But never the ones I make to children. I never squinch on a promise I make to anyone under the age of  ten. To flint that innocent expectancy and to then just snuff it with fake-ass assurances or forgetfulness, has all the cruel of setting a kitten’s tail on fire. And kids remember stuff like that. There was this girl my mum once gave a lift to who borrowed the Mad magazine I was reading that morning. She promised to return it. Never did. I don’t usually call people this, but really, Bitch! It was one of their special editions. I hope she developed a really embarrassing but non life-threatening rash, that could be easily treated with a few applications of some smelly topical lotion.

Promises. I have some trouble with them.

Especially the ones I make to myself. I will write something for posterity everyday. I will finish the short story now-now. I will take more pictures. Et cetera.

So, it’s muchly obvious that The Year of Thinking Recklessly project, while having bloomed with some promise, is now in need of some deodorizing. I’m sorry. I just can not keep it up with it. It was a bit stupid of me to take on the commitment knowing that my movements would not be regular or predictable for the five months into this year. The inclination towards recklessness has been nuked by constipation.

Dare I promise to try again next year? Nah.

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flew an eagle

soaring and swooping.

What a bird!

Unlike anything

I’d seen or heard.

Oh, but I heard

and it didn’t sound

oppressed to me.

–

(Of course, if I understood more than one-seventieth of what she was saying, I’d be able to provide a fleshier commentary. But, g’damn, her voice is impressive.)

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Having read installments of this title via dailylit.com, I wanted to take a bash at designing* a cover for it. I took my cue from protagonist Prudence Crowley’s nickname ‘Tuppence’.

Graphic source: Karen Roe

*Don’t judge me by this cover. All these years and I’m still n00bing about:)

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After a great dance of squishy hopping about, I felt less eeeghwaikeeooogheey and a bit more 9-years-old-after-madressah-braving-the-oceans-of-the-civic-centre-parking-lot-as-a-keen-stomping-adventurer-on-her-journey-home.

When we got in, I washed my feet with soap. They were feeling kind of furry.

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1. I have a real problem managing time.

2. Hence I’m a pro-procrastinator.

3. It is difficult for me to wake up early especially if there is nothing pressing to attend to.

4. I sing along to jingles and other tracks when I watch TV or listen to the radio.

5. Chaos is my element.

6. I’m always up for eating strange things.

7. I like the bitterness of schweppes dry lemon and malts.

8. My dreams are often strange and textbook. (There’s one I would like to translate into an art installation; a swimming pool shell filled with condoms that have had little notes placed in them by people writing about their regrets or unfulfilled dreams)

9. I’m easily distracted.

10. I can lose hours on repetitive games.

11. I really, really don’t like conflict.

12. I’m selfish. Not because I want to be, but because I don’t know how to be any other way. (I am an only child)

13. My stuff is everywhere.

14. I speak silly.

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“Bikya! Bikya, bikya, bikyaaa! Beeeekya, bikya, bikya, bikyaaaa!”

It goes on for most of the day, the calls varying in intensity and persistence, but always with the quality of stirring Cairo’s kitty population.

When we first heard them, we thought  it was an Egyptian-variety Hadeda.

But these weren’t birds, rather men in bakkies or carts looking for old things to buy.

Zakiya and Zaheer told us about them when we first got here. She said it sounded like they were calling out her name. I can’t disagree:)

Clicking through wikipedia and blogs, I learnt that bikya is taken from the Italian roba vecchia – “old clothes”. Egypt has had Italian presence since the Middle Ages and the ‘clothes’ bit has since evolved to include anything that could be re-used. I can imagine the tenacity and resilience of the bikya call puncturing the waking dreams of generations upon generations.

Still, it’s a pretty cool way to upcyle your clutter.

Naeem’s been looking at classified plug-ins for some of his wordpress blogs and tossed the idea of a book swop/sale listing at me. Not even a few seconds into the install when what should we hear from the streets below but the universe speaking to us in the strong and clear directives of “Bikyaaaa Bikya, bikya, bikyaaa!”

