No one is ever going to love you more than I do.

Life continues, more or less according to plan. I love saying that, even if at best of times, the plan for my life is sort of a general feeling in a particular direction, but regardless, things are going well. Life at Twisted Toast is enjoyable and stressful, as I knew it would be, filled with very good creative energy (and tension, at times) and good times. I am looking forward to getting really stuck in in May, but we've done well for the past two weeks - we've launched our website and we've signed our first client, so we're off to a good start.

I'm finding it easier than I thought to deal with the lack of internet at home. Tomorrow will be a month since I had uncapped DSL at home, and with my DSL installation only scheduled for 3 May, I've got another two weeks without it, but it doesn't particularly terrify me. I realise that's somewhat sad, but I really do consider myself a denizen of the internet, and in the past, not having access to uncapped, high-speed internet has been an exercise in agony and frustration for me. I've made do the past month by doing normal stuff, like going out, and the like, which has been actually a lot of fun.

Fortunately, we've had uncapped internet at work which I've abused (outside business hours, naturally) to download some stuff. I finally got around to watching Arrested Development (I was harassed into submission by a new friend to do so) and I feel ashamed that I never watched it sooner. It's genius in a way that defies comprehension. People so much cleverer and funnier than me poured so much effort into it, it's a show that is both ridiculously entertaining and in a way, humbling, to watch. I've also started watching It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and I'm finding it pretty enjoyable as well. I'm also slowly but surely making my way through Downton Abbey, and despite it being slower than a Home Affairs queue, I'm getting into it. I'm generally not a fan of period pieces, or slow dramas (Downton is both) but I'm getting caught up in the language and style of the whole thing. I could totally be an English gentleman, with a valet and butler and footmen to wait on me.

I've also gotten stuck into Sim City 4k whenever I've had some free time (of which there's been precious little of late) but frustrations regarding commute times in larger cities has once again stymied me. There's this whole subculture of Sim City players who delve into the details of creating mass transit systems for large metropolises in minute detail, and it's just a layer of complexity that's too much for me.

Beyond that in terms of gaming, it's been somewhat quiet. I've finished Dragon Age 2 on two characters now, first a mage, then a rogue, and now I'm in the process of playing through as a 2H warrior. The last has been the most fun, just because of the ridiculous cleave damage when partnered with another 2H warrior like Fenris. Add Isabella into the mix, and Anders as a buffbot, and my party is effectively a three-man whirling dervish of blades that don't so much kill street hoodlums as much as resemble a highly efficient sausage machine, turning human flesh into neat piles of minced meat, organs and bones. It's all very fun. Speaking of Anders, there are very few characters in film, TV or games that I've detested as much. Such a fucking whiny, annoying little child of a mage. "Ooh, the mages are being oppressed by the Templars again!" Fucking hell, Bioware really sucks for making him the only viable support caster in the game, so you have to drag him along all the time. Really grates me.

I've also installed Crysis 2 and I've given it a whirl. It's not really game-changing in terms of actual gameplay, but it is kinda fun. The stealth capabilities are in my opinion, for the single player at least, highly overpowered, and I totally cheese the ability to destealth, fire off a single headshot, and then restealth with no penalty. Still, it's kinda fun, and I'm enjoying getting into a shooter again. The most impressive thing about it is without a doubt the graphics. Even on the lowest settings, it absolutely blows me away. When the game started, I didn't realise I was ingame - I thought I was looking at a pre-rendered cinematic until I actually had to do something, and I was like, "Wait, what now? Is this ingame? Holy shit!" True story.

Right, so enough about games. Back to TV series! I've just finished downloading the first episode of Game of Thrones and I absolutely cannot wait to get home tonight, get gym out of the way and come home and watch it. I'm going to make popcorn and everything. If I can look forward to the birth of my first child as much as I've been looking forward to the TV debut of this show I will consider myself a great parent. I'm seriously so psyched, and I suspect that if this show is a disappointment I will have to seriously re-evaluate my approach. On a somewhat related note, the rest of tonight will be spent playing Portal 2 with my homie Steyn. Busy night.

All in all, life is good. The move to JHB has been everything I had hoped for, and then some, with some surprises in ways I had not expected (let's just say there's substantial (and good) differences between Pretorian girls and girls from Jo'burg). Having a 5 minute commute is glorious, fireplaces are win, space is good, and a turntable was a fucking hipster but fun buy.

