Goodbye 2022: you were weird but better

Let's continue the trend of annual year-in-review blog posts, shall we? Something for my biographers to look back on one day. Or just me ... in some old-age home with a magnifying glass.

2022 for me won't be defined by the outside world, for a change. I met the love of my life early this year ... moved from Pretoria to Johannesburg to be closer to her ... and two weeks ago she and her son moved in with me.

This time last year I was sitting writing this update on a laptop before going into a cinema to watch a movie by myself. This time I'm sitting at my PC, listening to my girlfriend and her son talking while she cooks dinner in the kitchen.

I am ... feeling blessed.

I'll be honest, I wanted so much for myself this year. Again. I accomplished so little else worth even mentioning. Again. 

Let's call it incremental gains. Small updates on my website. Finally getting my firearm license, paying off my handgun (a Glock 19 Gen 5 for the record), collecting it (feeling simultaneously that little bit safer AND significantly more apprehensive about all the new worries it brings into my life).

No change in my working life (for better and worse in this economy I guess).

It felt anticlimactic when the announcement came early this year that we could all remove our COVID-19 masks. Somehow the infections dipped and the masks came off and ... COVID just disappeared. Herd immunity? Government conspiracy? The vaccines finally helping (I got my booster at the start of this year)? All I can say is it's good to see people's faces again. And I'm not feeling naked in public any longer (it did feel VERY strange for a good month or so without a mask on). There are STILL the odd few people (mostly old couples - understandable I guess) mooching around in masks, but I'm happy to say COVID disappeared just in time for us to collectively face our next national crisis.

Loadshedding.

We moved up rapidly from Stage 2 loadshedding to Stage 4 loadshedding, and are now switching between Stage 4 to 6. I wonder if I'll remember living in 2022 and not having electricity for half the day in blocks of 2 to 4 hours at a time. 

We're working around it. Of course we are. Solar has never taken off more across South Africa, and everyone is an expert in lithium batteries and inverters. I can't get solar because I live in a residential estate. My girlfriend is planning to buy an inverter trolley for us, using a small windfall she got ... so maybe we'll be a little bit better off in 2023. Because it's not going to get better. Every day Eskom reports grimly on all the additional power generating units which have gone offline for unexpected repairs. Even the Eskom CEO resigned (no-one is surprised - the only surprise is that he lasted this long, but the political pressure became unbearable).

That's politicians, isn't it? Something needs to happen before the next elections. Only we all know it won't be easy. The warning signs were there the first time we had loadshedding, back in 2009 if I'm remembering it correctly ... when I covered the affects loadshedding had in Knysna while working as a community newspaper reporter. Then it was a novel issue and interviewing the local icecream manufacturer bemoaning the loss of all his stock was just intriguing. Now it's feeling more dire.

Someone in the ANC likened loadshedding to motivating for regime change. That's a rough paraphrase but it'll do. You get the point. He's not wrong. Even the least educated voters will understand there is a problem when the lights keep going off. And they might understand that Eskom's failures cannot be attributed to Apartheid. This is on your doorstep, ANC. The buck stops with you.

*shrugs* Can we stop talking about electricity now? It's boring. It's so contrary to the 'dream life' we're all trying to live, which is hard to do when it's by the light of a rechargeable lantern.

No, let me rather talk about the new hope my girlfriend has given me for both my life personally and the future. For the new responsibilities her son has brought into my life. Talk about going from zero to 100 rapidly ... from not being a father, to suddenly being a co-parent to a 13 year old boy.

I can't tell you how good it feels to hold my girlfriend and to just not be alone anymore.

So ... 2023. What do you hold for me? I swear to goodness I am either going to get my website off the ground once and for all, or else I'm going to start afresh with something else. And ... money. Yeah I want to pay off my debt. Same as every year then. A luta continua.

 

Goodbye 2021: you won't be missed

What's to celebrate about 2021? In others' lives ... maybe something. In mine, it's slim pickings (mostly a handful of hard-won lessons which I'd have just as soon preferred not to learn).