So with that, I bring you “Books&Bikya“, a free space for you to list:

• book/bikya swaps

• book/bikya sales

• pre-loved books/bikya to pass on to others

• interesting things you’re looking for

• crafty things

• upcycling initiatives

• book club/thinky meet ups

• events

De-clutter. Share. Upcycle. Make a clean buck. Make good clean friends. Get creative. Be thinky.

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At a masjid fi misri just before maghrib I find jidatee* with her nose in His Signs, while a metronome of bone on bone keeps time with each fatha, each kasra. Those knees creak as much as the scuffed plastic of her chair.

She’s not really my grandmother. I hear only one word out of her hundred. “Ana la atakalam arabiyya”, that’s what the guidebook told me to say. “Er er er, ana talibah, min junoob iffrikiya”, that was today’s lesson.

Jidatee, who’s not really, fingers the cloth of my jacket before pointing to my skin. I think she’s trying to ask me why I’m not black. “Er er er, ummmi, er er er, ummi’s ummi’s ummi er min Hindee-yah”. I hadn’t yet learnt the word for grandmother or the greatness thereof. Jidatee brings her finger to her forehead to make a little circle in the middle. “La, la, Muslim” I say. Sounds a bit like a song, and we laugh before we pray.

–

*arabic for my grandmother

This started out as a poem, but I couldn’t.

I ran one of those vintage photoshop actions on the photo of a window in Masjid Bilal. It’s just down the road from our flat in Madinat Nasr. I’ll be posting more pics soon. Perhaps I should retitle my 20-ken project to “The Year of Shooting Recklessly”. I’ve been a bit suck about the writing. Our place is on Naguib Mahfouz street, so I’m trying to channel some prolific writer spirit. So far all I’m filling up with is karkadey and basboosah. Good gorge, Cairo’s wonderful.

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They were probably aiming for défilé.

Acute Fail.

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If I had known I’d be seeing six of my words in typesetted/isbn-ed glory, I would have put a bit more pith into them.
Though still, freaking yay! And they send you your very own contributor’s copy. I’ve got nothing but heart for Smith Magazine and HarperCollins.

–

Our travel preps de-geared my slick momentum for The Year of Thinking Recklessly project. I’m committing myself to finishing the short story by tonight. I’ll have to jippo the entries so that they all number up to today; a bit of a cheat to maintain consistency and keep me on track.

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How to kill time to great effect:

Improvise a notepad-wallet using bits of things you may have around your home office.

Or in my case raid the craft junk accumulated over the years looking for something that will double up as fasteners because the paper-brads I had in mind just weren’t working out. Hence the gogga-like fuzzy black things (pipe cleaners in their not-so-secret lives).

However, I had something of a brain-drizzle while blogging this and reworked the cover-fastenings so that they looked less like toxic caterpillars (and a bit more like displaced boobs).

What went in?

For the notepad: A4 printer paper cut into quarters with the bottom corners rounded, two staples, piece of lace sticker tape to hide the staples.

For the wallet: Corrugated cardboard, scrapbooking paper, two paper-brads to secure the loops made from a rubber-band, rest of the fastener fashioned from four paper circles and two brads, four eyelets (two for the loops to enter the cover and two for the fastening-brads to be secured through), a velcro dot.

I’m giving this to my little cousin who starts Grade One this year.

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[I'm reminded of my late maternal grandfather who would keep rectangles of cardboard torn from cigarette cartons in his pocket and use them to note down any thing of interest. He was a meticulous record-keeper, and each family member had their own file in the curious grey cabinet I'd spend hours scratching through as a child. Birth records, school results, newspaper clippings, First Aid certificates, letters; that's how I met my mother's brothers who had passed on before I was born.]

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This desktop wallpaper has been created at a screen resolution of 1280X1024.
Right click on the image and choose “save link as” (firefox and chrome) or “save target as” (internet explorer) to download.

