missing mpho pharasi…

You didn’t have to die. I always think about that. You should be here. You taught me the real meaning of friendship, love and so much about being selfless.

When I saw this pic/meme, I immediately thought of you. I thought, there’s no one I know who could possibly have such a phucked up, totally crazy but legendary experience, no one but Mpho! I thought that could totally be you 😂 but you’d obviously be looking totally sexy.  You probably wouldn’t be the one who’s passed out though, you’d be somewhere in there, in mix.  Hahaha
hah you probably called the ambulance?  Then laughed when you told the story right?

You lived life. You lived fully. That’s what I miss the most about you, you were you, all the damn time.

I miss my best friend so much. I hate that term, I hate labels, but you are the only person that I could admit to being my best friend. 😂 I don’t know what that’s about.

You live in my head, you live in my heart, it must be so tiring because I know you live in so many other people’s hearts too. So much work? 🙂

I think, actually I know that the one thing that hurts me the most is that I never got to see you laid to rest. That hurts so much. I wish I had honored your invitation to come out to maftown that one last time, but see, I thought you’d always be here. I thought you’d always call and say you’re at some random place so let’s hook up.

But that’s how life is isn’t it? Nothing is permanent I guess.

just be there when she’s ready to walk out…

One of the worst things that I’ve ever put myself through was being in an abusive relationship (physical, emotional, verbal…zonke bonke).  For 5 odd years or so… I lost my dammed mind, completely brainwashed!  I’m soooo glad I can laugh about it now.  Now I know for a fact that I’m smart☺😂, don’t fight it, you know it too. But I let myself be controlled by someone’s sick, sick twisted mind, I was young too.  Let me just tell you this, while you’re in that cycle, that mess…your mind is reduced to the size of a raisin. Your sense of reasoning…out the window.

Now most of us know of someone in an abusive relationship. Be it physical abuse or mental abuse or any other kind there is. I know a couple of people who are in this situation. And it hurts me, it hurts everyone who loves them too. And mostly, it hurts them too.

The biggest challenge is trying to convince someone in this situation to WALK OUT! It’s as good as talking to yourself. #BrainWashedVibes. My sisters can tell you all about that…I can’t count the number of times I was sat down, spoken to, shouted at and even at other times begged to WALK OUT. But I couldn’t, I couldn’t do it, for 5 odd years or so. I was stuck in a pit, some might say self-inflicted or whatever. But that was that.

This is what happens…someone, who’s sick in the head and in the heart makes you BELIEVE you are nothing. Seriously, and for some unbeknown reason, your mind believes this, all of it. Even if at the back of your mind, there are alarm bells going off😂 but yep you believe the crap. You believe that no one understands you like this sick person, you believe that no one will EVER love you like this sick person.

Your family and friends dare not tell you to leave. They dare not!!!

The only time a person WALKS OUT of an abusive relationship (especially physical) is either when they finally snap out of it and realize their worth or when they are dead.

I WALKED OUT, I snapped out of it. There’s a funny story about the guy who helped me wake up 🙂 one crazy person who did something amazing for my life, and they don’t even know it. Crazy maafuckr

Now back to my point. If you have a loved one going through this, all you can do is be patient. Be very patient. Whenever they decide to leave the abuser, but go back again in a week or two, be patient. Don’t throw in the towel. Please always be that life line, whenever they come up for air from that sick persons stronghold. Be that life line. I know it’s tiring, I see it all the time. I always ask myself, “dude where was your sexy brain during all this?” And I never have the answer, ever.  Now, my story is deeper than this, and one day I’ll tell it 🙂

But for now, remember,

1. you don’t have to take crap from anyone, not ever.
2. no one is the only person who will ever love you, in fact, they DONT love you if they make you believe that.
3. starting over is the best thing you can ever do for yourself.

 

i love girls, girls, girls

There’s nothing I’d love more to do than inspire young people to be great.  I’d love to be able to reach out to and speak to young people from all walks of life.  Each individual has sooooo much potential, sooooo so much!  But more than anything in the world I’d love to be able to reach and awaken the realization in young women that is, they can be anything they want to be.  Shouldn’t there be a class about this subject at schools? hhmm

If I were a motivational speaker, my core focus would on be reaching out to young women, empowering them with skills, empowering them with knowledge and empowering them with the most important seed of all, which is self-love.  I’d love nothing more than to witness a turnaround in the way young women see themselves.

