you know something's wrong when...

…you’re singing ‘Poker Face’ by that personality free zone Lady Gaga and its whirring round and round in your head and your wrists are still pleasantly in tact. Make it stop!

Other things that need to stop:

Eating. I’ve done it again, I mean it was a simple introduction “arse meet wagon” and the arse/wagon relationship continued (not without its problems) for around 3 weeks. Three happily shed kilograms later, the marginally smaller arse fell, well and truly off the wagon. It fell merrily into a few bottles of red wine, somewhere near a crate of cheese, poached eggs atop garlic grilled asparagus, lasagne, more cheese, espresso and inevitably and quite rightly so, more red wine.  Today it stumbled toward an apple crumble, so cinnamony, buttery, toasty warm and inviting, that it took one look at my guilt ridden brain and told it to fuck off.

I must get out of the food industry, or my pleas to the heavens for skinnydom come, will be drowned out and suffocated by butter icing. I’ll turn tragically into someone who can’t quite manage to get the cake mix to the oven and inhales it before it so much as graces a cake tin. I have some willpower left, I think, but it probably need a serious calorie-free boost.

Last night my dad was on phone call duty. June is birthday month. Aunts, cousins, cousins-in-law, friends, foes, they were all there on the list. I’m in the kitchen (preparing the lasagne, obviously) and I can hear him nattering. It makes a pleasant change from his attachment to that guitar. I’m picking up on some regularities of each conversation. Most prominently ‘no, I wish I could marry her off, but she’s still here’. He’s joking, which is fine, what’s not fine, is that they’re asking.  They  are the South Africans, the prodigal tribal elders, whose own daughters, all by my ripe old age of 24 (I kid yee not) have been married off. The husbands have handed over herds of cows and goats and the daughters are now the mothers and wives of Africa. I’m glad there is an ocean and 12 hour flight between us. I’ve learnt many a lesson from my previous attachments (boyfriends if you must) and that is, I could most certainly not see myself married to any of them now. No offence lads, but you understand.

So now I face some interesting dilemmas. I mull over the possibility of an attachee, I mull over who the current options are (shudder) and think about what small amount of my time I could possibly devote to them, without, like my African counterparts, becoming their live-in carer. What brings these dilemmas to the forefront you may ask? Surely there are other things higher on the agenda? Why yes friend, there are, but you see, a friend of mine recently joined an online dating site and given that my dear mother once asked me ‘have you thought about online dating?” it meant that I definitely had to think about internet dating. Fortunately for me, said friend has sacrificed herself as the guinea pig, so we’ll just see how she gets on, wont we?