what I wish a few people in my life would understand

You want me to WHAT?!?

When I was eight years old I tried to jump off a high-dive board into the swimming pool at school. I realised for the first time that I was afraid of heights as I sat down, clutched the edges of the board and shook uncontrollably until I was able to crawl back to the platform.

By the time I reached 15 or so heights had become such an issue I found myself unable to stand on a desk without shaking, and walking over bridges made me incredibly nervous.

So anyway when I was fifteen I went on a school camp where rock-climbing and abseiling were two of many incredibly cool activities (like archery and raft-building) and I decided that it was time for me to get over all of my nonsense and climb that silly rock face.

Much screaming and crying and shaking and swearing in front of the headmistress later I got to the top! Unfortunately abseiling did not go as well, as I freaked out, went into hysterics and clawed my way up the rocks to the top again (I tried about five times, including once with an instructor next to me holding my hand).

Since then I’m largely better with heights. I climb things whenever I get the opportunity (kind of like poking at an old scar to see if it still hurts) and I discovered years ago that if there is a lizard to catch I lose all fear of anything, and so I’ve become relatively comfortable scrambling around rocks.

The fear of abseiling stayed with me though, and even though I was invited a few times I was always too scared. At the same time it was annoying. How can I be the fearless lizard-hunter if I’m terrified of dangling off the side of a cliff?

Anyway on Saturday evening as I was fixing up my nap-smudged eyeliner (I know you’re not supposed to sleep with makeup on, but does taking a nap count?) I got a call from Leia inviting me to go abseiling on Sunday. I agreed immediately (which was rather funny because I think she was expecting to have to beg and stuff).

So early on Sunday morning, she arrived with coffee and took me off to meet the other crazy cliff-danglers. And they pointed out the first place we’d be abseiling from/off/at/on (?)

You have got to be kidding me!

“Don’t be silly it’s only 50 metres! You’ll be fine…”

By this stage the others went to admire a little waterfall (complete with dismembered cow-head)

while the view of the bridge started doing this to me:

We got to sit around and wait for Leia and another guy to set it all up, and the bridge loomed over us, looking higher and higher by the minute. Fortunately the others were really nice and one of them even had blue hair so we compared notes and all chatted about silly things while I felt my heart-rate rising with each passing moment.

By the time we got to the bridge I felt like I was somewhere between throwing up and passing out. One of the other guys went first so that he could help people at the bottom and he very happily climbed over the edge and slid off.

And then it was my turn.

Let me just say: kneeling on a tiny little pipe while shaking (and apparently ghostly pale) and being unclipped from the safety line because it got tangled is NOT fun at all.

It is a good thing I hadn’t had breakfast.

I didn’t cry (yay!) but it was close.

I clung onto the bridge so tightly I ended up bruising my palm.

And for some reason once I had finally done the ‘letting myself slip off the bridge’ step (talk about going against every instinct known to man…) while being photographed a LOT and not really caring much at all (I cared later). I opened my eyes and looked around and… it was really pretty up there!

So i said so, and everyone laughed a lot and took MORE photos of me (smiling and with my eyes open this time) and then i got to work getting down to the ground because the harness had shifted slightly and become rather painful.

(this isn’t me, as I kind of had my hands full while trying to avoid an ugly death)

It LOOOMS!

(This isn’t me either)

All this next to the crazy bungee jumpers leaping around…

(I thought they were supposed to go straight down?)

(It may look graceful here, but you didn’t hear the guy screeching like a girl…)

From there we had a lunch break and then headed off to the next spot – a cliff-type thing that looked a lot shorter from the ground than from the top. We got to swim in the river, take a nap and generally enjoy the scenery for a few hours

While Leia and co set up the ropes.

For the record, I don’t care that those ropes can theoretically hold up a car. They’re SO thin! And the little spindly trees…

I had a full-on freak out and said lots of nasty things. To help matters my ropes got tangled up again which meant I had to do some square-dancing on the cliff-edge (step left, then right, turn around, turn back, step right…). Leia responded to my stream of verbal abuse (I don’t remember much of what I said, I was terrified and having nasty flashbacks to my previous experiences) by laughing, which made me yell even more. I do remember her explaining that she was giving me some slack on the safety rope and I yelled at her and made her take the slack in immediately.