I might be wrong, but I think self-love, self-confidence and the ability to be happy with being just you is the most important thing.  I’ve seen too many girls, too many women unhappy or unsatisfied with who they are.  There is this need by women to be acknowledged by the people around them.  There is this desire to get approval from people who don’t even matter.  I wish that we could realize this earlier on in life, realize that actually people’s views of us must not ever be a measure of who we are.

Now on the subject of being happy with being just happy with yourself, I’d like to touch on the subject of being happy by yourself.  I wish more ladies knew that it’s okay to be alone, it’s okay to be single, it really is ladies.  Yes being in a relationship at the right time with the right person is amazing!! Totally out of this world, but it should not be all you aspire to.  I’ve seen way too many ladies (good, quality ladies) try so hard to be loved, try so hard to be in relationships, just because nje.  So, just because all your friends are in seemingly fairy tale like relationships, it doesn’t mean you should throw yourself easily onto anything that looks like it might be love.  Seriously, it’s okay to love yourself 1^st, find yourself, figure out what you want and love will find you (if that’s what you’re looking for of course).

Now back to my point…The only thing you should focus on is bettering yourself for you, for the right reasons, because YOU want to.

 

There’s always gonna be bills to pay, so live a little…

I think I was born to travel the world.  LOL, seriously.  In my other life I might have been a wandering gypsy.  I imagine I might have never lived in one place for longer than a month.  I imagine I stayed in log cabins in Fiji which were filled with the smell of beautiful winter holidays and wood lit fireplaces and lush bear fur carpets on laminated wooden floors.  I might have even stayed in all of the worlds’ mountains at some point too, because nothing makes my soul as peaceful as being in the mountains.  Or I could have been the air? That’s the only way I could have been to all those places.  Hmmm.  But in this life though, none of that, I live a normal life in this life
Anyway, I think that one the most important things a person can do for themselves is to travel.  It does not need to be globetrotting, but start small, see your country and neighbouring countries, then do Greece! I need to do Greece ASAP…

I used to make sure that in a year, I visit at least 4 new destinations.  That’s not too much and it really doesn’t take too much from the pocket.   Over the last 2 years however, I’ve stopped doing that, I let “life” stop me from doing what I love the most.  That’s how we get stuck in a rut, we let bills get in the way of enjoying life and trying new things.  There will always, always be bills to pay, there will always be something important that needs to be taken care of.  So if we keep putting off doing the things we like to do because of bills, we are never gonna go anywhere, we are never gonna really live.  Each and every day, month and year is gonna be the same, and our futures will be riddled with nothing but regrets of time wasted.

This year I’ve decided to get back into my beautiful not so routine, routine.  I’ve made a promise to myself that I will get back to going to four places I’ve never been within the year.  There are ways to stretch those rands and to make them work for you.  I’m no longer going to focus on the “why” I cannot travel.

Do yourself a favour too, do join me J

An almost crappy weekend away, with a really wrong turn…(Pt 2)

The next morning was meant to be spent at a spa, somewhere at a nature reserve, we had that to look forward to.  Saturday morning, off we went looking forward to a lazy, relaxed day at the spa.  We trust Google Maps, so we punched in our destination address, and hit the road.  I made a call to the spa just to conform how long it should take us to get to them from where we were, the lady on the other end of the line said roughly 40 -45 minutes.  Cool!

After driving for a while, say a good 30 minutes, the sexy voice from Google Maps prompts us to turn right…hehehehehe and so we turned lol.  The worst part is that it was a gravel road, so we took it easy because we don’t got no SUV.  After driving for over 30 minutes, we started getting worried, the estimated arrival time displaying on the GPS kept changing, form 30 minutes to now an hour.  So the mood was starting to change.