For me, 2021 is a year of finally buying a new COVID-19 facemask (after my first batch of handmade masks ... made by my ex-girlfriend ... had way outlived both the 'few months' we'd all thought the COVID pandemic would last and their own frayed elastics).

In terms of love, this was a year of 'close but no cigar' on four different occasions. Totally different women, totally different reasons for breaking up, but the end result - wistful memories and tears and disappointment - still remarkably alike each time.

Professionally, if 2021 had a label it would be "Let's do all the things we improvised in 2020 while working from home and livestreaming everything ... and try do it a little bit better and more professionally this time around." It was a year of incremental improvements, increasingly frayed nerves, more staff resignations, more e-mails starting with "I'm sorry but..."

I know I'm not alone in this. I've seen a news story just today about a survey where the majority of participants agreed that 2021 was a terrible year for them not only personally but professionally as well. So I guess I'll draw some comfort from not being alone in the experience, even if I am still alone physically (not least a sensible 2m away from everyone - thanks again, COVID-19).

For the sake of posterity I should probably note that at the time of writing this, it looks like we've survived South Africa's fourth wave of COVID-19 infections. I personally got the Delta infection in July this year (and survived without hospitalisation - although I felt sick and had to get medicine for the symptoms), and got the two shots of the Pfizer vaccine. Next year I get to look forward to the third booster shot.

I'm sorry if I sound so pessimistic. There is hope as well. Hope in the improving statistics surrounding survivability and transmission, as vaccination rates in the country steadily increase. Hope in the reduction of stories around people's loved ones and friends dying. Hope in the continued low lockdown level and its ever-reduced curfew hours (currently 23:00-04:00 if I've got it right ... I can't be bothered to check).

What will all of this mean fifty years in the future? Will I remember it? Or will these magical words and phrases be lost to time. If they are, it will be no loss. COVID-19 might have helped so many of us work from home, and forced our employers to digitize their operations in ways we could never have imagined less than two years ago. I used to personally generate reams of paperwork which had to be printed out, signed and scanned back in dutifully ... and digital signatures of PDFs have eliminated all of that. While some people are still close friends of a printer, I'm happy to say that I'm no longer.

How will I remember 2021? I will remember this as the year of falling in love with a woman I had to eventually file a formal missing person's case for through the SAPS (not a recommended experience). That case is still open. Like so much else in 2021, closure is hard to come by.

This year I also passed my firearm competency testing and applied for my competency certificate with the SAPS. Our beloved SAPS (the Southern African Police Services - god forbid I forget that) are taking a mere 12 months to process the application, so 2022 should allow me to purchase a handgun and apply for a firearm licence ... which will take another 12 months to process. Something to look forward to in 2023, I guess: the ability to defend myself.

Let me not forget the noteworthy deaths of this year. Closest to home: my uncle Peter. There's a lot I could say about that, but not much of that which I wish to put to (digital) paper. I flew down to Cape Town to attend the memorial service, and it was extremely emotional (overlapping as it did with the latest chapter of the 'falling in love' saga mentioned above). A bit further but still close: the marketing manager for my client, Marius. Further out yet ... Desmond Tutu. And that woman from Egoli. And FW de Klerk. And ... *sighs* 

This has been a year where I think 'tried my best' summarises it. I've given my all to 2021. Absolutely every last shred of myself. There have been successes along the way. There have been the highest highs. I am not mentioning all of them here, but ... not enough.

And that's the sticky part, isn't it? After 2020 and surviving the first year of our very first pandemic, AND the most painful breakup of my life, I know I'd had high hopes for 2021. I don't know now if I didn't deliver on those hopes, or if they're all just slow-burn works-in-progress. 

