Aghast…
My mother had an old, large vanity case. It was dark green with a shiny chrome buckle and had intrigued me for a long time. When I was very small it had been full of old lace and buttons from mum’s childhood and that of her own mother’s. Many a happy hour had been spent poking through it and matching the contents, pondering the history. For some time now it had been on the top shelf of her dressing room cupboards, far out of reach. Until the evening my brother and I were left with a babysitter and I went exploring.
I was a nosy child, always looking through things that I had no business with at all, which caused much consternation and endless punishments, but it was me.
Having scaled the shelving and teetering on tiptoes I gripped onto the vanity case and pulled it onto the floor. At 15 years old I was not ready for what I found.
Inside that vanity case was a lace and satin corset, browns and creams, with suspenders for stockings; a leather breast thing with steel hoops for the breasts to stick out and a latex body suit. There was also a black dildo.
There is nothing like realizing your parents are having sex. Not just any old sex, but strange stuff. I felt awkward around them both for years.
Meditation
My beloved younger sibling read some research that says PC game players’ brain activity is identical to that of buddhist meditators while meditating and playing. Snow job? No. The research exists. Which brings into question the validity of different types of meditation. I have met two people in the past week who claim that sitting watching the kreepy-krawly sends them into a meditation space. This is probably true.
I really struggle to meditate in a traditional way, but I know that if I am battling with something – something cerebral like a creative idea or strategy – and I play a bit of Starcraft or similar the problem gets solved while I am doing it.
Cool huh?
So, everyone who enters a near trance state by doing anything is in fact meditating. Unless it is drug induced. So, next time I am accosted by some buddhist smug asshole (which they generally ALL are) I will state I am a Catholic PC game player and they can kiss my ass.
Medical mumbo-jumbo
I used to eat a lot of natural foods until I learned that most people die of natural causes. I wish my artist would understand this. But NO. He is a mumbo-jumbo addict. If it’s holistic anything he buys in. I have blogged in the past about the alien fungus he had, or the cure-all syphilnum homeopathic rubbish (sugar pills about the size of pinheads). Then he spreads this to the children. I don’t mean the fungus or the other stuff – I mean the cure thinking.
The latest fad doing the rounds in his artsy fartsy circles is an “intuitive pharmacist”. Yes folks, this is a proper chemist, who just looks at people and gives them over the counter cures. Somewhat dodgy I think you will all agree.
Of course, everything he says should be taken is homeopathic. I don’t have the time to get into the evils of homeopathy and the giant scam that it is, so please visit www.quackwatch.com. I have said it before: How is it that a bottle of Echinacea drops costs more than a bottle of vodka and an entire Echinacea plant from the garden shop? I’ll tell you how: It is a scam.
Never mind that, now there is a new breed of mumbo-jumbo cretin. This lot are what they call iridologists. This means that they take a photo of your eyeball and use it as a diagnostic method for everything possibly wrong with you. From worms to cancer. Sure. (www.quackwatch.com again please).
Before all the homeopathy nuts jump all over me let me state very clearly: Most diseases are self-limiting. They do not require medication. So, regardless of whether or not you are taking corenza c, Echinacea or eating rose petals, that cold is going to go.
Where the mumbo-jumbo gets dangerous is when they claim it can treat serious illnesses. Like cancer. Anyone who likes can take me on with this. My daughter had cancer at the age of three. Nothing was going to stop her dying other than chemo.
So, now I have artist swigging back loads of Echinacea, toddling off to buy crap from the “intuitive pharmacist” and claiming the fungus is taking over again because he doesn’t want to get out of bed. Um. It’s cold and wet today. I bet nobody sprung out of bed.
These snake-oil salesmen ought to be publicly flogged. And I think My beloved Artist needs a lobotomy.
Art Deco Junkies get a fix…
The weather is dire today – been huddled up in our tv den all afternoon watching Poirot dvds. The ones with David Suchet as the neurotic and anally retentive Belgian detective. Artist and I are really into art deco so we watch and spend the time like this:
Artist: “Fuck love, did you see that black trim?’
KC: “Ya, I want that in my study, but with green walls not yellow.”
Artist: “We need a gazebo so i can build pillars like that.” (note: these are deco pillars big enough for a stadium)
KC: “Love! We must get a mirror like that.”
It’s quite pathetic really. Except that we really are building a monument to art deco in our Greenside hovel. Just finished another room. The light fittings are my passion – but I have blogged about them before, with pics.