Slack is scary.

and of course once I’d got going, yelled at her for laughing (you can’t grip properly if you’re laughing…) and had to negotiate the whole falling-over-backwards thing after a pesky ledge I made it down, collapsed into a quivering heap and confirmed via the radio that I was alive, albeit shaky (you should see the photos I took after this point, they’re completely blurred…).

I felt kind of bad for all the things I’d said, particularly since I hadn’t died and so most of it was entirely unfounded. Plus I hated that although I had finally ‘beaten’ the fear, I was still scared and it didn’t feel like I’d accomplished anything. A few minutes later the guy in charge radioed to ask if he could use my camera up top (I’d left it up there), so I gave him one condition:

“Can I do that again?”

And I managed to smile most of the way down the second time!

My apologies

I am trying to use Windows Live Writer now, so if this looks weird then i m sorry, but I had to try, and blogger’s formatting (particularly with pictures) was driving me totally nuts.

I’m not quite sure how to express myself right now. I’m exhausted, I’m stressed out, ,I’m leaving for the field in a few days, I have friends having crises, I have to pack…

And I’m addicted to this website. I decided to use some of my favourite doodles to describe what’s going on in my life.

There’s going on fieldwork:

Coming to terms with having to produce something worthy of four years of my life:

 

Beating back cynicism and negativity (I’d rather be a real optimist than a fake cynic, and cynicism is SO last week). Seriously, I’ve found myself being happy lately, and not for any particular reason. Maybe not having a reason is reason enough?

I’ve also finally moved on from somebody who hurt me quite badly a few months ago. It took me longer than I expected, and I kept realising that I had moved on, and then moving on further and then realising ‘hey, I’ve moved on!’ and then…

   

And, of course, coming to terms with who I used to be, and trying to accept the past for what it is.

How very profoundly zen-ish! Goes to show that insomnia has its uses!

Shiny things, men in uniform AND fireworks!

So A couple off weeks ago I was invited by my fabulous cousins to attend the dress rehearsal of the South African tattoo. This is the advert:


Basically my cousin's fiancee was dancing in it and as he was helping around backstage the free tickets managed to get redistributed to his younger sister and she offered one to me! I was super-excited as I wanted to go last year but didn't get around to it until the tickets were sold out... Plus I had no idea that my soon-to-be cousin does Highland dancing! And the cousin who gave me the ticket (therough the other cousin of course) drove me there and home which was SO nice! We also got to catch up a bit which is nice as we were almost inseparable as young kids and then kind of took our own paths as we grew up.

The show was so much fun! There were fireworks, the lights were pointed at the sky (it was outdoors) which meant that we got to pretend that there was a UFO above our heads until the performance started (I am easily amused) and we got to sit in the second row from the front and see EVERYTHING!

As I can't write about everything without it taking until next week I will do a Things I Learned list:

• You can be an individual while wearing a kilt - one of the guys looked exactly like I'd imagine a goth-piper to be. He was dressed exactly like everyone else, but the long hair and earrings remained, and the attitude was still there!
• We have drum majorettes in this country. I had no idea. They were adorable, with their big smiles plastered on and so much enthusiasm.
• There are local groups suppteaching music and dance to kids here, and they were incredible! Watching a few hundred kids doing some really fast-paced gumboot dancing is not something I will forget in a hurry.
• Yellow kilts look suspiciously like skirts, particularly when the men choose to wear them short...
• Rifle drills are AMAZING!
• It's easy to see who is enjoying themselves and who isn't - and how easy it is to ignore the performers just going through the motions and watch the ones who are smiling and really getting into it.
• Flag-throwing people from Italy are very Italian. And very skilled considering they did all their flag-throwing stunts with the wind blowing rather harad!
• I'm not quite sure why there was a stunt-motorcyle exhibition, but it was unbelievable! There are very talented (and crazy) people out there!
• The marching band leader guys (I should know the name for them) take themselves very seriously. There was a world champion leading one section and he didn't even flinch or smile or blimk too much. We discussed his inner emotions in depth from the stands.
• The Highland Dancers were really good! Not that I can talk as I was *cough*forced*cough* into it when I was four and never made any progress at all besides deciding that the swords were fun to play with between lessons. And I think it's very cool that my soon-to-be cousin can do it!
• When the older men from the SA Navy went off to the side to play electric guitars and drums for us we realised that there's no age limit on playing what you want to!
• I want to go to Burundi and hear their drummers again. They had the most incredible energy (and giant smiles) and the vibrations from the drums kind of resonated in my collarbone and it was one of the most amazing experiences ever.