I've worked more on my personal website and plan to promote it some more this December holiday. I bought a laptop for myself (after getting frustrated at wasting all my money on women who were no longer in my life). I'm writing this article on this new laptop now, sitting at a Mugg n Bean, about to go to the next door cinema soon and watch Spiderman's 'No way home' in IMAX 3D. It's a small step in the direction I want to be heading in, and right now at this very moment, god knows I'll accept any small step in the right direction I can get.

So 2021 ... sleep well. RIP. Farewell. Thank you for some things. Fuck you very much for others. 

2022: hello baby. Where've you been all my life? I've been waiting for you. Let's make some magic together.

The old new normal

I don't know why it is, but around once a year these days I think of this blog and think "Hmm, I should probably share something." My last post, I wrote as lockdown was announced in 2020 for COVID-19 ... now, here we are in August 2021, still under lockdown.

This thing we were all hoping would be over in a few months, more are saying will be with us for the rest of our lives. The thought of that is so terrible, it's hard to describe. So collectively we just don't think about it anymore.

But before I talk about the future, let's document the past year. A year of changing lockdown levels to keep track of every few months: curfew times (CURFEW - in my mind that was always associated with war time), how many people can be in a building, whether or not you can buy alcohol or cigarettes.

The one constant throughout: wearing facemasks in public places, and sanitising our hands before entering any store. Businesses closed down during lockdown, restaurants in particular. I was one of the lucky ones, able to work non-stop from home for my employer, an advertising agency.

South Africans used to shake hands everywhere ... now we generally don't even try the awkward elbow bump we tried doing for the first few months. Behind masks, 2m apart from each other, not touching: this is not the future I signed up for. Now I joke whenever I see a girl take off her mask how rare it is to see a nose or lips ... and although it's an old joke, it's just becoming truer all the time.

We spoke in 2020 about the "new normal" of getting used to video-conferencing and staying clean. Then going into 2021, I heard a radio DJ talking about how this is not the new normal anymore, this is just normal. And that was inescapable in January, and equally so now in August.

Two things have changed for the better: you can actually BUY sanitizer anywhere and everywhere (I currently have a bottle of 80% alcohol with tea-tree oil for softening my skin in my car), not like in the early panic-buying days where sanitizer was snapped up like it was holy water; and the long-anticipated COVID-19 vaccines that we just heard about for months being rolled out in the UK and US and other organised countries have finally arrived in South Africa in a big way and are publicly accessible (I'm actually booked for my first of two vaccination shots next weekend).

It's also worth mentioning I've survived COVID-19 myself. Twice, I think. Last year I think I got it but I never went to the doctors because there was a stigma about getting it and everyone knew the doctors couldn't really do anything about it. Besides, that time I didn't cough or heat up or get anything worse than really bad muscle aches and headaches. In July this year, however, I got the new-and-improved Delta variant of COVID-19, which is something like two or three times more infectious than the regular old kind, and this variant is killing young and healthy people left and right ... but like I said, I survived with nothing worse than just bad flu-like symptoms and a regular cocktail of prescription antibiotics and vitamins.

It feels weird sharing these little details now, but I'm almost doing it in the hope that one day all of this "too common to mention" detail will all seem barely-remembered and strange. Can you remember the times the hospitals, even the private hospitals, were so full that you basically couldn't get into one unless you were dying, and even then it was a struggle (with news articles about people dying in ambulances outside of full hospitals - until the newspapers got tired of the same stories)?

Can you remember where we used to have our temperature measured religiously? All I know is my average temperature on the skin is 36.5. AND that when I got COVID-19, one of those scanners never even blinked a digital eye at me, so the whole saga is just ritual to help us feel that The Powers are doing something, when in fact we're all just helpless in the face of this virus. Mass vaccination and herd immunity should help ... in a few decades.

And I reckon that's enough about COVID-19, don't you? I pray for all of us, every single one, that we get through this, and find a way to adjust to life even under these conditions. We're getting there. By next year I think this will feel like plain old normal life, for real. And yes, that's sad. And no, I can't do anything about it.

