Oh hi, how’s it going? It’s me! Every girl ever. I’m really looking forward to this date. I’m not nearly as attractive as you remember me being because when we met the bar was dark and you were drunk. Come on in.

Let’s start off with the unavoidable tour of my incredibly typical post-college-girl apartment.

You’ll notice that I went ahead and purchased everything that Ikea and Pier 1 have ever produced. There’s my decorative birdcage over there even though I don’t have a bird, and there’s my gay wicker basket with bamboo poles in it. I don’t know what the hell that’s thing’s all about, but I bought it.

Hey check it out, I have more candles in here than a Roman Catholic Church. Doesn’t it smell like Hazelnut!? If I were to light all of my candles at once you could see my apartment from space! I fucking love candles!

Come on into the living room.

Oh, I see you met my cat there. That’s “Freddy Paws Jr.” Why don’t you pet him and act like you like cats even though you hate cats? There you go. Oh, he took a little swing at your eye there huh? Yeah, he’ll do that.Hey, let’s check out the kitchen.

Hey look at my refrigerator. There are pictures all over it! Look at all these pictures of me and my equally vacuous friends from college! We were so crazy! You can tell we’re really good friends because our faces are all pressed up against each other like that.

And check it out, we’re holding up alcoholic beverages to the camera in every single picture. That’s to prove that we were partying. College was so fun! But of course I don’t talk to any of these girls anymore because now they’re all bitches.

Let’s go back into the hallway!

Hey, before we leave I’m going to go in the bathroom for ten minutes for some mysterious reason. Why don’t you sit awkwardly in my big, stupid, round papizan chair over there while you wait for me. It’s like you’re sitting in a hug! Be right back…

Sorry that took a half an hour, I don’t know what the hell I was doing in there. Let’s go!

Wow! Thanks for opening my car door for me! I’m totally going to blow that meaningless gesture out of proportion and delude myself into thinking that you’re a really good guy because that’s what I want to believe.

Well, here we are at the restaurant. No thanks waiter, I don’t need to see a menu, just bring me some expensive things. Hey I know, while we wait, I’ll tell you all about my unspeakably boring job. I hate my boss. He’s a jerk! I might get another job. Maybe something in pharmaceutical sales.

Now let’s talk about my family. I love my family. I want you to love my family. I want my family to love you. I want you to make love to my family! I want you to go golfing with my semi-retarded brother Travis. That would be so God damned cute!

Wow! I can’t believe I ordered all this food! I have no intention of eating any of it. No thanks waiter, we don’t need a box. Just throw it out.

Hey, I’ve got an idea, let’s go to a bar and have an after dinner drink! It’ll be great, it will be just like how we’re drinking here, only it will be louder and we’ll have to stand up. Come on!

See, isn’t this better? Oh hey, what a coincidence. Look over there! It’s a group of my friends that I knew was going to be here. Let’s go over there so that they can judge you!

Hey, I have to go to the bathroom for a half an hour again for some reason. You can stay here and talk to my unbelievably hideous friend Christine! Christine’s so ugly she scares kids! Talk to her! She has a job and a family that she wants to talk to you about too. Be right back.

I’m back! Sorry I was gone for three hours, there was a line. I want to go home now.

Well here we are at my door again. This was really fun for me and not you. You should pretend like we’re going to do it again sometime! Maybe I’ll see you at Target a few months from now and we can avoid eye contact because you never called me. Here, have this awkward goodnight kiss that’s as empty as my soul. Good night!

(I didn’t write this, I received it in an email)

Awkward

If you have driven around Joburg, even just once, you would have noticed handing out flyers at the robots is not uncommon, one in particular catches my attention every time. It is the infamous DR (insert random African name here) flyers, promising wealth, enlarged penises, increased health etc. These usually also tell you how this AMA-ZING doctor has discovered a new plant that has a magical medicinal property that all the medical scientists in the world have not yet discovered! Ama-zing right?

Most people (I know) would sit down in the morning with their cup of coffee and read the news be it on their computers or the newspaper, me? HA! I have my coffee in the car and wait for the first person handing out my morning amusement. My excitement for the morning, if I don’t get a flyer I know it will not be a good day!

