There was a poetry competition a while back…the theme was The Elephant in the Room…thought I’d share my entry (Couldn’t post it back then cuz it was against competition rules or somefink)

(a BIG thanks to Mother and maddie for their critiques)

Daddy, Daddy.

every night i lie in bed. awake…
heart, heavy in my chest –
i wait and wait for Him, the Snake,
to creep beneath my dress.

will He come tonight? is He late?
or has He simply forgotten?
i curl up in a ball of hate
and try to wish away His sin.

i am but a little girl
of eight, ten and fourteen;
trapped in this nightmare world,
why must Daddy be so mean?

He tells me He loves me. me!
but why is love this painful?
He gives me His guarantee,
then uses me like a tool.

“It will be our little secret. Shh…
“Don’t let Mommy know.”
His fingers trail across my flesh,
and i silently scream, “No, Daddy! No!”

the tears well up, i weep in despair:
“Stop doing this, Daddy! Daddy, please let go.”
but He doesn’t hear and He doesn’t care.
He keeps on delivering blow by blow.

unable to see, my vision is blurred;
paralysed by fear, i freeze still.
blink once, twice, and upon the third,
i breathe in this midnight chill.

||Because I could not stop for Death –

He kindly stopped for me –

The Carriage held but just Ourselves –

And Immortality.||

-         Emily Dickinson

I’ve never really thought about it.  Death, that is.  The only time I thought I was truly dying turned out to be something quite trivial, and it happened too quickly for me to ponder the “consequences”, whatever they may be.

But now my dad’s sick.  I don’t even know what – my parents won’t tell me.  I suppose they want to protect me, as if I’m still a little kid who needs to be quarantined from all the badness in the world.

It’s scary to see the one person whom I’ve always looked up to, whom I thought was infallible, is now as fragile as a shard of glass that’s about to break into a million little pieces.  My dad has lived an impeccable lifestyle.  He doesn’t smoke, only drinks moderately, is active and eats healthily… there’s no reason for him to be sick at the age of 48, except he is.

A life without my dad would be unimaginable.  He is the only constant in my life… the only person I love.  If he falls apart, so would I.

I was never a graceful child.  In fact, from as far back into my childhood as I could remember, I had always been the awkward kid who would crab walk and bump into various stationary objects along the way.  My body would be full of tiny bruises.  Once, when I was about 7, I tried to cross an alley when a bicycle came speeding towards me. I went left, it went left; I went right, it went right; needless to say, I got flattened, and the tread-marks were not pretty I tell ya!

As I grew older, my circumstances underwent little change.  I was still awkward and accumulating bruises.  The difference between then and now is that people expect me to behave according to the various protocols society set out for us, and any standard deviation would earn me scornful glares from old ladies who are too elitist for their own good.

I would like to think that I had perfected my chopsticks skills at an early age – 5 years old to be exact.  My ability to use a knife and fork remained questionable.  Getting the food bits onto the fork (or miniature rake as I would like to call it) was hard enough…getting it all the way to my mouth without dropping anything was near impossible.  So, it was only a matter of time before my culinary faux pas made its appearance.

I was casually trying to cut a piece off my pork chop when my knife slipped and subsequently caused half the mealies on my plate to jump onto someone else’s, and I watched helplessly as a couple of kernels bounced off of a guy’s arm.  To make matters worse, that day I was sitting at “the white people’s table”.  Luckily, there were no witnesses apart from myself and the kernel guy who shrugged off the incident.

The next day, I wanted a change of scenery and sat at “the black people’s table” instead as I figured they would be less judgemental.  I cleverly decided to use my hands to tackle the deboning of whatever it was they served us.  Unfortunately for me, my fingers slipped and the bone (thing) went flying to the middle of the table.  Oops.  All I remembered from that incident was my friend’s comment, “If bones couldn’t fly before, they could now.”

…How awkward!

|| If I’d the power to cheat time sweet time,

I’d use it to make reality sublime.

Would it be unfair, would it be a crime

to want you in this little heart of mine? ||

1.  I love it when you sms me.  I scroll through my inbox and re-read the messages several times a day.

2.  Thinking about you brings a smile to my face.

3.  I love how the conversations never get boring.

4.  I like damaged people because I like the idea of being the one to fix them…But I don’t know if I can fix you.  Maybe you’re just too broken to be mended.