I'm headed off to the Drakensberg this coming weekend, and I'm looking forward to it. There may be pictures.

New skin for the old ceremony

The coolest things about weight loss are the things no one tells you to expect. I mean, everyone tells you how great it's going to be to fit into new, smaller clothes, or how healthy you're going to feel, but no one ever mentions that you're never going to struggle again to get out of your car in tiny Joburg parking bays. No one mentions that airline seats, while still pretty uncomfortable, no longer feel like you've been poured into them. No one gave me a heads up that finding things like hip bones would be so much fun.

Anyway, I should probably not talk about too much about the whole fitness thing. A couple of beers recently loosened a friend's tongue sufficiently for him to tell me off over the whole body transformation thing. Apparently, it's made me a complete douchenozzle, and his words were that while I've always been someone who's been completely arrogant (and I quote verbatim here) "very difficult to be friends with", apparently it's become infinitely worse since I lost the weight. This was understandably something of a shock to me, but I'm trying to not let it bother me. Truth is, you can make new friends. Also, I did a bit of digging, and it seems that this is a fairly common issue among people who lose a lot of weight. When you're the funny, joking fat guy in a group, that's your role. If you decide to change that role, things can go sour. Ce la vie.

Anyway, on to somewhat more lighthearted topics. I had a superb Valentine's Day, and an even better birthday. In the past, it's always been a massive downer to share my birthday with Valentine's Day, but this year it worked out pretty well. I ended up giving gifts to all the pretty girls I know, which went well (many of them gave me things back), and I got some absolutely amazing birthday presents, including two of the books I most wanted to read, namely, Machine of Death and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Thank you so much - you know who you are!

Speaking of zombies, I'm looking forward to Dead Island in the biggest way since watching the epic teaser below:

What an awesome video! I love how conflicted I was after watching it for the first time. The music, the composition, everything about it is brilliant. What a unique way of presenting the zombie apocalypse. In a genre that I thought was starting to feel stifled and unoriginal, they've found a hook and presented it well. I can't wait.

So much for everyone

It's been a fairly adventurous couple of days. Thursday and Friday last were the UCM Management Conference, which was a fantastic opportunity to discuss issues of strategic import and spend some time with colleagues I've grown very close to over the past three years. We did some workshops and discussions in the morning, followed by quad biking, archery and spa treatments in the afternoon.



The quad biking was particularly fun, and I managed to completely wreck my quad's suspension and blow out a tire. I just kept on going, which was probably foolish, considering a quad with a blown tire barely needs a whisper of a reason to flip, and I had to actually stop myself from flipping over on a few tight corners with a some well-placed footplants. Anyway, good fun, as was the archery. Looking at the photos, I suspect I was the only one who was more impressed with my archery form as opposed to how great I look. I was really chuffed - check the straight arm, straight fingers, eye lined up with the arrow. Even the mohawk is getting in on the target-alignment action!

The spa treatment was heavenly. Any reservations I may have had over the ability of a female masseuse to really adequately massage the knotted, twisted mass of muscles that is my back and shoulders were soon assuaged as my skilled masseuse employed fingers, the palm of her hand and eventually her elbow to knead every last ounce of stress and fatigue out of my tortured muscles. It was glorious.

Thursday night was raucous. There's no other words really to describe it, and it shall remain so.

Friday was rather emotional, driving back the three hours to Pretoria on my lonesome, feeling like death (I've drunk to excess perhaps twice in the past nine months) and completely emotionally drained. UCM has been a fantastic time in my life, and good for me in many, many ways. It deserves a more thorough examination and a more respectful retrospective, but I'll leave that for another time.

The focus for now must be on the days ahead.

I miss the rewarding gaze of a friend from my younger days...

There are some nights where you hit the gym and you lift weights until your muscles scream for mercy before dying a thousand deaths as each muscle fiber fails completely and absolutely. Nights where you get on the treadmill and run until you can feel your heartbeat in your temples and knees want to explode and your veins pump battery acid and you taste blood and bile in your mouth. Tonight was one of those nights.

