Tag: true story

  • Handwriting Analysis

    I used to have some fun when interviewing candidates for various posts in IT at a previous company that I worked for. The standard process would be for them to complete and sign some forms before the interview commenced, so I would normally ask to see the forms before even meeting the candidate. 

    By looking at their signature, I would tell the other members of the interview panel what I thought the individual would be like, and often I would even guess the duration of the interview. I was right every single time. It was hilarious. Eventually, I had managers walking up to my desk before they went into an interview that I wasn’t involved in to find out if I thought it would be worth their while to interview the candidate before they even met him. 

    Poor candidates. Finding a job is tough these days. 🙂

  • Disordered Minds – follow up

    The speech that I wrote for my niece seemed to have fared well. She received full marks and was asked to present herself and her speech to the regional head of department from the Department of Education in South Africa. She received more positive feedback from the HoD as well. 

    Earlier this week, she came to me again for advice, but this time it was about a poster she needed to compile for an Afrikaans assignment regarding social decay, or something like that. For some reason, I’m still the first person she seems to think of whenever topics of this nature come up. But the part that tickled me most about it was that she took the following quote from my original post, translated it into Afrikaans and reused it on her poster. The quote was:

    “Of all the things we take for granted in life, our power of choice is probably the most abused gift we’ll ever receive.”

    Then she looked at me and said that it was the quote that “I got from that Cynically Jaded guy”. She still doesn’t know that I am that guy. 🙂

  • There was never an absence of criticism, or name calling. I was always the butt end of taunts and mockery and isolated, not by choice. If it wasn’t my slim physique that was being ridiculed, it was my nose for being too big, or my hair for being styled strangely, or my teeth for being crooked. I maintained amicable relations with most in my family, but my elder brother despised me for as long as I can remember. So trying to find something to be positive about in life was never an easy task. If I asked for a second helping of food I would be verbally abused. If I spent time with the very few friends I had from school, I would be ostracised for not having time for the family, and therefore deliberately excluded from family activities when I got home.

    I recall times when I walked through the streets at night until very late, listening to the laughter and noises from the homes in the neighbourhood of families and friends doing what families and friends do. It was alien to me. The reason I was walking the streets at that time of the night when I was in my very early teens, if that old even, was because for reasons that I can’t recall, I did not accompany my family to a visit to some or other extended family. As a result I had to loiter outside until they returned because I was locked out of the house. One night I was literally kicked out of the house when I was barely 6 or 7 years old. He grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and sent me flying out the front door to go searching for a jacket that he had hidden away to teach me a lesson for forgetting to take it in the house when I was done playing. It worked. I never forgot that lesson.

    Excerpt from the book I never wrote

    Ramblings of a Madman

  • A Strange Incident

    About a year ago, I was home one morning. It was an average morning. Normal clear blue African sky, with a scattering of clouds, and the early morning chill that usually lifts shortly after sunrise. But being South Africa, and being Johannesburg, this is all enjoyed within the confines of high walls, electric fence and burglar alarm systems. The perimeter wall around my yard is no exception.

    I have electric fence all around, coupled with palisade spikes set in panels between solid brick pillars on the front wall, and for good measure, another security gate halfway down the driveway to separate the front of the yard from the back of the yard, also with palisade spikes forming the security gate. So it was particularly surprising on this ordinary morning that I found a pristinely clean husky dog in my backyard. 

    As can be seen from my above description, the only way into this section of the yard would have been to jump over the electric fence, which would have triggered the alarm, or creep through the gap between the electric fence and the palisade spikes, which would have seriously injured the dog given the sharp metal spikes at the top of the palisade. But this dog was without injury, and without collar. I walked towards it, and instead of it reacting in a defensive or threatening manner, it simply rolled onto its side and looked at me with those piercing blue eyes. As I approached it even closer, it remained calm, tilted its head to the side and continued looking straight at me without even a hint of threatening to attack me. In return, I didn’t feel the slightest bit threatened or in danger.

    After a while I stood up and walked back into the house and continued watching him from my window. He calmly walked over to the flower bed under the tree in the backyard, went specifically to a spot where I had recently caught my maid burying some muti* from her sangoma**, urinated on that spot and then quite literally disappeared. I never saw that dog again. 

