At the company I work for we have these lifts, an obscure fact I know and not as uncommon as one would think in the corporate environments of today. Side note: to our pseudo-American counterparts a lift is an elevator and visa versa, honestly (!) learn to spell, learn to read, learn to speak! Just learn. You are not the be-all and end-all of civilization – that would in fact be the Chinese. Have we not been inundated with enough westernized culture? Culture, pppfff! If that’s what you can really call it.
Anyway, these lifts… you can spend the whole day waiting for these lifts. And one day while waiting for said lift to arrive, it made me think. The situation I found myself in could be transpired into everyday life. If you think about it, isn’t that all we do? We wait for lifts. Obviously not literally, that would just be stupid, the “lift” referred to in this instance would be the emotional hindrance of life, the up and down feelings of elation, euphoria, angst, depression.
We’re all searching for our place in life, preferably one that is fulfilled. We just want to be happy. But no one is just happy all of the time. 12% of everything is amazing… the rest is crap. We all get into the lift expecting to go up, but we don’t always. Is it a conscious decision? Can we wake up in the morning and say to ourselves: “I’m going to be happy today, I’m going to go up?” Yes, it may work for the first 5 minutes of your day, but there are always going to be external factors that influence your emotions. Traffic, work, life. Yeah life! It’s such a huge impact on living.
Furthermore to my analogy of corporate living, we can take the building structure into consideration, starting off at the basement level. This inner dwelling of darkness, depression and despair. We’ve all been down to the basement. Moving up to the penthouse, where we all dream of being. In our building’s case, the 4th floor is utopia. An oasis of achievement, flashy canteen, games room. Satisfaction. Ah! Ofcourse if we were to have a Haiti freak earthquake it would completely crumble this analogy. Excuse the pun – don’t be hating the Haitians.
And me, well I’m stuck on the first floor at the moment, waiting for the lift. But as far as I am concerned, life is a terminal illness and we’re all born to die.
Friday, February 12, 2010
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Mutton Dressed as Lamb
Considering myself to be on the undesirable end of the clubbing world’s age bracket, the thought of clubbing seals has increasingly become more appealing than clubbing in itself. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t deem myself old, really I don’t (an old soul maybe), but in the Jo’Burg nightlife scene I disturbingly feel like a trout swimming upstream with salmon.
With age you expect some form of solidity of what you know about life. Confidence in what you have and what you have to offer. Yes - I drive a semi-decent car that I pay for myself, I have a semi-decent job that pays the bills and for my alcohol addiction (the guilty pleasure for which I feel no guilt) and I can hold a semi-decent conversation, conversation that makes no difference to someone who is judging you on your appearance.
But instead I find myself intimidated by 22 year olds who still live off a weekly allowance, driving their mom’s car and whose conversation includes nonsensical grunts and farts reminiscent of the weight-lifting section at the gym.
In this meat market environment everything is seen at face value. Much in the same manner as you would approach your butcher and ask for a nice rack of lamb, in a club you often find yourself attracted to the lamb with the nicest rack.
Everything you think you know, or think you have confidence in, goes completely out the window in this world. The moves I thought I once had now rival those of an awkward hippo climbing onto the river bank. You start questioning everything, every move, every gesture. If I stand against the wall looking all mysterious and ominous, am I really looking that way, or am I looking like a wall-flower, out of place and awkward. In this arena the latter is definitely more appropriate. And that’s exactly what it is… an arena. The women, gyrating seductively in the centre… sexy, sultry lionesses. And the men, lined up around them, gladiators. Fearless. Defiant. Swords ready to go in for the kill, so to speak.
But there I stand, unsure and insecure of what I have to offer. And I don’t know what is more unsettling, to not be enough for a lifetime or to not be enough for just one night? In this ominous world of getting laid I find myself taking on a voyeuristic approach. A watcher if you will. Watching the scantily clad, nubile young things with their youthful exuberance… and watching the time to see when I can go home.