In other news, this month marks the second year of my divorce. I'd like to say I got my life together, despite COVID-19, but I honestly don't. I've been working longer hours than ever this year, the girl I felt sure was the real love of my life broke my heart and my finger (THAT is a story I'll leave to my memory), and I'm moving into a new apartment next week. The most 'exciting' personal news I have is that I've completed my proficiency training for a pistol last month, and applied for my firearm competency through the police (a process that is expected to take months), and when THAT is done I get to buy a gun (not a cheap exercise) and submit a license application and then just maybe in a few more months I can eventually walk home with a gun concealed in my waistband.

That's not a decision I took lightly, or a decision I ever expected to take. But there were a few factors this year that made me realise I needed to be able to defend myself. And that I'm all I can rely on. And the bad guys have guns, and they're merciless. And all of that was BEFORE the riots and looting of a few days in July, triggered by former president Zuma going into jail.

So here I am. COVID-19 survivor. Alone. Tired. Over-indebted. Sad. Hopeful for a better future. And very much aware we all feel this way. We're in trench warfare together, against an enemy we can't see, with no way to fight it except to stay away from each other. 

That was my last year. This is my present. And how about my future? What will that hold? Honestly all I want is love. It's all I've ever wanted. COVID-19 hasn't taken that part of me away, nor will I let it. Tune in in 2022, I guess. I hope I've got something more positive to share then.

COVID-19: reflections on Day 4 of the crisis

Firstly, I just have to apologise for my long absence ... 17 October 2018 was my last post, and here 1.5 years has gone past. It's been a tumultuous time, filled with the lowest lows and the highest highs, and yet here we are ... 19 March 2020. Things are getting more tumultuous than ever.

So what's brought me to post now? COVID-19 ... aka Coronavirus. In South Africa we're sitting on Day 4 after the President declared a National Disaster following the global spread of COVID-19, and its growing impact in South Africa. That was Sunday evening, with around 48 "infected" in South Africa. Now it's Thursday evening, and we're sitting at 150, but the true number is most likely way higher (we just don't have enough test kits - and the government is most likely trying to avoid mass panic anyway).

Everybody calls this an unprecedented time, and it certainly feels that way for me. I heard the phrase "worst plague in 100 years", but don't quote me on that. I think that's really the thing about COVID-19 that is so difficult to navigate: telling the genuine facts apart from the outdated data and outright "fake news" (another recent phenomenon).

I felt this special time warranted a snapshot in time of what it's like living now. Of where I'm at.

Things are moving quickly. Yesterday my company had already released a Coronavirus Business Plan detailing its new corporate policies surrounding everything from travel restrictions to how to apply to work remotely. I did the latter immediately and got my approval today. Tomorrow when I wake up, I start work from my PC at home: armed with Google Hangouts for videoconferencing and a VPN to get onto my server, I'll need to make it work.

This week has been a flurry of trying to do "normal" work, alongside COVID-19 related tasks. I'm a project manager in an advertising agency in Pretoria, so that's entailed liaising with suppliers of sponsored events to enquire what their event plans are (most events are cancelling after the president declared a ban on gatherings of more than 100 people), briefing in urgent social media and other communications, helping forge electronic communication channels between myself and my client (in-person meetings are a luxury nobody is indulging in anymore), and generally just hoping that nobody I'm meeting has been to Italy (Gauteng DOES have the highest infection rate in South Africa - so I'm at ground-zero).

Let me not forget the panic buying. Stories about people stocking up. Then evidence in the local stores of long queues and people loading shopping trolleys to breaking point. Me joining in one lunchtime on a limited budget and walking away with this (not the biggest haul in the world - but hopefully enough to buy time in a true crisis). All the basics: tinned tuna and pilchards, instant noodles, my favourite cereal, long-life milk, bottled water, and some other odds and ends:

I feel obliged to mention for the sake of history that people are so afraid of running out of toilet paper that everybody is over-stocking on it and the stores are reportedly all out. I haven't checked on this yet ... I need to check that out this week and see if I can get some more. In case. Apparently it's all New Zealand's fault because they import toilet paper from China, so when COVID-19 locked down Chinese imports then they found themselves in a ... err ... sticky situation. South Africa manufactures bog roll so we should be fine. Should be. But apparently shelves are running empty there too, of that most priceless commodity.

