Just Listen

Today, I am having a brilliant day. I am busy crafting a beautiful, wonderful story for online journalism mentoring program UPIU.com as part of a Journalism assignment and I am loving every minute of it. Getting in touch with sources across the country is a tough task, but I must say that I have approached it with much gusto and I feel that I deserve the success I am experiencing.

The rest of my life is quite a blur at the moment, and I would like to fill you in - at a later stage.

Right now, I am simply dropping by to deliver two key points:

1. Never be so busy looking at the sky that you miss the dog poop you are about to step in.

2. Always do your buttons from the bottom up.

...I wish I had pictures of all the people I loved in my room right now. I think I will go print some this week, and put them up all over.

PS: Can you believe that I only have two months left in this cozy little res room?

Easily, life slips on by...

The weather in Grahamstown today is chilly, but not predominantly. It is also melancholy and tired, but very satisfied. It is as if the bones of the world, after an achingly hard day’s work, are content in the knowledge that they will soon rest, and be stretched out across the seas, over all the beauty that is the world itself.
That is how I feel today – I feel a nostalgic sadness, a pleased sigh of contentment, a resignation to the day and the week and the month and the year and the life that is mine and can never be changed with anything else, and I am happy. Upon arriving at my modest residence room at 5 o’clock in the glum afternoon, I was struck with a sudden rush of wistfulness that bubbled in my nostrils and fizzed in my brain as it whirred past my eardrums. This weather, the light in the room when I opened the door, the smell that is finally my own, but still my mother’s...
It all reminded me of being young – taking duvet days and listening to the rain outside, taking in the smell of the new earth – and of being older – falling asleep doing an art assignment and waking up to find the house submerged in the half-dark of such a late afternoon hour. I remember thinking that I had never felt so cold, so lonely, and so utterly small. I had also never understood life so easily.

On the topic of having your own smell. Every single person has a smell, and buildings and homes and institutions and companies have their own smells as well. When you are in your own house, you never smell its smell, but when you return to it after some time absent it hits you like only home can.

You will never smell your own smell, but I remember reading about some studies done that claimed that each person has a particular smell and that people who are a good genetic match to that person will love it. Put simply – or romantically – this means that your soul-mate will adore the way you smell. I don’t know if I believe that this is the case in all people or in all relationships – surely, there are people that are in relationships and dislike or feel neutrally about their partner’s smell, and surely there are people who love each other’s smell but can’t stand each other’s anything else.

Back to the topic – having your own smell. I remember realising that our house had a smell quite distinct to any other, and that every house smelled different. People might smell like their houses, but they also have a distinctly individual element to their own smells. I remember wondering whether – and when – I would acquire my own smell, and what my own house would smell like one day. Although a residence room is not a house and lacks the smell of a kitchen, living room, bathroom, child or partner, it is quite a good litmus test for my personal smell. I don’t mind it, but imagine disliking your own smell? That must be what drives air freshener sales...

Next year, I will have a flat (what I will call my ‘practice house’), complete with kitchen, living room, bathroom, spare room, and my own Ben. This will be the true house-smell test. What kind of cooking will we do? What soaps will we use? Will we have flowers in our house? These are all relevant questions when considering your house smell.

Go on, all of you. Go smell your house.

Safe from the outside world

So, I bet you are all wondering what I have been up to the past while! Here is an updated mini-biography, the one I use for freelance work I do for Women Inc.

Kayla is currently a first-year Journalism and Media Studies student at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa. She is the editor of the Comment & Analysis section of student newspaper Activate and she a writer for the Politics, Business, and Features sections, as well as a sub-editor for the paper. Her other subjects are Economics, English, History and Sociology. She devours books and sees herself as one of the blessed few who actually enjoy working. She is involved with student society SHARC (Student HIV/AIDS Resistance Campaign) at Rhodes and has recently graduated as a certified Peer Educator. She is also a Media Representative for SHARC. She is the community engagement representative for the African Drum Society and is currently working with up-and-coming student society Common Ground in the same capacity. She loves watching art films and her guilty pleasure is shopping.