5.  You’re a smart guy with a great earning potential :P  Too often, too shy. But we can remedy that – with a bottle of whiskey! (Can’t do anything about the tallness though :-)

6.  You’re sweet, kind and caring.

7.  And hot.

8.  A little weird at times – I have yet to meet a person who tolerates lentils and grapefruit as much as you do.

9.  One of these days, I will convert you to the sweet side of chocolates, whipped cream, and slush puppies.  No more Mr Fitness Freak!

10.  I want to ride on your motorbike, and not in a dirty way…:P

|| “’You are drunk Sir Winston, you are disgustingly drunk. ‘Yes, Mrs. Braddock, I am drunk. But you, Mrs. Braddock are ugly, and disgustingly fat. But, tomorrow morning, I, Winston Churchill will be sober.”||

We have all had our moments of drunken insanity. Binge drinking until 2 am, chundering outside The Roof and eventually passing out on the cold linoleum floor is all too familiar a routine for some of us. Such stories no longer faze me. In fact, if someone had to tell me he threw up chunks of lamb in his sleep, I would have looked at him with blasé indifference and told him to get back to me with something better. Thursday night, however, was a series of continued moments of Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. What happened that night was so mindblowingly insane, I’m still struggling to believe that it actually happened.

(I was not present when the incidents occurred, so I am relaying all this information as told to me by C. And for anonymity purposes, we shall call the instigators Cory and Jay.)

The night started off pretty tame with a couple of rounds of drinking poker. It has been a pre-drink tradition for as long as I can remember — a cheap and fun way to get drunk, fast. So before the group had even left C’s house, a couple of the notable members were already smashed. The situation was made worse at Gandalf’s where everyone drowned themselves in free booze. Cory, in his infinite wisdom, decided that the bathroom (which was a mere 10 metres away) was too far, so he unzipped his pants, and pissed into the air-vent next to the bar. The girl who was standing beside him did not look impressed, and neither did R. who slowly eased away and pretended not to know Cory.

But this was just the icing on the cake. As everyone was on their way back to C’s house, Cory and Jay decided to head back to Gandalf’s to get Jay’s car which incidentally was parked outside C’s house. Cory and Jay walked up to a car that somewhat resembled theirs and tried to open it with Jay’s house key. After 20 minutes of trying, the bouncer eventually approached them and said something to the effect of, “Hey, you can’t open a car door with a house key man.” Jay refused to listen of course, and in his inebriated state, he somehow managed to convince the idiot bouncer that it was indeed his car, and that the bouncer should break the window so that he could get in. And the bouncer obliged…

Two seconds later, a girl came over screaming at the top of her lungs, “WTF is going on?!!?!” At which point, Jay and Cory simply walked away, and left the bouncer to deal with the girl and the big hole in her car. They walked back to C’s house and again, attempted to open the front door with Jay’s house key. Eventually, the lack of success angered Cory so much that he took Jay’s house keys and threw them (somewhere). The keys were never found. The failure of plan A effected plan B, which was to climb over the wall – a feat possible only when one is drunk (it has been tried and tested). When they finally made it into the house, instead of sleeping over, they decided to drive home. So they got S’s copy of keys to let themselves out the house. They left, leaving the house door wide open, and the key still in the keyhole. (Note: The house was situated in one of the dodgiest areas whereby if a car was parked outside, its tyres had a 50% chance of turning into bricks the following day.)

Jay, with his superb driving skills, made it all the way from Obs to Liesbeeck Gardens before he turned too sharply around a corner and mounted the curb. He then tried to put the gear into reverse, but couldn’t. He kept on shifting it into 4^th gear, so his car went further forward each time. Then, all of a sudden, a policeman appeared next to him and was knocking on the window. He asked if they were drunk, to which they replied with a rather slurred “Noooo”. The policeman noted that the two were clearly too drunk to drive, so he got in the car and drove them to their flat, and left without charging anyone.

Moral of the story: Don’t drink and drive!! Or if you do, then hope for a nice policeman who will drive you home.

Statistically speaking, there will always be one weirdo (or freakazoid, depending on the intensity of your judgement) in a group of randomly composed individuals.  This post is about someone whom I have never met, but the stories involving him are so legendary that I have to dedicate an entry to him. (For the sake of anonymity, we shall call this guy “Duke”.)