But because it seemed like the place was close, we remained hopeful, I mean… Google Maps had never let us down before.
About 40 minutes later we got to a boom gate, branded with the name of the estate the spa is situated in.  So we breathed very deep sighs of relief.  The security guard didn’t ask us anything, he simply did what looked like jotting down something on his board.  For some reason, we did not say or ask him anything, besides exchange greetings.  He lifted the boom, and let us through.  Little did we know what was up ahead.

So we drove on further into what looked like a “neighbourhood” of nature reserves and huge plots.  There was absolutely no sign of human life, we would 30 minutes or more without seeing any other cars driving on the dirt road, or even a pedestrian.  We drove on, under he assumption that our destination was just up ahead, like really close.  30 minutes after passing the 1^st boom gate, we reach another boom gate.  There we were greeted by another security guard, who also seemed to scribble something on his note book.  We exchanged greetings, and this time we actually were smart enough to ask him for directions.  He kept us hopeful, without a doubt on his face, and with the utmost confidence in his voice, he told us to continue straight in that same direction and that we would reach our destination in about 30 minutes!! Hahahahahaha!! I mean…despite the fact that we had now been driving for over an hour and we had been told that our destination was just over 40 minutes away, he seemed like he knew what he was talking about.

So we drove off, into the open dusty, rough road into the wilderness.  We’d been driving for a while when suddenly we lost all signals.  The radio went off and our phones were as good as snorkelling gear in the Sahara.  And we had no clue where we were, or where we were going.  You have to see this place to understand this.  Literally driving to nowhere, in the middle of nowhere.  By now, the mood was rather sour, not what we had hoped for at all!

We started assessing our options…whether to go back or to forge on and see where the road would eventually take us.  We drove, and drove, and drove and drove.  Until finally we came across a very, very old man walking along the road.  It really looked like a scene from a horror movie.  Tltltltlttl!! U brothers wathi we shouldn’t stop to ask him for directions, because he looked like a typical serial killer right out of a Steven Spielberg film! Lol…But we stopped, cause I’m so brave and I assured him that I’d protect him…  Well the old man told us that we were nowhere near our destination and that we should have turned somewhere way back.  He told us about an alternate route that we could take, continuing on the same course.  We thanked him, and off we went.

At this point, I was just missing my bed, at home.  Like, besiyaphi nje to begin with.

A few minutes after the encounter with the serial killer look alike, we came across rangers, heading towards where we were coming from.  We stopped them, and told them about our dilemma.  They looked at us like idiots, and confirmed what the old man had said, we were wayyyyy off.  They gave us the right directions, just as the old man had said.  And again, off we went into the roughest roads, with no SUV!

Our human campuses had said that we would get to another boom gate; we followed their direction correctly and we made it to hopefully the last boom gate!  We greeted the gentleman at the gate, and we told him about our sad, sad story.  He laughed and laughed and told us that the security guard at the 1^st boom gate was supposed to show us a concealed gate which is sort of a back door entrance to our destination.  That idiot!!! Or actually us idiots, for not asking! Mxm…
This security guard assured us that we were now really close to where we were going and told us which way to go.

We drove on and at some point got to a concrete road, I had never been that excited to see a concrete road before.  It was pure bliss! That joy did not last for long though because, in order to get to where we were going, we had to get back on a gravel route again.  We got to that route, but we were hopeful and just enthusiastic that we did not pay attention to the excessive sand on the road.  One minute we were talking and laughing the next minute the car was swerving dramatically from left to right, for what seemed like a good 5 minutes (it wasn’t that long). But eventually my knight in shining armour managed to get the car back into control and it eventually came to a halt.  We were just really, really lucky that there were no big trees on that route because we hit those small ones which inflicted no damage to the car at all.

The entire time this was happening, I wasn’t thinking about rolling off a cliff and dying or whatever, I was just thinking, when will anyone see us if we crash and need help?? I was so stressed! Geez!

But anyway, we made it out of that little scene safe and sound, with our hearts obviously on the floor.  But on the brighter side we were so close!

