Let’s leave the beaver-cheek-causing frustration that is work, aside. Just thinking about how badly I want to make it makes me sympathise with reality show contestants and that, dear readers, makes me want to lash myself 15th century style.

So, consider me hobbled until one of the 3 options I currently have pays out. And I mean pays, as in cash money, preferrably in monthly installments so that I can get an iPad*** and be featured on it, eventually.

1. Word of the day: esurient – The Sage: 1. devouring or craving food in great quantities

2. Insight of the day: Suppressing frustration and want makes Feylian a rabid little ferret.

3. State of the pool: furiously churning and rebelliously sloshing against the shrinking walls of the pool

4. Joys of the day: Rives (I skipped the TED intro, you should know it by now), 2 meetings which went goddam brilliantly**, dinner with El the Legend and our Taye Diggs look alike neighbour****.

5. Awesomest lines: Kite by Rives

And so I made for you a kite, enormous,
out of coat hangers, brown paper bags
and the masking tape from that drawer in your kitchen,
and I hung it in the hallway
where you couldn’t hardly miss it,
and I tagged that kite with my words,
I wrote:

Just so you know–

My weird mind wanders and my brave heart breaks.
I’ve nailed some milestones, but I’ve made mistakes,
Cuz I got more faults than a map of California earthquakes.

I am taking a nap beneath your covers.
Wake me if you like me.
Wake me if you want me
Wake me if you need another poem.

Your once and future lover
has made himself at home.

*Hungry is perhaps not the right word. Look at the word of the day. That’s me, baby.

**If it did otherwise I would’ve dragged its sorry asses to the corner of the room and hissed it into submission. Mama ain’t playin’ nice no more.

*** A legitimate wish and don’t you eyeroll at me or call me a fangirl. I am not. It is just bloody cool and I want one.

****I would like to point out that he is funny, articulate and smoking hot.If she doesn’t flirt I’ll be forced to stab her with the salad fork. Which we don’t have. The plastic handled cheap fork then. With hot sauce on it.

©2010 Feylian's World. All Rights Reserved.

I think I did a prat fall out of bed this morning.  Ok so it didn’t help that between me dreaming of how Google Wave will change the world*** and my lovely 2.5 year old demanding ice cream at 3 in the morning, I did not get much sleep.

Have you ever wanted to eviscerate someone? Well I would like to rip the intestines out of an all round bastard. I wish with all the biohazard grade bile currently backed up in my body that I could tell you who he is. This evil mother…bitch decides to pay MM (to whom I outsourced the job) only a part of an invoice 5 MONTHS after she worked her ass off. His reason? He feels that the printing handling fee to which they verbally agreed is “ridiculous/exaggerated” and he doesn’t feel like approving it. I could go into how much work this…man…caused by only getting back to us at his leisure. Oh and they have posted us the checque for the ‘approved’ amount… a few days ago. $#%*&!!!!! This means he not only foresaw that we could do nothing but it is doubly insulting that he gets to say “the cheque is in the mail”….ooooh breathe Feylian breathe.

I need to stop thinking about this because I will do something career killingly stupid. What I resent most is that we, as said bastard hammered home, have no power to really do anything about it. A war over a R5k invoice is stupid and he has a lot more resources than we do. He is a crooked nuclear waste carrying tank and we are 2 guerilla fighters armed with ancient Mauser’s and a handful of bullets. Oh for a little justice. This is the kind of thing that makes me really hate men of a certain age and type****

Gahhhh…anyway back to the Google Wave thing. If you have not yet played with this please do so now. It will change the way we communicate so radically it is breathtaking to think about. It is still, as Boaz says, a bit chaotic and buggy but the potential is staggering.  I woke up at 4 this morning knowing that it will almost completely replace forums. And that’s without the collaborative bells and whistles. What I want is for my company to…ahem…ride the wave and write a plugin. We have the skills but guess what? Yes, that’s it. We don’t have enough programmers. SAP and Salesforce can afford to throw a few grand at innovation whereas we could maybe do so a bit later…so unbelievably frustrating. By the time we can afford to play with this new tech it will be too late.

