It's my blog and I will go on about me endlessly if I want to.

I am feeling totally self absorbed right now so I am going to ramble a bit about me.

I have 4 days off next week due to leave carryover. I am so happy about this I could sneeze tiny Happy dwarfs. Ok, that description sounds like I am on drugs, but it made sense to me.

For some reason my body seems to give out every 3 months or so, and then I need a holiday or I will melt into a puddle. I don't know why, because other people around me don't use up all their holiday, some of them don't take any.

I think it has something to do with my mental fragility. But I can't argue with my body, I have been hanging by my last thread of sanity for the whole of October, which is my 4th month without a break. I think if I had to go one more day I would cry, scream, or do something with a builder's drill that I might regret later.

I don't know why I am feeble like this. It's pretty annoying. They need to make seamonkeys more robust.

Speaking of builders, they are still drilling to Australia, only last weekend there was a near-death mishap which involved an explosion, a circular saw and an enquiry into negligence, so I reckon they will be around even longer. I have started to get headaches when they STOP drilling now. The ground also moves quite frequently, which is novel.

And finally in this lame post, here is something that made me smile for some reason. A Chinese colleague experienced his first English summer this year, and he asked me last month, "so, where was the summer? It feels like it hasn't started but it is already over."

He told me that where he comes from, 40 degrees C is a common temperature, and summer only really starts when it hits 30. So I told him that when it hits 30 here, and it did once or twice this year, the temperature will be on the front page of all the newspapers, the entire country shuts down, and they basically call a state of emergency. They call it "high alert" or something.

It just made me smile to think that there are so many different versions of "normality" and "reality" out there. There is so much diversity. One person's madness is another person average day.

I dunno. I dig it.

Leopard print

Image from celebritybeautybuzz.com

I don't get it. Don't get why:

• It exists at all, except for caveman dress up parties
• it was ever in fashion
• it is always in fashion. Someone is always wearing a leopard print something, every year, forever.

Is it attractive, sexy, appealing to you? It certainly is not to me. I think it looks hideous. Snakeskin is almost as bad, but not quite.

I assume some people out there love it, so please can you explain the appeal. Also, I dare you to post your leopard print items on your blog, as a kind of leopard print wall of shame. Or if you love it, your leopard print wall of pride.

I don't own a single leopardy item and never have. My ancestors left their caves a fair while ago, I like to think.

Or else they were too poor or scaredy cat to wear leopard and had to settle for dassie or even worse, palm leaf instead.

Maybe they just walked around nekkid, it would explain the extent of my dress sense.

UPDATE: here are links to leopard print walls of... wonder:

• Goblin Talk- Coming clean

Love is like Fanta

I was just pondering, as I do, on the train, when I am not dreaming of seasheep, about love, the romantic kind.

Love is a positive thing. When you are in love with someone you think they are special, , are interested in what they have to say, think they are sexy beasts. These things all make a person feel wonderful, right?

So then why does love have to be such a hit-and-miss affair? I think you know what I mean if you have

a) been in love with someone who doesn't love you back

b) been in a loving relationship with someone but then fallen out of love

c) been in a relationship when they no longer love you and break up with you but you still love them

These are all crappy situations to be in, and there is so much positive loving energy just going down the toilet. I have been in situations a and c. It feels like you are sending out waves of love that just break around the person like Fanta bubbles. If they aren't into you then the love vibes are no good to them and do not make them feel wonderful. In fact unwanted love can be annoying and embarrassing.

WHY? This is a highly inefficient system damnit, please will some engineer person see to it asap. Optimise the energy inputs and outputs and neural networks and all them other made up things you do. (BFG if you are reading this, engineers are very clever and useful and your optimisation of our walk to work to the nearest millisecond is exactly why I stay with you).

There are so many unloved, lonely, unhappy people out there. It is very rare that two people love each other and continue to do so over time.

Don't you think we should be able to harness all those wasted love vibes for something useful, maybe bottle them and give them to unloved people? Or we could give the bottle to the person we love as a gift so that even if they don't love us back they can still benefit from all the positive vibes we send their way? Maybe they would remember us fondly or something.

Have you ever had the unfortunate experience of investing huge amounts of loving energy into someone who does not return your feelings? It doesn't help to know they don't love you, and will NEVER love you, you will keep producing the pointless love energy until hope and delusion finally decide to die.

