The Misinterpretation of Dreams

I've begun to wonder about the signals that I am sending out, to the opposite sex in particular. It seems that I always seem to attract the guy who has a girlfriend, but wouldn't mind a good screw! Now I do understand that that type of guy probably goes around sniffing at anything with a hole, but this is just happening to me a little too often! So maybe the problem is with me.

Now I don't consider myself to be promiscuous and I don't think that I dress provocatively. I don't think that I'm sending out signals saying that I'm easy. But maybe I'm sending out signals saying that I'm desperate? Or am I signaling that I don't need a man for anything other than physical satisfaction, because the rest I can do for myself?!
I'm not sure what it is, but this booty call thing is becoming a little bit more than a coincidence, it's threatening to turn into a pattern. And no, I have not yet become a booty call girl (one who takes her booty over to the man's place when he calls, when his girlfriend is out of town) but I can't help wondering if there's something I'm doing that I can change, in order to deter this kind of man! Is there a specifically coloured ribbon to wear on my lapel which can do the trick? Or maybe I should have a t-shirt printed: I AIN'T NO BOOTY CALL GIRL!

Now, first I must excuse myself for not blogging for a while! I was having some trouble loading the page! Not sure if it's because of my bush internet connection or a web page error.

Nevertheless, I have been contemplating friendship with the opposite sex lately. Is this really possible? Now this obviously doesn't apply when referring to gay friends, because I am not in the least bit attracted to any of my gay guy friends and I am sure there are plenty of women who have very good friendships with gay guys. (Is the opposite true? Can guys have really good friendships with gay women? Or do they just fantasize about a threesome?)
I'm also not talking about your best friend's partner, because most sane people are not attracted to their best friend's partner. I can admit to at times being somewhat envious of my best friend's partner/relationship, but that is outweighed by the admiration that I have for them and I am never in the least bit attracted to her partner. I see him more or less as an extension of her. It seems that most guys usually feel somewhat protective of their good friends' partners especially in the friend's absence.

But what about a guy you meet who is not connected to you, or only remotely connected, and you find that you get on quite well, conversation is easy and he's not bad on the eye? Is it possible to then have a completely platonic relationship with this person even though you spend a significant amount of time together? And let's say you're both unattached.

Personally, I know that I do have platonic guy friends. I actually lived with a great guy for a few years and there was absolutely no attraction between us, and he could even cook! We're still friends now, but for most of the time that we lived together either one of us was usually in a relationship. What if that had not been the case? Would we have been able to remain just friends despite spending so much time together and getting to know each other so intimately that we could speak to each other while one lay in the bath and the other sat on the bathroom floor?
And no, I'm not regretting not having more than a friendship with him, because friendship is one of the most valuable things you could ever find. I'm just wondering: Are heterosexuals really capable of having completely platonic girl/guy friendships? Without even the tiniest hint of sparks between them?

There are so many different kinds of love and obviously the English language does not do it justice with just the word love to describe all those different kinds of love. But here, I'm talking about that non-platonic kind of love, romantic love. Most of us want to find one special person to share it with.

I think there are different kinds of romantic love too and everyone experiences romantic love differently and everyone has a different idea of what romantic love should be.
The love I had/have for my ex boyfriend was/is the head over heels kind. Where everything is just this mad tumbling rolling out of control rush of emotions. I used to think that I just loved him so much that there was nothing I was unwilling to do for him. And yes, I saw some of his faults and there were things that I didn't like, but I thought that "love is stronger than that" and"love is all you need" and a mountain of other myths that fairytales lead us to believe. But as it turned out, despite all the love we had/have for each other, it just couldn't fill all the gaps and smooth over all the imperfections. It just was not strong enough glue to hold us together.

So what kind of love is the right kind? Is it intellectual love? A relationship where you can say: I am with so and so because of 1,2 and 3. We are good for each other because we complement each other in such and such a way. ??
Is love at first sight the right kind of love? Where you lay eyes on a person for the first time and think you know beyond a shadow of doubt that you're meant to spend the rest of your lives together? (As I'm sure is obvious from the wording, I don't have much faith in this kind of love. I think it's based on physical attraction, which can fade.)