The more time I spend submersed in research on new tech and SEO/Social marketing the more I know that it is my path and passion. I just wish I could know MORE. There is so much to learn and it is so bloody awesome. Quite literally bloody as my no longer elastic memory and reasoning attempts to assimilate vast amounts of information and this leads to blood dripping out of my ears. It also causes my team inclination to sink to previously unplumbed depths. Or perhaps I just need that holiday more than I thought. I think it might be a good idea for me to work from home tomorrow. I’ve already growled at El and I love her…

1. Word of the day: disembowel (The Sage: 1. remove the entrails of) I like that. The old Roman in me wants to then use a stick for a spot of divination.

2. Insight of the day: Being angry is really bad for you and wonderful for your dentist.

3. State of the pool: hissing, spitting hot but contained acid.

4. Joys of the day: 1. going home, 2. wine, 3. speaking to no one, 4. Reading Anathem (it is a really big book ok) in a womb like bath.

5. Awesomest lines: From an Ars Technica article on Google Wave.

“If I had to describe, the best I could do is this: Wave is a mash-up of email, IM, IRC, online forums, and wikis, all rolled into an experience that sort of resembles (to me, at least) a MOO.”

6. Scripture lines: Ezekiel 25:17 (King James Version)

¹⁷And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes; and they shall know that I am the LORD, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them.

*The kind of intimate that a 90′s R&B singer would just have to compose a song that would contain words like “hot”, “grind” and “my baby”. And the video would feature LL Cool J licking a lollipop and the required tight cut off jeans and I’m-a-lumberjack**shirt. Wait, there should be some whipping too. And a fine sprinkling of calcium dust on everything.

***Think a tsunami of 2012 proportions.

****50ish, married on paper but definitely not in spirit, too many business dinners portly and just short enough to qualify for Napoleon syndrome but not so short that he would fail at business. The kind of guy who thinks it his right to paw his secretary. I’ve known, and been pawed by, enough of these to qualify this grand generalisation.

©2010 Feylian's World. All Rights Reserved.

Either I have become more aware of the members of my gender or I am suddenly surrounded by a few drool inducingly hot females. All shining hair, lip gloss wielding, lily white yielding flesh and razor wit. I completely understand why you wand carriers* can barely think around women. Let it be known that I occasionally have these 2 hour bouts of infatuation on extraordinary human beings, male or female**. Himself said that he thinks everyone has these bouts but that they just don’t talk about it. Is this true?

Now, I am no hag and have in my time caused a few moments of lusty discomfort but I’ve always wondered what it is like to be truly beautiful. Do beautiful women have so different a life from the Jane’s of the world? And while we are at it, beautiful men too. CC is freaking gorgeous***. Poet Programmer piningly concurs. So let me rephrase: do beautiful people have so different a life from the rest of us?

I wonder what it is like to look in a mirror and 9.9/10 times think “not too shabby, eh Nige” as opposed to the mental editing that happens with normal folk. Oh don’t pretend you don’t know what I am talking about. The Jane’s of the world all have that brain powered editing suite without which it would be just that little bit harder to walk out the door and face the world which has had beauty ads crammed down its collective throat everyday for years. Lookit this if you are doubtful:

1. Word of the day: rapturous (The Sage: 1. a feeling of great rapture or delight)

2. Insight of the day: My ‘golden oldies’ are almost exclusively 90′s music. This sucks beyond belief as it was just the other day >.< *mutter mutter*

3. State of the pool: Sluggish but quite burbly.

4. Joys of the day: 1. Listening to ‘golden oldies’, 2. drinks with El the Legend, Himself and FdP at the upside down cow later today 3. Listening to D cutely mangle say “plesier” when I thanked him.

5. Awesomest lines: Neal Stephenson’s Anathem. I can’t begin to describe how magnificent this book is. If I ever stumble across the fountain of youth I would offer the first cup to this man on the promise that he will never stop writing.

* I put on my robe and wizard hat from good ol bash.org.

**I believe that you should be a little in love with the people with whom you spend time because otherwise you are wasting your life. Why spend time with people for whom you couldn’t care less?

***Aesthetically speaking folks. I adore Himself who btw is smoking hot…/grin…*sigh pine*, anyway…CC is the kind of godlike pretty which makes him so far out of the Jane league that you wouldn’t even consider a liaison with him. Like, ever. Unless you look like Hot Bridesmaid…pity she has a significant other and CC is in that godforsaken ocean place.

©2010 Feylian's World. All Rights Reserved.

