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namaste

May 4, 2011 by cybersass

when i left town last friday, the world was caught up in the throes of a fairytale wedding. when i came back on monday, everyone was talking about the death and funeral of a man hated by many. there has been much rejoicing at the death of bin laden and much controversy at the rejoicing. i remember being woken up in los angeles by a phone call to turn on the tv on september 11, 2001. minutes later we watched as the towers collapsed on the other side of the country and i remember the tears i shed at the horror of so many deaths. my ex-husband is from new york and i remember our fears for friends and family.

and yet, whatever the world may think of him, though he was abhorred by many, i cannot rejoice at another death.

this is a poem i wrote at the time:

fragments   911/9.11                   9.15.01

                

tomorrow is late

for the clocks were stopped today,

time evaporating in a fiery ball

and with it, all we know

of how a life is lived.

a ghostly,  gray oblivion holds sway;

so many vivid lights  flickering

…..off.

today fear took flight on grim wings,

a grisly nightmare from which we shaken, cannot wake.

the mind rebels.

my mind repels reality as if any moment now

i’ll see the credits roll.

i’ll find that this is just

the  spill of celluloid unspooling-

a blockbuster.

the world is rapidly unhinging.

our souls are singed -

indigo, tinged with rue…

my feelings are mirrored in the frozen faces,

the gashes of tear-stained, stricken eyes,

horrified hands, aghast, clasped

over silently screaming mouths:

“this is the way the world ends

this is the way the world ends

this is the way the world ends…”

tomorrow is late

and despite our hopeful waiting

for some,

today will never come.

we are standing in the shadow of dark wings,

extended.

we need to send out the light,

we need to bend back the black.

we have plumetted

and plumbed the depths -

now let us ascend.

and today i would like to extend this wish i wrote for someone dear to me, to you reading this. have a good life. to quote gold fish, get busy living.

have a fabulous odyssey with  marvellous adventures.
be safe and successful in your endeavours.
laugh long and loud with enough tears only to bloom the bulbs of joy.
walk in the world with honor and respect for yourself and others.
have compassion as well as passion.
be truth.
magnify and be magnified – be magnificence personified.

i honor the place in you in which the entire universe dwells.
i honor the place in you, which is of light and peace.
when you are in that place in you and I am in that place in me, we are one.

namaste

Posted in life | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments »

falling down on the job…

April 15, 2011 by cybersass

it seems the opinion of some people at work is that i’m accident-prone. now why ever would they think such a thing?!  ;)  though i guess,  looking at the statistics, i can’t really refute that.

since i started working on binnelanders (we won’t even go into what happened before!), here’s the impressive  list of things i’ve been through:

  • about 6 months after i started, driving down the road, i got a shot-gun pellet in the eye. long story. major impact on shooting. court case. still have the shot-gun pellet in my eye-lid.
  • during the break between season 1 and 2, back in the states, out in the desert, a friend gave me some water out of what turned out to be a dirty container. wound up in hospital on morphine after a week of gastro. had pig’s-feet playboy-bunny hallucinations. don’t ask.
  • a few years ago, i decided that i needed to get a laser peel. yes, vanity, thy name is… you’ve probably read the posts and seen the (pretty gross) pix. huge disaster. burnt, puffy, puss-y face. hyper-pigmentation to this day. couldn’t shoot. major impact on shooting.
  • a crew member tried to *crack* my back, sent my intercostal muscles into spasm and left me curled up on the floor unable to breathe. ER, lots of pain.
  • lost my contact lens in my eye and in the search for it,  burst a blood vessel. had to wear glasses as disguise.
  • moved my seat in a restaurant, not realizing the chair was broken and got my  finger caught between the seat and the frame. major, unbelievable pain, blood all over  the table. probably needed stitches. took months to heal. scarred for life.
  • visited a new friend’s house, and walked into his glass coffee-table (long story, i was sober, but had a pretty darn good excuse to get sloshed after). gash below my knee. should have gotten stitches. scarred for life.
  • sliced the tip of my little finger off while cooking valentine’s dinner. ER, stitches, expensive, sore. result, missing about 3mm.
  • huge bruises and scratches down my thigh from being dragged down the road by my dog on my s-ass! not impressed.
  • hula hoop in eye resulting in a burst blood vessel which made me look like a demon. major issues shooting. editors having to paint in hundreds of frames. still have scenes to re-shoot, making me less than popular at work.

so it would seem that they may be right. irony is, most of the above was way beyond my control.

i drove a motor-cycle for 5 yrs before i even drove a car, and for the first 6 months i had about 5 accidents involving no one, but myself and i still have the scars to show for it. after the last one i just decided that that was that. i was done with having accidents and i never had another. unless you count the motorcycle being stolen as an accident!

so, seems it’s about time i made that decision again. enough’s enough. i’ll try to keep my ass off the asphalt, and no more  pokes in the eye with a sharp stick!

