alien tongue

2002-09-30T00:10:00.000+03:00

I find myself spending less and less time online. It's strange. There was a time when I would happily spend hours sitting at my computer in the evenings, but that just doesn't seem to happen all that much anymore. I still read the occasional blog when I'm at work, but I haven't written a thing for weeks.

Somehow, I just seem to have way too many things to get done when I get home. Also, I've started reading again. I managed to lose the habit in the last little while and I'm obviously making up for lost time. Most of my reading has just light entertainment. A bit of SF, a couple of murder mysteries, that sort of thing. I'll read more substantial things again soon, but my mind has needed to be in pure escapist mode lately.

I've been working like a demon recently. The project I'm working on is rapidly reaching the halfway mark, I would guess. We're delivering the software in smallish incrememnts, which has the advantage of producing deliverable software early enough to make the client see actual progress. It also has some downsides. The most obvious one at the moment is the number of little deadlines we have to meet. The fact that they're little doesn't really make them any less stressful. We've been working 12 hour days and weekends to get the work done. It's starting to take it's toll too. I've been a lot more irritable of late. I haven't been studying much Tamil either, which is not at all ideal.

One of the nicer things that's happened at the office is that the group of people I work with has finally gelled into an actual team. It took a while, but we're finally working well together and the office is usually full of people having fun with the work. Morale and commitment levels have been at record highs recently. We have learned (the hard way) not to have too many discussions about sex, religion and politics, but it works.

Last Tuesday, 24 September, was a public holiday, Heritage Day, and we had decided that if we met our Wednesday deadline the previous Friday, we would have the Monday off and have a very long weekend. We cleared this with the project manager and the CEO and all seemed well. On Friday, we were close enough, we thought, and the project manager agreed with us and so we had a long weekend. It was a great weekend - I spent most of it gardening and generally catching up with things I'd been neglecting. The weather was glorious and I was all refreshed at the end of it.

On Wednesday morning, however, we discovered that the CEO had decided that Monday actually hadn't been a day off, so we would have to deduct it from our annual leave allocation. No explanation or any suchlike thing. I felt like I was back in the Dilbert Zone. Queries got back some vague replies about miscommunication and other such wishy-washy bullshit.

I don't know exactly what happened, but I can tell you that the team's morale has plunged. If you ask any of us to work a 12-hour day at the moment, you're going to get laughed at. I find it inexplicable that someone could be so short-sighted as to destroy something that we'd worked so hard to achieve. We had pulled out all the stops to meet the deadline and we richly deserved some time off. Effectively, we've been told that we didn't deserve any such thing and, worse, we had tried to steal a whole working day from the company.

How stupid can you get? Anyone who's worked with a team of software developers knows that nothing motivates programmers like the prospect of time off. Not cash, not team t-shirts, not cool toys, not anything. By doing this, the company has told us that there's no way we're going to get time off when we meet our deadlines. Worse, it has told us that management is not to be trusted. Of course, the more cynical will point out that management can never be trusted, but that just leads to a situation where nothing real can be achieved. Management is going to have to work really hard to rebuild that trust. And I'm not convinced it can ever be fully restored.

2002-08-29T20:27:00.000+03:00

Welcome to the World Summit on Sustainable Blogging. Tens of thosands of people crammed into my study. Hardly enough space to move my fingers as I type. Sirens going mad as motorcade after motorcade speeds through my garden, ripping up the poppies as they go. Not to mention the tables groaning under their loads of caviar and lobsters and whatnot.

Hey, it's Joburg in 2002. Suddenly the world's attention is on South Africa again. We're all under strict orders from our government to be on our best behaviour -- no running around mugging foreign dignitaries and so forth. Of course, this doesn't apply if you're a sex worker. Pity I'm too old to go back into that line of work.

Joburgers have largely fled the city. Driving to work is a pleasure (if you don't work in Sandton) as most schools seem to have moved their spring break forward to coincide with the Summit. And if you do work in Sandton -- you probably deserve it for being the corporate slave that you are. Mike, sorry about all the hideous Gautengers cluttering up the beautiful streets of Cape Town at the moment.

The Summit has got a lot of attention lately. I've been staying the hell away from Sandton. I really can't take the chance of being shot by some over-zealous bodyguard. So all my news has come from newspapers and the web and talking to people at work. It's been interesting stuff too. The Sun, of course, does the typically tabloid thing in focusing on what delegates are eating. Bizarre that. If that's the only scandal they could rake up, it's pretty good going for the organisers. Others tend to take a slightly less desperate-for-sensation approach and even approach the actual issues, however obliquely.

Some (South Africans especially) focus on how terribly inconvenient it is to have the Summit here. They talk about the cost of upgrading infrastructure to cope with the influx of people. They go on about all the police guarding delegates instead of protecting their precious suburbs. They talk about the horror of "riots" on Saturday when several protest marches will be taking place. I don't buy it. Sure, it's cost me some tax money to have the Summit here, but I'm pretty sure all those dollar-spending delegates are happily pouring lots of cash into the local economy. And then, if the upgrades hadn't happened, these same people would be complaining about how terrible it was that they hadn't. If the police presence wasn't so strong and somebody took the opportunity to rid the world of someone famous, these same people would be complaining about what a pitiful police service we have. And, of course, it's a peculiarity of white South Africans to say "riot" when they mean "demonstration". It's obviously some kind of hangover from the bad old days when any public gathering of more than two people qualified as a riot and was reported as such by the state-controlled media.

Still, there are some who actually talk about the Summit itself and what it may or may not achieve. The jury's still out on this one for me. I hear that many expected delegates haven't actually arrived. I hear there is still vast disagreement on important points. But for me it can't be a waste of time to even attempt to address these issues. I hope with all my heart that the result of this Summit is actual concrete commitment to do something about the scary state that we've got the world into. I hope that it's not just more spewing forth of hot air coupled with short-sighted refusal to address global issues. Maybe I'm insane for even being able to contemplate such hope. But my insanity makes me happy and the world is full of sane and unhappy people.

2002-08-28T22:15:00.000+03:00

In the immortal words of Sam Gamgee: "Well, I’m back." It's been a wonderful few months. Months of being so in love that nothing else seemed to matter. Nothing could compare to the sheer wonderfulness of it all. Months of being in a state so rare in my life that I couldn't help but devote all my attention to it.

Of course, it's over now. Greg, beautiful Greg, wonderful Greg, brought my worst nightmare to life last week. Why? I'm still not entirely sure. I guess he's realized that he's not quite as in love with me as he'd thought. And of course we'd got to the point in our relationship where we either had to make some kind of commitment or run away screaming. Greg chose to run.

The last week has been tough. I spent a lot of time wondering what I had done to make this happen. I had to face the horrifying possibility that I may not be as wonderful as I'd like to think. I felt rejected and lonely. All my insecurities came to the surface clamouring for attention.

I've been told many times, have read in many places that the essential me, my essential self, is beyond such hurt, such pain, such suffering. On a deep and fundamental level, I've been told, nothing can disturb my bliss and tranquillity. But somehow, I've never quite got that. It has always remained an idea, rather than an experience.

One bleak evening last week, I realised that truth of it. I could look at my situation and somehow, none of it could touch me. I could even laugh again. Life is still wonderful and beautiful. I can still dance through the dahlias, even if Greg decides to stop and rest. That lesson is worth the pain and the disappointment. Oh it still hurt, but it didn't matter nearly as much.

I went away for the weekend to a little town in the mountains, to spend some time with two very good friends who had rented a cottage there for a few days. It was amazing. The clear air, the springtime garden, the warm lazy days and the joy of being with people who surrounded me with love and caring lifted me out of my unhappiness and hurt.

Last week I didn't like Greg very much. This week I see that he's still beautiful, still wonderful. I do still love him and I'm very grateful that I could share this time with him. I called him yesterday and told him so. I expected there to be some awkwardness, some discomfort. But there wasn't. It was an easy, open conversation. I think there may be hope for our friendship yet.

2002-07-28T23:48:00.000+03:00

I spent last weekend at a Zen retreat. From Friday evening until Sunday afternoon, almost the entire time was spent in one or other form of meditation. Most of it was plain old sitting meditation, but there was also walking meditation, work meditation, chanting and bowing. Even meals were a meditation. The entire time was also spent in complete silence.

It was not an easy thing to do. Sometimes I felt like I couldn't sit still for another minute. Sometimes my knees and hips hurt from sitting cross-legged for what felt like aeons. Last weekend was also the coldest two days yet this winter. I spent the entire time wrapped in at least four layers of clothing. Waking up at five in the morning was scarily difficult. All I wanted in the mornings was to go home and spend 15 minutes or so under a hot shower that twelve other people were not waiting to use.

It wasn't easy, but it was one of the best weekends ever. I loved the silence. Silence is an amazing way to direct your focus inwards, to see exactly what you are thinking, without being distracted by what other people are saying or being sidetracked by having to come up with gems of wit and wisdom all the time. I loved spending that much time meditating. The purpose of meditation (at least one of them) is to develop awareness or "mindfulness". To become aware of your thoughts and emotions and actions. To be awake in the present moment. The different forms of meditations were wonderful, because it became easy to see that everything you do in your life can be just the same. Every action can be a meditation. And every non-action too. It's an amazing way to be.

I like that idea because I often see that people confine meditation to the fraction of their day that they set aside for it. There's no point if the only time you are focused and aware is when you're sitting doing nothing. There's no point if you meditate religiously every morning and then go to work and say ignorant and hurtful things. Or if you spend your whole day thinking about the job you'd like to have someday. Or lash out in anger when someone expresses an opinion that's different from yours. Or deny somebody's humanity if they have a different skin colour or religion or ethnic group or accent or whatever.

I'm a long, long way from complete awareness, but to me it's something worth striving to attain. I've tried to pay attention this past week and discovered, to my horror, that I'm shockingly bad at it. Ah well, we all have to start somewhere.

BTW, it seems like my template is back. It needed some repair, but it all looks OK now. I've been thinking that this entire template could use a revamp, but that will have to wait for another day.

2002-07-16T19:45:00.000+03:00

No, I haven't become completely aesthetically challenged: Blogger's lost part of my template. Damn and blast. I do hope my links and archives show up again sometime soon.

Maybe they've been confiscated by the US government. Some blogger participating in Operation TIPS found something they didn't like, perhaps? Or was that RATS. Hey all you sensible Americans, wake up. I know you're out there. This is serious. The US is starting more and more to resemble somewhere in Eastern Europe a few decades ago. Corrupt business and police informers. Do something now, or it will all end in tears.

2002-07-15T23:00:00.000+03:00

Dammit Alka. Every time I try to leave a comment on your blog, enetation decides that it shouldn't let me. Anyway, what I was going to say is that I'll see you at tomorrow's Johannesburg breakfast blogmeet.