And I know I complain about the endless mess as My Artist makes sure everything that we do is perfect, but to tell the truth I am glad. Our home is really beautiful and totally true to the time it was built. When I bought it, there were five bedrooms. Now we have three bedrooms and the den (with a deco Catholic shrine that Artist built me) and my study. Well, my old study is now Kit’s bedroom and the massive front room she was occupying will be my study. A decision I made a couple of weeks ago. Kit has been brainwashed into believing it’s a good move.
Part of the pleasure of being here, owning this place, has been the slow finding of things. We have chrome light witch covers even. Probably stolen from some soon-to-be-demolished CBD building. The really big restoration job will be the kitchen. Once upon a time this house belonged to an orphanage, I think in the early 80s, and they had a kitchen donated. We have to gut it and put in terrazzo and wood in order to make it true. But the wall tiles are the original black and what used to be white.
Some of the floors in the front of the house are yellow-wood, not pine. Oh man, you see what happens when I start blogginig about my house? I get totally carried away. This is a deep and abiding love affair. I want to photograph every inch of it and blog it. Bore you all to tears.
*sigh*
I was trying to explain to a friend over lunch what we were doing. He said: “I love art deco, Andy Warhol was great.”
Bloody peasant.
You are never too old…
To be manipulated by your mother. I have been conned into spending R25k on tickets for myself and the small people to London in August for a family wedding. I would rather spend that and go to Italy, so how does this happen? Easy. Mothers know what buttons to push because they are responsible for the installation of said buttons in their children.
I don’t even really like most of my family. There is a good reason we haven’t “all been together in 20 years.” My mother somehow made this seem like a desirable situation. I know better. Nevertheless *swipey swipey* and here I sit, bracing myself for five days in the english countryside before me and my girls can hit the bright lights of London. If it wasn’t so damn expensive I would not be blogging in a complaining tone. But come on! That’s lots of money.
Especially when I know it costs the airline about R800 a seat to fly.
So, in early August the girls and I will be off on an adventure. I am sort of looking forward to it. Be interesting to see how everyone copes with my dad’s pariah status, his mistress, my evil alcoholic sole-surviving grandma etc. It will be a few days of that and then we get to cruise. I have some money over there so the girls and I will shop and tourist ourselves into a coma. Then off to stay with Artist’s sister so we can travel a bit to Cornwall and hopefully Wales to stay with yet more family there who have a sheep farm. Artist is belligerently refusing to come with. He detests London. I love London – just for periods of no longer than one month these days.
I need to have a sense of humour about this. My family is quite mad. Some in a nice way and some in a “find me a gun, dammit” way.
Oh -was supposed to go with Mr and Mrs Silwane on a trip today, but things changed. He phoned and we have agreed on a raincheck.
Lots of love
St K.
My mobile phone…
Mobile phones are about as personal an item as it gets. Right up there with my knickers and vibrator, to be honest.
I have, therefore, a major issue with people using my phone, fiddling with it and I have a particular issue with people using my phone to contact the other people in my household. I have stuff on my phone. My Artist and I are very respectful of eachother’s phones. It’s a privacy thing.
Yesterday, a colleague of mine, found he could only reach my voicemail so called My Artist’s phone to reach me. I was nowhere near my artist. I was enraged and my colleague could not understand it.
Surely I cannot be the only person that feels like this? My mobile is the way to reach me. I don’t use landlines and my cell number is available for all the world, really. But I can choose who I do and do not want to speak to. I can let people leave a message. I can choose not to answer if I am doing something that is more important than a call.
When people start stalking me with other numbers… I hate that. It actually tips me right over the edge.
I told my colleague this morning, that he had no clue where I was or what I was doing. I told him I could have been having a quick shag with someone else and there he is trying to reach me for business purposes through my boyfriend. Uncool. He still doesn’t understand.
K Chasu: Almost a burning effigy
I love sleeping pills. Yet I can’t seem to do them with any degree of grace. Last night, for instance, I nearly set the entire house on fire.
Once in while I take these incredible little blue pills called Dormicum. I get them from my dealer-doctor in 15mg form. I am a chronic insomniac and generally get by on about four hours a night. But if my head is busy it gets to the point where I am doing two hours and that just isn’t viable. I am then a more cantankerous cow than usual and everybody hates me. I can see them plotting murder…
The dose is one tablet at night. When I started taking them dealer-doctor told me to make sure everything was locked up and I was in bed before taking it. He was right. Anyway, in typical alcoholic style, last night I took two. This is on the premise that I am special and need more. I do this with every medicine. I am working on stopping that. I know it is deeply bad thinking.