So I I'll definitely try and go again next year! Failing that... anyone keen for a trip to Burundi?

Confusion, reunions and general weirdness

So it was an interesting weekend. I started off dutifully dragging my achingness off to the gym on Friday, and discovered that I was actually able to run! My family sat me down afterwards and told me that the TOD is psychotic and this is all rubbish and so on and so on. They were somewhat mollified by my promising to avoid exercise for the rest of the weekend as I had a lot of stuff going on...

Saturday was the vet as usual, where I was joined by the very charming seven-year old daughter of my bosses again, who was very cool this time. She made me business cards (my name is "Hellin" now) as well as making me envelopes so that I could write her letters, and a proper 3-dimensional landscape thing of children dancing around a tree next to a tent on a beach. Seriously, for a sever-year old? Impressive. She also gave me outfit advice for the evening which was seen with great amusement by her parents!

In the evening I rushed off (late as usual) to Tamara's birthday thing. I was pretty scared, particularly walking up the road in her complex. It was a beautiful night, the crickets were chirping and I had the awful feeling that it was the opening scene for a slasher-movie. As it happened I made it out alive (not just because of the flat shoes) and although I couldn't stay long, everyone was really nice, they seemed to like my entrance of "Hi, nice mullet!" and by complete coincidence one of my ex-students was there with his wife. By even creepier coincidence I had been thinking of him recently in the "I wonder if he's still alive?" kind of way.

From there it was a sprint to chief-Goth's house, where I had a mild freak-out at my general lack of makeup (as usual. Seriously, I need to start taking eyeliner with me!) I was distracted when I had to do the eyeliner and nail polish on one of the guys. To his credit he sat very still and it looked AWESOME!

From there we went off to Goth-world, which had a surprising number of normal people there, including one of my students of course. Here I am with La trying to pull emo-faces. Well I tried, La is always smiling! I believe we took this photo shortly after the eyelinered-guy tried to set me up with the bouncer (who was gorgeous!) and we had swapped phone numbers. As I said it was interesting...

And of course we had to find people with hats... This guy was quite into the whole photo things... I had just jumped off the dance floor having gone totally ballistic for about 5 songs in a row (including headbanging to Song 2, fending off some dodgy guy and laughing at someone trying to dance with La who didn't even notice he was there) and so I was exhausted and my hair had decided to remodel itself...

Hat-guy had a scary friend who was actually really nice, but had a weird tendency to appear in the bathroom whenever I was there. hence the panic-face...

I also got to spend a lot of time with one of the people in the social circle who I've never got to know before (beyond the obligatory re-naming and laughing at us when we got a bunch of random strangers to yell at the TV with us one night). The problem is that eyeliner-guy and his girlfriend are trying very hard to be puppet-masters in the whole situation. Seriously, if I want to get to know someone I will do it on MY terms. Don't mess with me, I can make my own decisions! AAARGH!

From there I went to La's house and had hot chocolate and a great discussion about life before crashing until the next morning where we had a great breakfast at MacDonald's (don't tell the TOD!). Then I went home and slept before I went to work with La in the afternoon and Chief Goth brought us milkshakes and we had a great time dissecting the previous evening a La Girl of course...

After all that... Things I learned this weekend:

• I know a lot more about music than I'd realised.
• I really suck at being out of my comfort zone. It's amazing how I can be the life and soul of the party and do crazy stuff as soon as 'My Girls' are with me. On my own it's just plain scary.
• Getting to know the quiet people is immensely rewarding
• sometimes eating burgers in the parking lot with a close friend is the best kind of hanging out.
• People are generally nice
• I should avoid a certain lip-gloss in future (thanks for pointing that out NOW Leia...)
• I don't like being a puppet
• I don't speak Girl. Or Guy. How the heck do people read so much into things? I just don't see the fine print. Seriously, I need a sign around my neck that says "Mind Games Prohibited" It would make life so much easier.
• People really DO say "I can like to" In my case it was a dodgy old guy who said "I can like to chat you up!" while looking down my shirt.
• Shy people are really good human shields.