Perhaps one day I should go and see one of these doctors because heaven knows I could do with the winning lotto numbers!

The flyer (all typed out, word for word from the actual flyer I got this morning)

Come & Discover the secret herbs. (this is the heading)

His specialties includes but not limited to (no name today… damit!)

• Finish unfinished work by other doctors without going back to finish work.
• Sickness or problems that other healers have failed to solve for you. (in other words your GP)
• Remove bad lucks, spells out of your way that keeps taking you money away & not progressing in whatever you are doing. (That explains the empty pockets!!)
• Extreme protection for those doing dangerous jobs like Miners, security guards, bank managers etc.
• Eliminate in family fights between children and parents, in-laws, husband & wife and ensure peace and harmony at home.
• Get you married to that love of your life in short time & seal your marriage with internal love & happiness forever (internal or eternal I wonder?? Nah definitely “internal”!)
• Guarantee that you are loved & trusted by your colleagues, husband, wife, in-laws, friends, you both etc.
• Guarantee you win that troubling court case no matter how or what stage. (now I know! Thank you flyer!)
• Ensure sexual satisfaction with lovers to avoid cheating with others for a full satisfaction that might ruin your relationship. (Ladies, we have just been given the secret to making a relationship work. Someone should let Cosmo know!)
• Do you have body or vaginal pains, bad periods, lots of fat, stomach pains. (lots of fat? Is that politically correct?)
• Ensure that promotion you have desired for a long time at work or in your career ie: sports, politics, music etc (that explains our government…)
• Ensure success in your life or business & turn your trade into a favourite among clients.
• Bring back lost lover even if lost for long time (classic!)
• Quite alcohol, smoking, drugs, using purely herbal therapies with no side effects
• Read and tell your problems before you mention then to him
• Are you diabetic, aged or have high/low blood pressure & it’s affecting your performances. (Now tell me dear doctor, how are you planning on fixing old age?)

www. freerice.com

Go onto this site, pick a subject and answer the questions.

For every correct answer you get, 10 grains of rice get donated to end world hunger!

About FreeRice (taken from the actual website, I did not write this.)

FreeRice is a non-profit website run by the United Nations World Food Program. Our partner is the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

FreeRice has two goals:

1. Provide education to everyone for free.
2. Help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free.

This is made possible by the generosity of the sponsors who advertise on this site.

Whether you are CEO of a large corporation or a street child in a poor country, improving your education can improve your life. It is a great investment in yourself.

Perhaps even greater is the investment your donated rice makes in hungry human beings, enabling them to function and be productive. Somewhere in the world, a person is eating rice that you helped provide. Thank you.

Read the above Blog before reading this comment…

Lion BURGERS??? seriously?

This is an absolute outrage, I cannot believe that people would try to justify eating this endangered animal by saying “The meat comes from lions raised on a farm.”

And to say it is in “honor” of South Africa??

My god, i am pretty sure i am not the only South African to take offense to this!

a lion, is a lion, is a lion people.

Picture taken at the Lion park – Johannesburg, South Africa

I was at a house-warming braai on Saturday night with my besty and a few of her friends. As i arrived I gave her a huge hug as I had not seen her for a while and she introduced me to her other girlfriends. “Ladies, this is *** she is my mommy friend”

To say i was surprised is an understatement.

When i was a bit younger (not by much..), i had 2 girlfriends, my high school besty’s. There was one girl who was the mommy friend – always doing the responsible thing, going to bed at a reasonable hour, studying when there was studying to be done, doing shopping for her mum when she was working, going home early from a party because she had had enough to drink, etc. Then there was girl number 2, she was the A+ student- the career girl if you will. She excelled in everything she did, knew where she was going and knew exactly how she was getting there and then there was me…

I was the girl who would party all night, snuck out of my bedroom window to meet a boy at the front gate, Left for the entire weekend and then dreaded the Sunday when i had to go home and face my mum (i didn’t tell her of course!)…

Now our lives seem to be completely different. Friend #1 is now studying at uni to be a social worker  she is still very maternal but that aside, she parties hard every weekend, dancing till the early hours of the morning- spends most of the time at her boyfriend’s house and just lives life as we all should in our early 20’s, friend #2 she is still career driven, also studying at uni but again parties until the sun comes up, got arrested once – GASP.