The world seems to run off entropy. Maybe us unloved lovers are what makes the world go round with our wasted Fanta bubbles. It would be nice to feel that all that intensity went somewhere, to some use, even if it is putrid orange and gives people gas.

Weight of the world

This has been the weirdest week. Melancholic is the word. I have been plagued by the strangest sadness. I go through every day convinced that someone has died. I have actually scanned the online news looking for announcements of people dying. Disturbing.

This may be partly due to my current music obsession, their songs tend to be heartbreaking to the core. Or perhaps that wintry SAD syndrome thingy is kicking in early.

Maybe since my soul has been roaming it picked up grief from another time or place.

Whatever it may be, may this cobwebby sadness blow away, I have no use for misdirected grief.

I fokken well hope it is misdirected.

Bottled boy

I am happy to say that the bob has ceased to be.

This is the time of year when I remember why I let the BFG stick around. Boys do have their limited uses*.

The BFG is my personal hot water bottle. He is a heat generator, a geyser, a steam engine, whatever producer of warmth you prefer. The poor guy cannot lie under our duvet without overheating.

I lie there like a slab of cold meat and steal all his heat.

He wakes up sweaty and I wake up cosy. Without him I would not survive the winter. We have no central heating. The nights can be a bit damp but I can put up with that.

Yay for boys and their superior thermoregulation.

*Ok ok who am I kidding. The BFG does everything in this relationship. He's the fixer, the organiser. I can't even drive. I just hang around like a parasite and suction all his bodyheat. I'm not sure what he gets out of this. But there is no accounting for taste.

Soul searching

Someone once told me that in some country somewhere (Japan?) there is some kind of belief that your soul travels while you sleep and if you sleep too long then it returns but leaves again and you can wake up before it gets to return. If you have ever woken up suddenly after oversleeping I think you can understand this theory. I walked around yesterday like my mind was a kite blown far far away.

These last few days have been a crazy mess. On Friday I ended up on a train going North instead of South (don't ask) and was preeeeetty late for work as a result.

On Saturday my driving lesson reduced me to a puddle of jelly for the rest of the weekend. I cannot describe how much I hate driving. Broccoli is looking appealing in comparison. Anyhoo I basically slept the whole weekend.

On Monday my alarm did not go off, hence my poor soul being unable to make it back. I managed to put my trousers on back to front but considering I had 5 minutes in which to get ready and leave the house, this was slightly less idiotic than normal.

So if you're ready soul, please come back. I am running around like a loop that lost its fruit down here without you.

If it wasn't for my discovery of this Dear Reader/ Harris Tweed awesomeness, I don't think I would have survived. Here is another one of their whacky songs. Why did I not find these guys before? I have been looking for a new favourite band for months. I played the Killers to death for now. I have killed the Killers. Is that Humanly possible? Is that Dancerly possible?

Interesting metaphysical question.

Not every taxi drives in the yellow. Yeah, some of them use the pavement instead.

Somewhere inbetween.

I have this urgent feeling of needing to blog about something, but I can't quite find what it is. So I am writing this half-assed post in the hope that I find it.

Things are quiet at the moment. Quiet is very good. Not quiet in the sense of builders not drilling in my ear every single day (until December, preserve my fragile soul. I think they are drilling a causeway to Australia right there in our cold room. That is my only explanation for how it can go on day after day), but quiet on the life falling on my head front.

I scanned the jobs in Cape Town the other day. I do this sometimes when it starts to get cold and dark here. I look for jobs for the BFG, not for me, because I don't mind too much what I do, but he has an awesome job, and it would take something awesome to get him to leave it. No such luck. In fact, as a friend pointed out, the only way we could find that kind of work in Cape Town is if we took it there ourselves. I don't know if this is true but I suspect it is and that is pretty depressing cos both the BFG and I are little lemming-sheep. We are no entrepeneurs. We need to work for someone. Sad but true.

But my heart will not let me give up just yet. Countries that have the right kind of work include Korea, the US, India, Japan and obviously here. There are options out there in the world if you know where to look. So why do I keep looking in Cape Town? I'm like the girl who couldn't let go.

I am planning my holiday to South Africa for January. I can't wait. It will be hothothot. I want to drive across the country and stop at places like Bethlehem and count the PEP stores along the way. Amongst other things of course.

Yip, I am the girl who couldn't let go. Should I be ashamed of this?

Wot's a shoo?

I know I am always harping on about the searches that lead people to my blog, but it's not my fault that people are so ceaselessly daft.

