poem 00:19
In the silent spaciousness of these precious minutes past midnight
I go online
to see if you are
too.
It’s simply astonishing how reliant we have become on technology and communications. Years ago when mobile phones first came out I didn’t have the need to have one and a telephone line was sufficient – if I wasn’t available, leave a message.
The Internet was fun and interesting, and a trip to the internet café every now and again was enough to soothe the cravings for information on just about everything imaginable and sometimes unimaginable!
Today, I can’t leave the house without my mobile. What if I get stuck on the side of the road? What if there is an emergency where I’m needed?
The Internet is now the digital lifeline between work, friends and family. I obsessively check email, respond to work queries, pop onto Facebook almost daily.
That said, I’ve been incommunicado since the 24 December 2007 – with my mobile the only mechanism to briefly check emails, send work through or respond to queries – a rather expensive way of being in touch and my monthly mobile bill is running close to R800.
Damn thieves stole the copper cables down by the weir in the village, which was really a crappy Christmas present and a bleak new year if lines were not immediately restored. Additionally, a friend in Scotland needed to email me new flight details when he landed in South Africa – it just caused major panic.
My livelihood depends on communications to get things done. I am a technology-reliant home office freelance writer and this had a tremendous impact on my writing business.
Research, interviews and general communications has become an absolute nightmare as I rush between friends’ telephone lines and internet cafes to get the work done. I am basically chasing my own tail, missing deadlines and providing substandard copy.
Somehow I have survived thus far but the pace has been incredibly slow and it had a massive impact on my business at a time were things were just starting to pick up - one year later which is the time it takes to set up a sustainable business.
Telkom (our only fixed line service provider at the moment) commissioned a contractor to dig trenches to bury the copper lines down our road for a month now, and I was briefly online but got disconnected again because the contractors got the lines all mixed up, which means I was surfing on someone else’s bill :)
I’ve investigated DSL and now need to get a modem and then I’ll be styling.
Things can only look up. I was about ready to give up this month. The publication that I write for commissioned me two stories that were simply impossible or unfeasible to complete, which was subsequently dropped, and meant that a large part of my monthly income is now missing. It really started to feel that I am peeing against the wind.
Thankfully more work has come in that does not require a lot of online research and hopefully my communication problems will get ironed out soon, or else I’ll have to move my business back to Johannesburg – the opposite of my intensions just over a year ago.
By Malcolm Bullough
Dang, I meant to write about this aaages ago to give people time to decide whether or not they wanted to come along. Then I got ill and stayed that way for weeks, and all plans went down the drain. :-p
It's been six weeks since Easter, which I'm coming to regard as a sort of personal turning point in my life. So much has happened since then that it seems really rather incredible.
One of the big things was/is the worst bout of ill health since the crazy delirium-filled days of the raging kidney infection back in 2003. This time around I caught a cold which led to another cold and then another, which led to my catching what my doctor called "a flu-like virus", complicated by chest, throat and eye infections. Nice. In the end I had to accept the necessity of antibiotics, of which I was given a 7-day supply coupled with a sick note booking me off work for a week and a bit.
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised at how wiped out all this has left me feeling, but I still find it remarkable to think how completely shot my immune system seems to be. Again, given the sustained stress of the Ping Wales years, the lack of regular exercise, the steadily declining diet and the perhaps inevitable bouts of depression, I'm really not sure why this culmination should surprise me at all, but there you go. People have an uncanny knack for self-delusion, which the body will always attempt to strip away using the only language it has.
Back in February, Andy drew my attention to this article in The Guardian: Upsides of being down. My favourite excerpt: Regardless of the reason for falling into depression, the journey has the potential to make us better equipped, in a general sense, for life. If we are too busy to think and feel, to be mindful, depression might represent the first opportunity to take an honest inventory of ourselves.
To which I say, true that. ;-)
I'm now notionally recovered from the virus and the infections, but I find I am very easily fatigued. In essence, this means I'm forced to pay attention to things I previously blithely ignored; making time to eat regularly, to rest my mind and body, to consciously assess how much I can realistically achieve in a given time period without over-exerting myself. These days I'm finding if I do overreach my limits, the payback is a lot more severe than it has ever been. It's a mental struggle to adjust to this feeling that I am not invincible or even infinitely flexible. :-p It's a hard lesson in mindfulness and respect. But as my mother used to say, back in the day, "As jy wil nie hoor nie, dan moet jy voel!"[1] So very, very true, and so ironic I can't help but laugh. :-)
[1] Literally: If you don't want to listen, then you have to feel. Usually the precursor to a hiding.
Thanks to the lovely Lottie, I am now the proud recipient of the world's first crocheted lens cap, pictured complete with attachment loop so it doesn't meet the same fate as its non-crocheted predecessor. Woooooo. Those wanting to follow in my trend-setting footsteps, here's where you find out more. :-) UK orders don't have to go through etsy; drop me a line and I'll hook you up. (That's a crochet pun, btw. Did you see what I did there?)
The new (outrageous) hair. :-)
Walking back from the library today, I heard a voice calling out to me as I passed. "I love your outrageous hair!"
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