    * muti is the African word for medicine, but is often used to refer to that of the dark arts. It is a common practice amongst the black population in South Africa

    ** sangoma is the African word for witch doctor, or traditional healer. There are good ones, and there are bad ones. And the bad ones are often visited by house maids who are generally from the black communities in South Africa (legacy of apartheid). They tend to get their muti in the hope that it will help them keep their job, especially when they know they’re at risk of losing it because of poor performance. Again, a common practice in South Africa.

  • I Still Hear Her Heartbeat

    cynicallyjade:

    The realism of my dream tonight still haunts me. It wasn’t a bad dream, nor was it a sad one. But the reality that I woke up to is. I heard the gentle ticking of her heartbeat so vividly again. It’s a sound that I haven’t heard in a very long time. 

    It was a love story that we both seemed oblivious to when we had it. We were young, high strung, passionate, but stubborn. But there was so much about her that I loved. She had a poise that was naturally elegant, a smile that still warms me, the most beautifully soft hair, and a voice I would kill for to hear again. She lost her voice during one of the many operations she had for a heart condition that she was born with. But when her voice returned, it was with a husky tone that sent tingles through me each time we talked. I can’t remember if I told her that or not.

    We’d sit in the same room at opposite ends, and with others in the room I was still able to hear the ticking sound of the valve that was inserted into her heart when she was just 14. It wasn’t a clock-like tick. It had a soft resonance to it that made it oddly familiar but unique. I was so attuned to it that I could tell the thickness of her blood just by listening to the sound of it. She needed to take medication to control her blood thickness levels so that the valve could function optimally.

    And tonight, after almost a decade, she leaned into me again, rested her head on my chest, and just surrendered the full weight of her timid body into me. And that’s when I heard it. That beautiful ticking sound confirming every passionate beat of her heart. I still hear it. But it saddens me now. The tears burn. Sting. Because the reality that I woke up to is that she is gone. She has been gone for about 10 years now, and the hollowness that I felt when she died still overwhelms me now. 

    We fought a lot. We treated each other badly at times. We loved each other ferociously all the time. And without realising it, we made our peace with each other a few days before she died. It’s only after she died that I understood the sadness I saw in her eyes a few days before. I haven’t thought about her, nor dreamed about her in a while. But now it feels like I just lost her again. 

    I miss her.

    I posted this in May 2011…sorry for the morbidity, but sometimes, our minds truly have a heart of their own. Only the Almighty knows what plagues mine tonight. 

  • That Last Fateful Encounter

    I’m suddenly reminded of her again. The gentle ticking of her heart and her husky soft voice. Yes, the ticking of her heart. I knew it so well by then, and I missed it for a long time before that, the way I miss it now. Her infectious smile always remained infectious. Even through the pain of life and the heartache of my insensitivity.

    Our passionately tumultuous marriage ended because of an idealistic notion that I refused to let go of. Such is the curse of Hollywood. Even worse is the curse of a childhood that left me emotionally unavailable for the better part of my adult life. After falling in love and marrying according to the cultural traditions, we seemed like the couple most likely to succeed. We were often compared to Helen Hunt and Paul Reiser in Mad About You. We really got along that well.

    At some point, out of sheer paranoia and morbidity, I was convinced that if I didn’t end the marriage, I would lose not only my wife, but also the best friend I had up to that point in my life and the thought scared me. I behaved foolishly. But there was no turning back. Our friendship did survive, but it was always a stark reminder of my stupidity rather than the true comfort that it offered me before I lost my presence of mind.

    Years later, after a lengthy time apart, we made contact again. I just ended another insane chapter in my life, and she was as cheerful as always. She had her flaws, but I always loved her enough to only ever remember her romantically. And still do. Only this time, when we talked, there was a serious under tone that she tried hard to hide, and I knew better than to pry or make a fuss of it. She didn’t like people fussing about the seriousness of life. 

    I had been unemployed for a few months by that time and was still looking for work. We went for coffee a few times and eventually watched a movie together called John Q. It was a movie about a little kid that needed a heart transplant, and one of the final scenes was the graphic detail of the surgeon inserting the donor heart into the little boy’s chest cavity and tapping it to get it going. I could feel her heart sink at the sight of it. It was too close to home for her given her numerous open heart operations that left her with the artificial valve whose ticking I grew so fond of. 