Anyway that's enough for today, I'm off to have lunch with Leia as I think we have a significant amount of news to catch up on!

Tales of doom (or it it Boom?)

vs


(Yes, more LOLcats. So sue me.)

I'm kind of fluttering between attitudes at the moment. On the one hand I am in severe pain - after the two hour-long torture session yesterday morning, followed by an hour of tai chi (with extra stretching - ouch!) last night (it was AWESOME! They let me play with a sword and I only hit myself in the head with it once!) I was pretty much unable to move this morning.

Of course I had a 9am session with the trainer of doom (from now I will call him TOD) so I managed to sort of fall out of bed (I'm ok as long as I don't bend my knees, so getting up from sitting, or sitting from standing hurts. A lot. Walking up stairs is slow but ok, downstairs not ok at all...), eat breakfast (not wanting to risk a repeat of yesterday's lunch-inhale), play with my dogs (slowly) and get myself there.

I met the TOD who was WAY too chirpy and I told him that I was in pain and it was all his fault. He laughed, lead me to a treadmill and blamed the tai chi. And then he made me run.

Here I must mention something. I have "one of those faces." you know, the face that says "I care! I love to listen. Tell me all your troubles oh random stranger and I will listen and sympathise and agree with everything you say." And generally I like the way that I meet very interesting people through their tendency to meet me and spill out their troubles. Of course trying to pass my drivers test while the examiner went on about her divorce and subsequent relationships was a bonus (I don't think she watched me too closely), while working at a vet, it is generally a bad thing (where you end up listening to things like: "And then he stroked the dog and it vomited and he just knew... and that was my fifteenth pet. My sixteenth was a kitten named Fluffy..."

Once people get to know me they tend to notice my total lack of tact and ability to give usable advice and then they can confide in me and I will not repeat what they tell me and I will sympathise because I actually do care.

But when I am trying to run on rather achy legs and not die, I am not particularly sympathetic about anything other than my own unhappiness. so when TOD decided to tell me about his girl-troubles I was most bemused. I mean I'm all for small-talk as long as I can breathe, but when you refer to your sex life as "doing the Boom-Boom" and discuss all four girlfriends in detail... I just want to fall off the treadmill. On the plus side my gasping at the effort stopped my natural response which would be to giggle uncontrollably and leave the room with tears streaming down my face.

And now I hurt. Leia and I were doing our twice-daily stretches in the lab (I will beat these silly short hamstrings of mine!) and I couldn't even get into the stretching poses without using my arms to push my legs into position. I had my legs crossed earlier and I only managed that by literally picking up one leg and pushing it over the other...

And poor Leia has had to put up with me. Because guess what:

And I whine. A lot. Now more than ever. And the poor girl has had to put up with my random ramblings on the awesomeness of tai chi, the pain of whatever TOD has made me do this time, the fact that the guy I really have a thing for went to her high school and a great deal of whining about the pain...

Yesterday she finally caved and told me to suck it up and shut up.

Sorry Leia, you rock. And thanks for knowing all the weird muscle groups and stretches that stop it hurting quite so much... And for listening to all my rubbish!

And of course I apologise in advance for my attitude tomorrow after I go and finish off this morning's exercises this evening and then have another session with TOD tomorrow!

If I ever get around to getting a sword I'll let you try it out!

Realisations

Sorry for yet another miserable post. Here goes:

My project has been crashing and burning in the last few weeks. the thing is, I probably have enough for a PhD at the moment, but not a good one, not an interesting one and the novel cool stuff I've been waiting to do is currently hitting a brick wall (the experiment is, I'm not planning on throwing lizards around in construction sites).

basically I've been organised and had everything planned, and now at the 11th hour I have been let down y pretty much every single person who had promised to help me. I'm talking "Sorry, this person spent all your research money, you can't order anything right now!" to 'Oh dear, this chemical costs R5000 per milligram and I seem to have lost the bottle! Don't worry, I know you need it this week, but it only takes 6-8 weeks to deliver if you order it now!" kind of let down.