Posted in life | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments »

down the rabbit-hole…

April 14, 2011 by cybersass

i am not particularly popular at work with some people at the moment….

here’s why:

a good friend of ours has an annual big-bash-birthday party, usually with some crazy fancy-dress theme. last year it was nympho’s and nuns – and this was my outfit:

 

nympho with a habit ;)

 

this year’s theme was “down the rabbit-hole”. i knew whatever outfit i came up with would require some kind of top-hat, so i spent one morning scouring the internet for ideas (there’s lots of inspiration out there) and making a miniature topper. lots of messy glue-guns and cutting out and gluing, but i thought for a first attempt it wasn’t bad.

 

 

come saturday night, i still hadn’t decided on a character or what i was going to wear, though it all came together at the last minute and i was quite satisfied with my creation. on the bottom was a victorian looking skirt, on the top a striped top i made,  under a sies! isabelle coat over which i wore a red belt i’d hand-sewn a while ago. it took a bit of last minute alteration to the top-hat, but i was happy.

the party guests loved my outfit, but they seemed to enjoy my introduction even more. so guess who/what i was? tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee’s lesser-known sister, tweedle does! it took a minute for the penny to drop and then they’d all grin like the cheshire-cat.

 

dum dee dum!

dum dee dum!

 

 

(note, that brooch is made from a button i found in my mom’s sewing-kit. it’s probably about 40 yrs old! and yes, that’s some of my art-work up against the wall).

ok, so enough preamble. the party was in full swing when one of my friends showed a sudden interest in my hula-hoops. (i’m reknowned for showing up at my friends’ parties with hoops on hip).  i’ve been hooping for over 10 yrs and it’s been incredibly frustrating for me that i haven’t been able to generate much interest for it here in jhb. in l.a. i’d take my hoop out and people would ask about it and want to try it out. not here. so when someone shows even the slightest interest, i’m ecstatic and just short of prosthelytizing.

so there we were in the dark with my 2 LED (light-up) hoops and i was showing her some advanced isolation moves which require holding the hoop and moving it like a big steering wheel infront of you. next moment she loses control of her hoop and i feel this searing pain in my eye. i’m so used to hoop -injuries though, that i kept on for a moment until my wildly tearing eye made it impossible. when we stepped back inside, i realized that i had my contact lens in my hand, my make-up was running and what met me in the mirror, was this:

 

 

of course my first thought was, oh shite! what am i going to do  about work?! i’m in the middle of quite a big story-line on the soap, and this was going to put me majorly out of continuity. then my next instinct was to go home and cocoon, but fortunately i countered that and the discomfort and pain and stayed for what turned out to be a really fun party, even though i was wearing diva sunglasses for the rest of it to protect my eye.

when i showed up at work on monday morning, i had just about everyone recoiling in horror because by now, my eye looked like this:

 

 

on-screen it looked even worse. i was looking like i was stumbling around in  twilight, like a demon from some teen-vampire movie. unfortunately, the show must go on, so for once i was allowed to shoot with my hair covering my eye (usually a major no-no) and a lot of angles had to be adjusted. seems we’ll be reshooting one scene and picking up 2 shots.

today the director told me how much he’d been cursing me the night before as they painstakingly painted 500 and something frames to fix my red eye. as a friend quipped, next time use the red-eye reduction setting! it’s actually much better by now, my homeopath friend’s recommendation to up my vitamin c intake to speed the healing, seems to have made a big difference.

though i don’t think i’m going to be forgiven at work anytime soon. apparently i owe a lot of people a lot of whiskey to make up for this.

i feel bad  that my injury has made life difficult for the production, but if you think i’m going to stop hooping though, here’s mud in your eye, mack!

