TAKING PLEASURE WHERE I CAN

Playing Music

So, today I am having quite a slow day; perchance this is due to having to wait as patiently as I can for word on whether or not a trip that I would like to take has been approved by management. I have a pile of pending work that I really can not be bothered to do – however, of course, I have to do it – so I decide to play some of my favourite music at high volume – being the boss these days, I can do what I want now :-) No, seriously, I play the music with the permission of my colleagues… the loud music lifts my spirits tremendously I must say!!

Getting out of a boring meeting

The advent of becoming Acting Big Boss has brought with it unending meetings. In the last two weeks I have been subjected to an astonishing range of meeting styles and chairs; today's however, took the cake!! This man does not have the slightest grasp of the concept of summarising!! He has recently been appointed head of research but I don’t know if he doesn’t yet have that much work to do so that he wants to hang on to us for as long as possible I don't know - it was ridiculous!! First of all, he thanked us for coming to the meeting (about half of us had cut), and went on about how he doesn’t thank us because he benefits in any personal way from our attendance, but that the organisation, ourselves, and blah, blah, blah. This went on for maybe 10 minutes!! Then on to Agenda Item number 1 – Minutes of the Previous Meeting: for a terrifying moment he directs the secretary to READ the minutes, and then when the secretary hesitates, he suggests we go page by page and make comments as we go. Ok. Page one: no one has any comments. The man directs our attention to the list of absentees from the last meeting: some, he says, have never attended even one meeting, nor have they ever sent apologies. He ponders the possible reason for this - asks us what do we think? Some people ACTUALLY join him in this speculation for some minutes!! To conclude that point he says, could we suggest a way forward – A way forward??? A way forward on what??? Getting people to come to meetings?? And may I remind you – this is Page ONE!! It is coming up to an hour since the meeting started at this point, and I decide I’ve had enough - I mumble something about having to attend to some students and other admin stuff and make my escape! I swing by the library and pick up a book titled 'Top Resorts Down Under' (as in Australia), full colour photos etc, and proceed to my house for a late lunch!!

Making a Salad

A friend of mine, whose culinary skills never cease to amaze me, and who makes the most killer salads, and who persuaded me once to actually eat a salad with RAW garlic in it (soooo tasty by the way!), told me once that making salad was dead easy! So, seeing as I had to return to the urgent matter of playing loud music in the office (and maybe do some work), and so had no time to make a proper lunch, I decided to make a salad. My friend told me that all one had to do was throw anything and everything that one had on hand together. Stuff always went with one another no matter what she claimed. Naturally sceptical at the time, I decided there was no time like the present.

Looking into my fridge, I line up some possible ingredients: red and yellow bell peppers, tomatoes – too bad I did not have any carrots, garlic (gasp!), I take out a half eaten can of tuna, black olives or green? – black I think. Uhm, a lemon – standard salad ingredient – even I know that; oh, Olive Oil from the shelf, erm – what else - peanut butter? Honey? Pesto sauce? No, maybe I am stretching it a little. I decide that I am set. Oh, wait, raisins! My friend uses cranberries but I say, she actually has to send for those from the United States!! Raisins would do as well.

Next: chop the peppers, slice the onions, (skip the garlic – maybe some other time), cut tomatoes, squeeze the lemon over the mixture, sprinkle salt, grind out some black pepper, mix in a handful of raisins and the shredded tuna, and finally drizzle olive oil over everything. Pour a generous amount of fresh passion fruit juice into a long stemmed wine glass (ok, I made the passion fruit juice last week but I've kept forgetting to drink it – it has however kept fresh because I did not put any sugar in it). Add sugar to the juice and top up with a few ice cubes. Get out my full colour picture book, carefully balance my plate on one of the two three-legged stools that pass as the sole furnishing in my living room, sit on the other stool and toast to my good health.

The salad was pretty damn good!! Even though when I'd finished eating it I spotted the jar of black olives standing unopened on the kitchen counter.. Probably wasn't meant..

Now I am back to playing music loudly and posting this before I get back to work… Ah, the good life!