I discovered that Mike has found another South African blogger, one Farrago. Damned South Africans are popping up like weeds all over the Net. I'll be watching this one with interest. I couldn't help wondering though, as it became clear that Farrago is also a resident of Cape Town, if Farrago is yet another of Mike's interminable series of alter egos. It would be quite an odd one this time, but I quite like it.

As for me, I am still in the throes of being in love with Greg. This has to be the most wonderful, bizarre way to be. I don't know what exactly happened, but it's like someone flipped a switch inside me. I don't know what I'm doing half the time. And it really doesn't matter. I'm probably badly neglecting everyone else in my life at the moment, but I'm hoping they will forgive me. Eventually.

Sometimes I get terribly paranoid about this relationship. This is also bizarre, because I'm usually the most unparanoid person around. But every now and again I find myself thinking: This is too easy. Something must be wrong. Stupid, yes. But it is there. Every time I feel that way I know that it is completely idiotic, but there's little I can do but wait for it to go away. Scary stuff. On some detached level, I can see myself setting myself up to cope with the almost unthinkable idea of things falling apart. I don't like to think that I might do such a thing, but I can't deny that I am.

On the other hand, I am very, very happy. Still dancing through the dahlias, prancing through the pansies or whatever. I woke up in the middle of the night a few days ago. It must have been around three in the morning. I don't know why exactly and it was only for a minute or two. I was lying in bed, Greg curled around me, fast asleep. I could feel his breath gentle on my neck, his body warm and close and I realised right then that I had never felt happier than at that moment. An odd moment to choose, perhaps, but I've been called odd before.

2002-07-07T18:33:00.000+03:00

Good grief! All this talk about anger is enough to piss a guy right off. (That's a joke, please step away from the flamethrowers.) But it is a great topic. And such an amazing range of opinions. I love it. Thanks to Burningbird for setting it all in motion.

It's an interesting thing to think about. I find that I both agree and disagree with almost everyone who's posted about anger. In one sense, I don't understand what all the fuss is about. For me anger is just another emotion. It's not a Bad Thing, nor is it a Good Thing. It just is.

The discussion that Shelley's post has generated demonstrates quite nicely that anger has become largely socially unacceptable. Anger gets a bad name because people so often allow their anger to take over entirely. People often express anger in terrible destructive ways. But that doesn't mean that anger itself is bad.

Many people seem to think that anger is a Very Bad Thing and must be avoided at all cost. But you can't get way with denying anger. Denial and supression of anger is dangerous. The trouble is that it tends to accumulate and fester and it will show up later, usually in destructive ways. Recognise it as it happens and deal with it immediately. It's a way that works for me most of the time. There is the slight danger of runaway escalation, but that will happen only if you're not paying attention. If you are, you can stop it as fast as you started.

Anger is an amazing way to become motivated. It provides a huge energy boost. The trick is to use it in a way that is constructive rather than destructive. You can get angry at a something and try to destroy it. Or you can step back for a moment and find some other way to change the situation. Beautiful things are possible through anger. South Africa's transition to democracy was motivated largely by the anger of millions of people. Of course, the opposite is also true. The hideous killing of many people by necklacing during the struggle was also the product of anger. Anger itself is not the issue, it's whether people allow themselves to become mindless or not.

I don't believe anger is necessarily the product of fear. Anger can arise from many causes. The oppression of others can inspire a deeply compassionate anger, for instance. The result of your anger can be working to make their lives better, or trying to make their oppressors suffer in return. The choice, as always is yours.

2002-07-03T01:10:00.000+03:00

An amazing thing happened a couple of days ago. Alka posted one of her poems. And it was good. As I read it, I could feel the emotion rising. By the time I was done, I was in tears. I was thinking, "My God! She knows. She knows. She has felt it too." Somehow, Alka had managed to articulate a rare and astonishing experience.

I love to dance. I love to give up all control and give myself over to the rhythm. I lose myself in the music and the dance. Sometimes so thoroughly that I don't even hear the music any more. Nothing exists but me and the dance. Me at rest and the universe dancing around me. The dance of the galaxies, the dance of the stars and the planets. The dance of of the seasons and the dance of life. The dance of Shiva Nataraja dancing the cosmos into existence. And I am there. Observing and yet part of it. I am a star some of the time. Or a planet. Or sometimes a tree. Sometimes a flickering flame, sometimes the sound of the drum. I am at the still point while everything happens around me. Beautiful things and terrible things. Strange rhythms, spirals within spirals. And everything underpinned by the deep tone of the first sound, the sound of creation.

An experience like no other. Strange? Yes. Bizarre, even. Maybe I have taken too many mind-altering substances in my life. But it is beautiful beyond description. And powerful. I am left humbled by the magnificence and majesty of the universe, overflowing with joy and wonder. And in some subtle way Alka has managed to capture that experience in a few lines of poetry. I am left humbled.

2002-06-26T21:50:00.000+03:00

Three weeks of no blogging. Three weeks of barely even reading a blog. Three weeks of being distracted by real life. Three weeks of dancing through the dahlias, as Mike so eloquently puts it. I probably deserve to be shot or severely maimed or something.

Something wonderful has happened. Something that I had resigned myself to believing would never happen again. At least, not to me. It came out of nowhere, so suddenly that I am still a little bit in shock. I don't know what to say. I don't know if I have the words to express how I feel at the moment. How I have felt for the last few weeks. It's been a complete rollercoaster ride of emotion, from the dizzy heights of complete euphoria to the dark depths of utter paranoia.

What's going on? Something wonderful, of course. Or rather someone wonderful. Someone who goes by the name of Gregory, is tall and skinny and is the most wonderful beautiful human being. Physically, emotionally, mentally, whatever. I could write volumes praising the curve of his lips when he smiles or the shape of his hands or the depth of his honesty and compassion. I don't know what it is exactly, but there's something about Greg that just makes me dissolve into a soppy mess whenever I see him or even think about him.

I love him. Body and soul. I love being with him. I love the anticipation of seeing him again. I love falling asleep beside him. I love waking up with him. I love talking with him. I love being quiet with him. I love his touch. I love the sound of his voice. I love the colour of his eyes. I love the way the smells. I love the taste of his skin. I love his intensity. I love his passion. I love his sense of humour. I love his openness. I love his directness. I love his eccentricity.

I could go on, of course, but I think that's just about enough. Mike was saying a little while ago that he thinks about sex when he's blogging. Trust me, you do not want to know what I'm thinking right now :) Damn. Probably time for a cold shower. Again.

The effects of being in love have been a little odd, to say the least. Alka tells me I've been wandering around the house with a silly grin on my face ever since I met Greg. I've been planting lots and lots of flowers in the garden. And, most weirdly, I've been waking up with songs playing in my head. This morning it was Louis Armstrong singing La vie en rose. A couple of days ago it was the Eurythmics' Right by my side. There's even been, to my absolute horror, some boy band singing some disgustingly saccharine love song. I have no idea where my brain got that.

I've also not being blogging much. Or even at all. Partly that's due to my getting a new computer, which arrived, much to my surprise, as a couple of boxes full of components. I spent some time putting it all together, only to realise that I had forgotten to order a couple of essential bits. It took a while to get it all organised, distracted as I have been. But it's alive and well now, finally.

In a desperate bid to get me to blog again, Alka has challenged me to a blogswop. My love story for her poetry, which she has been very reluctant to post (or even let me read, in the privacy of our own home). So here I am, heart flopping wetly on my sleeve. Now for the response.

BTW, there are a couple of new South African bloggers out there. Admittedly, they aren't in South Africa at the moment, but who cares. Philippa and Rex are busy blogging their great adventure into Darkest Europe. I've known them for years and they're two of my favourite people in the world. Hamba kahle.

2002-06-06T21:31:00.000+03:00

Cold, cold, freezing cold. It's been so cold this last week and a bit. I would have preferred not to believe it possible. While I was in the US, I waxed lyrical about how warm the winters here are. Well, I've been proved wrong, yet again. There have been days and nights that could easily be mistaken for a Midwest spring. :) One of the reasons I haven't been writing much is that I have been much too cold to sit at the computer. Curled up in front of a fire or under the covers is where I've been for most of the last week.

Work is finally going well. I have managed to bludgeon Java and COBOL into some semblance of integration. This could only be done with the help of a few lines of C code to help mediate between the two. I've spent most of the last week writing C wrappers for everything in sight, rediscovering the joy of pointers. Spending the last couple of years writing nothing but Java has been a bit of a double-edged blade. I had completely stopped worrying about the horrors of uninitialised pointers and having to free allocated memory. On the other hand, it is so useful to be able to do pointer arithmetic that I may be able to forgive everything.

And now for the really important stuff, which is the real reason I've been avoiding writing. I've just been too prone to mindless euphoria. I think I'm falling in love. Wonder of wonders. It's been years since I felt like this about anyone. I had thought that I was never going to experience such utter joy and complete terror again. But there I was, my tongue in knots, my mind whirling with idiot fears and still managing to be at least halfway interesting. Our meeting was a complete surprise, carefully orchestrated by a mutual friend and it worked very well. I think the intensity of my reaction has surprised everyone, most of all me. It's early days yet - one date so far and another planned for tomorrow - but I can feel myself teetering on the edge. By the weekend I suspect I will have taken the plunge.

2002-05-30T21:15:00.000+03:00

I am running across the grass towards the house. The storm is at my heels. My father speaks to me. He suggests that I fly and it seems so completely natural. I focus my mind and relax completely and the wind lifts me from the earth. Arms flung wide, I soar upwards.

I feel the storm behind me and I turn into it. My entire body is wrenched by the shock of the wild wind. Huge gusts fling me into the sky, far from the ground. I laugh for the joy of it. I soar and glide and ride the swift currents of air. I swoop down to skim the grass and spiral up around an enormous tree.

The air caresses me sweetly, no longer threatening. Snow and rain whirl around me. The ground is left far behind, invisible now as I rise through the clouds. Lightning rips the air apart, thunder squashes it back together. Finally I emerge above the storm. The light is everywhere, reflecting from the blinding white clouds below, pouring warm and wonderful from the sun above. I cease my headlong rush and drift in the calm, gentle air.

I was born for this. This exhilaration, this joy, this ecstasy. I soar ever upward, forever free, forever light.

2002-05-29T01:03:00.000+03:00

I'm exhausted. I've been working all night. It's now after midnight and I finally think I can stop and go to bed. But I don't think I can actually go to sleep now. It's only Tuesday and I already feel like it's been a busy busy week. I worked (or at least tried to) most of the weekend too. I wrote some software a couple of months ago and it needed what I thought were a few little tweaks. Like hell. I managed to break it quite substantially on Saturday and have spent the rest of the time since then getting it all repaired again. Sometimes I wish I were a gardener. But I suppose if I were I'd just whine about bugs of a different kind.