They're good nights, because they afford you the opportunity to clear your mind of all distractions, until it's just you, the feeling of blood coursing through your veins and that inescapable feeling of being alive. What a cherished sensation it is, that feeling of existing, the feeling of having a body that works, and perhaps most amazingly, not thinking about anything in that marvelous, endorphin-induced post-gym high. My internal monologue is at times, maddeningly rapid-fire, like a machine gun, and annoyingly, seems to process ideas and concepts in parallel, which can be enormously confusing if you're not paying attention. Yes, sometimes I get confused by my own brain. Not a particularly flattering admission, but there it is.

Anyway, for once, I wasn't thinking of anything, but I was listening to Dan Mangan on the way home, and one of my favourite songs, Basket, happened to come on. I was singing along as one does, and somehow, out of the blue, with nothing in my mind as a result of the gym-induced emptiness, I thought about my grandfather. It may well have been the lyrics: I used to be so young / how did I get so old? / Won't you take my cane and hold my hand / you're holding on to all I have / just a basket full of memories / and I am losing more each day it seems.

For some reason, I just vividly pictured him, and all the time I spent with him as a young lad growing up. Since he passed away almost two years ago, I've thought about him maybe once or twice. The one occasion where I actually talked about him was on a game drive with some colleagues (I consider them friends though, as an aside) and somehow the topic got onto people who'd influenced us, and there are very few people in my life who've had as profound an influence him. I'm not sure why I felt like sharing that evening, perhaps it was the cold (for which I was woefully unprepared), or perhaps it was because there was very little game to see, or perhaps it was just the company. Either way, I shared some remembrances of him, and tonight, choked on the inexplicable suddenness of the emotions that came welling to the forefront out of nowhere, I felt compelled to share a few recollections of my grandfather.

I'll preface it by saying that I'm incredibly sentimental, often to my detriment. I compulsively collect souvenirs of people and places, little mementos that tie me to the most profound experiences in my life. My apartment is a mish-mash of trinkets and baubles, and each one has a story. It's all horribly soppy, but my most treasured memento is my grandfather's war photographs, which he left to me. My mom has them at the moment, as she's having them digitized, but they are one of my most cherished possessions. Having a piece of the past that's so real and so personal is a remarkable thing.

In my mind, I perceive time as a rope. A really thick rope that passes by overhead, just out of sight and out of mind. Mementos, trinkets, photographs and souvenirs are like pulling a single thread out of the rope of time, and anchoring that thread to the present. Any time you look at that item, hold it in your hand, think about it, it's like tracing that thread back to that rope and remembering that time. It's a reassuring mental image, at least for me.

Anyway, and as another side, thinking about my grandfather I couldn't help but notice that the people I most admire are the people who are the most flawed. Perhaps I'm just attracted to things that are broken, but I find that perfection is highly overrated in people - it's why Superman is flat, two-dimensional and boring and Batman is awesome and cool.

My grandfather was, as we all are, a flawed man, but him perhaps more than most. He was, by his own and others' admission, a very poor husband and father, and a deeply flawed man. I'll never understand the demons he went through, seeing men he considered brothers dying and fighting in the trenches, and he worked hard to hide those horrors from me, sheltering me from the harsh realities of death while indulging my insatiable appetite for war stories. I see that now - I lacked the cognitive and emotional intelligence as a youth to see sometimes how hard it was for him to talk about what he experienced in the war. It didn't matter to me then, because he was an awesome grandfather, and I think sometimes that part of it was a sense of regret that he spent so much of his earlier years drinking with his friends instead of spending time his family. His penance ultimately resulted in some of my fondest childhood memories. His eyes always lit up when I visited, and it was this memory of his face when he'd see me knocking at the door that struck me tonight while I was listening to the song.

He inspired so much in me, and nurtured so many of the character traits that shape my personality now. My love of English, of History, particularly the Second World War, which later expanded to a general appreciation for the vast tapestry that is the written and oral human experience. My love of literature, poetry and art all found their roots in the early trips he took me on to museums, art galleries and the time I spent literally at his feet as he recounted his war adventures, or extolled the virtues of Charles Dickens and his ability to construct marvelous tales, at times, quoting verbatim from his novels with an accuracy that I find uncanny to this day. We'd sit and debate for hours on the dichotomy of a particular phrase, or he'd lecture me on the etymology of some esoteric English term. As a bookish young lad, you could hardly ask for a more perfect mentor, teacher and companion.