It's just another painful reminder that we're all human. People are afraid. They're angry. They're tired. They didn't ask for this, but now it's here, just as we start to tip over into the winter chill and were emerging from the darkness of Eskom's national loadshedding problem (I can only hope that the me in the future reading this doesn't still have electricity shortages).

Where to from here? In South Africa, we're most likely going to see COVID-19 cases spiking. I fear for our industries which are most affected: hospitality and entertainment are being wiped out overnight or forced to retrench most of their staff. You can't move a bar experience online (maybe the new business model is to ship alcohol to clients and they can get drunk together over a video-call ... but getting drunk alone and vomiting over your keyboard most likely won't have the same appeal).

There are rumours of province-wide shut-downs, if not country-wide shut-downs. Families will be broken apart. People are being retrenched. We're still trying to find the humour in it, and there are COVID-19 memes everywhere ... but they're just not funny anymore.

The ONE upside, if any, is that COVID-19's worst symptoms for most people are a fever and dry cough, and you get better in two weeks with no medical intervention. For 2% of people (mostly the old and infirm) there is a harsher downside: death. Nobody has died yet in South Africa, as far as the media knows. Yet.

I like to think that this is better than an Ebola-type virus, which would strike people down with blood running out of their ears and noses, with guaranteed fatality in most cases. At least that, right? Maybe this is just a trial run. Maybe it's an opportunity for a bit of that "Blitz spirit" (World War 2) in a country as divided as ours. Maybe it's going to drive a deeper political wedge between people, when COVID-19 enters the townships and the poor cannot afford to stockpile or access private medical healthcare. Most likely that, in fact.

So if the above demonstrates nothing else, it's just how all over the place this is, and this is just for me. Stories are swirling around out there, with every more bizarre headlines. And maybe we're all going to get Coronavirus. Maybe we have to. Maybe it's better that way. Maybe we should be deliberately infecting ourselves rather than trying to distance ourselves and just prolong the agony. Two weeks and you're either dead or alive and able to continue life (although some people CAN apparently get reinfected).

Hope. We have hope. I have hope. We will survive. Some of us will survive. Most of us. I think. I hope. I plan. I work. I try.

“Hope” is the thing with feathers - (314)

BY EMILY DICKINSON

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -

That perches in the soul -

And sings the tune without the words -

And never stops - at all -

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -

And sore must be the storm -

That could abash the little Bird

That kept so many warm -

I’ve heard it in the chillest land -

And on the strangest Sea -

Yet - never - in Extremity,

It asked a crumb - of me.

Things they don't teach you in school

In an increasingly networked world, how strange it is to find ourselves so frequently isolated.

The problem, of course, is that we aren't taught to network with each other. Our parents outsource our networking to teachers, and our teachers just try and ensure that none of us choke to death on an eraser on their watch.

Social networking, ironically, encourages the same form of isolation. Facebook, for all its might, is possibly the single most damaging social networking tool I know: yes it will help you find your long-lost friend and that aunty who will like your pictures, but how will it help you find people who will challenge your ideas, people who need you in their lives, people you can fall in love with?

Facebook is fantastic for keeping touch with your existing social circles, but it fails spectacularly when it comes to meeting new people, or having real-time debates. Twitter is marginally better, except who uses Twitter anymore except for children and people in the Middle East who're organising rallies all the time (apparently)? 

By an anachronistic stroke of luck, I discovered real social networking online in 2008, in the form of Internet Relay Chat (that's a whole separate story for another day). Even then, it was abundantly clear that most of the people left on IRC (and there weren't many) were in their late thirties and forties, and remembered it from its heyday in the '90s ... at which time I was in my teens, and my family didn't have a PC in the house, never mind a 56k dial-up modem.