I started learning Tamil a little while ago. Tamil is spoken mostly in South India, which is where my great-grandparents came from. I grew up speaking English almost exclusively and I decided it was time to explore my cultural heritage a little bit. It's only been a couple of months, interrupted by my visit in Chicago, so I haven't got very far yet. But it is really excellent. Tamil is very different to most other languages I've encountered. It isn't part of the large Indo-European group of languages, but is out on it's own limb somewhere. We've been spending a lot of time recently learning the alphabet, which is very beautiful and elegant, but it takes some getting used to. Unlike the Roman alphabet, the Tamil one has a symbol for each consonant, vowel and for each possible combination. This could be frighteningly complicated, but fortunately there are a few patterns that make it all fairly simple.

The one thing I do find that is encouraging is that the pronunciation of words comes easily to me. To Engish-speaking ears the sound of Tamil can be very strange, but what little exposure I've had to the language seems to help. There a couple of sounds that simply don't occur in English and most of the ones that do are pronounced quite differently.

I can't wait until I can speak and read Tamil with some degree of confidence. I would love to visit India. See where the family comes from. Do a Roots type exercise :)

I love the idea of learning new languages. It opens whole new worlds to you. Places you you can go. People you can speak to. Literature that you can read. Tamil is just the first on my list. Next will have to be an African language, probably Zulu. And then, who knows. Chinese would be good, but I've been told by many people that it is extremely difficult to learn. Most people agree that learning languages is best when you're extremely young and that it gets more difficult as you get older. But what the hell, I can at least slow the inevitable atrophy of my brain.

2002-05-23T02:12:00.000+03:00

I don't know why exactly, but I am rather out of touch with what's happening in the world at the moment. While I was in the US, I must have watched more TV and read more newspapers and browsed more Web sites. Or something. I felt a lot more like I knew what was going on. Since I've been home, I hardly turn on the TV any more, I have gone completely off newspapers and even my Web surfing has reduced dramatically.

I don't know what's brought it on, but I seem to have entered another very introspective phase. I seem to be paying much more attention to what is going on with me and my immediate surroundings than in the far-flung corners of the world.

I don't know why, maybe, but I quite like it. I usually only go into an introspective phase when I am thoroughly depressed. And then I find the worst horrors of my dark side lurking around every corner. I'm thankfully not chronically depressive. But I am subject to fairly common short, sharp, shocking episodes when the bottom falls out of my world, leaving me trapped at the bottom of the abyss. I generally recover in a week or two and the last time I got suicidal was around twelve years ago, so the depressive episodes don't bother me too much. This time it's different. I'm not depressed and yet I'm being introspective. This makes for a pleasant change. For once, the things I find in my psyche are quite positive.

For instance, I was very very angry at the venture capitalists who funded the software company I started a few years ago with some friends. It all ended in tears at the end of last year and I came as close as I ever have to positively hating the evil bastards. Well, that's how I thought of them at the time. But now I find that it has passed. I don't like the way the do business and would certainly not do business with them again, but somehow they don't seem so evil now. They are simply people doing their best to make their way in what they see as a hostile world. I find the way they choose to live in a world filled with fear and loathing sad and pitiful, but hardly evil. I had a telephone conversation with one of them yesterday, which is no doubt why this comes to mind, and it was actually a pleasant experience. He was being his usual manipulative self, but it didn't touch me in the slightest. Instead I had a sudden mental picture of him as an actual human being, as opposed to the corporate robot I'd always seen him as. Maybe I'm starting to grow up. Maybe it's about time.

2002-05-21T23:14:00.000+03:00

I think Blogspot's gone Buddhist on me. I visited my blog for the first time in a couple of days to find that it had disappeared. All it said was "Page not found". A nice little lesson on the impermanence of things, I guess, but just a little bit disturbing. Some day I'll be able to afford to host my own site. Until then I'll just suffer quietly.

It's been a slow and frustrating couple of days at work. Trying to get programs written in different languages to talk to each other is an effort at the best of times. But when one of them is COBOL, which still hasn't had the decency to crawl off to the fabled dinosaur graveyard and expire quietly, and the other is Java, which is positively Nazi in its attempts to prevent any contamination by lesser languages, you're just begging to have your head whacked repeatedly against a particularly solid wall. So I have a sore head and not much else to show for two days of effort. Damn.

I haven't been blogging much either, but this is the time to end that, I think. I decided when I started blogging that I would sit down and write for at least an hour each day. I managed to do that while I was in Chicago, but since I've been home, I've been way too busy. But now that the rush of reconnecting with everyone I hadn't seen in a while is over, I can take some time to do this.

Writing every day is a remarkable exercise. I wouldn't have believed it before, but just sitting down and writing is incredibly cathartic. Well, it is for me. All kinds of stuff just pours out of my head. I disappear into a kind of trance state in which nothing exists but me and the keyboard. It's a weird kind of meditation, but it works for me.

When I'm writing, I try not to edit what I've written. That breaks the flow and it just feels wrong. I also try not to place any limits on what I write about. When it's all over, I go back and edit it. Quite a lot of it never makes it onto the blog. There are some things I don't really want to discuss in public. Someday maybe, but right now, no. Very often, what I've written surprises me. At first, I was deeply suspicious of these surprises. Now I welcome them. It is so good to discover how I really feel about things.

I also realise now just how much I enjoy writing. I can't believe that it's taken me this long to get around to actually doing it. I've entertained vague notions of writing for years, but there was always something more important to do. But now, I can't wait to sit down at my computer and immerse myself in the flow of words.

This "writing meditation" started as a pleasant side effect of maintaining a blog, but now it has become the purpose. Having stuff to post is now the side effect. Also a pleasant side effect, but even if Blogspot decides to lose my blog forever, I'll still be here every evening, writing myself into existence.

2002-05-15T21:56:00.000+03:00

I've been taking some time to consider the future of my blog. Now that I don't have an official reason to maintain the blog, I've been forced to face the terrible reality that I may now be an addict. I've managed to hold out for nearly two weeks, but I can't any longer. Life as we know it may end, but the blog must go on. Anyway, someday I may have something interesting to say. Even if it is in an alien tongue.

I've been very busy settling into something approaching my normal life after two months away. It was disturbing to arrive home and find that everything is more or less the way it was, but subtly different. People too, are subtly different to how they were a couple of months ago. The really scary thing is realising that people change more or less continuously, but slowly enough that I don't notice changes from day to day.

I took a four-day weekend and headed south to the fairest Cape. Wonderful amazing place. It does have far too much scenery for its own good, though. It would be just so easy to drive off a cliff edge while entranced by the sheer wonderfulness of it all. I mosly went to visit Charmaine, who I hadn't seen for far too long. It was a weekend of excellent decadence and delight.

There was also the first ever real-time meeting of South African bloggers. More will no doubt be said about this later, but I will say that I have verified first-hand that Mike Golby does in fact exist, despite there being some question about that recently. Six hours is a long time for a single conversation, but it was still way too short.

I got back from the weekend to find that the doppelganger I'd left in charge of things had got me embroiled in a war of hideous proportions. Bullets go screaming by. Bits of metal keep falling out of the sky at high velocity. Men in skirts keep showing up at the door, yelling incomprehensibly. I think they're asking for directions, but it's hard to be certain. I have gathered that You Know Who has escaped from the jungles where he had been safely trapped and is attempting to take over the world again. He must, of course, be stopped and the world made safe for democracy again.

Propaganda and disinformation abound. It is very disconcerting to read that one's Commander-in-Chief is really one of them. I don't believe a word of it, of course. It's an obvious attempt to undermine the morale of the glorious and heroic Vanguard of the Revolution. All fabricated by the devious and demented PorridgeBoy. Quite sad, really.

2002-05-02T19:33:00.000+03:00

I'm home again. Over the last few days I've rediscovered so many things I love about being here. Looking up into the infinite African sky. Being warm, even if it is officially winter. Seeing friends and family who I missed so terribly. Discovering that the cats still love me. Driving on the left side of the road. Feeling the huge wet drops of an African thunderstorm. Being in my own home. Walking in my garden, dry autumn leaves crunching under my feet. Being among my own people, in all our chaotic glory.

The flight back wasn't as bad as I expected. Despite the crowded cramped plane and the four hour wait for my connecting flight in Amsterdam. Even despite the squalling children and the little girl who took an unseemly interest in my meal. It's really difficult to eat while someone is staring fixedly at you from across the aisle. A kindly jetstream gave us a helping hand across the Atlantic so we arrived in Amsterdam an hour earlier than scheduled. It would have been even earlier, but Dutch citizens refuse to be woken before six by planes landing at Schiphol.

I had four hours to kill at the airport and I anticipated being bored to tears. But that didn't happen. I tried to take a nap - flying east meant that my brain was convinced it was late at night and I had no business being awake. But the bright spring sunshine soon put an end to that plan. So I wandered about the airport and discovered that there is a casino lying in wait for unsuspecting jet-lagged passengers in transit. I can't be bothered with casinos - a moment of thought will tell you that the odds must be loaded in favour of the house and I'm not much of a masochist - but it was interesting watching half-asleep people stumble into its gaping maw, never to return.

I sat in the lounge, sipped a Coke and chatted to some fellow lost creatures. Eventually there were three other people at the table and they all had fun and interesting stories to tell. Even just where they were travelling to was interesting. I was suddenly struck by how global a society we live in. I knew this in an intellectual sort of way, but the situation was a perfect Aha! moment. There was me, travelling to South Africa. There was the Swede, on his way home from the US. There was the American, on his way to India. There was the Iranian, on his way to Venezuela. Four strangers off to the four corners of the earth, having a friendly chat in an airport in Amsterdam. Wow.

2002-04-26T05:58:00.000+03:00

The omens are loooking good. Mark Shuttleworth is in orbit. Yesterday's Astronomy Picture of the Day was of the Southern Cross. The Americans gave us a farewell lunch. All very positive signs.

The time I've spent here has been incredible. What an education! I've learned so much. About Chicago, about the US and most of all, about me. Some of my preconceptions have been shattered. Some have been reinforced. I've learned things that I didn't think I wanted to.

Important lessons number one: Chicago is cold. I expected it to be, this being the Frozen North, but I was not nearly prepared for the sheer scale of it. That took some serious getting used to. In the end, I managed to acclimatise quite well. I never expected to see the day when I would casually walk to work in subzero temperatures, snow flying through the air almost horizontally. The plus side of that is that winter in Johannesburg is going to be a picnic.