What kind of love is going to stand the test of time and endure through all kinds of hardships? In fact, are there actually any guarantees in love?

After watching Special Assignment the other night, the show was about young girls and their sugar daddies, I've been wondering about the unwritten Laws of Attraction. What are we allowed and not allowed to find attractive in a potential mate?

In the past, most marriages were arranged with money and status in mind. In fact, even today in cultures where marriages are still arranged, these are two very important factors. But, in modern society, the term "gold digger" is not exactly complementary. Yet many men flaunt what they have in an attempt to attract a mate. So, is a woman not allowed to be attracted to a man because she perceives that he will be able to provide for her material needs?

Then there is physical attraction. In this regard much more pressure seems to be placed on women, to be physically appealing in order to attract a mate. But most women don't want to be seen just as sexual objects. So if a woman dresses alluringly, can she be disappointed if a man can't see past her physical beauty?

I'm not sure what's right and wrong, I think: To each man his own. I do believe that you will get exactly what you're looking for. If the most important quality you're looking for in a mate is physical beauty or material riches, you're probably going to find that, but you're not guaranteed anything else. You might end up with the richest guy you've ever met, but you're not guaranteed that he will be good to you.

I thought I knew what I wanted, but now I think I know better what I don't want.
First and foremost I don't want a stupid man. What the hell is there to talk about with a stupid man?
I don't need a man to support me, but I also don't want to have to support a man all my life! Maybe I'm just not a modern enough woman.
And last but not least, I don't want to have to change a man! If I don't like him the way I find him, then he's not for me. No smoothing the rough edges for me, thank you very much!
Am I asking for too much?

I realise that during my past relationship I became a bad person, I behaved in ways I never thought I would. Did things I didn't believe I was capable of. My ex boyfriend told me that I didn't remain the person he fell in love with, and quite honestly the opposite is true too. By the end of the relationship he was not the same guy I fell in love with in the beginning. Now, I can't help wondering why that is.
Is it an inevitable change that comes about, and that would come about, whether we were together or not? Is it because we were bad for each other? Or is it that I really was a bad person all along and just hid it really well, until I got comfortable, and then I let it all hang loose? It could be that we're all capable of doing bad things, and being good is a choice we have to make all the time. Maybe I just got too distracted and caught up in the whole spin of things and forgot to make the right choices everyday. And the little choices that we make everyday are the ones that count the most.

Now I'm a Durban girl, but after living in the Western Cape for two years, I decided that I didn't like Durban all that much. However; over this past weekend I saw Durban anew! I've decided that there are some things I still love about Durban.

I think it could be that I was viewing everything from a different perspective, or it could be that living the rural life has just made me gagga for any city. But having breakfast alone on Saturday morning and watching everything go by, this is what I thought:
Durban is the only place where on a Saturday morning in July (the middle of winter) the sun is shining brightly and the beach is FULL of activity. I sat at a window seat at a little restaurant along the beachfront called The Deck and watched the guys playing volley ball, the ricksha men looking for and finding customers, the Muslims dressed in full attire wading in the shallow water, a black boy creating a sand sculpture of Ganesh!!, couples cycling past on their two seater bicycles and of course the surfers with their sculpted bodies making art on the waves. I also caught a glimpse of something slightly inappropriate: a twenty-something year old girl showering topless at one of the cold water showers meant for getting rid of the sand and salt water! But no one batted an eyelid, everyone just went on by as if it was completely normal. I realised that maybe Durban wasn't as conservative as I sometimes think. Or maybe it's because toplessness is actually traditional attire for Zulu women, so maybe that's why it's not thought of as over exposure on a Saturday morning on the beach?!
I also realised that I don't have any pictures of Durban, because the camera only tends to come out when I'm on holiday in new places and Durban has never been a new place to me. So on Saturday morning I pulled out my camera and decided to get some pictures of Durban. I wish I knew how to post pictures to my blog so I could share them!