WHEN PAIN IS GOOD

Two or three weeks ago I overdid the walking exercise and stressed a muscle in the arch of my left foot. For ten whole days I walked around limping and I felt thoroughly sorry for myself!! At day eight I went to the sick bay and the nurse suggested that I bandage it, but all that got me were more sympathetic smiles and head shaking from everyone I passed – the foot got no better!! Two days later my friend decided to take matters (i.e. the foot) into her own hands and gave me a hard massage; I left her house jumping!! I remember walking aimlessly around campus, running unnecessary errands just to test the foot out, and trying not to let doubt into my heart; scarcely could I believe that I could walk without pain - I mean I had limped around for ten whole days and five minutes of massage had put me right as rain. I had heard of people to whom miracles happened – they regained their sight or threw away the crutches, only to be hit by severe doubt and be back with their infirmities in no time… So after that time I really struggled to keep my belief up… The point is life felt so much better – it was like I had gotten a new lease on life..

It’s like earlier today: I had really, really bad cramps from my period starting, and as I lay there on my bed groaning and rushing back and from the bathroom to throw up, I felt as miserable as anything... This pain always reminds me of the pain of child birth, and makes me wonder how much pain women in labour must feel seeing as some of them scream out loud and even jump up and run around the ward like crazy people (not to mention where they find the energy).

This thought occurred to me again recently when I had to have my hair dreaded. I had had it in braids for almost four months and the extensions being quite heavy had been kept up a constant pressure on my scalp as they hang down under their weight. The day I undid the braids, I decided to go straight to the salon and dread the hair. GOOD GOD!!! What a nightmare that was!!!! First of all my hair was a tangled wrangled mangled bush – what can I say?? The hair dresser drowned it in detangler and conditioner and all manner of lotions to help detangle it, but to no avail – he had to comb through the hair inch by inch, and I felt as though my scalp was going to peel right off!! At one point I asked him to hand over the comb so I could do it myself but wah!! Nothing doing.. We were at this for two whole hours and I sat through it with feet, teeth, shoulders, elbows my WHOLE body clenched, until I thought I was going to faint with the pain!!

Finally we got through the detangling and then came the dreading: he started off massaging wax into the wet hair (even that was painful!) and then starting in the back took a small portion of the hair, pulled through it with a fine comb, then set the comb back at the base of the hair and pulled through the portion again while twisting the comb until he’d twisted the to the full length of the hair; at this point he portioned off another small amount of hair and made another dreadlock, and so on. This process also took some time, but as he got to the middle of the head, the wax that he had spread all over the hair had now hardened so it was getting more and more difficult to pull through the hair to twist it. Every now and then though, he sprayed my hair with water, and then continued. Now about two thirds of the way to the front of my head is a very sensitive area – I think it became that way because of a fall I had on the ice when I went ice skating once – when he came to that region, tears just begun rolling down my face – it was soooo painful!! I kept surreptitiously wiping away the tears but man – that is when I begun to really wonder if I would ever bear the pain of childbirth!! Anyway, in time of course he finally twisted the last one, and I could go home at last!! My friend – if I tell you how I felt!!! I walked out of the building – I had to use the back entrance because it way past closing time – I passed some shady guys playing a dice game of some sort, walked through the dirty smelly back street, stepping over flowing sewage and passing more shady (incidentally dreadlocked) street boys, briefly felt afraid but told myself to look confident and not lose a step, but nothing could dampen my high spirits!!

So anyway back to earlier today: after the cramping and vomiting had passed, and I had brushed my teeth and washed my face, I stepped out into the punishingly hot midday sun and felt that all was right with the world. I even decided to reward myself with some junk food at the staff pub, and they were playing some country that had me tapping my foot and dancing in my seat! For once even the gloom and doom being reported in today’s papers had no effect on me – ALL WAS WELL WITH ME!!

THE UNCONSCIOUS

I have been having the weirdest dreams…

Eh, before I go any further, I must say one thing:

BARCELONA BABY!!

