Console me

I have to compete against some Locust Queen.

A play on an afrikaans word and one of the main game characters.

I'm thinking an early release in time for the IIFAs

Bollywood ain't big enough for me yaar.
Aasia put me on to this gem of a site.

nauseatalgic (i like this word, i think i'll keep it)

I swear, I will not post any more of these nausea-talgics and time capsule things again.

---

from: capsule@forbes.net
to: saaleha@gmail.com
date: 17 November 2008 16:00
subject: greetings from 2005

Greetings from your past. In the fall of 2005, you agreed to receive this message, which has been preserved for a year in the Forbes.com E-Mail Time Capsule. For more details, visit http://www.forbes.com/capsule

Here is the text of your message:

hey there dollie,

Hope this finds you well, smiling and happy.

are you married to your soul mate yet?

what's been happening since we last left?
right now, i'm sitting in Paula's home office, messing around on the internet when i really should be making headway with the investigative journalism conference logistics.

the currents in my life>
-*-the one that got away
-**-unclassifiable
-***-a distant friendly distraction
-****-the blind date (who i'll be chatting to this Friday)

i wonder which of these have stuck around.

I hope you've made some progress with your writing and all the big dreams that you've had at the tender age of 22 have translated into a little reality.

mwah and hugs

your past Self-

Saaleha

(how long is your hair now? and have you lost all the weight? more importantly-do you have your driving license and a car?)

--------------------

Hey there littler Saaleha,

Good Lord, weren't you the über bubblygum back then, with alphabet-case issues, and your head full of boys.

Thank the Almighty you don't 'dollie' and 'mwah' that often anymore. 

Well, lil ditzy Sal, none of those okes are of any weight to you now. 

But, you'll be pleased to hear that you have indeed married your soulmate, a boy from the 'ville, would you bloody believe it. Of the ghaam too, despite all your protestations that you'd never get with one of the People of The Cook Book.

You've also been with the company through three other Investigative Journalism conferences, and while you don't handle logistics anymore, you still mess around on the net when you should be making headway with other things. You're also thinking that a bit of R&D is as good as some R&R and may find yourself in a different kind of workspace next year.

You lost the weight. Then you gained the weight. Then you lost some more. Then you got that happy stomach and funtastic forearms and now you're planning on going back to gym. Tomorrow.

The hair is short. You've never had it so short. They even shaved off some from your neck. But that's also because you Bhamjee's lean towards the hirsute, rocking the bad moon rising and all.

Yes, you drive and you have a Chevy Aveo that your husband won't acknowledge because it isn't german-made. He also thinks it's a big blue shelf in the garage. You drove off to work one morning, with his spectacles, garage-card and cd flying off the roof and making violent kissie-kissie with the tar. He got most of his stuff back and had to cancel the card. You're kinda sure he still loves you.

Ah the writing. Let's not talk too much about the writing. You were more confident back then. But you have been accepted for a MA programme in 2010. We'll talk then.

And the big dreams, well, you're living one of them, and you're pretty much on track on the trek. You just need to be a bit more zenlike about things. 

Calm. 

Focused. 

Like Water.

You're  still clumsy. I know you didn't ask but you should know anyway.

Don't think I've seen this one on HijabStyle

Hola, hola, hola, kicking it for Mzansi Apa!

(Get yours at Al-Hidaayah (sp?), Mint Road, Fordsburg, JHB)

doodle is a funny word and doodling just sounds like it should be dirty

As far as business ventures go, I wish the blood of Charou ran thicker in my veins.

My first chug of entrepreneurial spirit was some time in Std4 (Grade 6 to you young 'uns) with a little start-up called "Cupid Aint Stupid". 

I dealt primarily in matters-of-the-heart and would write custom love-letters and poems for a very reasonable R2 each. I was also the purveyor of fine hand-made twinsaver tissue flowers .

I made enough to buy a few chip rolls at break-time, but the business wasn't sustainable.

The type of people who didn't write their own love-letters were also the types who promised to pay up tomorrow. And the market for tissue flowers was soon overtraded after I gave tissue-flower making lessons for R3.

I never sold much else after that, apart from a few sticker sheets in Std5 and my old Archie comics much later on (a transaction I now regret).

But now I've hit on this idea of customising notebooks.

I'm a huge notebook phan-girl. I'm moleskine-verskrik, and the one I'm currently desecrating is a gorgeous leather-bound volume from Florence with the giglio embossed on the cover.

But I don't quite know where to start. Sites like cafepress.com offer exactly the type of arrangement I think would work for me, but after exchange rates, the final product is too expensive for the average blog reader to consider [Would you pay something like $12 for a notebook just because it had something clever on the cover?].

Are there any South African based print-on-demand set-ups?

Here are a few of the notebook cover ideas, taken from some of my more obscure blog-moments over the years:

Is this the kind of thing you'd willingly hand your credit card details over for?

The backbone of colonial America and where-house sales

Chuck Palahniuk is of that rare strain of writer. 

He violates us with the most extreme characters, but they're so utterly believable, that we'd just lie down and gratefully push a few hundred in their pockets afterward.

5g33k and I watched Choke last night. 

A sex addict support group, a potential half-clone of Jesus Christ, an ingenious restaurant choking scam, a fucked-up childhood, a mad mother who meant well and a doctor willing to get herself impregnated in the hospital chapel in order to carry out a radical stem cell procedure. And there's more.

All of it plausible.

I haven't read the book this was based on, and therefore can't make any judgements on the medium migration, but I could see Palahniuk in almost all the pixels.

I may be writing out of my ass here, but what I got out of it was a portrait of damaged people, searching and failing. 

I like that about Palahniuk; that as much as the people he creates are so tremendous and weird, there are little filaments running through them that seal the connection with the reader/watcher.

You may not be a chronic masturbator, but when you see Denny draw the stripper as a perfect female form, you're taken right back to those moments where you felt total acceptance of a beloved.

The journey you take with the protagonist Victor Mancini, is one you may still be on, even though you might never find yourself naked in an unlocked airplane bathroom.

--

Exclusive Books sent out a mass email informing Fanatics cardholders of their warehouse sale. They spelt 'members' as 'memebers' in their email subject line. I think that most of us bloggers are meme-bers.

Back to the ware/wherehouse sale. The dulcet tones of the GPS dominatrix lead me to Strijdom park where I expected to find a huge structure bursting its zinc with covetable titles.

I was disappointed to find a selection that took me all of 20 minutes to browse through.

I came home with two facepainting kits and fairy stories for the brats, three photobooks with accompanying soundtracks (the American Cars and Cuban beats for my uncle, the Sax! and Moods of La Habana for myself), Terry Pratchett's Thud!, Alduous Huxley's Those Barren Leaves, a Marie Claire Breakfast recipe book and The Bollywood Cookbook for my mum (ta for the heads up Kaye).

More to add to the pile of the unread. Whereas I used to eat up entire days reading, now I tend to digest books in spurts, little bites before bed or huge gastronomies on rare Sunday mornings. I'm currently gnawing on Lita Epstein's If you can't say anything nice, say it in Yiddish. To the recent vermin carrying the blogosphere plague, "Zolst es shtupin in toches arayn."

--

NaNoWriMo 2008.  It's the first hour of Day 2 and my word count is bleak. Forget bleak, try non-existent. It's November's fault. Months that start on the weekend have no real ooomph about them. I'll start writing on Monday.

Did I convince you?