No wonder our world is in the wtf state it is in. Good lord folks…Read. Please read? Hell, I will even be ok with you reading Die Son or Heat* or even Huisgenoot**.

Do NOT watch MTV’s The City. I watched about 7 minutes of beautiful people being extremely nasty to each other in P Diddy party look alike places. I kept glancing around me in the typical ass-porn watchers’ stance of please-dear-lord-let-no-one-I-know-catch-me-watching-this-filth. If that is not scripted I am a giant zucchini wearing a bowler hat.

And then I thought to turn to good ol’ sitcoms…Noooooooooo. Either tv became suicide-with-wet-meat-bad or the past year has rid me of the wish to turn my kingdom/mind into a stupid free zone (mostly). Even National Geographic*** had some insipid take on Nosferatu on. Nuh UH.

Anyway. Rant over. Now on to something restoring like Punch Drunk Love. Luckily pseudo intellectuals like moi can turn to Adam Sandler**** for sanity restoring entertainment.

* Sunstroke anyone? I am not going to develop this further because I am still reeling with the shock of nearly stabbing myself in the eyeballs with a salad fork in desperation. I’ve never wanted to be blinded and deaf so much in my life. And this includes the time I walked in on someone’s parents’ scenario which involved pleather and baby oil.

**/SHUDDER

*** Every geek’s safe house tv wise

****Laugh now. Think you get the irony. Then watch this movie or Reign over me. Yeah. We’ll talk while you weep with how good The Water Boy can be. Soul, go to your home.

©2010 Feylian's World. All Rights Reserved.

Which leads me to suspect that I might be addicted to my friends…I haven’t seen MM since last weekend and I’m jonesing for her company. I am still deeply pissed at Russian Mafia Guy and Amazonian Godmother because although I understand that new love needs space, I hate that I need to negotiate a time to pick up my freaking shampoo…which is  probably a little unbalanced on my side. But it kills me. Smug Marrieds** suck. Maybe I am like a Neo who focuses not on Trinity or all of mankind but just my little group of heartfriends.

In other news…I got to see Delicious One last night. That beautiful boy robs me of words and still breaks me. And yeah…the apple thing still applies /grin. I love that he is waking up to who he could be.

1. Word of the day: perfidy (TheSage: 1. an act of deliberate betrayal, 2. betrayal of a trust)

2. Insight of the day: I am a narcissist on an Evil Stepmother level. “Mirror mirror who is the…ooooh lookit…pretty me”.

3. State of the pool: Troubled and murky

4. Random thought: I now live in Midrand with Wawa and Manly Man in a huge house. Free State hospitality ftw!

5. Awesomest lines: Dra my saam by Anna Davel

Dra my saam as die nag jou koudmaak
dra my saam as jou voete bloei
en die pad te lank word
dra my saam

dra my saam as jou fotoboek,
vou my oop en blaai deur my
laat jou vingers dans, driftig dans
oor my krom-krom rug

6. Scripture lines: Romans 8 (New International Version)

³⁸For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, ³⁹neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

*Forever.

** Credit to Helen Fielding

©2010 Feylian's World. All Rights Reserved.

This is not so good considering the players: a deeply unhappy client who lies and thinks that imagined conversations are statements of work,  a colleague who had major surgery about a week ago and a programmer who likes things in a very specific way. Luckily CC, Timo, WaWa and El the Legend are intervening. My respect and love for these people grow daily.

I know I seem about as admirable and heroic as a piece of yellow belly fur of the Wuss species found in Cowardia very far south of Bravery but yesterday snapped me like a twig. At some point my tear plumbing broke and I had little salty pools of cooling fear in my ears. I tried not to sob but whenever he brought the drill near me and that sound of the misery of a thousand wailing Nazi orphans hit my nerves, I wept. I was terrified and I walked out shaking like someone had assaulted me. The last time I felt as invaded and broken, I really had been.

And I get to go back. Yippee… In the mean time I am still in agony and am living on painkillers and alcohol. Kinda helping the diet so that rules.

I will stop whining soon I promise.

1. Word of the day: intemperance

2. Insight of the day: If you find a team that really makes you understand why people rave about “synergy ” make sure they know how awesome they are to you. Who knew teamwork could be so amazing.