IRC, for anybody not familiar, is moderately complex to use by modern 'point and click' standards, but the principle is dead simple: users connect to chatrooms that are hosted on IRC servers, and those servers record and send plain text chat messages (both public and personal) instead of websites. It's real-time, and although your 'client' (the programme you use to access the IRC server) might save all the chat messages in text logs, nobody really reads those: just like real life, you're either there and participating in the conversation, or the moment is gone and ancient history.

The magic, then, is two-fold: 1) You immediately get access to a pool of human beings connected to the same chatroom as you, from around the country or around the world (depending on the type of server you're on); and 2) The ball is entirely in your court what you SAY to these individuals, and how you react to them.

The reason why I am STILL going back onto IRC in the year of our lord 2018 is precisely the same as it was ten years ago: there's just nothing like the possibility of having actual conversations (both group conversations and one-on-one) with people you'd most likely pass on the street and never share more than a momentary glance with otherwise.

While society seems to increasingly isolate us into our individual worlds of cellphone screens and media consumption (TV, movies and staring blankly at other people living their lives on YouTube); IRC forces us to connect. If nobody says anything, then they'd just be sitting there staring at a blank screen.

And so people DO speak up. Social barriers dissolve. And (if you're lucky) real connections are formed. 

I won't lie to you and say that all debate on IRC is highly intellectual. I won't even lie to you and claim that most of it is emotionally uplifting. The vast majority of it is pretty much the kind of small-talk you'll hear with a bunch of strangers in a bar, only nobody's drunk (well some are) and they're all listening to their own music.

Like anything else in life, however, it becomes what you make of it. I've found repeatedly that it's an amazing icebreaker ... just milling around in chat until you find somebody whose chat style gels with yours, and you continue the conversation in private. Before you know it, you've made a friend you wouldn't have imagined you'd ever have: maybe somebody 15 years older than you, maybe somebody living 1 200km away, maybe somebody with some wildly different views than yours, but ... a real, living human being, and you're not just shouting at each other in a bar but having actual conversations.

Again, I feel it's important to stress that IRC isn't this magical place where unicorns live. It's just a blank screen, and a very loosely moderated one at that (although most rooms will have admin teams who will try keep conversation just this side of an outright fistfight) ... and because all the input comes from humans, a lot of that input is filled with anguish, anger, petty frustration, egotistical-driven grandstanding, or wild jealousy.

And love. Real, unadulterated, knock me over a feather, how is this even possible, love.

I met my first girlfriend on IRC, on a general 'chat' channel. I met my wife on IRC, on a trivia channel of all things (where a computer programme asks general knowledge questions and the people in the room try to answer correctly before anybody else). My theory is that it doesn't matter where people who have a strong connection meet, that connection will jump across distance and mediums like an electric spark jumping between two wires.

That doesn't mean I'm advocating IRC for lonely hearts. For a lot of the reasons mentioned, it's actually a spectacularly bad place for that: it is filled with groups of jaded people tired of being endlessly flirted with, and other groups of people who just endlessly flirt out of habit rather than desire. Somewhere in the middle are the normal, everyday people ... and talking to them might help you see problems in new lights; feel better about your shitty life; or just laugh when everything else is bringing you down.

And so IRC for me is caught in this weird twilight state: it is a dying technology platform (with a very low-grade form of cancer given its longevity), and yet it also contains unadulterated human connection that is found absolutely nowhere else in our always-on, always-consuming (and hardly ever publishing) world.

Personally I'd love to see IRC receive better marketing, so more people are even aware of it. Maybe what it needs is a transition of its core tenets to a new technology platform (Virtual Reality-based chatrooms already show all the benefits of IRC with additional body language and physical interactions not possible on text-based IRC). Heck, if there's a passion project I'd ever love to attempt, it would be to reignite social networking on a mass scale using an IRC-type platform to encourage people to truly connect with each other.