Me?? I sit at home, with my fiancé. Wake up the same time every morning, go to work, come home, make dinner, shower, watch a series (greys anatomy, fringe etc) I will then go to bed and either 1. Read my book or 2. Knit – I KNIT?? When did this happen?

I have become old, old in my youth.

This should not be happening.

I do not want children right now, but I do have an itch to care for something, mother it, love it and have it depend on me, so I began the hunt for a monkey!

I got to work one morning and realised I hadn’t spoken to a friend of mine for quite some time… and in that time so much had happened to both of us so I felt a bit guilty! But that got me thinking about her life, well one part to be precise… her monkeys! She has two beautiful marmoset monkeys which she absolutely adores!! Solo and Sam…

These monkeys and I have never got along…. even after hours of time spent in her garden looking for snails (urgh!) feeding them by hand for another hour or so… giving them their dinner, playing with them (through the cage!) etc. These monkeys just did not take to me at all! But they are still gorgeous and so I decided it was time I got a baby monkey!

I have searched on line for the past few days and this is what I have concluded:

1. Most people advertising monkeys for adoption who say they are in Pretoria on the advert are more than likely really from Cameroon, probably caught the monkey wild, or stole it from the mummy monkey and it now trying to make some cash on the side.
2. The “free monkey for adoption” adverts are a load of nonsense, these people would like you to just pay for the transporting costs BUT they want the money before they send the monkey (in their personal bank account) and if you suggest going to see the monkey, you will probably never hear from these people again. How do you spell S.C.A.M?
3. All the photographs are the same… the hand holding the monkey in the photograph is the same!  The (awful) pink nail polish on the hand is the exact same!!! Either this person is getting around or it is a…. SCAM
4. The email addresses. If an email address is something obscure I usually don’t trust it but if it looks like a cat ran over the keyboard whilst you were choosing the alias I try to run the other direction. Something like kfjfuimsjid2000@gmail.com for example!

Anyway the list could go on and on and on… but in the mean time my search continues, I hold thumbs and pray to whoever will listen that I find my monkey!

So I decided to have a quite dinner on the night of my birthday with my fiancé, my besty and my neighbour, after trying out oysters and waiting 2 hours to get a drink we decided we would be better off going elsewhere for some food, we landed up at a cute tai restaurant (no names to be mentioned) we got our food and it was lovely!! Except of course for the uncooked prawns that gave me a lovely case of food poisoning. I spent most of my birthday sitting next to a toilet bowl. I was not ready to give up just yet! I decided I would have a small get together with a few mates at Manhattans night club 2 days later, which was fantastic, I danced until I couldn’t breath, drank enough to have fun but stopped before the toilet bowl would become my companion for the night AGAIN and left before my feet got sore.

Getting to the point. My fiancé is a reservist and my besty is a bleeding heart (rescuing animals from townships, the SPCA, anywhere she can find them really) point still coming…

They both decided that we should take a ride through Alex at 3 in the morning whilst they both told me horror stories of people shooting at police cars whilst they patrol for no apparent reason, how the dogs are treated, how people have to live etc. The smell was atrocious, the rats where the size of small dogs and we had no problems finding them either! I am not going to lie- this was a terrifying yet crazy experience – unreal almost, I mean I live in an area that has a township down the road and another one over the hill and I drive past them every day, and you look at the kids playing soccer and the taxi drivers parked and bobbing to their hip hop beats, and on Saturday night there is always a party! I can’t sleep anymore if there isn’t blaring music coming from the township, vuvuzelas being blown like the world is about to end. My point? I guess it made me think. I get really bleak with life when it’s the 20^th of the month and I just can’t afford to go out for some sushi and a few cocktails with the girls, I see the negative more often that I see the positive, yet these people living in the townships who don’t have/ can’t afford some of the “luxuries” that I would call necessities, still see the positive, still dance the night away and find joy in what they do have, it’s time to stop being disappointed with what I don’t have and start enjoying the things I do have.