3. State of the pool:  Shameful, self pitying saline

4. Random thought: Not so random. John Mayer – Why Georgia. JM is better than Naproxen Sodium and that is saying something.

5. Awesomest lines: Perfect Guy sent me this on Sunday. Don’t know who/where it is from:

“…That is the extent of what I want now. To stand out in the open and look up at the immense blue sky above me, to gaze at the howling infinite once last time…”

6.  Scripture lines: I was at Perfect Guy’s baptism on Sunday and it was unbelievably moving. Made me realise once again that I am not living it right. Grace is so powerful and so easy to confuse. I was driving in the car and stunned because I know that I don’t deserve such love.

Romans 10 (New Living Translation): ⁹ If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. ¹⁰ For it is by believing in your heart that you are made right with God, and it is by confessing with your mouth that you are saved.

*True pain is almost always partnered with some form of violence whether it be on a cellular level like cancer or neuralgia or somatic like broken bones and being shot etc.

**I leave. El the Legend calls it “disengaging”. My exes call it “abandonment”. So if  I stop arguing know that my bags are probably already in the idling car.

©2010 Feylian's World. All Rights Reserved.

I’ve already lost an 8th of my teeth because of exactly this. And yet, notwithstanding the 1. constant looping nightmares of spitting out my smile in calcium grit and 2. pain so intense I weep like a little kid who wishes the needles of fire would please leave her jaw muscles,  I do not make the appointment.

Do you know what it is to have fear be so real and so tangible that it feels as if fingers of menacing ice has gotten hold of your solar plexus and is squeezing just to watch you helplessly gasp? Just the thought of that drilled bone smell, antiseptic metal horror…or feeling the cold invasion of a needle scraping against your cheekbone…oh gods…I would rather have the tooth pulled and live on soup for the rest of time than face the fact that I have an abscess and need a root canal and heaven only knows how much more work…/shudder.

I’m convinced dentists must be the nicest people on earth. Who else could handle knowing that someone is so utterly at their mercy and yet be kind?**

For now, I will continue in a haze of medication and dull, throbbing pain. So if I walk into you and then apologise to the chair you are sitting on; just nod and give me some more Codeine.

1. Word of the day: odontophobia

2. Insight of the day: I’m a fool and will soon be a toothless hag

3. State of the pool:  Sluggish, pulsing blood and saliva

4. Random thought: How come they can’t make a more marshmellowy cotton than those Kalahari dry mouth tampon things dentists use?

5. Awesomest lines: It’s been a while but here is Emma

[azure]
your memory
emphasize the empty
space, where images
used to hover between
the tangible and the imaginary

in quiet distress
I wait for the solace of
finding magic instead
of frailty, and one word
answers to a line of thoughts

like a blank canvas

awaiting the stroke of

coloured paint, your words

tame the white spaces into

breathing pieces of being

© emma

6. Scripture line: Oh man. How lost we would be without the Psalms.

Ps 91: ⁵ You will not fear the terror of night,
nor the arrow that flies by day,

Ps 27: ³ Though an army besiege me,
my heart will not fear;
though war break out against me,
even then will I be confident.

*I think any true dictator is a dentist gone bad. They get so used to eyes brimming with fearful tears, limbs shaking with terror and pathetic whimpering that they get addicted. I’m sure Pol Pot harboured secret endodontic fantasies and since Korea is hardly a haven for veneer seekers, he had to settle for mass murder by blunt things like bullets, rape and fire.

**Except for the military bastard who started this horror in my soul. I should have had my wisdom teeth extracted while blissfully unaware but that…man…thought it better for me to be awake and have my agony be witnessed by 6 dental students. Perhaps if he made the effort to ensure that the 3 injections he gave me were sufficient I would not still be traumatised. There are very few sounds as disconcerting and sanity-snapping as hearing, and feeling, your teeth being broken out of your jaw. Also quite fun when your chair tips as that…man…braces against it for better grip.

©2010 Feylian's World. All Rights Reserved.

I am so incredibly angry I feel like ripping muscles from tendons and flinging it to the acid jowled beasts that currently resemble my mental state. I would very much like to devour any joy, any light or goodness but I know before I even taste it the coals on my tongue will reduce it to bitter ash. Which is my just deserts and please don’t tell me it isn’t. You have no idea what I’ve done. And, HA!, to how many people.

