Author Archives: Eleanor Madziva
Love in the Time of Twilight
There are moments in life when I think I am living in the twilight zone. I look around and think to myself: somewhere out there, in a parallel universe, the real Eleanor is living my life. I hope she’s getting a much better deal out of it than I currently am, because I have grabbed a straw so short that its existence is something of pure imagination.
Mostly hallucinogenic.
As one of my many concerted efforts to stay out of trouble and jail, I am helping out at a university’s international office. What I didn’t realise is that I was jumping out of the fryer and straight into the nuclear-fuelled fire!
If this has not come through in my earlier writing, I have a very low tolerance for foolishness and idiocy. The two characters who deserve pride of place in many of my dealings with the average human being. But when you step into a university you harbour visions of knowledge, enlightenment, perception, insight, rationale and reasoning wafting through the air ducts thicker than the smog in Beijing.
And then you start the long walk to academic freedom and find that these visions are little less than something you would get at the end of a pipe. What makes me bring out my knife to slash angrily at the air is the inability of people in academia to follow simple, straightforward instructions.
In my checkered history of teaching English to the Japanese I picked up the skill to issue crisp instructions, leaving no room for confusion or misunderstanding. I have instruction-giving on lockdown tighter than a pimp’s wallet towards the end of the pimping month. But the indifference to following instructions, exhibited by these supposed scions of higher learning, is enough to make you stab your own thigh repeatedly because you would have already stabbed your eyeballs out.
Academia be damned, I will take someone with a measure of common sense, preferably metric (not to be confused with matric). But this would be nothing if it was not compounded by the fact that my colleagues are the sort who would not be out of place in a period drama of in-breeding hill people!
I had the misfortune to overhear a ten (10) minutes conversation between two male colleagues debating the merits of a Russell Hobbs iron. For the benefit of those for whom the language import might not have sunk in: I listened in on a conversation between two MALES discussing the virtues of a brand of iron!
I am now ready to lie down and give up the ghost on any claim to womanhood that I ever had because in my 30 odd-years existence, I have never once felt any stirring in my loins to have that discussion. Ever. I will now don my cloak, put on my vampire fangs and retire into the twilight zone.
Love In The Time of Snobbery
In this life, they tell you that there are two things that are certain: death and taxes. To that truncated list, I’d like to proffer my personal addition: my inveterate snobbery. 30 odd years of middle class pretensions later, my snobbery is no longer the inchoate, undiscerning spectre of my opinionated teens, but a sharpened, refined weapon more deadly than a drunken samurai wielding his nunchakus as he repeatedly stabs the air with his double-edged jintsu blade.
Case in point – in a rare bout of altruism (I’m hoping Santa will forgive the preceding eleven months of malfaisance and come early this year – Kalahari or not) I’m volunteering at a soup kitchen. As I stand above a vat of greyish, lump mass masquerading as some form of protein (I have my suspicions that it’s some kind of soy extract), plastic spoon in hand, ready to ladle out sustenance to the desperate few, a twinkle catches my eye.
A sparkle as misplaced as a nun stripping on a pole makes my head move back, my ladle dangling mid-air as lumps of gunk drip from its “Made in China” plasticness - a Gold tooth!
My mind reels.
Even the homeless have gold teeth! So you don’t need to not have money to also not have class. If I had my way, I’d rid the whole world of gold teeth armed with nothing but a rusty blunt fork and a burning rage fuelling my crusade. A gleaming grille was never designed to be on anything more than a fancy motor car.
A young moolah ba-by video this ain’t. I am hunting down the stake driven through Dracula’s heart to repeatedly, with cold-hearted detachment, stick it in the eye of that slow-witted loon who thought it was a good idea for brown folk to go around with expensive mineral deposits in their mouths.
My snobbery takes other oral forms. I am one of those Stockholm Syndromed darkies with a slavish attachment to the English language, having pronounced myself its Guardian and Protector. There are no salary benefits, but the wholesale butchery of the language that I’ve witnessed in this country has sent my snobbery into spheres that the SKA will struggle to reach.
The worst offenders being those entrusted with information to the great unwashed (SABC, I am looking at you). So Saturday night, I am listening to a news programme on SAfm and there’s mention of a sports initiative for girls called “G-sport.” But the newsreader took it upon himself to pronounce it as “G-spot,” that’s a whole different ball game. I’m assuming most parents don’t really want their daughters to be on that ball or that game.
Or when the likes of Eddie Zondy come up with gems like “None more blind than those who cannot see”. The snob in me mutates another hydra-like head. There is much work to do in the continuous struggle of my self-appointed role!
Love In The Times of “Please Call Me”
A special seat is reserved in hell for the inventor of the “Please Call Me” (PCM) feature.
To his immediate left, will be seated the dullard who decided to roll it out en masse. One year and eleven months in this country, I have never seen the need to send a PCM. More tellingly, I don’t even know how to!