So eventually, after driving for what seemed like an eternity we got there, and still had our beautiful spa day.  After our lazy day and we went back to our new beautiful hotel room.  That felt like a dream.  I  would like to be a die hard romantic and say I would do it all again in a heart beat!  But nah, I’d skip all the other crappy stuff and fast forward to all the cozy, sexy parts… LOL all in all I can say that I enjoyed my weekend away with my sugar.

Above all, I’m saying is thanks God this happened in broad day light.

An almost crappy weekend away, with a really wrong turn…

What an interesting weekend this turned out to be! At some point it felt like a really long and wrong weekend.

I for one had been looking forward to this past weekend forever! Why can’t we go away every weekend anyway?  So when it was finally here, I was obviously excited. And judging by the pics of the hotel from their website, it was bound to be an absolutely amazingly relaxed weekend.

So on Friday afternoon, off we went to our little adventure (joking, it’s like a 2 hour drive)…but anyway, we were excited to get away from everything and just chill.

*cues dramatic music* we were excited, until we got to the hotel that is, yhuuuuuuu!!!!
After entering the reception area, we both went silent.  In my mind I’m thinking, okay, maybe, just maybe, the actual room we plan on spending our weekend in is actually a bit like the pics on the freaken website!

So the lady checks us in, says we can pay the balance amount for the rest of our stay, luckily we had left our bags in the car so we said we’d pay later.  We got handed our key, and a kind gentleman escorts us to our room.  The patio and the swimming pool area??? NOTHING like the absolutely gorgeous gallery on the hotel website.  So now I’m getting really worried, bordering pissed actually.  And oh, how can I forget the absolutely loud and ratchet playing somewhere in the hotel dining area? Yhu, laaark really, we were literally somewhere in Hillbrow.
So anyway, the kind gentleman opens our hotel room, and proudly says “this is it!” and shows us our bed, TV area, our view hehehehehe!! And lastly our bathroom with a 4 foot long cockroach just lying there.  Then this guy asks us “so do you like it?”.   AHAHAHAHAHAAHHAHa!! I was so confused, that was one hectic anti-climax.  We asked him, what happens if we say we don’t like it? And he said we could move to another room, we get to the reception, and we’re told, nope there’s no other room.  But at that point we had decided (without saying a word to each other) that we would not be spending another night, after the Friday night at that dreadful dungeon.

We are such polite people really, because we didn’t even throw tantrums, we just told the lady at reception that we would not be staying for 2 nights as initially arranged.

We went into our room, to rest, cause that’s why we were at Bela Bela…to rest.  Kanti, aszi niks!! The hotel was hosting a freaken matric dance tltltltltl yho zingasawi!! That just topped it all off.

Well eventually the loud, drunk and horny teenage voices eventually disappeared into the night and we stopped concentrating on all the bad stuff and looked for a reputable hotel chain and booked for our next nights’ stay.

The next day was meant to be a hassle free, rest day… It turned out to be something else, a very funny near death experience.

I’m tired of typing now, will write about that later… So basically, pictures are deceitful!! Never again will I trust a picture, I’m scarred for life…

Ahh to be young, insured and financially savvy…

Consider this scene; an aged retired man…or woman lounging on a hammock while being hypnotised by the majestic horizon.  The surroundings are nothing short of breath-taking, and pretty expensive.  Aren’t they just lucky?
No, they weren’t always rich.  These guys saved up for their golden years.  You could do the same.

Start now, start small.  Yes you are young, that age of retirement is nothing short of a myth to you at this point in time.  You will get there or you might even want to retire early, consider that.  Can you imagine how much you will have saved by the time you reach your retirement age? Possibly millions!

There are numerous factors that come into play when we speak of saving up for the future. For instance, the now…yes the present, your current salary.  Some people can barely make it through the month with the salary they currently earn, and so they tell themselves that they will start saving up when they get that better paying job.  This doesn’t usually happen.  Most young people know that they should be saving up for rainy days, or for retirement, but there is that little thing called a tight budget.  There never seems to be enough money to cover the bare necessities, how then can one even contemplate saving for something seemingly so far?  It’s possible, just start.