I was delighted by how beautiful the city is, the buildings, the parks, the art. I loved the public transport system. Buses and trains that run all day and night (not all of them, but most of the ones I wanted) are such a good idea. And of course the nightlife here is excellent. Lots of pubs, lots of clubs, lots of music venues. Of course, they all close at 2 am, which I've complained about before, but there had to be a downside.

I was, eventually, pleasantly surprised that a lot of people here are very friendly. I missed that for the first few weeks because I was being very depressed, but when I got over that, it became clear. No-one asked where South Africa was, which was a relief. I've read all these horror stories about how 62.876% of Americans can't find Alaska on a map or whatever, so I was expecting the worst, but it didn't happen. I got a lot of "You don't look African". I was very tempted to respond with "Well, yes, and you don't look Native American", but my restraint was admirable.

I learned quickly that there are some topics that I should not discuss. It was literally "Don't mention the war." People got upset if I mentioned that I didn't think it was a good idea. I was accused of being un-American. Well, I'm not American, so I can be un-American if I like. I was emphatically told that America was here to protect freedom and democracy. Actually, no. America is here to protect America, and that's about it. Anything else is probably wishful thinking. I seem to have survived without even a single lynching attempt, so maybe I learned some tact in the end.

I was very depressed for the first few weeks. There were a lot of contributing factors. I was a stranger in a a strange land. I was alone. Everyone and everything I loved was thousands of miles away. I was too cold to go anywhere or do anything. It was my worst nightmare. Being alone was the worst.

I don't make friends easily. I used to think that my brain was missing some essential circuit that allowed other people to just strike up a conversation with a total stranger and survive through those vital few minutes that lead to a decision to continue this or run screaming. But being completely isolated here and horribly depressed forced me to go look for that circuit. I had to dig up and sift through vast accumulations of memory and pain and fear, but I managed to find it in the end. Or at least a reasonable facsimile.

That was close to the hardest thing I've ever done. A lot of people are afraid of rejection. For me, it expressed itself by avoiding almost any situation where there was potential for rejection. It's not gone completely. That would be too good to be true. But I think I'm making progress.

This is my last post for a few days. I won't be within posting range until Sunday and then I will probably feel like death warmed over and left to congeal.

Boredom and email brought me some fun links today:

Psst, want to know the Truth? Check with the Tool of Objective Truth. They use AltaVista to do the searches, but I think I may finally have found a use for the Google API. It's pretty amazing. Thanks Rex.

If you've been reading blogs that try to convince you of someone's theory about absolutely anything, you should definitely look at this site. It's a collection of common logical fallacies often found in arguments for or against something. It also gives you pointers on how to refute such arguments. Look though it and you'll recognise a lot of them from your reading on the Web and newspapers and from politicians' speeches.

Ever followed a link to the New York Times? Here's the end of all your regstration woes: The NYT Random Login Generator.

2002-04-25T07:17:00.000+03:00

Just one more day. I'm probably going to be bored as all hell again for most of the day, but I'll try not to mind. Not too much anyway. I'll just surf the Web, find obscure sites to look at and fail miserably to resist buying stuff. Hey, it worked yesterday.

The last couple of days have been busy, busy, busy. Busy trying to get work done mostly. Trying a little too hard as it turns out, but that's better than not hard enough. The last thing I want is to be sitting at my desk swallowing caffeine pills and getting all sweaty palmed.

I am torn between wanting to leave already and wanting to spend more time here. On the one hand I want to be at home, lying on my bed with the cats curled up next to me, purring loudly. Or sitting chatting to Alka over a glass of wine, or three. Or inflicting an American accent on poor unsupecting South Africans. On the other hand, I want to stay here a while longer. Be a real tourist for a bit. See what Chicago is like as it warms up. Go see Star Wars Episode II on opening night. Get to know a few more people. And on the third hand, I'll be coming back, I'm sure.

In any case, staying here will be way too hard on my poor wallet. For a poor boy from the Third World, this is a hellishly expensive place to live. Next time, I'll remember to save up for a bit beforehand. Of course, this trip was a bit sudden. And I was a jobless ex-Internet software entrepreneur for a while at the beginning of the year, so it's not surprising.

Come Friday I'll be heading off to the airport, hoping desperately that KLM will let me fly business class again. The odds are not good, but for me the glass is one tenth full. There I'll climb into a little metal tube along with a few hundred other sardines. A mere eighteen hours later I will be back in Johannesburg. I will have traveled seven hours and two seasons into the future. And to think there are people who say miracles don't happen.

2002-04-25T00:22:00.000+03:00

What to do? What to do? OK, I'm bored at the office today. Finished off everything I had to do yesterday. Now I get to twiddle my thumbs for two days. Or maybe write the Great South African Novel. Nah, maybe next week.

I think I'll just make my first ever daytime post. I may have to do this in stealth mode though. The office has very strict Internet usage policy. Not that anyone actually heeds it, but I happened to get the computer with the screen that absolutely everyone can see. Try as I might, I could not rearrange the office to ensure any privacy. I can't count anymore the number of times I've turned around to discover someone reading my email over my shoulder. Rude, rude, rude. But at least I have the satisfaction of knowing that some of the things I write in email have definitely given some people a bit of a scare.

Random site of the day: Screenplays For You. It contains the screenplays for a couple of hundred movies. Fun stuff, if you like movies. I found the link on Donga, an online journal of poetry and other writings from South Africa.

Don't you just love the Internet? I decided I wanted to go to Cape Town for a long weekend in May. Ten minutes later I had a ticket and a confirmation number and my credit card had taken a nasty hit. This is a whole new level of impulse shopping. Gotta love it.

2002-04-21T23:30:00.000+03:00

Blame Canada. Blame Canada. For the cold wind from the frozen wastes of the North. For destroying my plans for a lazy Sunday afternoon drowsing in the sun by the lake. Damn and blast.

I did want to have a lazy weekend. This has been an exhausting week. Lots of work to get done before I leave for home and lots of compulsive writing into the early hours of the morning. Maybe I'll just stay in bed instead. Or maybe I'll just wander over to the coffee shop down the road and install myself in the armchair by the window with a book. No red wine I'm sad to say, but that can wait for next week when I'm back home and good red wine is affordable again.

Oh God, the wine. I have six bottles of wine that my boss left with me when returned to South Africa. He asked me to mail them to a friend of his in California because he had run out of time. He was looking slightly panicked about the number of things he had to get done before he left, so I agreed. Simple enough. Not! I tried to send them by mail. The US Post Office does not ship wine. I tried to send them with UPS. No luck there. I tried to send them with FedEx. They won't ship wine unless I'm a licensed wine distributor. What do I do next? I really don't want to abandon these poor bottles of wine to a sad life of lurking in alleys, selling themselves one sip at a time to make a quick buck and just waiting to ambush me next time I come to Chicago. I wonder if there's a Californian dope seller in the city who may have some space to spare in his truck on the return trip. Is there any legal way to do this? If I had the time, I wouldn't mind going to deliver them in person. If this were a movie I'd just knock off a convenient bank, steal a car and drive into the sunset, scattering dollar bills as the credits roll.

I found an interesting store yesterday - Dara Tribal Village. An odd name, yes, but an interesting place. It's full of art and craft from all over the world. I even saw some Zulu woven baskets in amongst the Afghani carvings, Thai buddhas and Guatemalan crucifixes. I walked in the door and the owner's dog made straight for me. He's a wonderful velvety chocolate brown Labrador retriever. He just ambled over with his rawhide toy in his mouth, flopped down at my feet and said "I'm beautiful. Love me." Completely irresistible.

It's run by a very pleasant woman called Rachel and her partner Abdul. He wasn't around, but Rachel and I chatted for a while. Life is hard for them at the moment, as it is for many in these uncertain times. For them it is compounded by the fact that Abdul is from Afghanistan and so they are directly affected by the war. We talked about war and the futility of violence as a way to achive peace. A faintly surreal conversation to have with someone you just met five minutes ago, but also a good affirming feeling.

I've just seen Alka's latest post. A beautiful piece about violence and compassion and the contradictions of life in South Africa. Alka and I share our home in Johannesburg (along with a variable number of cats) and reading today's post I realise how much I miss her presence. But I'll be home soon. Next week this time, I'll be asleep in my own bed. Well, more likely just lying there staring up at the ceiling because, even though it will be nearly midnight, my body will be convinced it's four in the afternoon. I'll probably be forced to go sit at my computer and blog some more.

2002-04-19T08:26:00.000+03:00

It seems I may be a peace blogger. Maybe it won't make the slightest difference and maybe it won't even be heard over the baying of the dogs of war, but I gladly add my voice to those who say that it is time to end the madness. For me, one life taken is one too many.

It's really way too easy to get into the Middle East/war debate and neglect other important things. So now, something completely different.

I am a frequent visitor to The Onion. There is something completely irresistible about their weird and wacky brand of humour. Over the years they have produced some truly inspired stories. My all time favourite is the story about desperate vegetarians declaring the cow a vegetable and then tucking in with gusto. It is particularly funny because I am a vegetarian. There's nothing like laughing out loud while looking in the mirror. Unfortunalely that story isn't in their archive, but try this one: Microsoft Patents Ones, Zeroes.

I was delighted to discover that Chicago is the home of The Onion. I was even more delighted to discover that they give the print version away for nothing every week. Wonderful stuff. I must pick one up tomorrow.

In the few weeks I've been here, I have become very fond of this city. When I arrived, I didn't think I would. Mostly because the weather was awful and the people all seemed so unfriendly. But living here and discovering it's oddities and quirks have made me look at Chicago in a different light. I like it here. I will be leaving in a week, but I think I'll definitely be back.

I'm also looking forward to going home. I can hardly wait. The thought of sleeping in my own bed again is almost too wonderful to contemplate. I'm trying not to be neurotic about whether or not the cats will recognise me. And of course my mom will want to feed me and I will have no objection at all. It will even be worth spending eighteen hours squashed into a tin can with my knees up around my ears.

2002-04-18T12:10:00.000+03:00

I have very mixed feelings about Mike's post yesterday. It takes me back years and years to places I had hoped to leave safely behind. The incident he refers to happened at a time when I was heading rapidly towards adolescence, just beginning to wake from the long dreamtime of childhood. Over the next few years the full horror of apartheid would slowly reveal itself to my no longer innocent gaze.

I don't know if I can possibly convey the betrayal and anger I felt when I began to realise that the fabric of my society was woven from lies, ignorance and hatred. That everything I had accepted as just the way things were were really part of some sick, twisted and brutal alternate reality. A reality dreamed up by people obsessed with power and privilege and built on the wreckage of other people's lives. A reality propped up by the Newspeak of state-controlled media and enforced by the police and army. A fantasy justified by distorted Biblical quotations and tortured logic.