Cellphone users can send PCM’s across networks
In my four-eyed view, why must MY wanting to speak to you cost YOU money? I am a foreign student living on a pittance, yet I can rustle up one rand and muster the energy to walk to the phone booth to make a call. How can I take you seriously, as a potential partner, if you’re so cheap as to ‘propose love’ to me ON MY DIME? Unless you are:
- In jail and have used up your one phone call on scurrying around for bail money;
- On death’s door step, unwilling to kick that bucket until you’ve said your last goodbyes to me;
- Even poorer than I am (obviously no one in my current sphere of influence makes it on that list);
…then you must train your trigger finger away from that PCM function!
I recently met a guy, in active employment (not toyi-toying in front of a mine or a farm or a burning pile of tyres somewhere), who promised to call me the next day. Three days of silence later…he sent me a PCM. How is that the same thing? Now that tells me five (5) things about you:
- You’re not serious and you’re unreliable.
- You’re not serious and if you can disappoint me in small things, you’ll likely disappoint me in the big ones.
- You’re not serious and you’re a cheap skate.
- You’re not serious AND you’re a fool for thinking that being unserious, unreliable and cheap will have me dropping my Bridget Jones granny pants for you, which is what, at the heart of it all you’re surely after.
- You’re not serious and you don’t have class. PCM couldn’t get more oppositer (sic) than classy if Usain were chasing it down with Mike Tyson waiting in ear-chomping eagerness on the other end.
While I am not in the hunt for flowers (allergies) or chocolate (weight issues) or wining and dining (potential drunkardness and that dreaded weight issue again) the taste of death and carrion that a mis-timed PCM leaves in my mouth is not the thing to inspire romantic sonnets. And I don’t even have particularly high standards and yet, like a drunk high jumper with one leg shorter than the other, that bar is failing to be cleared.
My Christmas Wish List: That Men in Black thingamajik to wipe memories clean. Give it a good workout on the 51.8 million this country presently holds (can’t run the risk of contagion by sparing the innocent few) and allow that dastardly PCM to join its malevolent progenitor in the fiery pits of hell. *Rant over*
Misconceptions
Spending a lot of time on the internet as I do means that invariably not all my time there is well spent. For all the fun that looking at shoes
is, it is safe to say that my time could be put to much better use, including broadening my mind in more intellectual pursuits and keeping abreast of world affairs at more than a superficial level. Knowing the latest about some overpaid hip hop stars shenanigans in the club with some under-age girl does not a fine mind make.
My time wasting sometimes sucks in other people as lengthy online chats take over, enabled by Google Talk, Skype, Yahoo Messenger and all other manner of chat functions designed to keep you shackled to your computer, bug-eyed with fatigue but still banging away in an online pseudo-relationship.
I was chatting to one of my service providers a few nights ago when he dropped this gem on me, and please note, this is an exact quote of what he said: ‘because I know you like to swallow I won’t cum from now until then…I’ll be ready to pop’. Like to swallow? Really? Like to swallow? How on earth did that idea get planted into your head and gain enough roots for you to confidently assert that? Clearly someone has been watching too much porn and has had some weird notions embedded into their skull (and having watched a fair bit of adult content, I have seen that a lot of them do not in fact swallow, preferring to play around with it and then spit it out. I am on to you, you porn wenches).
Having had this conversation with a few of my closer friends, not one of them has ever admitted to liking it. At best, a steely resignation to the whole thing. Even Samantha off Sex and the City, nymphomaniac extraordinaire that she was, would balk at it on occasion. It is nothing more than a necessary evil because the alternative of having it all over your recently-coiffed head is too unbearable to think about. Never mind the cost involved. It got me wondering what other misconceptions men are running around harbouring about what women like and do not like when it comes to matters carnal.
Take for example some men who grow that one finger nail on their pinky finger until it is this long gnarled extension gathering dirt and all manner of other indescribables. Upon asking why they felt the need to cultivate this cringe-inducing travesty, some of them have answered that it helps them to administer sexual pleasure and gratification to women. My poker face constantly being in the shop for repairs, I recoiled in horror at the thought of this filthy nail scratching rabidly at any poor woman’s sensitive bits. Get out the brillo pads why don’t you, if administering injuries is what you are looking to do. At least with genital mutilation they get it over with quickly and once it’s done, it’s done. You are not expected to lie there and pretend that you are enjoying having your lady parts grated off and facing the likelihood of infection setting in. But, therein lies part of the problem: women pretending.
Steven Fry recently got into trouble for suggesting that women have sex with men because it is the price they are willing to pay to stay in a relationship with them. And for a lot of women, that pretending seems to be part of the package they tie to the whole sex act. Fearing that their partners egos might be more fragile than some gentle direction could take, they suffer in silence when their needs are not being met. Thinking instead of queen and country and loads of laundry that need doing and cakes that need to be baked for the next fundraiser as their man gets more of his biblical knowledge of her long-suffering body. Unaware that her moans could just as easily be from pain as from pleasure, he continues his assault, firm in his believe that he is doing A Good Job. And so the cycle of misconception continues to turn.
So my young man saving up his payload was told in no uncertain terms that most people do not like their jobs, but they do them anyway. And that same logic extended to his idea about my fondness for the act of swallowing; furthermore, not for nothing is the preceding act suffixed by t
