infinite rest - part i

it's friday! it's a beautiful day, and i'm pretty sure that after posting this i'm going to head into town and try to get some gift shopping done. and perhaps a little drinking with friends if they're around.

a quick summary of the past week before the details:

1. it's been an extremely relaxed week, the weather was mostly cloudy and cool so it was very indoors and reading or napping or vegging out in front of the telly. which, mind, had so little to offer that it was mostly set to classic music videos. i did see the fifth element again. at some stage i'm going to try to count how many times i've watched it.

2. except when it was outdoors, on monday my mother took me and my london cousins out to our friend's farm and me to visit my second mum in paarl. yesterday i joined my new friends, "the sailors", and springer and crew on the beach for an incredible afternoon / evening of volleyball followed by pizza and good pool.

3. sq and i are definitely not happening. it started with her sending me cooler-than-lukewarm messages, escalated to very unpleasant miscommunications with no sense of humour, and then calmed down with friendly explanations of why this can't work. it's been three days of this, actually, and it's felt like a very real breakup.

oh, well - better virtually than pushing on to a real date and having that fail.

---monday:

the whole day i was tired and perpetually needed to pee. i don't know what that was about. we picked up my cousins and drove through to spice route, which is a beautiful farm with a magical view of the valley; their coffee is terrific, their variety of chocolate is great, their beers are top notch and the brewery-visit experience very cool, their pizzeria is excellent even though they were struggling as they'd hit capacity, and their preserves store had some very interesting items. we then moved on to fairview, but only to drop off my cousins before heading out to paarl.

my second mum's looking good, i hear she wasn't doing so well when my mother last saw her. we didn't talk too much but it was nice to just spend time with her, her family seems nice (it's the first time i've met them, really) and it amused me that i had no problem understanding all the afrikaans even if i wasn't totally comfortable speaking it.

i don't know why her niece's husband kept referring to us as "so-called whites" (the quotations are his), that was kind of awkward.

by the time we were ready to leave the skies had opened up and it was pouring with rain, we were soaked by the time we'd gotten the cousins in the car and the drive back felt cosy and protected and involved a lot of chatter and just the right amount of chocolate tasting.

a braindead evening ensued. i was suffering from restless leg syndrome and it hasn't really let up since.

---tuesday:

in spite of the sore legs and feet i got a good night's sleep, had good dreams and woke up feeling right! i went to the dentist to have my sore post-incompetence tooth sorted out, but after much detective work we couldn't figure out which tooth was actually giving me grief so we decided it was better to leave it :S

i was intrigued when i went in to find a young dentist who's good-looking and looks like a serious sportsman; doesn't quite match the stereotypical dentist in my head. after i left i was informed that he was my niece's first serious boyfriend, which i found quite amusing.

i milled around the health store downstairs, finding a couple of things i wanted but getting stuck at the fridge: what the hell does "flexitarian friendly" mean?!?! after much discussion and googling we all decided that it was a particularly bad marketing idea, the products are vegan and the company's not doing itself any favours by not labelling them as such.

i had a powerhouse wrap (sans cheese) for breakfast at nü, then spent the day on the couch reading infinite jest or napping. when i read the preface, which states that nobody could read this book unaffected, i thought "challenge accepted!"
i failed, this book really is crazy and crazy good! i just got through reading a footnote that's so large conceptually and such brazen use of mise en abyme that i'm having trouble wrapping my mind around it.

i bought the first harry potter book in french, but i'm going to need a lot more focus than i'm currently capable of in order to get through it...

in the evening i took my mom out for chinese, the place is great and the food was good, and i was ready for bed by the time we got home.

---wednesday:

horrible dreams of sweating sewerage and being chased by a hippo with a grudge. then waking up to a breakup message. i remedied the morning with a day of doing very little, eventually heading out to mr price to try to buy shorts to replace the ones i destroyed over new year's... i was severely disappointed by their lack of cool :(

i was thinking of heading to town, but found myself taking a walk on the promenade instead. what interesting timing! as i walked past the mini-golf wondering about the variety of people playing on a random overcast afternoon i recognized the sailors that i met at the festival! we went to newport deli for drinks and tapas, i tagged along to town to meet a couple of friends of theirs and we went through to cavendish to meet a sister, eat dinner and watch 47 ronin.

the movie is beautiful, but it's long and a lot less action-packed than the trailer suggests. we were all looking for a fun ride, and about halfway through we were doing the wave with yawns. to make me uncomfortable i'd developed a rather nasty bellyache that made me pretty bleak.

at least overall i enjoyed the evening in spite of that!

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