This week over coffee one of my best guy friends reminded me about the time his hairdresser persuaded him to have a man perm (and yes, it was the same hairdresser who cut my hair like Lady Di’s – not). While it’s with enormous regret that I don’t remember him showing up at school on Monday morning with curly hair, it must have been pretty funny. Because even very good-looking people – like him – have a pretty hard time pulling off this particular look. The eighties were cruel, but the worst part must have been the fact that we all believed we’d look better with tight ringlets around our faces.
I’m sure I dated this guy when I was sixteen. He used to borrow my gel.
I even remember the picture I took along with me to the salon of the way I wanted to look. It was a page torn from a glossy magazine, and the girl was extremely beautiful but with huge, pretty dodgy hair. So, take someone who’s not extremely beautiful but does have nice hair, destroy her one redeeming feature, and what do you have? A bad Monday morning in assembly. And again, what hairdressers failed to mention was the fact that the way you looked when you left the salon, all blow-dried and fabulous, was not the way you looked when you emerged from the pool after P.T.
How it looked when you left the salon……how it looked when you came out the pool.
But at least I was not alone. I remember a whole bunch of us walking around looking like poodles from hell. I don’t have a single picture of myself permed, and there is probably a reason for that. But I chuckled all day at the image of my friend with his curls. They didn’t last long – he went back to the salon shortly after and had them all hacked off. We girls, on the other hand, had to wait till ours finally ‘relaxed’, a process which could take quite a while. Ayayayayay, the eighties. It’s a miracle we survived.
Really want to run my fingers through this.No, Bradley Cooper! Just, no.Justin Timberlake not bringing sexy back.Wriong on so many levels.
Wouldn’t it be the coolest thing ever if real life was like Facebook? As in, people could only see you from a certain angle – your best – the one from which 98% of your pics are taken (we all know the other 2% were snapped by friends who didn’t know you had an angle rule and when it ended up on your timeline you felt too petty to untag yourself). That would be so awesome because everybody knows good-looking better get better jobs, have happier relationships and live more productive lives. You would SO get head-hunted, like, immediately, and meet Mr Right tomorrow.
And not only that. Imagine when people’s voices were making you bored, you could just choose a drop-box and remove them from your Timeline. One minute your boss is droning on about emerging markets, the next, there’s just an empty chair in the boardroom. Gone until further notice, buddy! And best you up your game, or I’ll never listen to your boring voice again. Or, better still, you could replace him with people you find interesting. Like your best girlfriends and that cute guy you picked up at Caprice and friended over the weekend. Suddenly, Monday’s strategy meeting just got way more fun.
If you could organize your office like you do your facebook community, you’d always be surrounded by people in sexy shoes holding cocktails, and your view of the back of the photocopier would immediately transform into a vista of Lion’s Head at sunset or a wintry beach or an adorable puppy. Bit sleepy from staying up to watch Scandinavian TV series all night? No problem: type your manager’s name in the ‘custom’ button under your status update and everybody but her will be able to see you’ve curled up under your desk for a nice little nap. And if the sarmie you made last night starts looking a bit sad, you could just instagram it. With the right filter you can make anything look gourmet.
Immediately, in your Facebook World, everything dull and miserable would cease to exist and your days would become endless forays into the winelands, meals with truffle foam and being surrounded by all your friends all the time as you smiled your way happily through life. What’s more, people would have to mind their ‘p’s and ‘q’s or your just wouldn’t ‘like’ them. And everyone knows how crap it is not getting any ‘likes.’ You’ll never have to break up with anybody because you can just press ‘unfriend.’ What’s more, if you report them to the Facebook Police they’ll never be allowed to talk to you ever again. No more end-of-relationship post-mortems – hurrah! By the same token, if you were tired of being single, you could just change your relationship status. Want to be engaged to Caprice boy? Done!
So, there’d be a button for when people bug you; a little air emoticon to warn folks when you’re crabby, and if you were feeling lazy you could just share somebody else’s clever, original post. Wouldn’t that be cool? To your boss: ‘what do I think? Didn’t you see my SHARE? Duh.’ Mark Zuckerberg is a genius, no doubt about that – I’m sure he’ll be up for the challenge.