The same goes when it comes to getting insurance.  The youth do not see this concept of insurance as one that is relevant to them.  Boy are you wrong if you believe that insurance is only for old people!  Ask a person who has lost it all within a split second, whether it is to a fire, to an accident, to the unfortunate encounter with criminals or to Mother Nature’s wrath. Get yourself some insurance, and live with no regrets.

The world has undergone a total metamorphosis over the past couple of years.  And so have you perhaps.  You are working your way up the corporate ladder or you’ve probably even arrived!  You own a shiny mean machine or maybe you have managed to get yourself a not too shabby second hand vehicle as your 1^st car…whatever gets you from A to B.  You have probably even accumulated some valuable assets; your smartphone, a top of the range laptop and even furniture.  All of this is insured right?

Get yourself covered…within the blink of an eye all you own could be lost.

Here’s a tip: write it off! Whatever little amount you agree with yourself on putting away or towards your insurance…write it off and consider it as not even a part of your salary.  Yes it’s not as simple as that at all, but in a couple of years you will most certainly see the rewards.

Ask an older person what they wish they could have done differently with regards to their financial standings while they were younger, while they could do it.  The most probable thing they will say to you is that they wish they could have saved and put away some money for rainy days and for their golden years.  Investing towards your financial wellness is the best you could do for yourself.  As mentioned before, start small but start now.  Get in touch with a reputable financial adviser; you will be amazed at what your supposedly insignificant salary could do for you.

Indebted for the privilege of being born?

During an interesting discussion with my colleagues, a thought-provoking issue came up.  The demographics of the group of colleagues was an interesting mix, varying widely with regards to the age groups.  The elderly obviously think we’re a lost generation, and a very selfish one too at that.

One of the elderly in the group passed a remark on how we (the younger generation) are always broke; whether or not we are employed and usually getting paid pretty well.  They asked why are we always broke? Okay not every young person is always broke but you will have to agree with me that at most times we struggle to make it through the month after pay day.  That’s when one of the younger people in the group raised an interesting point…

Maybe some of the young people are always broke because as soon as you start working you are expected to pay back a looooot of people that helped in your upbringing.  If it’s not your parents expecting you to pay them back for raising you and putting you through school.  Then it’s your mother’s aunt who put your mother through school so that she could get educated and put you through school; now you have to pay for their grandchildren’s education.  Okay…maybe these are extreme examples, but I’m sure you know of similar stories.

So, do we come into this world already drowning in debt? Are we brought into this world with the obligation to pay off some sort of debt we did not even actively acquire?

There are things I’ve heard a couple of times from some parents. Things such as “I raised now you must pay me back”.  I don’t know…I think no child is asked to be born therefore no children should have the burden or obligation of paying back their parents for raising them.
The desire to honor and take care of your parents should be one that comes from the child because they are grateful and appreciative for all their parents have done for them.  Your children’s dreams should not be put on hold because they are taking care of the debt of being raised and having being taken to school.  Yes it would be stupid, to say the least, to live a lavish life while your parents back home are starving.  The issue is contextual really.

I think, moving forward as young parents, let’s save for our retirement.  Let’s plan ahead and make sure that our children grow up not wanting for much.  And also, we must work to ensure that we are not so poor that when are kids start working we immediately feel like it’s payback time.

Familiale ~ Jacques Prévert

Jacques Prévert has got to be my favourite poet of all time. here is one of his great poems..I wish i was a poet…

La mère fait du tricot
Le fils fait la guerre
Elle trouve ça tout naturel la mère
Et le père qu’est-ce qu’il fait le père?
Il fait des affaires
Sa femme fait du tricot
Son fils la guerre
Lui des affaires
Il trouve ça tout naturel le père
Et le fils et le fils
Qu’est-ce qu’il trouve le fils?
Il ne trouve rien absolument rien le fils
Le fils sa mère fait du tricot son père des affaires lui la guerre
Quand il aura fini la guerre
Il fera des affaires avec son père
La guerre continue la mère continue elle tricote
Le père continue il fait des affaires
Le fils est tué il ne continue plus
Le père et le mère vont au cimetière
Ils trouvent ça tout naturel le père et la mère
La vie continue la vie avec le tricot la guerre les affaires
Les affaires les affaires et les affaires
La vie avec le cimetière