I'm coming to get you....
Monday, February 28, 2011
T-4: Time travel
I have achieved the power of time destruction and destroyed T-5. You are now a day closer to me...
Sunday, February 27, 2011
T-6: Humour is the best medicine...
... so I'll just leave this here.
Hope your neck gets better soon. x
Hope your neck gets better soon. x
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Friday, February 25, 2011
Thursday, February 24, 2011
T-9: Trapped in Tuscany
Johannesburg's hysterical materialism, nouveau rich sensibility, frontier paranoia and aspirational culture combine in the form of Italianate architecture, sculpture and design. What is it about the putti, fountains and cracked walls of la bella toscana that inspires people (or tricks them) into believing that they have reached their highveld ambition? Who made naked boys the ne plus ultra of achievement? (Sure, the Vatican did, but not officially).
Truth is, Joburg is and always has been a scruffy, dusty frontier town, the Wild West, where fortunes are won and lost on the throw of a dice or the whim of a railroad. Personally I prefer the ramshackle side of the town, the weatherbeaten sections the Tuscanati never visit. At least there's something real about them, their decay isn't postponed, and it certainly isn't sprayed on for effect.
Still, the Tuscan theme remains a mystery. Maybe it's because the upwardly mobile consider themselves the pillars of the community?
Truth is, Joburg is and always has been a scruffy, dusty frontier town, the Wild West, where fortunes are won and lost on the throw of a dice or the whim of a railroad. Personally I prefer the ramshackle side of the town, the weatherbeaten sections the Tuscanati never visit. At least there's something real about them, their decay isn't postponed, and it certainly isn't sprayed on for effect.
Still, the Tuscan theme remains a mystery. Maybe it's because the upwardly mobile consider themselves the pillars of the community?
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
T-11: I love it when you talk techie
Having spent a day fiddling with various knobs, it was comforting to know we were at least doing the same thing, trying to figure out compression rates, render times, frame rates, and all that other bullshit no-one trained us for but no-one's going to do for us.
Such dire work naturally switches one's mind to sex-speak, trying to generate some heat beyond the transformer resting against your thigh. Here are some ways to spice up your techspeak:
How do love thee? Let me count the pixels.
Spank my firewire.
I'd like to take a megabyte out of you.
I'm making room on my drive so I can fit your entire file.
I'm really integer, you know?
You've rendered me speechless.
Oh well, it'll have to do for now. Just that I've been pulling my wire and you double clicking your mouse for long enough now. It's time to leave the technical stuff to the geeks, to unplug the machines and, without the use of a manual, just feel our way around.
Such dire work naturally switches one's mind to sex-speak, trying to generate some heat beyond the transformer resting against your thigh. Here are some ways to spice up your techspeak:
How do love thee? Let me count the pixels.
Spank my firewire.
I'd like to take a megabyte out of you.
I'm making room on my drive so I can fit your entire file.
I'm really integer, you know?
You've rendered me speechless.
Oh well, it'll have to do for now. Just that I've been pulling my wire and you double clicking your mouse for long enough now. It's time to leave the technical stuff to the geeks, to unplug the machines and, without the use of a manual, just feel our way around.
Monday, February 21, 2011
T-12: Parallel Universes
Feel like I'm living in a parallel universe. And, of course, it begins on television...
Come back to my world or let me into yours, because I don't like this look of the galaxy.
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Saturday, February 19, 2011
for he's a jolly good fellow
Happy Birthday my darling, thinking of you now, while I sleep, during the day - we'll find ways to connect ... Love Michelle xxx
T:14: A nightmare without you
I had a nightmare last night. We were at some large house or hotel, and a large event was taking place. I was looking and looking for you but couldn't find you. Somehow I knew you were looking for our child, even though I didn't know what the child looked like. A friend spoke to his child who was there. The child was only about five but looked and spoke like a child twice his age. Something in what he wrote and said helped me find you.
Eventually I did find you. In a room at the top of the building. You were incredibly sad, like you knew the time we had was short. You lips were twice the size and your eyelashes twice as long. You sat with me at a long table but didn't eat anything. We held each other close, but again the feeling that it was temporary. An overwhelming sadness.
Then a noise. I walked out of the room, and saw two shadowy figures behind the smoked glass of the front door. And I suddenly realised they hadn't just come for me, they'd come for you and for our child, whom we couldn't find anyway. I pressed a nearby panic button but the button wasn't connected to anything and had no effect. I turned, attempting to warn you about the intruders, but you were gone.
I woke up. Aching to have you by my side. And you were thousands of miles away. It may not quite be nightmare when you're not with me, but when you aren't, there's no true end to it.
Eventually I did find you. In a room at the top of the building. You were incredibly sad, like you knew the time we had was short. You lips were twice the size and your eyelashes twice as long. You sat with me at a long table but didn't eat anything. We held each other close, but again the feeling that it was temporary. An overwhelming sadness.
Then a noise. I walked out of the room, and saw two shadowy figures behind the smoked glass of the front door. And I suddenly realised they hadn't just come for me, they'd come for you and for our child, whom we couldn't find anyway. I pressed a nearby panic button but the button wasn't connected to anything and had no effect. I turned, attempting to warn you about the intruders, but you were gone.