    She just smiled as always and assured me that she was perfectly fine when we left the cinema that night. She was due for another blood test. Something she did at least every two weeks to monitor the thickness of her blood so that the valve wouldn’t clog up and cease. I could usually tell the thickness based on the sound of the valve. She insisted that I take her for the test, even though it was routine for her to get her family’s chauffeur to drive her to these fortnightly appointments. I was caught up in job interviews and she refused to go with anyone else. I told her that I was due for an interview the next day, to which she looked down and said that she knew I was going to get the job because I always got the job if I got the interview. I just laughed it off. 

    The next day I landed a job in Saudi Arabia for a one year contract, and I’ll never forget her response. For the first time since our divorce a few years before, she broke down in tears and pleaded with me not to go. She told me that she lost me once before and now that I was finally back, I was leaving her again. I couldn’t understand it, but I didn’t have much of a choice either. I needed the job. 

    She fell ill the following evening without me knowing. Due to a twist of fate, her regular doctor was not available, and some reckless bastard attended to her instead. He downplayed her symptoms of her chest infection and prescribed some medication without considering her heart condition which landed her in hospital, still unknown to me. 

    I needed to leave within days for the urgent assignment in Saudi, and had planned to fly out on the Thursday evening after the interview. On Thursday morning I delayed my flight plans at the last minute because I just didn’t feel comfortable making the trip that day. So I postponed my flight to Saturday instead. On Thursday evening at just after 19h00, around the time my original flight was scheduled to depart, I received a phone call. She had died. Her heart finally gave up, and just like that, she was gone. No long distance phone calls from Saudi as I had planned, or special trips to visit her. Everything was suddenly pointless. And I didn’t even see it coming.

    I broke down for the first time in my life, despite having lost other close family members before. I was always composed. But not this time. When I heard those words on the phone I felt weak and my knees almost gave way under me. I sat on the nearest thing I could find. She was gone and I didn’t know how to deal with it.

    Her funeral was held that same evening according to Islamic rites and customs. It was a cold winter night, and her family that had despised me since our divorce embraced me hesitantly when I saw them. I stood in the cemetery and watched in disbelief as they lowered her into her grave, and the most striking memory of that evening was the sight of tears dripping from the face of her nephew as he knelt over in the halo of the flood light that lit up the proceedings in the darkness of the graveyard. 

    Two days later I left for Saudi. Alone. And the months that followed saw one of the greatest depressions of my life set in. It was truly the winter of my discontent.

  • …my parents had split up after a very long and disruptive marriage. They came from two different worlds. My father wanted to please his mother, and my mother wanted to please her father. Their commitment to these ideals made them stick it out for almost 28 years give or take a few years. That’s more than just a few of my lifetimes which in some ways is impressive by most counts, but in other ways it’s sad beyond belief. Being a family of six kids, plus my eldest brother that passed away when he was a precious six months old, and another miscarriage, it was a miracle that the stress and strain of all that responsibility, a low income, and a lack of real interaction between my parents allowed them to persevere for as long as they did.

    They were both admirable in many ways. My mother was always striving, and still continues to strive to improve the quality of her life and of her family’s. She never backed down from a challenge to supplement my father’s income by doing more than her fair share of work from home. My father worked as a warehouse supervisor for a leading clothing wholesaler at the time. This in itself had its perks because we would often end up wearing the sample items of lines that they never brought into the South African market which automatically allowed us to be fashionably dressed at the lowest price. However, not all the clothing samples were fashionable, and not having much choice in what we were given to wear, it was sometimes embarrassing to be seen in some of the clothes that we received. But the important thing is that we were always neatly dressed and never went hungry. So despite my anger and disappointment at some of the events in my life relating to my parents or my relationship with my father, that is something that I’ll always be eternally grateful for.

    Excerpt from Ramblings of a Madman. The book I never wrote.

  • Naivety

    I was reckless far too often, mostly due to naivety and gullibility rather than due to any wilfully neglectful action on my part. It’s sad to think that we live in a time when trusting too much is considered being gullible rather than being sincere and optimistic. Then again, maybe that’s why some think I’m insane. Seriously, who could possibly find a good reason to trust first and question later these days? Ok, I admit, I do. Not for any reason other than the fact that I will not contaminate my judgement or my values because of the dishonest and deceitful actions of others. No matter how much it hurts or destroys parts of my life that I love dearly, I refuse to give in…and I pray that I never will become so weak and despicable that I do give in from fatigue.

    Excerpt from Ramblings of a Madman

    (the book I never wrote, but should have)