(and elisabetta, if you’re reading this, don’t feel bad, i don’t think anyone at work believes i didn’t do this to myself!)

Posted in friends, family, life | Tagged , , , , , , | 6 Comments »

a few more random things about me

April 5, 2011 by cybersass

in the interests of TMI, here’s a bit more about me, me and me. ;)

  1. almost 20 yrs ago now, i bit into the apple and the tree of knowledge spoke to me. it said, you shall *never* own a pc. and i never did.  it all started circa the early 90′s with a little grey brick laptop with a b/w screen and i’ve never looked back.
  2. i love gadgets. OMG! do i love gadgets. any gadget. all gadgets. ok, so maybe i’m not so much a fan of the battery operated butterfly, but all things electronic? mine! no wonder i have so many obsolete gadgets lying about. ipad 2 – i wantsssessss!!!
  3. when i  was about 15 i had a fall off my brother’s bicycle that left me leary of them till about 10 yrs ago – i drove a motorcycle, but i wouldn’t touch a bicycle. my bag slipped off my shoulder and into the front spokes, sending me catapulting spectacularly over the handle-bars. i hit my head so hard that when i sat up, through a grey haze i could see 2 of everything venn-diagramming into each other. i’m sure that slight concussion explains everything.
  4. i never learnt to type at school. when i was growing up, typing-class was something you did so that you could become a secretary. and i was never going to be a secretary. then in 1993 a friend told me that there was this thing called the internet and that i would love it. she was so convinced that she gave me an amiga for which i found a screen at a yard-sale, after which i spent a month doing a program learning to touch-type. one of the best things i ever did.
  5. the same friend taught me some rudimentary html and i’ve been building my own websites ever since. badly, but still. maybe it’s time i learnt a little more. or follow the curve and *outsource*.
  6. i can whistle like a goat-herd. or like i grew up on the street-corner. i was about 37 when i decided that it was a skill i absolutely had to acquire, so i practiced till i got it right. now i surprise most people as i split their ear-drums. i think every woman should be able to type. and whistle.
  7. i’m an ACE-certified (american council on exercise) fitness instructor. i used to teach hip-hop and cardio-kickboxing classes at l.a. fitness in l.a. i had an awesome, fit body back then. i just didn’t know it. :(
  8. i only started smoking when i was 21 – and let’s just say that it wasn’t the first thing i ever smoked! fortunately i was smart to kick the dreadful habit. in fact i did it a number of times, but i did it for good in 1997. funny, i hated the smell on my fingers, my hair, clothes and everything, but i still occasionally have a fantasy of lighting a cig.  i think what i liked most about smoking was that it disguised my social ineptitude. i could put a live coal between me and the rest of the world and very few people were willing or brave enough to push beyond those boundaries. i still miss that sometimes.
  9. i only really started drinking alcohol at about 35. but i’m sure i’ve been making up for those years of abstinence.
  10. i only met my biological dad and my 4 half-siblings when i was 14. strange.

 

so there. tell me more about you.

 

Posted in life | Tagged , , , , , , | 4 Comments »

putting an accent on it!

April 3, 2011 by cybersass

i spotted this meme on jenty‘s blog the other day and seeing that i have such a mutt of an accent, i thought it would be fun to do. i recorded it in my dressing room at the studio, but it’s just taken a few days to get around to posting it.

if you’d like to play along, here’s the deal: say the list of words and then answer the following questions. its’ so funny because i would say many of these words differently depending on whether i was in l.a. or johannesburg. and if you do play along, leave me a comment so i can check out your version and hear what you sound like. :)

Aunt, Route, Wash, Oil, Theater, Iron, Salmon, Caramel, Fire, Water, Sure, Data, Ruin, Crayon, Toilet, New Orleans, Pecan, Both, Again, Probably, Spitting image, Alabama, Lawyer, Coupon, Mayonnaise, Syrup, Pajamas, Caught

* What is it called when you throw toilet paper on a house?

* What is the bug that when you touch it, it curls into a ball?

* What is the bubbly carbonated drink called?

* What do you call gym shoes?

* What do you say to address a group of people?

* What do you call the kind of spider that has an oval-shaped body and extremely long legs?

* What do you call your grandparents?

* What do you call the wheeled contraption in which you carry groceries at the supermarket?

* What do you call it when rain falls while the sun is shining?