Your nose is not as big as you think. While you’ll never be wild about the sight of yourself in profile, you’ll grow into your face and even learn to like it a little, hard as this may be to believe. The next 30 years are going to go quickly, and you’ll look back and be amazed that you could get this old. But don’t fear the passing of time. Life gets easier the longer you’re around, even though you don’t learn as much as you’d expect. This is because, as you grow up, things somehow become more vague; less black-and-white as you begin to grasp the contingency of life, and the fact that most things are actually beyond our control. But with this uncertainty comes a kind of humility which often makes us nicer human beings.
Your parents are raising you to have a healthy disdain for authority. While that is a good thing in principal, your rebellious nature is going to get you into trouble, and you need to learn when it’s time to shut up. Not everybody wants to hear your opinion, and as much as you pretend not to care, the harsh words directed at you will end up hurting you deeply. So, try to be less outspoken and a little more cooperative. In a few years time you’re going to start neglecting your school work and your gymnastics and your dancing in favour of chasing boys. This is a really stupid thing to do. Unfortunately, it will take you many years and a lot of wasted energy to figure this out for yourself.
When you’re 40 you’re going to make jokes about not understanding numbers, but actually having a grounding in maths is pretty important. I know you find it difficult, so work harder at it. There’s going to come a time you’re not going to know how to work out a percentage, and it’s going to be embarassing. Stop taking the easy way out. And stop being so frightened all the time. You’re clever, and you’re going to make good choices. As much as you want this right now, you’re not going to live in Hollywood and be famous or rich. But you’ll do work that you love and your talents will be rewarded and that counts for a whole lot more.
You’re going to have your heart broken, and you’re going to suffer a little. Okay, a lot. You’re also going to break some hearts along the way, though through the inherent self-centredness of human beings, you won’t be aware till much later of the impact you’ve had on some people. Be kind to the ones who love you. They deserve it. High School really is the school of hard knocks. Those cool people who won’t let you be in their crowd and make you feel ugly and unworthy? Let me tell you a secret: they didn’t amount to anything. Their lives are small places, and things didn’t turn out so well for them in the end. So, stop going home after school and crying on your bed. They aren’t worth your tears.
Things are going to go good for you, so try to relax a little. Think carefully about every decision you make because they really do count in the end. Life is long movie with a short storyline, and you don’t want to be left high and dry. And don’t, for the love of god, go to that hairdresser in Somerset West and ask for a Lady Di haircut. Someone should have pointed out to you that she didn’t wake up in the morning with all those glorious flicks, and it’s going to take you a lot of years to grow out that particular mistake. You’ve got good hair; don’t mess with it.
I kind of knew I was going to love blogging. After decades of writing for very specific markets and always having to ask myself whether a Cosmo girl would identify with what I wanted to say, or if I was being too ‘out there’ for the Clicks Club subscribers, or if a word I wanted to use would be understood by a younger audience, the sheer, unfettered joy of sitting down at my keyboard and thrashing out whatever thoughts I care to share using whatever words I choose to share them in is one of the most liberating things I’ve ever experienced. Creating without constraint is a heady feeling indeed.
But it also scared me, the notion of putting myself and my life out there in the no-holds-barred way I’m partial to. What would people say? What would they think? What if they hated my writing and told me so? Because, while I have a pretty big mouth I have a dangerously thin skin. Not an ideal combination. But for some reason I was compelled to head off into this very unknown terrain where anybody who cares enough can read your innermost thoughts, and enter the most private of private spheres – your head.
And I’m not brave. I might sound confident and courageous when I publish a post which is either deeply personal or a bit controversial (I mean, what white South African has the audacity to call themselves black?), but in reality I’m shitting myself and my stomach churns with every new comment I see awaiting approval. Because, maybe even more than other people, I’m terrified of not being liked.
And then an interesting thing happened which kind of changed the way I view the world. Everybody has been nice. Okay, not everybody. Of the nearly 10 000 individuals who have visited and viewed my blog since its launch three weeks ago, one person wrote me a cross letter. Which I pretty much deserved since I kind of tore their blog to pieces (it was my ‘Letter to a Hipster Blogger’. We live and learn). But that girl aside (and you know, dude, I’m sorry. I was totally showing off) everybody has been so freaking amazing. And supportive, and encouraging and share-y.
The love has poured out from all corners of the globe. I had a woman in Texas tell me her story about mothering; a few guys thanking me profusely for the piece about marriage (‘How Marriage Sometimes Feels Really, Really Crap‘); a French chef start a conversation about food . I’ve had a really insightful chat about flaming with a Huffington Post blogger (who is actually following my blog – how cool?); letters from people in China and Holland and Moscow and Tanzania. And the theme is always the same – of our sameness and shared experience of the world.