All in all, I came back to the sticks, from my weekend in Durban, feeling refreshed. A change is as good as a holiday, even if the change is just the way you look at something!

As you all know, I watch Oprah. Today she had a man on called Harville Hendrix. He is a psychologist who specialises in couples therapy. He has come up with a form of couples therapy called Imago Relationship Therapy. This form of therapy is founded on the theory that we are inadvertently attracted to a person who is basically like our parents. We are attracted to this person because they're supposed to heal the wounds inflicted on us by our parents. The reason that relationships don't work out is because we are unable to succeed in this healing process. Part of the Imago theory states: ...we marry for the purpose of healing and finishing the unfinished childhood business.

How depressing is that??!! I refuse to accept that. I will not be a part of proving that theory.

A good friend and I were having a similar discussion about the scars that parents leave on us, and we came to the conclusion that in our parents' day they had married and had children before they had time to really find out who they were and to heal the scars left on them by their parents. So they just passed the baggage and hurt on to us. Not purposefully or anything, but it's just the way it was. In their case Harville Hendrix may be right. But I, for one, refuse to accept this fate for myself. I refuse to accept that my most significant relationship needs to be a constant struggle. Is it not possible for us to recognise the childhood issues we carry with us and try to work through them on our own, in order to ensure that we can have happy and healthy relationships and marriages in the future, which can produce minimally scarred children? I'm not saying that there will come a day when we are miraculously healed of all the hurt caused to us in the past, I believe that it's a constant work in progress. But I certainly do not want to go into a relationship with anyone, expecting them to heal me, to make all the wrongs in my past right. Do we have a choice in the matter? Or is who we're attracted to, and end up with, something we don't really have control over?

I refuse to accept the Harville Hendrix theory in my life. I would rather die alone than burden one person with the task of fixing me. If I can't fix myself, how can I expect someone else to do it for me? It's not fair to go into a relationship knowing you're a broken person looking for a fix.
But what if we really don't have a choice in the matter? What if we may think we're fixed; only to find, as we continue in the relationship, that we have indeed been drawn to a person just like our parents because of some subconscious need for fulfillment and resolution of unfinished childhood business?

A sure sign that I'm getting old, is that I don't go around purposefully making controversial statements anymore!
This change has come about so quickly! Just last year I started a group on Facebook called: Kaffir- it's not a colour it's a state of mind. I basically started it to get people thinking and talking and to shock a few people. But, recently I've found that I don't make controversial statements anymore! I can't remember when was the last time I said anything that raised some eyebrows!
Now don't get me wrong, I haven't become a coward or succumbed to popular belief, but I just find that I'm not voicing my opinion quite as often.

I do still believe that white trash is the worst trash. This is a breed of people, who were sitting in the gravy on the train for the past century or more, saying: "Ek gaan nou nou ietsie eet. Ek wil net eers gou die laaste bottel brandewyn gou klaarmaak!"
They woke up with a shock as they were kicked off the train and landed on their butts on the wrong side of the railway tracks to find: "Die F@#KEN kaffirs eet nou my gravy!!"

I do believe that JZ did it and then took a shower! But what can we expect from an uneducated ex-con? I think Bob has neurosyphillis; as did Napolean, Hitler and many other mad world leaders. I do find it amazing how these crazy men manage to rally so much support! It just shows how desperate people are for someone to lead them, someone to look up to.

I believe, inspired by a friend, that it should be necessary for us to have licences in order to have children. Women should be born barren and then have to take conceptive pills, instead of the other way around. They should only be allowed to obtain this pill after they have passed numerous exams in order to obtain a child bearing licence. We need licences for guns, licences to drive motor vehicles and even licences for TVs! Isn't child rearing way more important than any of those? And yes, financial stability should be one of the considered criteria on the child bearing licence application form. I've seen way too many children die of malnutrition and related complications. Do you ever wonder what the world would be like if there were less people on it? Would poverty be a thing of the past? If those below average intelligence were not allowed to reproduce, would we have less crime, less socioeconomic problems? If children were brought up properly, would our jails be empty?