It is often hard for people who did not live through apartheid, and especially on the wrong side of it, to comprehend the sweeping scale of the system. For instance, the "social engineering" that supported the whole edifice was astonishing. Generations of people grew up being taught (and mostly believing) that your legal status, social rank, intelligence and abilities were determined by such idiocies as the concentration of melanin in your skin and the kinkiness of your hair. More importantly, perhaps, they determined who you were allowed to love, where you were allowed to live, whether or not you were allowed to vote and whether or not you were eligible for human dignity. The utter stupidity of it is breathtaking.

Strangely, the things that come back most strongly are the little things. The things that chipped slowly away at your dignity and self-esteem day after day until either you broke and were defeated or you found some kind of inner strength to deal with it. The constant racial slurs made a good start. Then there were the shops, restaurants, theatres and so forth that you weren't allowed in. And the obsession with separate everything, from park benches to bus services to libraries. I recall the first time I was thrown out of a library for being the wrong colour. "But", I protested naively, "it's a library!" It was incomprehensible to me that anyone would want to restrict access to knowledge. I mean, surely the books didn't care who read them. It was only later that I realised that keeping people ignorant is one of the better ways of keeping them under control. This particular ploy was plainly visible in the underfunded, underequipped and understaffed schools.

Many people who failed to live up to the the Verwoerdian ideal of subservience left the country and many of those took up arms against the apartheid government. The war went on for a long time and terrible things were done by both sides. Mike notes just one of them. The government's anti-communist rhetoric won them support from Western governments while Eastern bloc countries supported the liberation movements. Back then the ANC was a terrorist organisation hell-bent on killing innocents and delivering South Africa into the arms of the Soviet Union. Simultaneously, every ANC fighter was a glorious hero of the struggle, prepared to sacrifice his life for my freedom.

The late seventies and the eighties were a time of horror. A time of dead children and assassinations and disappearances and states of emergency and bombs and necklacings. A time of things we don't like to be reminded of because they are so painful.

And yet I said mixed feelings. The other side is that it reminded me how different things are now. Things certainly have changed. I find myself living in a real democracy. I find my rights constitutionally protected. I own property nowhere near a township. I can't explain why things changed and probably shouldn't try. Somehow the people of South Africa turned their collective back on death and violence and said "Enough. No more. There has to be a better way." Hope somehow managed to get a foot in the door. A lot of people sat down and talked about talks for the longest time. Then they just talked for the longest time. We danced in the streets the day Nelson Mandela was released. We laughed and joked in the interminable queues at the polling stations. And suddenly there was the possibility of a future that wasn't all war and chaos. God, I love being South African.

Of course, like all good revolutionaries we like the thought of exporting our revolution. This may make us annoying at times. We tend to be convinced that there is a peaceful way to resolve any conflict. Some people say this is a simplistic and naive thing to believe. Maybe it is. And maybe not. The conflict in South Africa went on for centuries, and God alone knows how many people died in all the atrocities committed in all that time, yet we managed to find a way to make peace. We managed to do it democratically. We managed to do it without inflicting terrible vengeance on our opressors. We managed to do it without ethnic cleansing. We managed to do it without destroying our country. We managed to do it without destroying our economy*. We like to think that if a thing can be done once, it can usually be done again. What's so terrible about that?

*(There will be people who disagree with this last point, but they're the kind of people who believe that the sole measure of a country's economy is the relative value of its currency and so can't be taken seriously.)

2002-04-17T08:37:00.000+03:00

It seemed like such a mundane sort of day. It was clear that the most unusual thing that would happen in Chicago yesterday was that it would be hot enough for me to feel truly comfortable. And so it was.

But in Outer Blogovia, strange and wondrous things were happening. Mike Golby revealed that he had masterminded the capture of his arch-enemy, Gary Turner aka PorridgeBoy. The poor Scotsman has apparently been sent off to Guantanamo Bay, there to await the pleasure of the US Navy. Not only that, but Mike also confessed that it was he who had written the account of the Chukka Bar Incident. In fact, Mike gave up the pretense entirely and signed yesterday's post at Gary's site with his own name.

Shock! Horror! And jolly well done to Mike. But what does this all mean? How long has Gary really been Mike's alter-ego? Has Gary ever been anything more than a figment of the darker side of Mike's imagination. Is Mike coming apart at the seams even as I write? Is this all some paranoid fantasy happening in Gary's mind?

What's really going on? It seems most likely that they are two personalities sharing a single mind. Wielding Occam's Razor with surgical precision, we can see that a single mind could easily cope with the demands of their blogging. And we know there is nothing more strenuous that they would need to cope with. Unfortunately, they've started competing for control and things, as we have seen, have started to get nasty. We can begin to connect some the odder things that have happened recently. Other denizens of the beknighted island on which the Scotsman lives have reported being shocked and terrified when he suddenly slapped himself across the face, then grabbed up a newspaper and started whacking tables and walls all over the pub. New information, from sources in Cape Town, reveals that just seconds before, Mike had been bitten by a mosquito. Telling, isn't it?

What this means for the future of blogocracy as we know it, I don't know. I hope they manage to resolve their difficulties without too much more bloodshed. I wouldn't want this to escalate into a full-scale war complete with blogtanks being mobilised and server-side bombers destroying innocent blogs. I wonder if Gary can be recovered from Guantanamo before the evil Yankee bastards do too many vile and despicable things to him. I will even plead with Mike to forgive his heinous sins. Still, as a South African I must sing Mike's praises for defeating the agent of the former imperialist colonial power. He is now officially The People's Hero.

2002-04-15T08:43:00.000+03:00

Well, I said it would be a great weekend. And so it was. Even the anticipated chaos restricted itself to one almost funny episode of trying to get three people to the same spot at the same time. It involved a sudden disappearance of taxis from Chicago's streets just when I needed one, some distinctly unhelpful hotel staff, comic timing that Chaplin would have killed for and one dangerous moment when I almost gave up hope that the others would show up. But it all worked in the end. The perfect Hollywood ending.

Later, when the taxis reappeared from wherever they were hiding, I got to meet the taxi driver on whom every stereotyped American cab driver ever seen in a movie was modeled. He delivered a fascinating monologue which ranged over such subjects as his hatred for the media, how the media hated Bill Clinton because he was too clever for them and had used Monica Lewinsky to get him out of power and how they had conspired to replace him with a more pliable president. In short, the United States is ultimately ruled by a conspiracy of news editors. Government by the media. What's the term for that I wonder? Mediocracy, perhaps?

For the rest, there was good conversation, good food, good friends,good movies, dancing until ungodly hours and general all round fun. Oh, and the best weather yet. Which provided the perfect opportunity for a drowsy afternoon lying on the grass by the lakeshore watching people stroll/jog/ride/rollerblade along the path.

Browsing in a second-hand book store turned up a copy of The Bush Dyslexicon, an interesting dissection of quotes from George W Bush's statements and speeches. Most of them are hilarious, including one instance when he named his brother Jeb as "governor of the great state of Texas" and had to be reminded by the interviewer that he is in fact the governor of Florida. It had me laughing out loud until I came to a statement, made after a tour of Auschwitz, that was in such unbearable bad taste that I am still amazed that he wasn't instantly smitten by a bolt of lightning. Such bad taste that I can't bring myself to repeat it here. The book is simultaneously funny (mostly because I'm not an American) and chilling.

I saw Jason DeFillippo's post about his worryingly high score on the autism test and it got me thinking. I've taken the test before and, coincidentally I hope, got exactly the same score he did: 33. The control group score is 16.4. It worried me too at the time, but I've realised that the last thing I want is to stop being a "freakin loon", as Jason puts it.

I write software for a living. I love my work - I find it immensely creative and deeply satisfying. And I'm good at it too. Current research indicates that a lot of programmers, engineers, mathematicians and other geeky types show distinct signs of Asperger's syndrome or high-function autism. It seems to go with the territory. And we're in good company. Einstein, Newton and several other intellectual giants also displayed many of the symptoms. Not that I would equate myself with Einstein - sadly, there are some things that even shameless arrogance balks at.

2002-04-13T04:04:00.000+03:00

This is going to be a great weekend. I've stopped being depressed, which can only be a Good Thing. Spring has finally arrived, looking bit sheepish, but all is forgiven. And Farrel is visiting from DC. I haven't seen him in months and I'm really looking forward to it. Farrel is one of my favourite people in the world and it's terribly sad that he no longer lives in South Africa. It would have been very distressing for me to be in the US and not spend some time in the chaotic insanity which surrounds him like his own private atmosphere. As a small example, his flight from Washington was due to arrive at around seven, but for reasons unknown, it's been delayed by nearly an hour. Well, at least it gives me time to ramble on.

Bye-bye birdies
This was reported a few days ago, but I couldn't resist it. The Indian police are grounding their pigeon mail service, according to the Washington Times. The service, the last one of it's kind in the world, has apparently been rendered obsolete by radio and e-mail. Another great tradition destroyed by the relentless march of technology. Someone should have told them about RFC 1149. They could have run e-mail over p-mail and made everyone happy.

And finally
An interesting theory on why free software almost invariably has a sucky interface. I'm not sure I agree all the time, but I did like the bit about "The quality of an interface design is inversely proportional to the number of designers." Linked from Joel Spolsky, who has a lot to say about interface design. A lot of very useful things as it turns out. Read his book, especially if you're a programmer, but even if you aren't.

2002-04-12T05:11:00.000+03:00

Today was a glorious day in Chicago. It was warm, it was sunny, the lake was an almost tropical blue and even the wind was just a little breeze. I took my lunch to the park and had a little picnic with the squirrels and pigeons. There were daffodils in the grass, blooming their little hearts out. Birds were mating furiously everywhere, it was almost embarrassing. The trees are still bare, but if you listen carefully you can hear little popping sounds as buds burst into life. Days like today fill me with the urge to prostrate myself and give thanks for being here to experience them.

Of course, I could have been tactful and toned down the exuberance and not frightened any unsuspecting readers, but what the hell. I may not have much tact (at least not online, where tracking me down in order to lob artillery shells in my general direction is hard work), but then, I'm sure my sheer brilliance and shameless arrogance more than make up for such a trifling lack :)

2002-04-11T09:21:00.000+03:00

I haven't really gone silent, strangely or otherwise, as Alka complains. My weekday time seems to consist rather largely of work, work and more work. Oddly, this leaves me rather tired in the wee hours of morning, which is when I usually compose these works of genius. So I often do the unforgiveable and choose sleep over blogging. Hey give me a break, it's been less than two months since my first toddling steps into the wonderful world of blogs. The addiction is growing, but give it time. I have no doubt that someday soon I will find it impossible to go to sleep if I haven't produced a nice long rant. Until then, sleep will happen more often than not.