There are many things in this biography you already know, and some you didn’t. I have updated it a few times in the last two weeks, because I don’t really know where to draw the line when it comes to getting involved. Should one? I haven’t encountered any problems as of yet, but these commitments are still young. I hope that I can give them all the attention they deserve, and keep a little for myself.

Right now, me-time amounts to Monday movie nights with Ben, Friday morning baths, Friday laundry days, Saturdays with Ben and Sunday afternoon picnics (for which I have become quite renowned) with friends.

The rest of my days are divided between lectures, tutorials, normal meetings, meetings where I lead and meetings where I am led, preparatory meetings and recapitulating meetings... Tests, essays, assignments, reports, preparations and plans, putting up posters and spreading words. I do it all.

So, there I go, shuffling from the world...

When you don't believe in magic, or stories, or something that you can't see, I believe that your life is probably not really worth living. Benjamin told me a lovely story while he was cuddling me tonight, about a young boy prince who unlocked the evil of the world (and whose favourite dish was spaghetti) on a quest for a magical flower.

We make up stories like this sometimes - the recipient of the story has to come up with three or four elements they would like to encounter in the story, and the storyteller then incorporates them into a story - short, sweet and simple, or elaborate, daring and ethereal. Whatever you feel like.

Lying on his chest, I allowed my mind the freedom to wander for the first time in very, very long... Drawing sparkling pictures in my mind's eye of elegant castles, deep and mysterious caves, dazzling flowers, and mountains that seem to roll on forever, I was truly happy for that moment. And I still am, knowing that this beauty is right there, under anybody's tongue, waiting to be born in another's brain.

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - The Ship Song

Come sail your ships around me
And burn your bridges down
We make a little history, baby
Every time you come around

Come loose your dogs upon me
And let your hair hang down
You are a little mystery to me
Every time you come around

We talk about it all night long
We define our moral ground
But when I crawl into your arms
Everything comes tumbling down

Come sail your ships around me
And burn your bridges down
We make a little history, baby
Every time you come around

Your face has fallen sad now
For you know the time is nigh
When I must remove your wings
And you, you must try to fly

Come sail your ships around me
And burn your bridges down
We make a little history, baby
Every time you come around

Come loose your dogs upon me
And let your hair hang down
You are a little mystery to me
Every time you come around

Come sail your ships around me
And burn your bridges down
We make a little history, baby
Every time you come around

We Take Mystery (To Bed)

Being back at Rhodes has spun me into a vortex of confusion and stress faster than you could say "beach holiday OVAR". I will give you a brief overview of the occupation of my mind over the last two (only two?!) days.

The usual lectures, sucking up time and energy and not yielding any significant or visible results as yet - psh. Tutorials for which I still have to prepare. Meetings. Tests. Essays. How is it possible to get this involved this early on in a term? Do you all know that I am officially the Community Representative for African Drum Society? I hope so.

Thinking and thinking and thinking, not a moment's rest, and I keep thinking about thinking, and now I am thinking about thinking about thinking. Life sucks when you can hardly live it for trying to figure it all out. I think we should all stop trying to find reasons for things, to find neatly packaged definitions and thoughts and ideas that explain life, because life is incredible and inexplicable, and if you keep trying to define it, it'll slip away before you even realized you were alive.

So that's that about that. I know, it's all been said before, but I don't think enough people have taken notice of what exactly that means. Most people just take it as another 'Truth of the Month', sampling it, rolling it around on their tongues, trying it out for palatability and leaving it in the corner when the next existential fad comes along. It's not an answer, or finality, or even a thought. It's just a recommendation, mostly for myself, to remember how to be alive.

On another note, ban gospel music in my res. It's really not appropriate at midnight or 6am. No, wait. It is never appropriate. Am I supposed to be tolerant of their music because it has religious subject matter? If they can tell me to turn down my certifiably awesome music, they should stick theirs up their bums.

That's that with that, then.