto this delightful testimonial by my primary school rival, on this blog affectionately termed The Nemesis, and suddenly my day, nay, my life, seems endlessly brighter.

birthdays with billy

I turned twenty-four yesterday, in what was a very emotional week and ended up being a very emotional day – I have now settled on accepting that I am not only in a very hormonal part of my cycle but indeed a very hormonal part of my life, and that if where in the past I only burst into tears in the company of close friends, I now do so with strangers and acquaintances too. This now just has to be accepted as an occupational hazard of one working twelve-hour days and who is, generally, at the end of her tether. Most of the day was spent struggling with my tendency to live in what CS Lewis terms the shadowlands, where the sun is always shining in some other place. It seems at times as if I have a complete inability to just accept this time of my life, and stop pining for what I don’t have, for a different time and a different season.

Luckily die Kollega bequeathed me, as a birthday gift, a 1962 edition of Billy Graham’s Die Geheim van Geluk (with a dashing Billy Graham in a blue suit smiling from the cover), which will surely change my life, and perhaps even my wardrobe –

Jy kan jou aan onsedelikheid skuldig maak deur die manier waarop jy jou aantrek. Vroue, as julle jul opsetlik aantrek om ‚n man tot sonde te verlei, dan is julle skuldig, of die daad gepleeg word of nie.

Now I know.

notice

To all the people who say that the twenties are the best years of your life:

Please stop lying.