The huge majority of people come to my blog hunting for naked South African men, as I mentioned here.

The latest question the internet is asking Dr Po is:

Do South Africans need shoes?

Well, if you pay any attention to my blog, the answer would be a definite NO. No clothes, no shoes, no electricity. No elephants on the streets.

But I wouldn't want to mislead the tourists, so

LATEST TRAVEL UPDATE:

The electricity is back online. Can't do anything about the elephants though.

Look, you should be glad. No worrying about what to wear. You can pack light. All the more space in your luggage for the 2 metre carved giraffe you have your heart set on, I just know you do.

Just bring lots of sunscreen for the more sensitive areas. And be warned, if you visit Cape Town, the water is freezing. You might want to consider the effects of shrinkage upon your ego.

P.S. this is another search that led someone to my blog:

nuked men in the sea

How very unfortunate for them, must have been a bit ow-y, I hope they float?

I am loving

This song Great white bear by Dear Reader, and the awesome music video that goes with it:

You should check out their website too, it is beautiful.

Apparently this album was released in February. But I only heard of this band this weekend. For this I blame:

• me, because I am a lowly cowpat and know nothing about new South African music
• you South Africans who are not cowpats, for not telling me
• me, because I am a nerd, which means I never know about new music and only hear it a year later.

Never fall in love with a spider, guys; "til death do us part" may come more quickly than you think.

A word to the wise

DO NOT

make a big fuss about going to the shops at 9.30pm after climbing, specifically to buy a sturdy umbrella for the express purpose of staying dry on my 20 minute walk to work each day, and then wake up the next morning and think "I cannot be arsed to lug that enormous thing around with me today, it is huge and won't fit in my bag, and where will I put it, it won't fit into my locker, ah buggrit, it's not raining now anyway."

Am going to go squeeze myself out now.

Little little daisy, you drive me crazy

I did the speaking on the radio thing last week. The less said about the actual speaking the better. Eugh. I don't think I will be able to bring myself to listen to the finished product as the sound of my voice usually makes me want to vomit.

I really enjoyed hunting down South African music for the guy to play though. You guys gave me so many excellent suggestions that I just didn't have enough space on a CD for all of them, so I am thinking of writing down names for him. He was very excited about the stuff that was not in English. Anything in some kind of an African language sent him nuts.

The only stuff he had pertaining to "Africa" before he met me was a version of " Qongqothwane" sung by Helmut Lotti, some Belgian dude. Dude! That situation had to be rectified asap.

I don't normally listen to Vusi Mahlasela or Miriam Makeba or Johannes Kerkorrel on my iPod, but since I hunted them down for him, I have been playing them and even though much of this music is not my thing I am amazed by the quality of it all.

South Africa is oozing with music brilliance, bloody hell. There is so much variety and amazing talent and good quality music to choose from I could easily have filled up 15 CDs.

One thing I think is that the good music does not try to please an international audience. Good South African music aims to please South Africans and will please the rest by proxy. But when bands start assuming fake American accents and changing their names to suit American audiences and altering their sound accordingly, they sound incredibly bland and characterless, they lose their soul, and then no one in the world wants to listen.

South African music rocks, and I am really happy to able to share some of it with people over here. I don't think it is possible to always be "proudly South African", but our music is definitely something to be proud of.

Insane in the membrane

As I have said many times before, I am no scientist. Which is a bit tricky considering I am... a scientist. But not a real one, I am half a scientist, a pretend one.

Often at work I feel like a 5 year old trying to have an adult conversation with the grownups. For some reason they seem to humour me, and accept me like this. I'm not so sure I can accept me like this, not forever anyway.

I have two major theories as to the difference between me and real scientists. Any additional postulations are welcome.

The first can be thought of as THE QUANTITY theory:

Pretty self-explanatory I feel, but this theory does not agree with my ego, so I am leaning towards this one-

The Structural theory:

exhibit A: Inside the Scientist's brain

As you can see, there is a central idea thread there, with further ideas feeding off that one and interlinking and subdividing. But no matter how branched the idea becomes, there is still that anchor that pulls it all back to the central idea, like a miraculous tree of life.

exhibit B: Inside my brain

The definition of scatterbrained, yes? Apart from the large focus point on FOOD, there are fizzles and sparks and moments of inspiration and insight. But nothing is connecting. I feel that my brain is like a giant dot-to-dot, and if only I could join them up, it would all make sense.

However - and this sums me up in one short sentence -

I have lost my pen.