Languishing in the Valley of the Howzit Dolls

Having vowed recently never to write about he-who-shall-not-be-named and reflected on the kind of thing I do for a living (ie advertising), I thought it was high time, again, for the sort of post that takes blatant advantage of the fact that I have an audience on whom I can inflict gloriously masochistic inventories of all the ways in how crappy my life is. I’m going to wallow in my misery like the pygmy hippo I saw at the Rhino and Lion Nature Reserve yesterday.

(Disclaimer: of course my life is not crappy compared to people who live in informal settlements and never know where their next meal is coming from. Obviously. It’s just crappy in the standard middle class Tuscan-cluster-and-two-nice-cars sense.)

Anyway, my life is now so magnificently awful that I have taken to writing bad poetry, to wit:

I am like a Cubist painting:
My life is in boxes, scattered
here
and there
I don’t know
where anything is and I’ve
been looking and looking
in every single last one of them
for something I’ve lost, a
sense of purpose,
and I haven’t
found it.

The bit about my life being in boxes is entirely true. Some of them are at my parents’ place, some at my grandmother’s. There are DVDs and CDs in a few, Carrol Boyes cake knives and cheeseboards in others (is there a South African couple that did not get Carrol Boyes for the wedding?); still others contain pots and plates and stupid bits and pieces of dekorasie that used to sit on shelves gathering dust.

Isn’t it funny how so many years can add up to so little?

When you are locked into the faultless logic of the life stage (young single, young couple, young family, mature family, empty nester) the next step is always obvious. You don’t think about it; it just happens. Elizabeth Gilbert mentions this in Eat Pray Love: how being married and having children assures your place in your world or, more specifically, the dinner table at family gatherings. When you step outside of that, working out what to do next is an existential challenge of monumental proportions. I live with my grandmother. I spend evenings reading You magazine and chatting to my mother. I’m on who knows how many Schedule 5 prescription drugs — hey, I live in the Valley of the Howzit Dolls — and every single day is a battle to come up with a solid reason to keep going.

Living out of boxes also brings with it perhaps unexpected ramifications: for one thing, I can never find anything, a sense of purpose or otherwise. Now that Jo’burg has endured a spell of hideously Capetonian weather, I’ve had to dig out my winter vests and tights, and dammit if I can’t find any of my scarves or gloves. I used to know where everything was, more or less — if I had an emergency that required a sewing kit or a cheese grater, say, I’d know where to locate said item, even if it took a few minutes of digging through a drawer. Now that everything is scattered and nothing is in its place, I don’t know where to begin.

(It doesn’t help that thanks to my incredibly high stress levels, I have the memory of a goldfish with incipient Alzheimer’s.)

I know that I will need to conduct an audit of my things, and decide which to chuck out and which to put back in the box where I found it. I’ve been putting it off, but it’s reaching crisis point; I must have bought three tracksuit tops in the past month just because I couldn’t find the ones I already own.

Hopefully, one day, I will be able to unpack those boxes, and put some kind of life back together again. If am going to be like a painting, I think I want a Thomas Kinkade. Okay, so I don’t really mean that; I may have lost my sense of purpose but I still have my excellent sense of taste. Nonetheless, I’d like something a little less scattered and a little bit brighter. A little more light and a little less dark. If things don’t improve, I may well feel compelled to write more bad poetry.

And that’s something that shouldn’t be allowed to happen.