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It doesn’t have the same retweetability of 2000&Mine, but if there’s to be a year that’s going to be about adding a few more gears to the brainworks, this would be it for me.

My biggest fails of 2009 include not following through on the TEFL course and wasting obscene chunks of time doing fokall*. For dreams to remains dreams; all you have to do is oversleep (I’m pretty sure I ripped this line off of somewhere).

Well, we’ll be having none of that this year. I’m tailgating Irfaan and making myself accountable (link via Hasina).

I begin The Year of Thinking Recklessly; a few lines a day, every day. Part memoir and part made-it-all-up, it is an exercise in creative consistency.

So here’s to the words, lots of them, and again, to consistency.

*not as much ‘dolce far niente’ as putting sloths to shame.

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If you find these a bit too chick-chic, you could always cut up  old comic books for coverage.

1. two coats of paint+antique crackle medium+gilding paste+varnish to seal
2. paper+modge podge/mod podge

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People tend to have long memories when it comes to hundreds of thousands of lives that could have been saved had Tshabalala-Msimang and the rest of the Mbeki-acolytes rolled out antiretrovirals (ARVs) instead of being drunk on denialism.

There is the matter of her legacy; a recipe for a good braai accompaniment. No doubt the beetroots, olive oil, garlic and lemons read like a meal on speed. However, it should also be noted that a lot of the media at the time did not adequately emphasise the link between a well-balanced diet and the efficacy of ARVs.

We all had our digs at Manto. Her reported drinking problems, controversial liver transplants and alleged kleptomania; these were enough for us to burn her effigies, stoking the flames with the newspaper accounts of a health minister who called time of death on the plot. Stephen Grootes has written an evenly-keeled piece on Manto’s passing in The Daily Maverick.

Now, I would like to speak ill of the living.

Granted, government’s response to the pandemic has since improved. On World Aids Day this year, President Zuma committed to improve access to HIV/AIDS testing and treatment, effective from April 2010. By March 31st of next year, the number of accredited ARV centres will expand to include all health institutions .

Policy changes include initiating treatment for children under the age of one year who test positive not being determinant on their level of CD cells. Patients with both TB and HIV will not have to wait until their CD4 count drops to 200 or less, as they will be treated with ARVs if their count is 350 or lower.

If President Zuma and his people make good, it is a positive turn for pregnant women with HIV. They will be eligible for treatment with CD4 counts of 350 (again, a departure from the CD4 count of 200 or less) or if they display symptoms regardless of their CD4 count. Those not falling into these categories will be put on treatment at fourteen weeks of pregnancy to protect the baby, a marked departure from starting treatment during the last term.

For now, however, access to treatment remains a challenge for the marginalised.

This could not have been more affirmed than at a recent meeting of jurists, civil society representatives and people living with HIV/AIDS, where executive director of the AIDS Law Project Mark Heywood read aloud from letters he’d received from people seeking recourse. While these come from South Africans, the cases are not unique and speak to a continent-wide issue.

[transcription]

“This is about a person who lives in an informal settlement in Johannesburg called Diepsloot, who was wrongfully arrested because he didn’t have papers and was suspected, by the police, of being an illegal migrant from Zimbabwe. This is his wife writing. He is in a prison or was in a prison until quite recently. ‘On the 4th of November I went there to visit him to give him some foodstuffs and hopefully get his hospital card so I could go collect his ARV medication. The policeman I found that day was very rude and refused to let Mr M give me his hospital card nor allow me to see him. He said Mr M had not reported that he was sick, and it was not important anyway. He refused my explanation. he actually said in that prison they don’t take prisoners to hospital for medication. I had to turn back with the foodstuff and try to return some other day. On the 16th of November I went back to Sun City [colloquial name for the correctional facility in Johannesburg South], I had foodstuff and ARV medication for him. The ARV medication was refused by police and they said to me I must consult with Sister X which I never did because I don’t even know who Sister X is. Therefore Mr M never got his medication.’”