So last night I lay awake trying to make a Plan C (A and B crashed and burned already) I began to feel the panic attacks as they came and went and I might have sobbed into my pillow a little bit more than I'll admit to. Add on that I'm exhausted and can't sleep and this level of panic makes me nauseous which doesn't help and I'm hitting hay-fever season so I have a cough and a runny nose and a sore throat... I made a plan and lay in bed on Google (I love having mini-google on my phone) researching the possibilities while trying to ignore the fact that tai chi has become really difficult and I'm not looking forward to it and the people I would usually go to for advice on this (i.e. my mentor, an older PhD student who knows her way around these things and Luke) are all off overseas and I felt REALLY alone...

When I realised a few things:

1. I shouldn't have this much responsibility. While I've always been very independent, being totally alone at this level is ridiculous and I don't know why I put up with it.
2. I need a supervisor. I need someone to help me and tell me what to do. I can't keep on doing everything by myself. It's just making me sick.
3. If it doesn't work out, I'm still 24, as much as I want to finish next year, the world won't end if I don't.
4. I can always do fieldwork later the lizards are active until March-April at least.
5. Breathe in, breathe out. Breath in... breathe out...

So at 3am I got myself up, found a scary price-list for everything that I need and sent it to myself so I could handle it today, sent an email to my superV demanding a meeting and managed to get a few hours of sleep.

So maybe there's hope... either way I can sort of breathe again, as long as I think calm thoughts every few minutes!

If we were supposed to kick our own ears we would have been born with spaghetti-bones!

So lately I've been having an ugly few days. You know when you wake up in the morning and your skin is bleeeuh and your hair stands on end and you have that LOVELY pillow-crease down one cheek? This was all exacerbated by the fact that I've been feeling a bit sick for the past few days. Why?

Well lately I've been getting healthier and healthier. Without realising it I'd stopped eating junk food, exercised more and yadda yadda yadda... And so when having an ugly day I did what every other girl (I hope) does. I got chocolate. Which quickly turned into me eating more junk food in 3 days than I have in the last month. Stomach ache much? And of course trying to use said stomach muscles to support me in tai chi... not so much.

Tuesday was awesome, I kind of just ignored the nausea brought on by having bought lunch instead of packing it in the morning, as well as having ice-cream with someone I'd rather forget... and it was so much fun! So much so when the class ended we thanked the teacher and ran back to our spot to carry on practising! Then having had a mega-bucket of popcorn on Wednesday (and skipping gym in order to go to a girl's night movie evening) and going through a lot of chocolate and biltong-flavoured crackers (which rock) yesterday, I went off to tai chi to find out that they expected me to do this:

And this:

This morning I kind of hobbled in to the lab with legs of jelly... (the jelly flavoured like pain) and resolved to eat properly, stop skipping gym to eat popcorn and try and find someone who will sell me an IV filled with coffee. And start pilates again so that I can build up some kind of core strength. Mine is gone (I had some! I promise!).

On a happier note four of the searches that have found my bog lately are (drum roll...)

horst kleinschmidt
parents and pocket money uk
how to make shoelace don't drop off when running
lizards eat beef

Which I think is far funnier than the previous ones (of which my favourite was "If something happens to me, I got people" or "What do you do if a lizard on head while sleeping")

Makes me want to start an advice column...

If you're going to (i.e. accidentally crashing) a Tim Burton-themed wedding reception

It helps to have a cool hat. And to be mildly scary (the one in the red was actually really nice, if a bit creepy).

Besides wearing enough makeup to make blinking difficult, cultivating the emo-face is very important. Smiling might crack the makeup (although La isn't very good at keeping a straight face).

If you don't have a cool hat of your own, it's OK to adopt someone else's. In this case we adopted both the hat, and the owner (who had a very nice waistcoat and a steady hand with the eyeliner).

The only bad part is that we weren't able to find the bride, so I'll just have to imagine what she did with her dress...