All I’ve managed to since I was 17 is break my world. Only in the past 6 or so months have I been anything but a sizzling patch of nuclear waste. Now I am turning 30 and the thought of my wasted life is kinda hard to swallow. I know that I am washed by the blood of Lamb but the memories are not as merciful. And I am surrounded by these perfect, wonderful people who have no idea and if they were ever to find out would be lost to me. So I don’t really have any right to hope for love. And it explains why I am so careless with it once I am offered it.

Wow. I am so not ok right now. I will undoubtedly bounce back from this but for right now I am drowning in sorrow.

Matthew Arnold: Dover Beach

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the A gaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

©2010 Feylian's World. All Rights Reserved.

Which is where the snag comes in. I have phrases swirling around me but nothing concrete and I don’t feel like being coherent or disciplined and writing a decently thought out ygm.

I don’t think I’m angry but I feel like I have been on fire and someone doused me with a chloroform soaked horse blanket. I feel like shaking every tiny young thing until their teeth rattle and then tossing them aside. Am I so hideous and old? Why is everyone better than me?

Ok so I am angry. Actually I am livid. And that is a hard colour to be when you are invisible. When did this horrible nothingness of being happen? Is a bit of warning too much to ask? Or is the sage wisdom of one’s elders considered warning enough? Please forgive me but I have a bit of trouble with accepting my fate. I am more than a little tired of kow towing to youth and its ever present request for flawlessness. Fuck this and fuck you. Fuck your shiny hair and bright smiles. Fuck your bubbly laughter and slim hips. Gouge out your eyes for looking at me and all of mine and not seeing us.

We know more than you. We have hard won experience. Battle scarred souls. What do you have? Other than a mouth so innocent and dirty that it makes them fall to their knees in front of your ignorant form.

Please don’t take me wrong. I love God and I know that this is not witnessing gentleness or love that so freely flows if only I’d accept it but sometimes it is cathartic to just say fuck it.

©2010 Feylian's World. All Rights Reserved.

Either just before or just after you exited stage left I started seeing an old school friend of mine. Not seeing in the American usage of the term, nor in the “visions” kind of way but in the “laid eyes upon” for the first time in 10 years way. At first I was very excited to talk to him again as I assumed time would have mellowed him as it has me*. No. In fact he got worse. He outgrew whatever self doubt he might have had and is now a frothing at mouth, The Shack distributing, vision seeing charismatic Christian who does not listen but instead only waits for his turn to speak. I haven’t had dislike infuse me so virulently and speedily as with this guy.

I just spent a ridiculous amount of time talking to him. There is something to be said for knowing someone for as long as I’ve known him – you do not have to wrap your sharp words in diplomatic puff pastry. Fun though that may be. Oh man. I think he is being a commitment phobic sob who is hiding behind seeking God’s will because he is a coward. And I said as much. Only minus the sob bit…I instead called him an idiot and cruel. I just wish I could shake him for what he is doing to that poor girl. The absolutely worst part is that I know why I dislike him and am as hard on him as I am. ** : I’ve known him for about 15 years and although we haven’t spoken in years the times we have spoken we have done so with shovels and delved each others souls and he has a very unfortunate habit, just as I have, of being able to cocoon the truth with arguments and beautiful words. And he is lying about something. I might be wrong. He might not be afraid of commitment but he is definitely lying about something and he is using his faith to shield it from view. Which of course makes me livid. Christians doing that is what made me turn my back on God. Well, that and me being a hedonistic, self seeking moron.

And since I am ranting let us do some more self righteous spitting:

I have a client who does motivational speaking. I think motivational speakers/life coaches are soulless hacks who make a living from manipulating people and they always end up making me think of the dad in Little Miss Sunshine. The temptation to roll my eyes whenever I receive mails from this man is so strong that I have to stab my clutch pencil into the soft meaty part between my thumb and forefinger until I whimper and even then my eyelids twitch.

None of that was loving. Oh man. Thank you Lord for Grace.

*I am starting to wonder after Saturday’s disastrous caffeine and vodka evening how true this adage could be. One of Chris’s friends thought I was on coke…NEVER again. The amount of damage and stumbling having a stranger think I am high on cocaine has caused makes my skin crawl with self hatred. No more.

** Why do we ever dislike people? I am so much like him it is awful.

©2010 Feylian's World. All Rights Reserved.