I'm deeply rooted into my past, and the past of my parents and grandparents. I feel a strong sense of family, a strong sense of belonging to something grander than me. I can't really explain it, but it's reassuring sometimes to know, and I feel sorry for people who are so quick to throw off their familial bonds. To each his and her own, I guess.

We are young, we have years ahead.

So, blogging. It's been a while; let's hope it's like riding a bike. Actually, considering my only real serious accident was while riding a bike (I lost most of the skin on my back and had a nurse digging gravel out of my flesh for an entire evening), let's rather hope it goes somewhat better.

Why the compunction to start writing again? A fair question. I didn't really have any New Years resolutions - the only one I actually made was that I vowed to embrace my inner spirit of rugged hirsuteness, but having shaved my hair into a Mohawk and rocking a very manly beard a mere two weeks into January, I can pretty much tick that one off the list. The others are fairly pedestrian, and for the most part, are ones I've already accomplished. Lose weight? Cool, done. Eat better? Like a boss, for the last nine months. Go to gym? Yawn. Get ridiculously good looking? Tick (ooh, cocky, I know). Work really hard at working hard? Totally motivated to do so, soon at least, but not now.

A big part of it is that I've been spending a lot of time reading lately. Books, and blogs - a few in particular that are exceptionally good and have inspired me to write again. I did a lot of reading over December, and it was perhaps reading Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov that reminded me about why I love English so much, with all its twists and nonsensical rules, but also its sheer beauty, the poetry and grace of well-constructed prose. I could wax lyrical on how much I love good writing, but it'd be somewhat self-indulgent, don't you think? Anyway, I had a serious case of writing envy reading Lolita, and it carries its fair share of responsibility for my desire to jot my poorly constructed ramblings down somewhere. Oh, it really is an excellent read, and I highly recommend it.

There's something uniquely personal about reading though that I love - it makes me more introspective and reclusive. A lot of people find it hard to believe that I self-identify as an introvert, but I definitely am. Reading affords me the opportunity to be true to that, and as a result, I find myself becoming increasingly withdrawn, contemplative and generally chilled out while on a reading vibe, like I was over December. December was as a result entirely bourgeois and massively civilized; eating out with good friends (no raucous drinking), the occasional pool party, sitting in the garden reading, playing with the dog or training in the gym. And while I may not have a tan to show for it, it was easily the best December I've had.

So - the writing. I guess ultimately it's as a side effect of the copious amounts of reading I've been doing, the new music I've discovered of late (there'll be a blog about that as well, I'd wager), as well as the fact that I'm in a period of massive personal and professional change. Perhaps it's something of a coping mechanism as well.

Either way, expect a few more random thoughts in the weeks to come.

Cleaning house

I ended up deleting a whole lot of old posts on this blog, in case you were wondering where they went. I'll be focusing more on my travels here, which is fine, because that's where it was going anywhere - I only seem to blog when I'm abroad and want to share those experiences.

Ich bin ein Berliner

I can't really say it, in truth. Obviously not - I've only been here two weeks. But I've enormously enjoyed my time in Berlin, and spending this morning just walking around Friedrichshain I cannot help but revel in the distinct personality of the place. It's an enormously interesting city, Berlin, and I've definitely fallen in love with it. Perhaps it was just because this morning it was snowing - big heavy, fluffy flakes the size of 50c coins that cover the grimy streets and make everything seem so perfect, but it's truly an amazing place.

I am going to miss it very much, but I'm taking home with me some incredible memories. The view from the Reichstag, both out across the city and its many landmarks, and into the German parliament, a symbolic testament to the German people's desire for a more transparent governement. The view down Karl Marx Allee, and the majestic (if somewhat dire) rows of imposing Soviet-style apartments. Frankfurter Tor is beautiful as well - I am genuinely saddened that I did not get to see it in the summer. Walking through Babylon's Ishtar Gate, beautifully restored at the Pergamon Museum, or standing in awe in front of the Market Gate of Miletus. Walking along Brandenburg Gate, tracing the path of the Wall to Checkpoint Charlie (which is itself somewhat unremarkable) and reading up about the storied post-WW2 history. And perhaps one of the most fundamentally profound experiences I've ever had - Sachsenhausen concentration camp, a monument both to man's unbelievable barbarism and tenacity in the face of extermination.

It's been a most excellent trip.