Still, it's nice to know she cares. :)

It was also great to get some encouraging words from Mike a day or two ago. Now there's someone who truly has the bug. Which is a Good Thing, because he often says sensible things, particularly about war and terror and Israel and Palestine. All subjects that I have strong opinions about. When I say sensible things, I of course mean things I don't disagree with too much :) Mike seems to get a lot of flak from people who are usually either uninformed or blinded by their emotions. I can't say I'd handle it half as well, so I'll let him do the talking for now. I'll just lurk quietly in the background and work on the plan to have South Africans take over the world for the sake of sanity.

And now for something completely different.

Maybe it's because spring is finally, grudgingly showing signs of arriving and the, er, sap is beginning to rise, but I finally feel comfortable here. Right now I feel like I could even live here. No, I don't want to, but I could. Last week all I wanted was to go home, but I'm enjoying it now. I've even developed the rudiments of a daily routine. My hotel room faces north (and overlooks the McDonalds across the road, but even that can't bother me now) so it doesn't get light early and I always wake up too late. No it has nothing to do with composing epistles at 1 in the morning. I've stopped even trying to eat beakfast at the hotel. It's much easier and tastier to grab a latte and a croissant at Starbucks and eat at my desk. And I've found some decent cheap lunch spots. And in between all this eating, I've even been enjoying work.

I have noticed that I've been eating far more than usual. I was a bit worried at first that it was some kind of depressive binge, but it hasn't gone away, so it must be something else. And I don't seem to be expanding rapidly either, so it probably has something to do with having to keep the body temperature above freezing while wandering about outside. Which I do a lot.

It really doesn't hurt that Chicago is filled with beautiful buildings. At least it is downtown. I haven't ventured too far into suburbia, so I'm not sure what horrors may lurk out there. Interesting and innovative architecture somehow seems to have become a tradition here. Definitely one to be encouraged in other places. Especially in Johannesburg, where it seems that almost every building has to be neo-something-old before people will pay money for it and most of the rest are rectangular prisms that try to be Modern but miss the point and turn out boring instead. The Chicagoan fascination with beautiful buildings seems to owe a lot to having to rebuild a large part of the city after a devastating fire back in the 19th century. Hmm, I wonder ...

2002-04-09T05:58:00.000+03:00

Dolphins underwater are the essence of motion. Graceful beyond description. Their bodies are confined, but their minds I'm sure are not. It's not hard to imagine amusement when they ignore their handlers and interrupt the performance with some game not on the schedule for the day.

The Shedd Aquarium is huge. A day easily spent. And well spent too. The centrepiece is a reconstruction of a coral reef. Of course there are the dolphins and the beluga whales. Belugas are wonderful. Dolphins are beautiful, but they always come across as the adolescents of the cetacean world. Belugas are much more elegant and stately. It's hard to imagine a beluga rubbing it's genitals against the side of the pool, as one bored dolphin was doing. This incident led to a particularly tense moment for one visiting family, until the mother came up with the "scratching an itch" explanation. Perfectly true, yet euphemistic enough not to warp a young mind into attempting any "unnatural activities".

My favourite was the Amazon exhibit, which may seem like an odd choice for an aquarium, but the river floods a mind-blowingly huge area every year to a depth of up to 10m. More like a vast tree-covered lake than a forest. Piranhas are strangely placid fish. Their reputation is not all that well deserved it seems. The anaconda, having eaten sometime in the last fortnight, hung motionless in the water, all surreal curves and spots. In the dry season there are strange air-breathing fish that live in the remaining pools.

The aquarium was also a good spot to observe several specimens of americanus vulgaris. And fascinating they were too, in all their pallid, pasty and slightly damp and smelly glory. From the way their young interacted with the displays, one might be tempted to attribute some slight capacity for learning to them, but sadly, it was soon overcome by the species' endless obsession with blinking lights and buttons that light up when you push them. They came in endless streams to ritually circle the coral reef. They gasped in unison when the dolphins demonstrated how they had managed to train a few select individuals to bring them food when they made simple gestures like leaping out of the water or waving their tails in the air. I'm coming very close to believing that strange heresy: these odd creatures may be our closest living relatives, even closer than bonobos and chimpanzees.

A thoroughly surreal discovery this weekend was Chicago's Indian neighbourhood. Streets lined with Indian restaurants, shops selling odd vegetables and basmati rice, the air filled with spicy smells and Bollywood's best blaring from speakers, even the saccharine strains of The Movie that Must Not be Named. The bus was filled with people chattering away in Hindi. I half expected to see traffic carefully avoiding a cow in the middle of the road.

I wandered into the Madras Palace, a thoroughly vegetarian restaurant, for dinner, which was full of people chattering away in Tamil. They were serving their delicious weekend special eat-as-much-as-you-can buffet, which was a Good Thing, because I was starving. Last week was not a good one for food. I was running out of cash and only got a new infusion at the end of the week.

I also managed to contact Gregor last week. I haven't seen him in a very long time. He's still in Seattle, working for You Know Who. I think he's finally got the job he's always wanted, working on the Common Language Runtime for .NET. He does report that Seattle is not that much fun. But then, I never expected it to be. How much fun can anyone have in a city where it rains that much? If I'm lucky he'll be visiting Chicago before I leave.

Our man in Washington and our other man in Washington are coming to visit this weekend. I am greatly looking forward to seeing them. It's going to be wonderful to have a real conversation again, with real people. I hope I remember how to do that. My few remaining social skills may have atrophied hopelessly.

2002-04-04T09:08:00.000+03:00

I've been told, fairly pointedly, that I don't post often enough. You know who you are. So today I shall attempt the "stream of consciousness" blog. Who knows where that will lead us. I promise I will do some editing so you aren't forced to venture too far into the twisted recesses of what passes for my mind. If you like that sort of thing, go watch Being John Malkovich again.

Rant of the day. Just as I finished moaning about how this lack of sunshine was making me depressed, it snows. It was bad enough when it snowed on Monday. At least I could pretend that was just some kind of sick joke. But today?! This is beyond sick. This is the kind of weather that inspires fantasies of burning a nice big building and warming my poor frozen body in front of it.

There was a fire in a building across from the office on Monday. I disclaim any responsibility for that one, but it did get me thinking. Seems to have been a freak accident involving a tank of gas in a jeweller's workshop. Rumours involving a small gold ring and someone who had read about taking the Ring to the Fire one time too many are apparently not true. Needless to say, someone is suing the poor bastard whose business now lies in smoking ruins. Or maybe she's suing the fire department for not rescuing her fast enough.

A funny thing happened on the way to work this morning. God, I've wanted to say that forever. Actually, it was a little bit freaky. I took the subway in to the office because I was late. Well, later than usual anyway. I got on the train and we went just far enough to probably be under the river when the train came to a rather sudden halt. After some time, I managed to disentangle myself from my bag and the rather large person who had been standing across from me. Then the lights went out. Ever been in a train stopped in a tunnel under a river and have the lights go out? Ever wondered exactly what will inspire complete claustrophobia?

Before I could rip the walls apart with my bare hands, some of the lights came back on and The Voice said "This train is experiencing equipment problems. The operator is currently off the train working to correct the problem." Not terribly inspiring. Then silence. There was a brief flurry of activity when the train driver climbed into our carriage from outside, fiddled furiously with something and then rushed out again. We started moving again a few minutes after that, although it felt like a lot longer. I still don't know what was wrong. I was just very, very relieved.

The Voice is the disembodied entity that makes announcements on the CTA trains. Kind of like the London "Mind the Gap" voice, but male. One of the newspapers here has a regular column dedicated to people writing in with their theory about who he is, what he looks like, etc. Very entertaining.

2002-04-01T09:59:00.000+03:00

I've been feeling quite down this week. Maybe that came through in my other posts. Probably the result of sunshine deprivation. The sun came out on Wednesday and that was pretty much it until this morning. Then it clouded over and rained.

On Friday I realised that there was nothing I could do except prescribe a course of retail therapy. My first session was a dismal failure. I was tempted by the Virgin megastore, but when I discovered that the ultra-cheap sale CDs cost $9, I decided that that was not the most useful idea. There was also the odd fact that the selection wasn't nearly as good as I would have expected. Certainly nowhere near the Virgin store in London, or even CD Wherehouse for that matter. OK, I'm not sure about CD Wherehouse, but only just.

Yesterday I wandered into the Sony consumer electronics store. I didn't buy anything there either, but I knew that was unlikely before I went in. All I wanted to do was look at all the new toys. There were plenty of those, including the biggest TV set I have ever seen and the smallest digital camcorder. Also cute little robot dogs. I'm not sure why anyone would want one - isn't the whole point of dogs the fact they are warm and fuzzy - but they were very cute. I will admit to a certain stirring of desire when I saw the CD Walkman that not only plays CDRs but also plays MP3 CDRs. But not enough to spend a hundred and fifty bucks on it.

The retail therapy finally worked out today though. I went to the big Borders bookstore, which is near the hotel. There's a small one near the office but its not half as entertaining. Imagine Exclusive Books at Hyde Park. Got it? Right, now imagine four floors of it. I spent most of the day there being very happy. I didn't even hurt the credit card that badly. But it was great. I would think of a book I had wanted to read, go look it up on the book search kiosk and, almost every time, it would tell me where in the store I could find it. Of course, I couldn't buy too many of them, but I could attempt a speed reading of several. To take one example, it was an absolute joy to finally get to look through Christopher Alexander's books on patterns in architecture, which inspired the design patterns movement in software.

The week at work was mostly good. I wrote tons of code and discovered new and exciting ways to make last week's code better. There was even something that could pass for conversation with an American. Hey, maybe they are human.

I also discovered Internet radio. Or rediscovered it, rather. The Internet connection at the office is scarily fast. More than enough to deliver a sustained 100 Kb a second. That's just to me and I'm reasonably sure other people at the office also get to use it. That is truly mindblowing (at least to a poor boy from the Third World). It also makes listening to streaming audio pleasant, as opposed to the excruciation of attempting it over a connection that forces you to choose between continuity and quality.

2002-03-28T08:17:00.000+02:00

As the crazy receptionist/documentation writer says, "There's a lot of angry people in this town." It's been three weeks now and so far I've seen five, maybe six, demonstrations, sorry I mean protests, in the streets of downtown Chicago.

First there was the actors' union insisting that a play be boycotted. I can't remember why exactly, but I'm sure it made sense. There they were standing in front of a theatre making lots of noise and handing pamphlets to passers-by. It was all so familiar. I felt like I was home again. All that was missing was the toyi-toyi. Which was probably a good thing. It would have been a little too Far Side to see a crowd of largely white Americans toyi-toying down the street.