Duke was, relatively speaking, a normal student studying computer science at UCT.  Everything was hunky dory until the end of his third year of studies where he suddenly garnered the urge to join the British Army.  So, he dropped out of university in order to pursue his new dream, while under the delusion that “people don’t die in armies anymore”.  His parents (for some unfathomable reason) supported this crazy notion.  Instead of going ballistic at the thought of seeing their son drop out in his final year of university, they simply went, “That’s nice”.  However, instead of flying to the UK, Duke packed up all of his belongings and went home.  Reason: he didn’t want to join the army in winter; he’d rather go in summer. So, he moped around the house for about 6 months and played video games all day long.

Six months came and went, and his “Army” idea went with them.  (I guess the novelty just wore off.) Duke was suddenly faced with a new spectrum of decisions.  He was a 20-something year old with no qualification, no driver’s licence, and minimum work experience.  Luckily, with some persuasion from his step-father, Duke finally decided not to throw his future away, and to apply for an engineering degree at the University of Pretoria.  (Why Step-dad steered Duke to a new degree was a mystery, but theories suggest that he wanted Duke to keep an eye on the Sister who was on the verge of dropping out of university herself.)

As (bad) luck would have it, UP refused Duke’s application on the basis that his marks were not good enough.  To combat his disappointment, Duke decided to take a short holiday to Mozambique where he drank so much that the next day, when he was on a diving expedition, he threw up in his regulator while underwater. As pieces of regurgitated food came out, schools of fish started gathering around him and were nibbling on the puke. (Disgusting imagery, I know!) Duke survived the ordeal, but needless to say, his mom was not impressed.

Moral of the story? STAY IN SCHOOL!

Every once in a while, an email would appear in my inbox, headlined by subjects such as “Grow another inch” or “Viagra for sustainability”. Such spammages are easy to detect, and they invariably end up in my trash folder without ever being opened.

A couple of days ago, I received an email forwarded from a legitimate source. It was a casting advertisementfor two roles in an independent short film directed by (presumably) a student. The roles were to be filled by an Asian manand an Asian woman. (The director was pretty specific about that.) The body of the email seemed perfectly legit,which I suppose was why the dude forwarded to all the ROCSA (Republic of China’s Student Association) members in the first place. The attached script, on the other hand, was abit more suspect.

Here’s an extract from Act Two: Scene One:

We hear sounds of laughter and happiness. We see the couple enter the front door. They drop groceries, kiss each other. We follow them to the bedroom (We stop at the door). Clothes fall on floor in frame.

Woman: “Are you going to help me with these or are you just going to stand there looking pretty?”

Man: “The latter.”

Woman: “Well, you won’t get any nookie unless you help.”

Man: “Is that a threat or a promise?”

Woman: (laughs) “Both.”

Man helps her get groceries into house but his “help” is more of a hindrance because while she’s trying to unpack, he’s sidling up behind her, squeezing various parts of her body and rubbing himself againsther.

Woman: “Cut it out, I have to get the milk in the fridge.”

Man: (nibbles her ear) “I can think of something cold that needs warming up.”

Woman: “You’re impossible!” (she clearly likes the attentionand is pretending her annoyance)

Man: “I’ve got some meat…”

Woman: “Well, in that case.” (she squirms when she tickles him)

Man: (Pulls her to the bedroom) “Me, Tarzan, you Jane.”

Woman: “More like the bogeyman! Ouch!” (she twists out ofhis grip to dash for the bedroom)

Man: (growls and blocks her passage to the bedroom,smothering her in kisses) “What’s the secret password?”

Woman: “I thought you were the one who was so eager?”

Man: “Oh, I am, but I’ve got something extra special for youbut I wanna hear you beg.”

Woman: (implied that she’s grabbed his crotch) “You call THAT special?”

Man: (Momentary look of shock then his look grows serious)“Careful with the goods, you don’t know what you’re handling there.”

Woman: “I know perfectly well what I’ve got in my hand.(They kiss pull back to look at each other and they’ve gone from playful tolustful) “Mmm, I think I want some of that.”

Man: “Then quit talking and kiss me.”

Woman: (pushes man back into bedroom and falls upon him onthe bed, her hands over his chest while she hungrily kisses his face and worksher way down) “You like it rough?”

Man: (twists around to dominate her, pinning her to the bed)“Not so helpless now.”

Woman: (she appears to want to say something but he silencesher with a kiss. It’s implied that his hand has gone to her crotch and when hestops kissing her she groans)

Man: “You want?”

Woman: “Yes!”

Lol! I think the irony of it all is that I responded to this email (before I read the script), and I eagarly told the guy that I would like to audition for the role, and even enquired about the fee!