My mind wonders, reminiscing about a life lived with reckless abandon and I have to ask myself, am I chasing a youthful existence that has long forgotten me? It’s at that point in the night when I down my last drink, bid adieu to the sexed-up teenagers and truly realise that I am indeed mutton dressed as lamb.
With age you expect some form of solidity of what you know about life. Confidence in what you have and what you have to offer. Yes - I drive a semi-decent car that I pay for myself, I have a semi-decent job that pays the bills and for my alcohol addiction (the guilty pleasure for which I feel no guilt) and I can hold a semi-decent conversation, conversation that makes no difference to someone who is judging you on your appearance.
But instead I find myself intimidated by 22 year olds who still live off a weekly allowance, driving their mom’s car and whose conversation includes nonsensical grunts and farts reminiscent of the weight-lifting section at the gym.
In this meat market environment everything is seen at face value. Much in the same manner as you would approach your butcher and ask for a nice rack of lamb, in a club you often find yourself attracted to the lamb with the nicest rack.
Everything you think you know, or think you have confidence in, goes completely out the window in this world. The moves I thought I once had now rival those of an awkward hippo climbing onto the river bank. You start questioning everything, every move, every gesture. If I stand against the wall looking all mysterious and ominous, am I really looking that way, or am I looking like a wall-flower, out of place and awkward. In this arena the latter is definitely more appropriate. And that’s exactly what it is… an arena. The women, gyrating seductively in the centre… sexy, sultry lionesses. And the men, lined up around them, gladiators. Fearless. Defiant. Swords ready to go in for the kill, so to speak.
But there I stand, unsure and insecure of what I have to offer. And I don’t know what is more unsettling, to not be enough for a lifetime or to not be enough for just one night? In this ominous world of getting laid I find myself taking on a voyeuristic approach. A watcher if you will. Watching the scantily clad, nubile young things with their youthful exuberance… and watching the time to see when I can go home.
My mind wonders, reminiscing about a life lived with reckless abandon and I have to ask myself, am I chasing a youthful existence that has long forgotten me? It’s at that point in the night when I down my last drink, bid adieu to the sexed-up teenagers and truly realise that I am indeed mutton dressed as lamb.
Friday, January 8, 2010
Blogging on the Bog
We need a witness to our lives.
A truer statement has never been spoke, or writ. Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, they all allow us to express every miniscule detail of our mundane lives, in the hope that someone else across the ether of the internet acknowledges our existence. It breaks down to our fundamental (with emphasis on mental) human need to be accepted by a society that is un-accepting of anything really.
So I’ve done it. Exhausting my Facebook updates, which are really unaccommodating to the vast amount of monotonous details in my humdrum life, I’ve joined a Blog. Or what I will now refer to as a Bog, purely because it’s a collection of people’s crap. As my first dump in this virtual toilet of life, I hope this will become a proverbial catheter, releasing my self-indulgent thoughts and emotions and breaking free of the infliction from the cranial pressure caused.
Yes I’m cynical, but I’m also a realist. Ironic, isn’t it? That I choose to express myself in a virtual world, an environment so far from being anything remotely real. But I do so in the hope to make an impact (my Mark if you will) in some form of society and that one day you will choose to be less like you and more like me.
A truer statement has never been spoke, or writ. Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, they all allow us to express every miniscule detail of our mundane lives, in the hope that someone else across the ether of the internet acknowledges our existence. It breaks down to our fundamental (with emphasis on mental) human need to be accepted by a society that is un-accepting of anything really.
So I’ve done it. Exhausting my Facebook updates, which are really unaccommodating to the vast amount of monotonous details in my humdrum life, I’ve joined a Blog. Or what I will now refer to as a Bog, purely because it’s a collection of people’s crap. As my first dump in this virtual toilet of life, I hope this will become a proverbial catheter, releasing my self-indulgent thoughts and emotions and breaking free of the infliction from the cranial pressure caused.
Yes I’m cynical, but I’m also a realist. Ironic, isn’t it? That I choose to express myself in a virtual world, an environment so far from being anything remotely real. But I do so in the hope to make an impact (my Mark if you will) in some form of society and that one day you will choose to be less like you and more like me.
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