There were a couple of small ones that I completely failed to understand. I think they may have had something to do with the primaries for the state governor's election later this year, but I couldn't be sure. Just a couple of hundred people marching along, shouting incomprehensibly and waving placards that made no sense. Weird, weird, weird.

The two Invisible Marches came next. I knew they were happening, because I could see the city police stopping traffic and I could hear the chanting. From the chanting, I think one lot was a bunch of women and the other a bunch of Arabs. I really don't have any idea what those were about. The trouble was, they were on the street 18 floors down in the middle of some nasty weather and I didn't want to know badly enough to go and see what they were about. They were on different days, by the way. They just both got a bad deal on the weather. Having a demonstration is no fun if nobody comes out to see it.

Then came the really big one. There is nothing quite so scary as seeing 3000 Anderson employees marching in lockstep down the street towards you. OK, maybe not in lockstep, but still terror-inducing. All I wanted was to get across the street to where a bowl of broccoli and cheddar soup was pining for the touch of my lips. I only just managed it before the March of the Androids swept all before it. They were unhappy about the company being indicted in the Enron case, because that's likely to force Anderson out of business and everyone will lose their job. All because a couple of people were a little too eager with the paper shredders. I always thought auditors knew that theirs is the one business where you definitely do not give the customer what they want.

And then there was the very small one. A single person, standing on a corner with a placard. And oddly effective too. A lot of people use the argument that a lone voice can make no difference, yet this lone person is the one I remember most clearly. I even remember what was written on her placard.

2002-03-26T08:12:00.000+02:00

I remember rabbiting on a few days ago about the "War on Terror" and the "War on Drugs", as Americans like to call their global socio-political re-engineering projects. Well, the clever little buggers have outdone themselves this time. There I was innocently watching Friends one night when this kid appears on the screen and says something like "This weekend I went out with some friends, drank a few beers and helped to torture someone's father". Then another one, saying something similar. And another. Then the message: "DRUG MONEY SUPPORTS TERROR". Subtle, huh?

Guess what, they're merging the two projects. I'm sure there's some kind of anti-trust legislation that should prevent this. Has anyone told the Department of Justice? But then, considering the job they did with Microsoft, I won't hold my breath.

The whole idea is also pretty much bullshit. It seems to be based on the fact that Afghanistan is the world's leading producer of opium. I'm sure you can follow the tenuous chain of logic from there. Retrofitted logic is the easiest thing in the world. Ask any mathematician, or lawyer.

But the weird thing is the complete mismatch between the content of the ad and the message. All the people in the ad look like fairly normal people who smoke a joint every now and then or pop a couple of ecstacy pills at a rave. At least, I think that's normal. None of them look like they've been doing serious amounts of heroin or crack. If they did, I could begin to understand the ad. But they don't. And the fact is that almost all the dope smoked in the US is grown in the US. And almost all the E used here is also made here. So where's the connection?

In the short term, all this laughable little campaign is going to achieve is to alienate people who use the softer drugs. They are going to resent being called terrorists. For the very good reason that they are not. If anyone actually believes them, it may also put a couple of farmers out of business in California or Florida. In the longer term, who knows? I hope that it makes people less eager to believe everything the DEA or FBI or CIA say about drugs and/or terrorism.

If you think about the way the US defines terrorism and the people and countries that it implicates in various plots and axes, then it becomes pretty clear that it is really oil money that supports terror. But that's a problem, because oil money also supports the US economy. Oops. Of course, if you think about other definitions of terrorism, which would include much of US foreign policy, then we would have to extend that to Coca-Cola and software too. Hey, there's a valid, ethically sound reason not to buy Microsoft software.

The "War on Drugs" itself seems to be little but an astounding waste of money. I have no idea how much money the US has spent on this war, but it must run into trillions of dollars. Most of the cash spent seems to have gone into propping up repressive regimes or lining the pockets of corrupt officials in Latin American countries. The funny thing is, the drug supply just doesn't seem to be drying up. Just today police found two kilograms of cocaine in a house right here in friendly Chicago and I'm sure there's a lot more out there.

There are interesting results coming out of the Netherlands and the UK concerning the Dutch drug decriminalisation experiment. It seems to be working. There are fewer addicts per capita in the Netherlands than in the UK by a large factor. Sounds weird, but it's not. At least not if you think about it before reaching for your Bible, Qur'an or other weapon of mass destruction.

Here in America they even have the example of the Prohibition. People these days have a bizarrely romantic view of that era, but when you stop and look at it, it's all very familiar. The bootleggers of the Prohibition were simply the drug lords of the time. And sneaking into a back room and sharing a bottle is not really any different from sneaking into a back room and sharing a syringe (except of course you can't get AIDS from sharing a bottle, but that's a different issue). All the "War on Alcohol" did was chew up money and lives until people finally came to their senses and decided that it actually made more sense to make alcohol legal. Did it stop people dying from alcohol abuse? No. But it did make life a lot safer and it gave people responsibility for their own choices. And, of course, access to help if they had a problem, without making them criminals.

2002-03-25T08:01:00.000+02:00

OK, it's a bit weird having four new posts on the same day. Within minutes of each other on the same day. I've been writing these over the past few days, but I haven't the opportunity to post them until now. I think I've posted them in the right order too. Wow, maybe the brain is beginning to recover slightly.

2002-03-25T07:55:00.000+02:00

Another great day. Well, the temperature hovered around freezing most of the day and it snowed on me as I walked back to the hotel, but apart from that it was great. I spent the day wandering around the Art Institute, which is Chicago's biggest art museum. I emerged many hours later after an experience that started out in near horror and went on to approach the ecstatic. Wow.

The collection is HUGE. I started out looking at the smallish African art collection. Which was fun and vaguely familiar. Mostly sculpture from West and Central Africa. Then I went on to the Ancient American section. This was mostly fun too. A lot of Maya, Olmec, Aztec and suchlike artifacts. Now we get to the horrific bit. I was struck by a particularly interesting clay figure of a man. At first glance it looked like he had a hideous scar across his chest. Then I realised that he was actually wearing some kind of skin-tight garment that was fastened across the chest. Looking a little closer, I thought, "Wait. This is a seriously odd bit of clothing he's wearing." It was clear from the detail in the figure that it covered him entirely - arms, although his hands were free, and legs, although the feet had broken off at some point, so I couldn't be sure. I could easily make out his own eyes and mouth behind the appropriate holes in the garment. Very weird. Then I read the plaque. It seems he was depicted as a participant in an Aztec ritual which involved wearing the flayed skin of a recently sacrificed victim. The "scar" across the chest was where the skin was sewn together.

I fled to the foyer where a beautifully serene Buddha and a couple of bodhisattvas helped me regain my calm. I took the hint and headed off into the Far Eastern section of the museum. Here there were more Buddhist sculptures, delicate translucent jade carvings, Chinese and Japanese paintings and some truly exquisite porcelain. I remember a vase, from the Qing Dynasty I think, which was glazed a prticularly rich shade of blue, the kind of blue I had thought existed only in dreams.

China and Japan led eventually to South and South-East Asia. The pieces here were mostly Buddhist and Hindu religious art. I was completely in my element, although I kept having to fight the urge to perform obeisances. Just can't escape the damned conditioning. There were even a couple of works from the old Tamil motherland which I really loved. One was a 14th century bronze of Shiva Nataraja - my all-time favourite depiction of a Hindu deity. There's something compelling about the idea of Creation being the dance of God.

I spent the last couple of hours wandering through the European painting collection. My head still hasn't stopped spinning. When you go up the stairs to the this part of the museum, the first thing you see is El Greco's magnificent 15-foot high Assumption of the Virgin. This used to be the altarpiece of a church in Toledo, even though Mary is being lifted into Heaven balanced on the crescent moon - a slightly pagan touch, I thought.

The collection of paintings is also huge. I have never before seen so many Picassos in one place, for example. There's one that I really enjoyed, which I will forever think of as Picasso's portrait of Alka, called Crazy Woman with Cats. I've also never seen so many Monets in one place either. Or Miros, or van Goghs, or Matisses. And lots of others. I am in the throes of severe sensory overload.

I'll have to go back. What remains of my mind just couldn't deal with it all at once. There are whole wings that I haven't even gone into. Let's hope that the cashier next time also assumes that I'm a student and charges me $6 in stead of $10.

2002-03-25T07:52:00.000+02:00

Unexpected pleasures. Saturday was warm enough to go outside without a jacket. Not for long, but still it was wonderful to go out and feel the warmth of the sun on my skin. Sunlight makes me happy; when it's not there, I feel grey and depressed. I would have been happy to be born into some ancient sun-worshipping culture. Waking up before dawn to give thanks to the sun as it rises, performing deeply significant rituals at the solstices. Too bad I wasn't.

Today was also a good day to play tourist. I went off to the Chicago Cultural Centre (I can't bring myself to write Center), mostly to visit the tourist info office. But I got seriously distracted. It is an astonishing place. The building itself is beautiful and the stained glass dome is amazing. There were also various exhibits, ranging from a look at the the man who designed several of Chicago's parks through some seriously odd sculpture, some of the starkest drawings I've ever seen and photography that was simultaneously playful and sensuous, to my favourite, a range of prints, etchings and suchlike by a graphic artist I'd never heard of, Red Grooms. His work was all intense, often moving and occasionally very funny. He seems to have an obsession with other artists - several of his works are portraits of artists, including van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso and a wonderfully surreal piece called Dali Salad.

Outside the Cultural Centre building is a life-size bronze of ... a cow. It is one of the last remaining cows from the 1999 Cows on Parade public art campaign, in which a lot of cow sculptures were placed all around the city. I paged through a booklet about the famous cows and they were wonderful. Whimsical cows, psychedelic cows, winged cows (at the airport), cows covered in postage stamps (this one was called Stampede), you name it. My favourite was the down-covered fledgling cow emerging from the remains of an extremely large egg. The campaign was seemingly hugely successful. It was modeled on a very similar one in, of all places, Zurich. Just when you feel comfortable with the boring Swiss stereotype...

2002-03-25T07:49:00.000+02:00

I promised a rant of the week and here it is. I wrote this on Fri, but didn't get to post it then.

Thursday, the 21st, was Human Rights Day back home. I managed to celebrate the day in a peculiar fashion by having a good old-fashioned shout-you-down argument with one of my colleagues. A fellow South African who was vigorously defending the police officers who killed 69 unarmed civilians on that painful day in 1960. I was stunned. I was amazed. I was angry as all hell.

I eventually realised that I wasn't going to change his mind. I had discovered that most bizarre of all specimens - an apologist for apartheid. A genuine dyed-in-the-wool racist. Someone who can (and does) use the word "black" in the tone of voice that others reserve for "maggot".