When I was a teeny bobber, I had the notion that everything existed for a reason.  Never mind what the “reason” might have been, I was convinced that nothing on the planet was in excess.  Since then, I had grown taller, wiser, and gained a whole new perspective.

I have identified three things that are completely superfluous, and quite frankly, I think evolution should take its course and rid our bodies of the following:

1. The appendix – Honestly, why do we even have this thing which serves no purpose other than to cause death by infection?  Sure, it might have been used to digest leaves when we were still primates, but we are not hairy, veggie-eating herbivores anymore.  I reckon the sooner our bodies get rid of this silly non-functional organ, the better.

2. Unwanted hair – I realise some people suffer from “the shiny patch syndrome” aka baldness, the rest of us are cursing and swearing every time we have to go to a beauty salon and fork out R150 for a professional leg wax; or fork out R40 for a do-it-yourself hair removal procedure which can turn out to be rather technical and time-consuming.  Not to mention the after-burns and in-grown hairs…it’s just a down right nuisance.

3. Wisdoms – Mine have been growing for about 3 years, and I’m still waiting for the bottom 2 to shoot out.  Like the appendix, they serve no purpose whatsoever, apart from giving me headaches and swollen gums.

Of course, all these can be resolved by surgery and laser treatments, but that is not the point.

Ask any Capetonian about the weather and he or she will (no doubt) ramble endlessly about the horrid rains that plague the Cape during the winter months.  As if the rain itself isn’t bad enough, the roaring wind will banish anyone’s thoughts of using a feeble umbrella as a shield, because it will be flipped inside out in 10 seconds.  Of course, a raincoat is out of the question as well because at varsity, wearing a neon-pink Hello Kitty raincoat is synonymous to social suicide.  (Unless you’re a proud member of the BA squad – which I am not – dressing up in anything with a weirdness level of 3+ constitutes as a faux pas.)

However, getting my clothes and hair wet isn’t my main concern.  The shoes are what I am worried about.  As an economically disadvantaged (read: a step above “poor”) student with many expenses, I only have 1 pair of takkies (or if you prefer to Americanise everything, it’s “sneakers”) that are not very water resistant.  Basically, if it rains 2 days in a row, then I’m screwed because it takes +/- 2 days for the takkies to dry.  This is where wellingtons come in.  They are (in my opinion) awesome – not for their great aesthetic outlook, but for their practicalities.  A pair of rubber boots is just what I need to see me through these cold rainy months.  In a city like Cape Town, you’d think the shops would be stocked with wellingtons-all-sorts.  But, alas!  I went to all the shoe shops in Cavendish (FTR: I looked for them in Kimberley as well, but I soon realised that searching for rain boots in a city that never rains is rather futile.) and only Woolworths had a couple of pairs of over-sized wellingtons left over.

Apparently, Pick ‘n Pay clothing in Canal Walk sells them, but:

1. I don’t have a car.

2. I’m too poor to get a cab to take me to Canal Walk.

3. I’m scared to ride such a long distance in a black taxi.

So, if anyone knows of a place in Obs, Claremont or Rondebosch that has size 4 wellingtons, please let me know, and I will forever be in your debt. =]

In unrelated news: A friend asked me to join his stock market game, so if you have any tips on which shares to invest in, give me a shout.

The Trip to CT

The bad news: It arrived 2 hours late, so instead of leaving at 21:55, it left at 23:55 instead.

The good news: None of the passengers displayed pig-flu symptoms.

The bad news: They were like pigs instead.

The Game

Right after I landed in Cape Town, myself, 5 friends and 13 friends-of-friends headed out to Imhoff farm for an afternoon of paintball.  It took us a while to find the place, and after an hour’s travel, we finally made it to the farm. The gear was a bit icky but we pulled on the sweaty jackets and helmets anyways and got ready for some action.  There was another group of kiddies there whom we had to team up with.  Despite their smallness, they were quite agile and some of them played better we did.  Since it was my first time paintballing, I decided to stay back and play defence.  In the end, I was shot about 7 times (mostly on my legs) and was surprised at how quickly the ammo finished.  After 5 games, we’ve finally had enough.  Bruised and drenched with sweat, we made our way back to res just in time for supper.  It was my first meal in 24 hours and never had res food tasted so good!

First day of lectures

Introductory lectures were boring as usual, and a complete waste of time. However it was nice seeing my friends after 6 weeks of vacation. The University still looked the same, and so did the Gucci-wearing Commerce girls dressed in tank tops and mini-skirts (Yep, in this weather!). Oh, and I finally finished unpacking all my junk. =]