And it’s gone both ways – through blogging I’ve found blogs which I’ve come to know and love. At the moment I’m following the heart-wrenching day-to-day experience of a 26-year-old woman in the UK whose husband has just left her for another woman. Her writing is raw, gutsy and painful and, by virtue of being almost 20 years her senior and having learnt some stuff along the way, I’m able to see her situation in perspective and offer her the kind of loving, supportive advice older friends gave me when I was her age and equally lost.
It’s been an extraordinary experience this, and it’s revived my faith in humanity. Even when I knew a segment of people would disagree strongly with something I wrote or be offended by my penchant for colourful language, they allowed me the space to state my case in the way I saw fit, and I’m humbled and amazed. Loving what you’re doing and waking up to 50 e-mails from people telling you they’re also loving what you’re doing is the coolest thing I’ve ever known. To everyone reading this, thank you.
I got this e-mail yesterday, and while it’s certainly been fiddled with – it’s just too good to be true – anyone who has read instructions on a product brought in from China will accept that it’s probably not that far off, either. I had a good laugh, and thought it was too funny not to share.
“A friend went to Beijing recently and was given this brochure by the hotel. It is precious. She is keeping it and reading it whenever she feels depressed. Obviously, it has been translated directly, word for word from Mandarin to English…
Getting There:
Our representative will make you wait at the airport. The bus to the hotel runs along the lake shore. Soon you will feel pleasure in passing water. You will know that you are getting near the hotel, because you will go round the bend. The manager will await you in the entrance hall. He always tries to have intercourse with all new guests.
The hotel:
This is a family hotel, so children are very welcome. We of course are always pleased to accept adultery. Highly skilled nurses are available in the evenings to put down your children. Guests are invited to conjugate in the bar and expose themselves to others. But please note that ladies are not allowed to have babies in the bar. We organize social games, so no guest is ever left alone to play with them self.
The Restaurant:
Our menus have been carefully chosen to be ordinary and unexciting. At dinner, our quartet will circulate from table to table, and fiddle with you.
Your Room:
Every room has excellent facilities for your private parts. In winter, every room is on heat. Each room has a balcony offering views of outstanding obscenity! . You will not be disturbed by traffic noise, since the road between the hotel and the lake is used only by pederasts.
Bed
Your bed has been made in accordance with local tradition. If you have any other ideas please ring for the chambermaid. Please take advantage of her. She will be very pleased to squash your shirts, blouses and underwear. If asked, she will also squeeze your trousers.
Above all: When you leave us at the end of your holiday, you will have no hope. You will struggle to forget it.”
The tiny piece of plastic that just cost a bajillion rand.
Don’t you hate those little mystery amounts that get added to the end of bills? No explanation, just a sum seemingly unrelated to anything. Which must be paid immediately, yesterday, or else you’ll be in trouble. So rude and, frankly, bogus. Telkom is partial to them, as are the Water and Lights people and banks loooove them. Even though I do all my banking online, ostensibly to save the bank tellers the trouble of looking at my face, they’ll still have the temerity to take R123,13 off my account at the end of the month for ‘bank charges.’ What am I paying for, here, and where do they even get that 13 cents?
I got one of those yesterday from my dentist which made me super annoyed. Apparently I clench my jaw at night (with bills like that, who can blame me?), and my teeth are taking strain, so I now have to wear a little plastic guard thing in my mouth when I go to bed. As if the other indignities you suffer in your forties aren’t enough. So, I get the impression made, it gets sent off to a lab somewhere and I pay the bill of R1326,36 which includes a R162,27 fee for transporting said miniscule piece of plastic from somewhere in the northern suburbs to my dentist in town (R162,27? Maybe they should think about replacing the Hummer Limo they’re clearly using to make their deliveries for a van. Just a suggestion).
But then yesterday, out of the blue, I get sent this statement for the amount of R721,27. Wth?! So, I call up the dentist’s receptionist and this is how the conversation goes:
Me: Hi there, it’s Susan Hayden (blah blah tells story), and I don’t understand this bill because I’ve already paid for everything.
Glynis: Okay, just hold on a second while I find your details.
Music: Chariots of Fire played on what sounds like a child’s electronic keyboard.
Glynis: Okay, here we are. The amount on your statement is for infection control.