I woke up. Aching to have you by my side. And you were thousands of miles away. It may not quite be nightmare when you're not with me, but when you aren't, there's no true end to it.
Thursday, February 17, 2011
What's more she's one of "your kind"
check these out... I'm glad I'm with you beyond classification...
T-16: My lilac-breasted role model
Dating agencies, internet dating sites and even matchmaking sources as esteemed as Take me Out may have different methods, but they seem to agree on one thing. When it comes to finding a suitable partner, it's important to have things in common. Some even go as far as pushing the belief that anything outside your culture is a things-in-common dead zone.
Bring on the checklist. When enrolling for 'love services', it is imperative and widespread to fill in forms asking you questions about where you were born, if you're religious, what you like to eat, the kind of activities you engage in regularly, and whether or not smell is important to you. Computer programmes are designed to match up answers and give each entrant's status a 'score', then trawl through a data base of rampant but lonely liars seeking a perfect match.
The main reason why the hit rate is successful but the match rate poor is that one tends to meet compatible people not through an algorithm but by meeting compatible people, that is, actually going out and meeting them. Why is it that dating questionnaires don't ask about parties, social events, clubs and dinners? Because generally the people filling them in don't attend such people-meeting events, preferring to leave their matchmaking to a microchip and hoping their other 'talents' (such as money, car, clothes) will paper over the cracks of their attendant (and unsurprising) lack of social skills.
Having a wife who's extremely brilliant has made me realise what it is. It's all very well finding someone who's attractive to you, who shares your interests, someone whose company you enjoy. But when you respect that person, when you look up to them, admire them, when you're intensely proud of them, then you're hooked. It's a reflection of you and of them. Next thing you'll be calling yourselves the Power Couple.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Pull the other one
Lying in a double bed was a chicken, smoking a large cigar and looking extremely pleased with itself, and an egg which looked very disappointed...
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
A Long Time Coming...
Today I reclaimed my sexuality and my womanhood, in honour of the two of us... I've had it up to here (I'm pointing just above my ears) at the sordid tales of das leben der anderen. Don't get be wrong, I knew that everyone around me was at it like rabbits, I knew that from the days of blissbox... the London air is full of sex... but I turned a blind eye - in some bizarre puritanical ritual (I was a nun in my past life).
While you've been choking the chicken I was preserving the holy temple, in some needless sign of abstinence. God knows I've tried!
But I'm no robot, and I have become more than a little preoccupied with sex and namely the lack of it. "It" infects my dreams, makes me want to stay in bed longer to keep the thoughts of the two of us doing lascivious things to one another in my mind - just a little longer before the feeling fades... I've missed talking about sex, I've missed the anticipation of it, I've missed the general groping under the duvet, the pressure, the warmth, the texture of you as you enter me...
I miss you.
So I took a little me time and had a glorious session, followed by a second one because I got greedy and realised I'd denied myself slivers of pleasure in these bleak times... because you were with me (by means of my excellent imagination and the help of a photo that I could zoom in on)and because quite frankly my body turns me on - I didn't feel too alone.
Of course as that beautiful Irish Pixie Sinead O'Connor said, Nothing Compares 2 U... but I bloody needed it... Even as I write this I feel the tingle of pleasure "down there" (your equivalent of "It Moved")
I am actually taking a little bit of time off... I know I should be working, but instead I plan to make a nice lunch and watch Sunset Boulevard...
and in honour of the late, great Gloria Swanson I'll end with this picture of the queen indulging herself - (watch the right hand)
"All right, Mr Gamaker, I'm ready for my close up..."
T-18: Grateful for what we have
What it is with relationship disorder? It seems to swirl around us like fireflies. Is it a lack of choice or too much of it? It is fear, neurosis, or the calmness of knowing (or even not knowing)? Whatever it is, there seems to be a kind of emotional/romantic rupture occurring in so many people's lives.
Now it may simply be a case of identifying this stuff more now that an immense calmness has entered our lives. In comparison with all the goings-on in friends' relationships, what we have seems positively pacific. Okay, maybe more Atlantic (which is infinitely better than being in the doldrums), and not without glitch and worry, but somehow cleaner.
Yes, we're the Power Couple. I've always known that. But power needs mass and energy, or some sort of Newtonian principle I'm way to far from Std. 7 science to remember. It requires, in our case, two bodies with drive to work, work on things, understand things, to really care about the whole thing, to have the deep need to keep the machine chuffing along.
It is perhaps no coincidence that I ponder all this in the sticky wake of Valentine's Day, and I'm certainly not suggesting these other people don't have certain energies and needs and ambitions. I'm not saying people aren't necessarily vigilant enough, or get lazy. We're all seeking happiness, and if we take our foot off the pedal or take each other for granted it's only because the energy isn't inexhaustible.
But what it needs is one of those glowing energy cells you see in science-fiction movies. When the machine around it has pushed its way across the universe and looks hulking and old, when all the humans controlling the ship from the bridge have long since perished in hyperspace, when the craft is discovered by generations hence, humanoid but not human, all they find to suggest the ship had some sort of mission, some sort of reason for existing, is this glowing cell, kept alive by the most precious thing known to man: an inexhaustible source of energy.
