Music: June 2008 Archives

Nkosi, sikeleli Afrika., or in Shona, Ishe Komborera Afrika.

Concerts

On Wednesday I'm going to see R.E.M. I had Radiohead tickets because R.E.M was sold out, but thanks to marktplaats and some good luck I swapped! Funny thing, the guy that phoned me to swap had such a young voice that I thought he was a teenager. I was really expecting the door to be opened by someone's mum, but no, it was a middle-aged man. It goes with the article I read recently about how the only people who can afford to go to concerts are the middle-aged. Ehm. That says a lot about me I know.

On Saturday I checked my email early enough and got tickets for Amy McDonald (I missed her last time she was in Amsterdam) and also for Jason Mraz. A few weeks ago I got tickets for Paul Weller. So that's four! I love living in the Netherlands, it's a musical playground.

Personal Manifestos

I read on a motivational website the other day about making your own personal manifesto. Despite sounding all Chairman Mao, a personal manifesto seems like a really good idea. What are you really after? What do you want? What are your primary goals in life?

The idea is to define your goals in one sentence which you can repeat to yourself as a kind of mantra or a reminder of why you're doing thing you're doing when it's bogging you down. Or maybe just to define to yourself what you really want. If you ask most people what their goals are, they'll have some longwinded explanation (after looking away embarrassedly) about what they think they want. The key is taking that longwinded explanation, trimming all the bullshit away and leaving just the core. I'm still working on my manifesto, but I'd love to know if any of you have one.

Being good-enough

I'm struggling with the concept of not being a 'perfect' mom anymore. My kids are in daycare for 102 hours a month now. It's 102 hours that they used to be with me, albeit while we were at football, the gym, tennis lessons, at home. I doubt if much of the 102 hours was actual one on one time with me, but still, I was there. Now I'm not there at all during those 102 hours and I'm not there during the time they're asleep at night. 

Perhaps it's time to revisit the concepts of Donald Winnicott's Good-Enough Mother. When I was in psychotherapy back in the mid-90s and agonising about being a 'bad parent' my psychiatrist presented me with Winnicott's work (The Child, The Family and the Outside World) as well as Alice Miller's Drama of Being a Child. I read through them and although I was able to analyse and rationalise the contents to myself I was never able to apply the concepts to my own life. Perhaps now that I'm older I'll be able to apply those concepts more effectively.

This ties in a bit to some of the things that my post on The Reader made me think about. The futility of making choices for other people and the inability I have to let go and allow those choices to happen. There's nothing harder sometimes than standing back and letting things take their course.

White and African

Still reading Blood River and I'm about half way through now. The immense grief I felt for Africa at the beginning of the book has abated a little, but I find that some passages really shriek at me. Like the one I read about how the Congo massacres in the 1960s run a black vein of fear through every white African, because we've heard about it from when we were little and it pulls on the 'them and us' divide that is instilled in us from birth.

When I was about 9 or 10 our white neighbours were held at gun point by black rebels in their house. The man was raped and tortured to death while the wife and their three kids cowered in a bathroom which was inaccesible from outside. They heard him screaming all night until he finally died at about 5 am. In the morning the party-line telephone rang and the news filtered slowly from farm to farm until finally it got to us. The first thing my mom said, standing in the passage in her candlewick dressing gown, tears streaming down her face, was 'my god, it's getting to be like the Congo here'.

Tim Butcher is quite astute in his observations about white Africans sometimes.

• I bought an epilator. It's a nice thing, once you get over the fact that instead of the 5 minutes in the shower doing your legs that it used to take you, it now takes half an hour to achieve the same result. And you end up with this ghastly uber-prickle situation whenever you get goosebumps. Nasty!
  
  
• I just paid my daycare bills all the way back to October. They hadn't billed me yet so I got a bill for 2600 euros in one go. Ouch. More shocking than the epilator.
  
  
• I had my hair cut short at my local hairdresser. This is the kind of hairdresser where you can't make an appointment but you have to wait in the queue. It cost 22 euros versus 60 at the middle-aged-lady hairdresser I went to before who cut my hair all wrong. The fancy-pants hairdresser I went to in Amsterdam was 150 euros and this haircut is better than any I had from either. I had to wait 2 hours for a place but still - score!
  
  
• When I was in the hairdressers one of the daycare workers came in. This is someone I've known for almost 6 years, since Seb started at pre-school here. She'd been fine all along until about a year and a half ago when I noticed that she was behaving oddly. Subsequently she started working at the daycare that the kids are at now and a few weeks ago I noticed that she was drunk when I picked up the kids. I reported it to the owner, and she was placed on office duty, away from the kids, and was supposedly getting some help. On Saturday when I saw her she was absolutely shit-faced.
  
  So, what to do now? Tell the owner of the daycare? Keep quiet? This is a difficult situation for me because part of me is sorry for her and part of me is still the little girl that had to deal with alcohol issues growing up.
  
  
• On Thursday I went to see Martha Wainwright in concert at Paradiso. It was good, but I was tired and she sort of went on and on a bit in some of the songs.
  
  Con: the going on and on.
  Pro: she looks like she's having a kicker orgasm during some of the songs. Go Martha.
  
  
• The next concert I have tickets for is Radiohead on 1 July. I'm considering Alanis on 13 June, but listening to some of the new songs I'm not so sure... some of them sound a bit nasty? Moratorium is ok. Here's a preview clip for the whole album. The thing about Alanis is that she makes me wonder if I'll ever grow up? I mean, it doesn't look like she has.
  
  
• It's almost the end of another school year. The kids finish school on the 27th June and then go into daycare for the summer. I'll be working mornings only while I recover from my neck injury, but they'll still be at daycare the majority of the time to allow me to rest. After the summer Joe goes to Group 3 and Seb to Group 6.
  
  They don't know about the divorce yet. They'll be going to a workshop in the summer where they'll be with other kids in the same situation and be encouraged to work through their feelings. I hope when we tell them that they'll be able to adjust quickly to their new situation and understand that they actually have more time with each of their parents, separately.
  
  
• Watched Atonement this weekend. Sad, but James McAvoy is a joy to behold. He was a joy in Shameless too. Chloe thinks so too.
  
  
• My new car is a Hyundai Getz 2005 model. It looks like this one. Same colour, just with a sunroof too. Nice huh? I'll try not to crash this one!
  
  
• Comments are still broken. They were never really intuitive with this version of Movable Type and now they're absolutely broken. Sorry! One day maybe I'll get around to fixing them. I've tried re-enabling comments but nothing works. Until then, you can mail me. Link in the sidebar.