[ends]

This is despite the existence of a clear court order about the duties of prison services to provide prisoners with access to antiretroviral treatment.

“I can tell you, with my hand on my heart, the situation facing prisoners with AIDS in South African prisons is no better today than it was three years ago [when the order was passed],” Heywood said.

That was just one story.

There are others Heywood tells; of a woman refused entry as a recruit to the Durban police because she disclosed her HIV status, a mother being charged by her baby’s father for attempted murder as he believes she transmitted the virus to the child through breastfeeding.

For as long as discrimination is perpetrated, as long as human rights are negated, the virus wins. We should put that on a t-shirt.

We know the spread of HIV/AIDS to be strongly linked to gender and class inequalities.

This virus highlights the differences between public and private health care systems.

It shows us up for what we are.

Our selective sympathy would not dare to go near homosexuals, sex-workers, prisoners.

In countries like Uganda where homosexuality is criminalised, the rate of HIV infection and transmission is increasing rapidly among homosexuals because the discrimination they face has become the root cause of their inability to access treatment.

Twenty-five years into the epidemic, Heywood says, and those who are at the most at risk of infection are not at the table of HIV/AIDS prevention because they remain criminalised, marginalised and fearful to the legal responses towards their lifestyles and their work.

So who do we slam?

If there’s one thing Tshabalala-Msimang’s death should bring, apart from the vigils for the hundreds of thousands she could have saved during her tenure, it should be for the millions who can still be saved if treatment is seen as an inalienable human right.

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I’m trying to imagine what would happen if a face camillian were to date another face camillian?

link

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Hunter-gatherer sensibilities trumped a millennium’s worth of progress as we engaged in a quiet war to secure, and deftly, the most well-vantaged space for our cars.

Parking lots bring out the moer in people.

And the ugly too.

We were all inching along; the tiresome stop-go-stop-go, mindless clutch control, memorising the grocery list by rote.

A woman in the oncoming lane had her indicators on to claim a spot where a family were busy packing up lots of groceries and what could have been a baby or its pram into the boot of their car.

The man behind her hooted.

She made spastic hand gestures towards her rear-view mirror.

The impatient man was either not versed in mad finger pokes or really didn’t consider her problems to be his.

He proceeded to somehow squeeze his bakkie into the gap between her car and the other parked ones.

This looked like it was going to blow all out. Best to move along now, I thought, nothing to see and all that.

Her window was wound down on the the drivers side and I heard her say it.

Quite clearly.

“Fucking kaffir.”

–

The shock stayed with me all the way to Pick N’ Pay and blog.

She could have called him an asshole or a fucker or a fucking asshole or some other more creatively-constructed epithet.

And he no doubt deserved some measure of profanity for forcing his vehicle past hers the way he did.

But she used that word. Why, that word?

Was she so angry at that man that she just reached inside and pulled out the most hateful thing she could think of?

Here’s what got me.

This was a young woman, somewhere in her 20’s. Probably around my age.

Hardly fed off of the boob of apartheid, right?

It isn’t that if she were older, it would be more easily computed. It’s just that I don’t want to accept that certain things are still being passed on.

Is my alarm just symptomatic of my naiveté?

What do you think?

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I bought the Arabian Geometric Patterns (Pepin Press) source book for Naeem a while back.

It’s stuffed with pupil-dilating sweeties, from eye-glutting intricates to simple, soothing repetitions.

An all-round pretty practical gifting, we’ve both used it on projects (like this month’s wallpapers).

Truth be blogged, I bought it because I wanted it. I’m very practical like that. We needed a kitchen clock. Guess what Naeem got as Eidie after Ramadaan?

For your downloading pleasure, I have zipped up all the wallpapers into one nifty folder:

Right click here to save. (5.83mb)

These desktop wallpapers have been created at a screen resolution of 1280X1024.

Right clicking the images will not download the full-res wallpaper, click the link highlighted above to get the zipfile.

I have also included the following desktop wallpapers, suitable for year-round use:)

Drop me an email should you want one of these in a different colour.

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