* What is the thing you change the TV channel with?

here goes!

Posted in life | 9 Comments »

to your health.

March 23, 2011 by cybersass

i thought i’d do a little update on some  health issues that i’ve mentioned before.

first of all, the finger. you might remember that i wound up in the ER on valentine’s day after attempting to make my finger part of the meal i was preparing. a few stitches and some painkillers later, i was all good. sort-of. it took about a week before i could remove the stitches and now it’s looking pretty normal. it’s still pretty sensitive when i bash it into something, but you only notice the fact that it’s 3 millimetres shorter than the other when i line them up to compare.

as for the depression which nearly made me feel like jumping off a bridge in january, that too seems to be something of the past. yes, i still have highs and lows, but i no longer feel like i’m free-falling and  about to go splat. obviously i am one of those many women who simply cannot handle hormones and even though i was on the pill for 18 years till i stopped about 10 yrs ago, and never noticed that it affected my psyche, now it’s impossible. 6 wks on the pill and i was ready to off myself. offing the pill instead, made a world of difference. hallelujah! a homeopath friend has also suggested that i take some 5htp for a while to boost my serotonin levels. so, if you’re on the pill and you’re feeling depressed, it just might be time to see your doctor and see if the one has something to do with the other.

as for my sciatica. let’s just say i still have a bum hip and i’m still not running. :( i probably have to go back for a few more jabs from the mean accupuncturist.

oh, and the 4-legged one is healing fantastically so far. if we could just keep her from acting as if there’s nothing wrong with her, she’ll be fine.

so, that’s the latest on my health. here’s to yours.

Posted in life | Tagged , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

doing nothing can be something

March 21, 2011 by cybersass

after last week’s hectic schedule of  7-7, mon-fri, the only thing i wanted to do this past weekend, was nothing!  and to a large extent, that’s exactly what i did.

friday night the bf went out clubbing with a friend, while i was quite content to stay home. he works from home mostly and gets a bit stir-crazy, wanting to get out of the house, while i’m away from home for at least 12 hrs most days at  the moment, so guess where i want to be?

was woken up early by the dogs on a rainy saturday morning and went to get some accupuncture for the sciatica which has been plaguing me for a few weeks now and has severely impacted my running program. fortunately there’s a highly recommended accupuncturist just a few kilometres from my house. the only problem is that he’s merciless. jabs each needle in with no compunction and even less mercy. i found myself crying out a few times as i got jabbed. hoping it works.

back home i made us some breakfast and then on the spur of the moment, we went and hung out with a friend for most of the middle of the day. that visit reminded me of the way we used to hang out at each other’s houses when i was living in yeoville in the late 80′s. there’d be no plans, you wouldn’t go out, there were no cell-phones or internet  and what tv there was, wasn’t great – but we had each other’s couches and kitchens and open doors. we were each other’s entertainment and support, playing card games and shooting the breeze and i spent some of the happiest times of my life around my friends’ kitchen tables. ok, admittedly copious amounts of certain green stuff might have gone up in smoke during those visits, but it was the ease and effortlessness of those relationships which will stay with me always. now we make plans and we know that at the last moment we can always send an sms to cancel. makes me nostalgic for those days.

spent most of the rest of saturday working on my scripts, reading and preparing for the coming week. sunday morning we went out for our first bike ride since the 94.7 race last november, our race numbers still stuck to our helmets. i think i stopped riding both because i injured my knee during the race, but also, i’m no longer keen on driving 40 minutes so that we can ride. this time, instead, we wheeled the bikes out the gate and rode around the neighborhood. we ketp it short and  it felt good to do something physical, but it probably wasn’t the best idea with my sciatica.

sunday night i declined the party we were invited to as i was the only person working on the public holiday. i didn’t want to cut the bf’s night short simply because i had to work next morning which meant i would’ve had to drive home alone  and i didn’t want to drink and drive. and i didn’t want to be the only sober one at the party, so it  seemed like the best idea to stay put and out of trouble and be alert for work first thing in the morning. so instead of partying it up with the rest of my friends, i very responsibly stayed home and most appropriately, watched a few episodes of “house”.

the bf finally rolled into bed around 5am, just shortly before i had to roll myself out and off to work. i’m sorry i missed the party, but i’m kinda glad i chose to do nothing instead.

 

 

Posted in friends, family, life | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

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