Upside-down

It's been a tough week so far, mostly because of the weekend that I had! First, several friends and most of my family have birthdays in February, so besides being totally broke, I get exhausted from all the socialising.


On Saturday I worked at the vet, went straight through to the videostore and worked (where I ended up eating chocolate cake with the guy who wanted to get me fired about a year ago) and then changed in the kitchen in the back of the shop and ended up sharing makeup tips with Joey while we did our makeup in the mirror over the cockroaches scuttling around in the sink (I'll work there, but I will never eat nything that ocmes out of that kitchen!).


From there I went through to La's birthday party which was awesme, over the years I've got to know most of her friends, some of them have even become friends of mine independently of her. Lara herself had come dwn with flu that day and was merrily mixing flu meds with alcohol so that by 8pm she was running around, introducing me to ev eryone (I think there was one person I actually hadn't met before) and saying "This is Helen, she's doing a DOCTORATE! And she's divine! Isn't she divine? She's divine!"

By the time they managed to stop her and escape, she would turn to me and say "You are divine. I'm so glad you're here! So glad! I love it that yore here! Oh Bob, have you met Helen? She's divine!" and so on. It was really funny!


Once she'd had comething to eat she settled down and told us all about her first week at her new job and all about how exciting and scary and totally overwhelming but awesome it is. I'm really happy that she's found somewhere to work where she's obviously being challenged but also supported and she's learning tons! She's also an incredible stoyteller, and I think that all our years as friends has trained her to see the melodrama in every situation which made for hilarious stories!

So La's getting all grown up, Joey's divorce is being finalised on Friday, another girl just got engaged and someone else is 8 weeks pregnant. Meanwhile I'm still studying, living at home and nowhere near any of the landmarks I had expected to be reaching by now.

And so life is a little bit upside-down, I'm not sure where I am,or where I want to be. And while I have the most fantastic friends and mentors, bosses who are supremely understanding, funding (!) and pretty much rather a lot to be thankful for, I was still relieved to get home early this afternoon, crawl in to bed, and listen to the rain outside while reading about bizarre experiments which made me feel a little bit sick.

And very glad the the carnival-culture isn't very prevalent in South africa. I guess we had enough horrors in day-to-day life without paying to see more! And by the time we'd started figuring ourselves out the rest of the (Western) world had somewhat passed that stage!