If you haven't experimented with IRC, there are so many gateway drugs. The easiest way of getting on is simply via your website browser, using platforms like www.chat27.co.za (South African) or www.dal.net (international server). Pick a username, connect to a channel, and plunge in (just type "/list >15" to get a list of chatrooms with more than 15 people connected to it at that time). Once you get hooked, you simply download your very own dedicated IRC client like www.mirc.com ... and the rest is history.

If there's one parting thought here, it is this: gaining confidence in online chat is a crucial life skill that translates perfectly into the real world. How do you start a conversation? How do you resolve conflict? How do you keep stringing together words in a way that somebody else will actually want to read them? What do you have to give to the world, and what do you want in return?

Crazy footprints and my life

As I grow older, I'm starting to enjoy dancing around the oldest existential questions. Can anybody else relate to this?

You know the Big 2 (and their two corollaries):

1) Why am I here (and what am I meant to do)?

2) Who am I (and what do I want)?

Now just like everybody else on this little planet of ours, I've gone through about a million different answers to those two simple questions ... to a point where it starts to look a bit like this when I think about it:

You know this feeling? It's like everything you've ever felt about something starts to overlap, and as your mind skims over the old worn footpaths again and flips between them trying to find new meaning ... it can all get a bit confusing/frustrating.

So what got me thinking about this tonight was this video, which I love an inordinate amount:

https://youtu.be/B9FzVhw8_bY

That video, for me, speaks to who I want to be (and therefore indirectly to who I am). It's quirky, irreverent, aesthetically appealing, original ... and I identify with all of that. This is what I want with life: fun, and to make beautiful things.

This is the real reason why I haven't gone off into the great blue yonder to start a business doing something I don't want to do. I know I want to have independence, but I also know I want it to be doing something I deeply enjoy and that means something to other people too.

In this disposable society we live in, I can't think of a single career that is fun, connects to people emotionally, and enables a reliable form of income for entrepreneurs. Standup comedian maybe, but from the behind-the-scenes I've seen of real standup comedians they're always on the road and behind the laughs is frequently a very calculated approach towards playing the audience that doesn't work for me.

So yeah, I guess I'm still trying to figure out what I want to do with my life, and there's a strong likelihood I'll always feel this way. Welcome to the human condition, right?

A rose by any other name...

If anybody ever asks me why I want to leave South Africa, here's a simple answer.

Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

Oh but that's not so bad, my more liberal readers will cry (those not in South Africa). Apartheid, Nelson Mandela, social change, blah blah blah (I'm allowed to be flippant about it if I've lived under this flavour of 'democracy' for 23 years).

Yes very well, but let me present Exhibit C:

And that's it, don't you see?

Firstly, if you want to do it, just come out and say it. Say "no whites welcome", why not. You think that dressing it up with other names makes it better, or somehow politically correct?

Secondly, there's the very key fact that white South Africans make up less than 10% of the population. Nobody's exactly sure how much less, but as that graph demonstrates white South Africans are emigrating, dying or just fading into irrelevance.

Which would be fine, except when you get continual reminders in public job advertisements like the ones I've shared above that if you're white you shouldn't even dare apply for some jobs.

WTF, really? It's like holding a townhall meeting, and then putting up a sign "freckled redhead Asians not welcome". Is it really necessary? How hard would it be for recruiters to just ignore applications from less than 10% of the population (I sure as hell know it'd make me feel better).

Instead South Africa is this country where race has been weaponized. A lot of people will say a lot about reverse racism, but the truth is that the recruiters who posted those job ads may well be white themselves (makes you wonder - were there any Jews helping the Nazis run the gas chambers?).

And that's just one of the reasons why I want to leave, but probably the biggest. The country has become like a big mean bully who keeps punching the little kid and then trying to make out that the little kid is running into his fist all the time.