Me: But, I didn’t have infection control. I just picked up my little plastic mouth thing.
Glynis: Oh. Okay, just hold on.
Chariots of Fire – this time for so long I’ve read everyone’s status updates by the time she comes back on the line.
Glynis: Hi Susan, sorry to keep you waiting, but I chatted to the big boss (she really said that) and it’s code HZR-6. You see, we can’t charge
you for that until you’ve picked up your bite plate.
Me: Code what? What does that mean?
Glynis: Well, the code for the lab is HFR-6, and the code for the dentist is HZR- 6.
Me: Oh.
Glynis: So, I’m very sorry about that. It’s payable immediately.
Me: Oh, okay. But I just… picked up my thing.
Glynis: Ja, I’m sorry.
Me: Oh, okay. Well, bye then
Glynis: bye.
So, fuck getting my hair highlighted this month – that’s gone out the window. But it did lead me to come up with a plan. I’m also going to make up some codes for myself. It’s a very clever system, because clearly people have no idea what to do with codes. I don’t. Next time I send out an invoice for an article, I’m going to include a code at the bottom and an extra fee for something like R554,12. The code will be DPC-5, and what it will stand for (though they’ll never know because it’s secret) is Disco Pants Chair (because I sat on a chair when I wrote the article and drank 5 cups of coffee to keep me awake). Why should they be the only ones who can be mysterious and make you pay for stuff you don’t understand? Fuck them.
And if the accounts department have a query, I’ll just put them on hold and play Sophie’s recorder while I pretend to look for their details and talk to the ‘big boss.’ Then I’ll come back on the phone and cite some codes, along with a few others to make them really confused. I’ll do this each time I get some erroneous bill, and with every invoice I send the codes will get longer and more complicated. Because I also like shopping at Woolworths, and at this rate I’m not even going to be able to afford the Juicy Red. Frankly, I’m feeling like a genius.
For the longest time I’ve been thinking about making a documentary on the fisherman of Kalk Bay, a community which won’t be around for very much longer. This week a photographer friend of mine introduced me to a film producer who liked the idea and offered to help us put it together at no charge. So, today we put the girls in the car and took a drive down there to have a look around.
It was cold and windy, and nothing much was happening on the quay. The woman I was hoping to speak to wasn’t there, so we took ourselves up the road for something warm to drink. The thing is, while doing what you love is great in theory, it doesn’t always translate into hard cash. This project will take a lot of time and energy, and there are no guarantees that anyone will buy our short film when it’s done. This is how it goes when you do this kind of work.
Penguin coffee. Just because they could.
We went on, stopping at art galleries and little antique shops. I love Kalk Bay. It’s so close to Cape Town, but it’s managed to maintain that little fishing village feel. By the time we’d walked the length of the town the sun had come out. The harbour was full now with people arriving for a Sunday lunch of fish and chips. Of making hard decisions, they say, ‘leap and the net will appear,’ a saying which is particularly apt in this case. By the side of the road someone was selling beautiful beaded hearts. I bought one to remind me of what I need to be following.
The incredible thing about Cape Town winters is days like today when the temperature sails up to 24, 25 degrees, and beaches where the south-easter howls in summer, like the ones around Milnerton, become perfection itself. We found ourselves there by accident after we discovered the Milnerton market was closing up for the day. People were surfing, swimming, looking for mussels or, like us, just chilling and admiring the view of Table Mountain.
Sophie and I dozed and watched the water, and Per and Elisabeth wandered off to find shells.
After an hour or so we walked up to Maestros for cold beer and garlic pizzas. On the way home 5fm played cool music and we turned it up loudly and drove with the windows open and the air was warm and the world felt good. And the thing is, this is where we live – not in crime stats or newspaper articles or doomsday predictions about the future, but in days.
So, I was at a party a while back and there was this guy chatting to some girls in a lovely American accent. And I thought, it’s so nice, all the multi-culturalism we’re experiencing down here lately, but then later on when he wandered into my periph and I asked him what part of the States he was from, he told me he was born in Nelspruit but that when he left college he lived in Chicago for nine months. Nelspruit? Nine months? Okay, something is very wrong with this picture.