I was horrified. It was like walking into a room and realising that it is crawling with cockroaches. At least cockroaches have the decency to scuttle out of sight when you turn the lights on. OK, I'm familiar with racism. Spending most of my life living under apartheid certainly saw to that. Even since the demise of the old regime, racism abounds in South Africa. I know, for instance, that many people mean "Black person" when they say "criminal" and that many people blame all South Africa's woes on the fact that the government is black. I know what the agenda is when people imitate a stereotypical African accent as a way to portray stupidity. But I also know that people who do these things realise on some deeper level that their beliefs are completely irrational and just plain wrong, which is why they try to conceal them.

This guy, on the other hand, is completely unrepentant. He's stuck in some wacky time warp where suffering from a melanin deficiency somehow means that he is superior to the rest of us. How does one deal with someone like this? At times like these I wish we had had a real Bolshevik-style revolution. At least then we would have some convenient gulag where he could be sent for some serious re-education.

On the brighter side, the fact that blatant racism like this so horrifies me and is so bizarre to me is an Good Thing. There was a time when this sort of attitude was a daily experience. I'm willing to bet that it horrifies almost everyone reading this too. It's become a glib cliche to talk about the South African miracle, so I won't. I'll just call it an low probability event.

2002-03-21T23:39:00.000+02:00

A quick note to the faithful: You can now comment on my posts. I can't wait. Thanks muchly to YACCS.

Also found Mike Golby, another South African blogger. He has some interesting things to say.

2002-03-19T16:49:00.000+02:00

I'm just a bad tourist. No doubt about it. St. Patrick's Day is a big deal in Chicago, what with all those millions of Irish-descended people living here. Green people everywhere, funny hats, huge parades, the President visiting the city, the river being dyed green, etc. All this was going on and I went to take a look, of course. Great fun it was too. But (and Alka will never forgive me for this) my camera stayed warm and snug in my hotel room. There's just no hope.

Of course, St. Patrick's Day and all those Irish pubs (I've lost count now, but they average around one every three blocks.) lead directly to the consumption of large amounts of Irish beer. I managed to stay away from the whiskey for the sake of my wallet. I still spent a lot more than I should have, but that seems to happen even when I'm not intoxicated.

I also went out clubbing on Sat night. It was great - more alcohol, loud thumping music, flashing lights, pretty people everywhere, the possibility of not spending the night alone. It was a bit of a nasty surprise when the club shut down at around 2 am. This is apparently standard for nightclubs in Chicago. There are one or two that stay open until 4 or 5, but mostly it's curtains at 2. Very bizarre. I can't imagine going clubbing in Joburg and being forced to leave at such an uncivilised hour.

I did however give thanks for the train service. They run all day, every day. I can't imagine there are too many places in the world where you can wander unsteadily into a subway station at 2:45 in the morning and five minutes later a train arrives to take you home. Having once spent an entertaining morning in London trying to get home after missing the last train, this was utter bliss. No wonder they like to call this "the city that works".

I learned at breakfast the next day that Chicago is positively wanton in the matter of allowing clubs and bars to stay open late. In most cities in the US they would have shut down even earlier. And as for staying open until 4, just forget it. This is all according to the waiter, who is a drama queen the like of which I'll probably never see again, so it may be a wee bit exaggerated. Our man in Washington tells me that there is at least one rave club there that stays open until sunrise, although the bar closes much earlier. But then, it is a rave club, so who needs alcohol anyway?

This has been the party edition of alien tongue. No rants, no tales of horror. Just good, er ... clean fun. I'll rant again later this week. Promise.

2002-03-15T05:57:00.000+02:00

I've just had my best meal yet in Chicago. There's a chain of restaurants that makes Asian-type food, called Big Bowl. I can now say that they make a damn fine Thai-style vegetable curry. Plus they serve Tsingtao beer. My happiness is complete. I'll be back, I think.

Being a vegetarian in this town is a challenge. Being a vegetarian on a very small budget is almost impossible. Being a vegetarian on a small budget who detests deep-dish pizza is completely impossible. For some reason, and I know the gods are rolling on the floor about this one, Chicago happens to be the home of deep-dish pizza. Even what they call thin-crust pizza has about half an inch of crust to carve your way through. Deep-dish pizza is a culinary horror. Eat one and you'll have nightmares for days afterwards. Nightmares in which you're trapped inside a giant ball of dough and are forced to eat your way out. Aargh!

Did I say vegetarian? I meant almost. I make an exception for sushi. But sushi is expensive wherever you go. I have found a nice spot that sells excellent sushi at lunchtime for a very reasonable price, so I've had lunch there a few times already. The fish is fresh, the sushi is exquisite and the chef is friendly. He's an immigrant from Burma, would you believe? We spent some time chatting yesterday, sharing our mutual disgust at finding ourselves in a place so cold that frozen rain falls from the sky.

I've found that foreigners and immigrants are, for the most part, far friendlier than Americans in general. I'm not sure why this is, but immigrants are far more likely to respond to a greeting or strike up a conversation. Maybe it's a language issue. Maybe immigrants are already trying harder to understand what other people are saying and Americans just don't bother. Maybe I should just give them some time.

The people at the office, with the exception of the receptionist, who is completely insane and quite wonderful, are definitely very cool towards me and the other South Africans. This may be a political issue - after all, we are the evil Third-Worlders come to steal jobs away from God-fearing Americans.

The language issue is huge. If my concentration wavers when someone is speaking, I find myself thrashing about in a loud flood of looooong vowels, dodging whirlpools that suck most consonants into oblivion and wild fountains that spout R's out of nothing. Say what?! This is, of course, completely mutual. I'm sure it's all very amusing to somebody.

I have to confess that I've made some concessions. For instance, in order to get a decent cup of coffee, I've had to learn to ask for a laahtay when I mean a latte. But if I start saying fawerr when I mean four, please will somebody shoot me in the head.

2002-03-11T08:12:00.000+02:00

It was the best of times; it was the worst of times. For the first half of my flight here, I got bumped up to business class. That was just wonderful. For the first time ever, I had no trouble sleeping on a plane. Ten hours of absolute bliss. Unfortunately, the fairy tale ended in Amsterdam. The switch to my connecting flight to the US was a little bit distressing, especially the bit where the airline officials ordered us off the plane just after we'd boarded, because they needed to do a "security check". Talk about paranoia-inducing!

It didn't help that I was back in cattle class. There was no chance of sleep, so I just read a couple of trashy crime novels (my latest obession). But even they couldn't stop me wondering when the bomb was going to go off.

We arrived in Chicago at about lunchtime on Tuesday. My brain was convinced it was around seven in the evening. This has not made for a happy week. I was finally able to have a decent night's sleep on Friday, although that likely had something to do with the consumption of large amounts of alcohol.

I haven't been able to do much touristy yet. I've been working fairly solidly since I got here. I did manage to get out on the weekend, but the weather has been thoroughly disgusting. The temperature today hovered around -5 Celsius, but it was at least mostly sunny and not very windy. Yesterday was just as cold, but was cloudy, rained and then snowed for most of the day and the wind was a vindictive howling demon that somehow managed to escape the frozen desolation commonly known as Canada.

In fact, you may have heard (there's been little else on the news here) about the scaffolding that the wind ripped of a building downtown and then dropped on a couple of cars, killing several people. That happened about half an hour after I had walked past there on my quest to buy a camera.

A few hours later, I sipped my $4 glass, yes glass, of wine over lunch, in a kind of self-congratulatory euphoria caused by returning from my shopping expedition with a firm grasp on my life and, even more impressively, not having had to amputate any of my extremities due to frostbite. The news of the flying scaffolding tragedy was all over the news. Something about the coverage got me thinking about how Americans seem to need to have somebody to blame for just about everything. Almost instantly, both the news anchors and everyone they interviewed was calling for somebody's head to roll. It didn't matter who - know one knows yet who it's going to be - but there had to be someone. You can see this clearly in American responses to other things, like the WTC attack. You can see it in the so-called "War on Drugs". You can see it in the incredible litigiousness of American society (you wouldn't believe how much of the Chicago Yellow Pages is devoted to lawyers).

I see signs of this sort of thinking emerging in South Africa too. Where we would once have said "freak accident" and left it at that, I supect we would also now have some desire to see someone take the blame. I'm not sure how valuable this is. The victims are still dead and the person who is officially to blame is hardly likely to be some sort of bizarre murderer just waiting for the next 90km/h wind so they can strike again.

Having mentioned the current "Wars" on both Terror and Drugs, I have to say that I find the whole idea of making war on concepts and inanimate objects misleading. They are generally a way to make opposition impossible - What, you mean you support Terror?! But as wise South Africans who lived through our very own version of the War on Terror, and of course, the War on Communism, we can see through this ridiculous ploy. Although I have the nasty feeling that by the time I get back someone will have declared a War on Crime or somesuch.

Oh well, it won't be for much longer. For verily there shall come the Liberation from Silliness and we shall ascend into the Bliss of Compassion. Amen.

2002-02-26T22:31:00.000+02:00

This post has nothing to do with going anywhere, but I had a close encounter with fame (by proxy) today and I couldn't resist.

My friend, Charmaine, has just started a Master's degree in bioinformatics. Talking about it to her left my head spinning with technical terms from a world I know very little about. I latched onto the fact that most of the software they use is written in Perl. Now that I know about. Perl is just perfect for this kind of work. DNA is just a bunch of very long strings and pattern matching is what bioinformatics is all about..

Charmaine was telling me she's going to be at the Bioinformatics Hackathon happening in Cape Town this week and next. A very cool idea -- lock 20 hackers in a room for a couple of weeks and see how much coding they get done. All the code is open source so there will be dancing in the corridors anywhere that work is being done on the human genome.

The fame bit: The hackathon got a mention on Slashdot today. Check out the hackathon's blog too.

2002-02-22T16:54:00.000+02:00

The main purpose of this blog (for now) is to keep track of doings and happenings on my upcoming trip to the US. I have spent a large portion of today at the US consulate applying for a visa, so it seems most appropriate to start today,

Bureaucracy is one of the stranger human habits and Americans seem to be as fond of it as any other bunch. The consular staff were friendly and reasonably efficient, but they were terrible sticklers for having exactly the right bits of paper. They sent me away once to fetch an obscure bit of paper that I didn't know I needed. An hour and many kilometres later I got back to the consulate to discover that they didn't actually need it after all. Bizarro.

The other bizarre thing was the visa application form. Not having much experience of such things, I found it very odd indeed. Not only did they want to know obscure personal details, like my mother's name, they also asked some strange questions. My favourite was Have you ever participated in a genocide? I would love to know if anyone has ever answered "Yes" to that one. It's just as well they didn't ask Are you a native of planet Earth?, which would have presented an interesting moral dilemma.

I must have been reasonably convincing because they agreed to let me visit for a whole year. I only want to go for two months, but still...