So there I was reading Roald Dahl’s Uncle Oswald, artist snoring so I sneaked a cigarette in bed. I woke up this morning, with scorch marks in the egyptian cotton sheets, a cigarette butt ground into my shoulder and an irritated artist. Not terribly dignified or graceful…
Blogbuddies – I could have died. I could have gone up in a small inferno in the middle of the night…
And it doesn’t end there. Earlier in the evening I took a long soak in the girls bathroom. They have the best bath. It is HUGE. Built like they used to in the 30s. We have to use candles because the room is still being worked on and the light fittings have been removed. I put the candles on top of the loo (was concerned about setting hair on fire if they were next to the bath) just under the little built in wooden medicine cabinet (also from the 30s). I elected not to blow them out cos they looked so pretty.
Little wooden medicine cabinet is now scorched. Paint blistering off.
So, is the problem KC and fire or KC and sleeping pills?
Prince Albert Olive Festival
Despite being almost dead for most of the time and unable to stay vertical for longer than about two hours at a stretch, I had a fine time in Prince Albert. We stayed on an olive farm, in the main farmhouse about 30km out. It was built in 18-something. Really beautiful. The lack of security issues was interesting and the sky extraordinary. The unveiling of My Artist’s tree sculpture was held during the Olive Festival in Prince Albert. Wow what a cool thing that was!
Strange but true they had olive pip spitting competitions. The record is something like 12 metres. On the day we spent hanging around the festival, someone got 11.6 metres. There was a local kid production of the Wizard of Oz, a cabaret etc.
Part of the main street was closed off for stalls and things. I was intrigued by what people were charging money for. One person was charging R5 a time to pet their dog. And getting money for it. Another coloured guy had a picture frame and perched himself outside the gallery. This wizened little creature pulled faces through the frame and people paid R10 a turn to take a pic. Bizarre.
The food was amazing. Karoo lamb is fabulous stuff. So are the figs and the cheese. Oh and they grow all sorts of things. The apricot trees are amazingly beautiful this wild burnt orange in the orchards.
One night we went to a restaurant that is open only sporadically, called The Olive Branch. It is owned and run by the ex-ambassador to Switzerland. We had an 8 course meal of the most incredible food I have ever tasted. For R150 a head. It was very French-style, so tiny portions, but really tasted like heaven. I eat out a lot in Jozi, but have not had food like that before anywhere.
It’s an interesting little town. A real community and by this I mean that everyone talks to everybody else and knows their business. Buying a loaf of bread takes 40 minutes because everybody chats. I would go a little mad there, but My Artist and kids want to buy the olive farm we stayed on. Hmm there is a lot of lemonade to be sold by the girls to raise the 5.8m he wants for it. It’s idyllic and even I was starting to think I could cope with it for six months a year.
Then we drove home via my beautiful city. The city lights were on and the traffic hectic and the taxis going mad and I realized that I love my big city. Jozi is home.
Anyway, I really recommend the festival to anyone. There are divine little places to stay in the town and the farmhouse is one of several that can be rented in their entirety for a period of time. Some are a lot cheaper than ours. But we had horses, tortoises, rivers and kudu wandering across the lawn. The Swartberg mountains and the nature reserve run from the edge of the farm. Well worth it.
It was bitterly cold and wet which I found intriguing. The last time I was there the temperature didn’t drop below 39 degrees. This time we had to turn on the under floor heating and wrap up warm.
It’s really good to be home and I feel a bit stronger than I did when I left.
“It’s never too late to abort”
It has been one of those family evenings. Today is my dad’s 59th birthday and, because Purple Dot’s is the day before, he generally comes down to Jozi to be with family for a few days. So there we sit around the big table at my mom’s Parkhurst hovel, each of us jabbering away delighted to all be in one another’s company at the same time. I am sick, barely coherent but doing my best to ask dad to please get on blog and adequately explain my entropy/life theory to GaryM who is deliberately being obtuse. This leads to more physics, astro and meta debate while the others are talking about whatever floats their boat.
My brother, who I adore in a love-hate way, is trying to compete with dad’s ipod in the bose blasting Hayseed Dixies, by turning up some or other crap on his mp3-playing mobile. Kit is dressed in her Spanish dancing outfit having just given us a small show on the upper deck. My ear hurts.
My Artist is discussing brush strokes with my mom, who is the Ice Queen as far as dad goes, but keen to learn more so that her new hobby of oil painting can improve. My mom is frigid because my dad has finally come out of the closet publicly about the new woman in his life. This has already lead, within the first five minutes, to my brother accusing me of taking my dad’s side. Blah blah. Of course I take my dad’s side. He never quite tumbled from that pedestal. Me and my dad are two peas in a pod.