Now, I understand very well the seductiveness of Americana. When I was 10 I regularly had conversations with myself in the mirror in a phony American accent because, in those days, everything American was cool and everything South African was stupid. They had The Cosby Show and CHiPs, we had Trompie and Blitzpatrollie. They had cool presidents and a Star Spangled banner, we had P.W.Botha and Oranje Blanje Blou. It just wasn’t ayoba to be from here. And it was devastating to me that my parents couldn’t see the error of their ways, pack up our belongings and go somewhere fabulous, like Idaho. Because any back-water town in America had to be better than Somerset West.
I also wanted to wear normal clothes to school, go to the prom, be in a sorority (not that I know what that means to this day) and drive at the age of 16. I just knew that in America I would be something. But, happily, I grew up and was lucky enough to travel and while I love the US with a capital ‘l’, and if I had to live anywhere else in the world it would probably be there – I mean, who else puts bacon on a cake? – I’ve also learnt that America is just a place like any other, and while it’s really, really good at marketing itself, real-life Americans are just ordinary people, and for all the hoo-hah surrounding this nation, can be surprisingly conservative and parochial in their thinking.
Which makes me curious about why some of us are so eager to leave our roots behind and take on this identity. Danish actress from the eighties, Brigitte Nielsen, had barely been in Hollywood for five minutes when, in an interview on Danish television, she asked the host to please speak English as she ‘couldn’t remember’ Danish. Huh? Then of course there is Charlize who we can’t get cross with because we love her so much, but must she talk like that all the time? Nicole Kidman still speaks like an Aussie, after all, and everyone understands her perfectly.
I guess, somewhere in our psyche, we’re still a bit shy about coming from a country which institutionalized racism right up to the nineties, and we’ll always have a slight inferiority complex about being on the arse-end of Africa and not having been allowed to buy Levis. But the truth is that lately we’re actually pretty much up there in the stakes of cool. I’d say, since Mandela, Nelspruit might even beat Idaho as a happening place to come from. So, Nelspruit guy, I hope when you’re old like me you’ll see the silliness of pretending to be something you’re not, drop the fake accent and embrace your roots. You’re more interesting than you think.
We all do weird things in front of the mirror. I make this little pout with my lower lip which marginally improves the dimensions of my face and then I walk around the rest of the day pretending to myself that I actually look like that. Sometimes I do the pouty face in the rear-view mirror of the car when I’m putting on lip-gloss and then I notice someone watching me and feel pretty silly, as I deserve to do. With the advent of social media and the inevitable growth of The Selfie – that long-armed, flattering pic your take of yourself with your phone – kidding ourselves that we look a certain way has been taken to a whole new level.
We’ve all lain on the beach and looked down at our thighs with the sun and the sea in the background and thought, ‘hm… not a shabby pic.’ Sometimes we even *clears throat* take that pic. And we’ve all, en route somewhere we want to look fancy, taken a photo of ourselves in the mirror to make sure the outfit we picked out actually works or sent it to a friend for advice on shoes or used it to establish whether the smoky eye we saw them do on TV makes us look like an extra on Jerseylicious. And this is all well and good, but it’s like picking your nose in bed – while it’s a fact of life, nobody needs to know you do it.
But then there are those people who actually post the pic. And it blows my mind. Because the folks who end up seeing it on Facebook and Twitter don’t think, ‘oh wow, s/he is looking awesome, those Cross Fit classes are really paying off,’ they think, oh-my-fucking-god-are-you-serious?! Whether you do it out of insecurity or plain, old vanity, it just makes you look like a twat. So, your new eyelash extensions are amazeballs, and when you stare directly at the light and aim the camera just so your eyes totally look like those coloured lenses? Do not post the pic. Your arm looks so freaking thin from that angle you’d swear you hadn’t eaten since October? Still – do not post the pic. When you lift yourself a little off your beach-towel and clench your stomach muscles hard and the light falling a certain way creates the illusion of a six-pack? Especially do not post the pic.
It’s hard, I know. We all want to look great and be loved and admired but the truth is our friends and loved ones know what we look like. They’ve seen us first thing in the morning, drooling after three bottles of Shiraz and doing the ugly cry minutes after we’ve been dumped. No amount of funny faces or distorted body poses are going to convince them we turned into Heidi Klum overnight. Nor is it going to make them want to be around us more. Because the truth is, it’s the quirkiness and imperfections we share that truly make us loveable. So, by all means send the pic to your besty and write ‘fucking hell, I am SMOKING right now!,’, but don’t put it on your Timeline. It’s just the wrong thing to do.
The Disco Pants Blog 