Even now, as we're apart, and I feel tired by missing you, I know the energy cell glows. It doesn't flicker or buzz, it simply glows. Without it, a relationship must be sustained through continuity, the appearance of trust, excitement, variation and the luxury of having options. These are all important, but shouldn't be the ne plus ultra or even the sine qua non or even the quid quo pro.
I cherish every day that I feel our energy cells glowing through the darkness of the universe of relationship trouble above our heads.
Now it may simply be a case of identifying this stuff more now that an immense calmness has entered our lives. In comparison with all the goings-on in friends' relationships, what we have seems positively pacific. Okay, maybe more Atlantic (which is infinitely better than being in the doldrums), and not without glitch and worry, but somehow cleaner.
Yes, we're the Power Couple. I've always known that. But power needs mass and energy, or some sort of Newtonian principle I'm way to far from Std. 7 science to remember. It requires, in our case, two bodies with drive to work, work on things, understand things, to really care about the whole thing, to have the deep need to keep the machine chuffing along.
It is perhaps no coincidence that I ponder all this in the sticky wake of Valentine's Day, and I'm certainly not suggesting these other people don't have certain energies and needs and ambitions. I'm not saying people aren't necessarily vigilant enough, or get lazy. We're all seeking happiness, and if we take our foot off the pedal or take each other for granted it's only because the energy isn't inexhaustible.
But what it needs is one of those glowing energy cells you see in science-fiction movies. When the machine around it has pushed its way across the universe and looks hulking and old, when all the humans controlling the ship from the bridge have long since perished in hyperspace, when the craft is discovered by generations hence, humanoid but not human, all they find to suggest the ship had some sort of mission, some sort of reason for existing, is this glowing cell, kept alive by the most precious thing known to man: an inexhaustible source of energy.
Even now, as we're apart, and I feel tired by missing you, I know the energy cell glows. It doesn't flicker or buzz, it simply glows. Without it, a relationship must be sustained through continuity, the appearance of trust, excitement, variation and the luxury of having options. These are all important, but shouldn't be the ne plus ultra or even the sine qua non or even the quid quo pro.
I cherish every day that I feel our energy cells glowing through the darkness of the universe of relationship trouble above our heads.
Monday, February 14, 2011
T-19: Trapped in pulp
Today for some reason I feel like I'm trapped in a pulp novel of the 1950s.
Perhaps it's because it's Valentine's Day, perhaps because we're far from each other (again), perhaps because I have sex on the brain (again). Maybe I have murderous thoughts. Or maybe I genuinely fear that monsters from outer space are going to destroy the earth with small red lasers they fire out of their gigantic members.
Is it a feeling of helplessness? After all, in the 1950s people truly began to feel helpless. I think it was a product of loneliness: as suburbs boomed and cars took over, suddenly people were left alone in wastelands of new communities, women left to the sound of air being release from Tupperware containers as they sealed, intelligent people who five years earlier worked in munitions factories and suddenly found themselves stranded on manicured lawns, no longer minutes from the nearest shop, but miles from humanity.
Communication broke down, mistrust blossomed, fear increased, paranoia reigned, the environment began to buckle under the weight of our aspirations, and love became a subversive thought.
Out here in the suburbs I feel this same sense of dread and reckoning. It's calm, quiet, the day only interrupted by mowers, angle grinders, electric garage doors and the distant drone of the motorway. Hence the proliferation of novels that satisfied our burgeoning xenophobia (aliens/commies taking over our homes/businesses) and tried to stem our rampant horniness.
I will attempt to turn my thoughts from pulp to cheese, and throw my arms around you in an embrace worthy of the front cover.
Happy Valentine's Day. xx
Perhaps it's because it's Valentine's Day, perhaps because we're far from each other (again), perhaps because I have sex on the brain (again). Maybe I have murderous thoughts. Or maybe I genuinely fear that monsters from outer space are going to destroy the earth with small red lasers they fire out of their gigantic members.
Is it a feeling of helplessness? After all, in the 1950s people truly began to feel helpless. I think it was a product of loneliness: as suburbs boomed and cars took over, suddenly people were left alone in wastelands of new communities, women left to the sound of air being release from Tupperware containers as they sealed, intelligent people who five years earlier worked in munitions factories and suddenly found themselves stranded on manicured lawns, no longer minutes from the nearest shop, but miles from humanity.
Communication broke down, mistrust blossomed, fear increased, paranoia reigned, the environment began to buckle under the weight of our aspirations, and love became a subversive thought.
Out here in the suburbs I feel this same sense of dread and reckoning. It's calm, quiet, the day only interrupted by mowers, angle grinders, electric garage doors and the distant drone of the motorway. Hence the proliferation of novels that satisfied our burgeoning xenophobia (aliens/commies taking over our homes/businesses) and tried to stem our rampant horniness.
I will attempt to turn my thoughts from pulp to cheese, and throw my arms around you in an embrace worthy of the front cover.
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