This is how I hope to get to Barcelona at the end of March: focus on the end goal, and care less about the means… So I keep saying
BARCELONA (there it is again), and visualising myself in the city, and studying the street map that I picked up at the reception of my hotel, and visualising myself negotiating the narrow (?) streets and figuring out the public transport; I have downloaded a tourist guide and picture myself visiting this café or that restaurant, basically!! I will know for sure tomorrow, so fingers crossed!! In the meantime, say it with me:

BARCELONA!!!

Right, back to our scheduled programming :-) I was saying that I get the strangest dreams these days – well, all dreams are strange obviously but let me say I am more aware of them these days. The other day I dream that I’m sitting in a chair, and ‘walking’ towards a certain room whose door slowly swings open as I approach, and then as I begin to cross the threshold, a force field of some sort pushes me out again – I say ‘force field’ because it was not a wind, nor any physical thing that I could sense – it really felt like I was being repelled or something… anyway, next thing I know I am lying on my bed – and at this point the dream sort of merged with reality because I felt like this was really happening – a strong wind begun to blow around my room and my covers were yanked off me as my body was forced upward at terrific speed, not very high up, somewhere near the ceiling I would guess, and there my body held, stiff and straight. This happened so fast that I hardly had time to be afraid – and then as I started to BE afraid, something told me that it was alright, this was merely a prelude to something that I had been waiting to happen, and so I told myself not to be afraid, and to just go with it.. Don’t remember what happened after that but when I woke up I racked my head to remember why I thought this was nothing to be afraid of, but could not remember… Up to now I cannot figure out what that was all about, but I am still not afraid anyway.

Then two days ago I dreamed that I had to have my tonsils removed – and that they would have to drill through my throat and remove them.. so the doctors stuck an intravenous tube down my throat and begun feeding me with anaesthesia. I could see the fluid coming down the tube into my mouth, and this went on for sometime, on and on and but effect; then I begun to feel like I was drowning in the anaesthesia, so I tried to tell them to stop but my voice came out as an incompressible gurgling.. at this point they pushed a tube the size of a magic marker under my chin and straight into my throat but at that point I woke up – heart pumping.

Then this morning, I woke up from a dream which unfortunately I have largely forgotten but I know it ended with a woman trying to get us out the back way because some people were after us and were banging on her front door (I don’t know whom I was with).. So she gives us a key to fit into a small key hole in the wall (one couldn’t tell there was even a door there) and as I tried to turn the key in the lock it begun to melt in my hand and twist out of shape and finally broke in two so that I couldn’t get the door unlocked. I quickly went back to find the woman and apologise for damaging her key, but I was greeted with abuse as she informed me that she operated a brothel behind that door and now how would she survive etc… Next thing I know I am walking along with one of my mother’s brothers and he is telling me that my grandmother on my father’s side (who died about a year ago) was berating him for not having any children (my uncle is over fifty and has four grown children, but somehow in this dream I also believed he had no children). Apparently my grandmother went on to ask him if he was ‘lame’ – and as he said this we were walking up to a group of people at a barbeque, and one of them turned out to be my grandmother and she was falling about laughing from hearing my uncle talk about being lame; and then I woke up.

Reflecting on these weird dreams, I wondered at the richness of our unconscious – basically during sleep our brains can make free associations and make up all sorts of stories! I have just come from reading a book of short stories by a guy called Maugham Somerset, and his stories are just astounding!! It features some of the most ordinary people but they are faced with some extraordinary circumstances – and it is not even as if these circumstances are fantastic – they are all perfectly possible – but surely they can’t all be inspired by true life – he must have made some of them up – but HOW?? I think I am a good enough story teller, but I don’t know how I will fare in the fiction genre.. A book that I am reading on craft encourages the beginning writer to just be confident that they are an entertaining story teller, and to go with it..

No wonder sometimes to aid my creativity I lie down and day dream for a while – all sorts of crazy stuff goes through my mind then! Perhaps I should begin to mine this source? I am reminded of my Mom’s visions: before she goes on a journey or has to leave the house to run an errand, she has a lie down and she says this usually results in her getting some kind of vision that shows her what lies ahead, and then she can pray as is needed. I don’t know how effective or true this is, but it appeals to me somehow…

So anyway hooray – more afternoon naps for me!! :-)