Artist’s dad is eagerly listening, he also paints. Artist’s dad is about 76 years old. His wife died four years ago. It took him a while to recover, but now he leads a bohemian lifestyle in Umhlanga and has grown a David Beckham hair style- I suspect that he has finally twigged on that a long-haired artist pulls more chicks than a computer programmer. Better late than never huh?
Purple Dot has glued herself to the couch in the TV room. She has long held the view that I should have been reported to Child Welfare when I got rid of it.
Sister in law is discussing work. She frequently does. Then money and spirituality.
Then the discussion turns to movies. We all agree that Sin City and 300 are excellent. Talk about V for a bit ag the usual agreements/disagreements. But I have learned better than to try and debate certain things with my brother. He, for example, spews venom when I talk about how I love Shiamalan. I don’t have the energy to communicate in a confrontational way tonight. The pain in my ear has taken over my entire existence.
This then leads to discussions around TV series. I throw in a comment: ‘I would love to own every episode of Dallas on dvd.’
*silence*
My brother, looking pointedly at my mother: ‘It is never too late to abort.’
This caused far too much general mirth at table for my liking.
The day I decided looks wouldn’t cut it.
(I am so undecided about posting this particular blog here amongst you vicious piranhas. Done it twice and deleted it immediately. Oh well. Let’s see.)
I was about eleven years old. The local high school was having a beauty contest for kids and we were allowed in our age group. To this day I cannot remember what on earth made me do it. It is unlikely that I really thought anything about it other than that it was an adventure. I was still making bombs with my brother and setting fire to empty plots at that stage. Or playing with Cindy dolls. Yet, there I was, dressed in a red, white and blue frock, off to the beauty pageant. I dragged my best friend Sharon along too.
My dad spoke to me beforehand. He said: ‘I may be biased but I think you are the most beautiful girl in the world.’ Armed with these words I went, feeling positive after all, dad was still on his god-like pedestal in those days. If he said I was beautiful then I must be.
My gran had bought me the frock. A word I detest, but it really, honestly and truly was one. We all lined up off stage, after handing in our names and been given instructions. We were to walk out of the furthest wing, across the stage, to the front and then down the steps where we would wait and watch the others.
I did my thing, smiling cheerfully, walking in my best way. My mom was big on posture so I knew I had that right. Sharon joined me shortly after, flicking her usually blonde, but now green from the chlorine, hair happily.
We watched the other girls all pretty much as confident and yet awkward as us. Then on walked Samantha.
At eleven years old, that girl slinked. She tossed her hair and gave a very un-childlike swivel of her hips. She was in a gold dress. Her brown skin sort of glowing. Her hair all streaked from lots of days in the summer sun. I was milk-bottle white. I have a skin that has never and will never develop an adequate tan. She was 11, but she was sexy.
Samantha won. Of course she did.
That afternoon I sat at home and looked at myself in the mirror and decided, emphatically, that I was plain. I never once thought again that I was attractive or beautiful. Instead I got caught up in being thinner. Maybe that would make the difference. It didn’t, instead my mom threatened to put me in hospital if I didn’t start eating and stop weighing myself 15 20 times a day.
So I just got more and more heady. And weirder. The kid with the spiky hair and black clothes? That was me. The odd one. Somewhat extreme huh? I didn’t win. So what? It wasn’t even like I cared in the first place. I must have been kind of nuts back then even to have taken it the way I did.
I always knew my brain functioned so I took refuge in that.
I have very unusually blue eyes. I was about 18 before I even realized it. I also realize now that I am in fact attractive. It’s only been the past couple of years that I have been able to look at a photo of myself without wanting to destroy it. I have never, since that day, compared how I look with anyone else.
People tell me I am looking great. So I have chosen to just believe them. I can’t see it. Genuinely. I can post my pic up on blog now without feeling like some sort of troll. I have a close friend who I trust that tells me I look good on any given day. I know I dress well. I have good taste and I buy good clothes.
So, what happened? I didn’t suddenly get beautiful. I just became a lot more comfortable in my skin. This is who I am. This is what I look like. It’s called having a sense of self and some modicum of self-esteem. I still have off days. When I look in the mirror and don’t want to do the day. I still feel fat, so I need the scales to reassure me.
I had forgotten that stupid little beauty competition until I watched Little Miss Sunshine. What an impact it had on me though.