Success is one thing most people want, but what exactly is it? We're all chasing it, but how do we actually know when we have it? I think success is something different to different people and at different stages in life.
A 6 year old might feel successful after winning at a game of marbles. (Do 6 year olds still play marbles, or have they never even heard of that game? Playstation vs marbles, I'm sure there's no competition!)
At present I'm feeling successful, because I managed to get 6 hours sleep during my 24 hour call. (Even though it actually had nothing to do with me. I can't choose how much sleep I get on call. It's all up to the patients.)

Most of society seems to equate money with success. Forbes has lists of Top 20 earners in numerous categories, and it seems that making it onto that list is the epitomy of success. The eternal question is: can money make you happy?

I really can't answer that question. I've never been around anyone who even comes near to making it onto the Forbes list and it's definitely not one of my goals. It seems though, that for all the money that people make, they still can't escape some common human problems. No money in the world can make icecream the end product of the digestive system.

The problem is that these ridiculously rich people are glorified. We're constantly told that these are our heroes. This is what we need to aspire to. If we're not ridiculously rich, we're not successful. This is just way too much pressure for me. If I spend every minute of my life trying to make as much money as I can, will I ever actually enjoy that money or will die before I get the chance? Will I be happy? Will I even feel successful?

Now don't get me wrong, money is not a bad thing. I've said before, that although money can't buy you love or happiness, you can't actually be happy if you're starving or can't afford good healthcare when you're ill. Once again, it's about balance. There's a difference between healthy ambition and greed.

For me, I think I will feel successful when I can be satisfied with what I have, and stop comparing myself to other people. Comparison is a difficult pitfall to avoid. It's method of measurement and can be a source of great dissatisfaction.
Until I have achieved my great success, I will have to be satisfied with the sense of accomplishment I get from achieving smaller goals: sleeping well, saving money every month, eating healthy, exercising now and then, being able to go on holiday every so often. These things make me feel happy, even if my bank balance has fewer numbers than the letters in SUCCESS.

As mentioned before, being newly single, I seem to find myself at home on the couch on a Friday night more often. The fact that our hospital has only 4 doctors for the month of July is not helping either! I'm on call so often, that when I'm not on call, I'm too tired to do anything else but sit on the couch!

I've decided that the characters I dislike most on TV are the doctors! Because:

1. They're always perfectly dressed with perfect make up on even after a 48 hour shift!
   
2. They send patients for MRIs (a high tech investigation, not readily available in the average South African hospital) when they present with a one day history of uncomplicated headache!
3. They always know what to say to patients and their family! I never know what to say.
   

• I don't know what to say to the 23 year old girl who's pregnant with her first child and has HIV. She's come to see me because her CD4 count is 79* and she needs to start antiretrovirals (ARVs). She hardly understands what's going on and why I've ordered an FBC, U&E and LFT** on her. She's tired, she's been at the hospital all day. She gets her blood results after 16h00 and I see that her Hb is 6.7^. I tell her I can't prescribe the ARVs now, she has to stay at the hospital overnight and in the morning she will have to give sputum to test for TB and do a CXR^^. It can't be done now, because it's after 16h00 and the Xray department and lab are closed. She's come to the hospital alone, she's waited all day and she still hasn't gotten what she came for. She just starts crying. I have no idea what to say to her! I just sit there and look at her and watch her crying for a while. I pass her a tissue and tell her she can wash her face at the basin. And I watch her crying some more. I can hear the other people outside the door in the queue, complaining about how long they've been waiting.
• I don't know what to say to the man who wants to kill himself because he found his fiance with another man. He works in the hospital mortuary and he thinks that death is better than his life right now. He is the sole breadwinner in his family, meaning he has to support his mother and alcoholic father and other siblings besides his own children and cheating fiance. She's been admitted to hospital because she attempted suicide, he has to pay for her care at a private institution! He can't afford private care for himself, he's come to me for help.
• I have no clue what to tell the old lady who comes to me because she's having bad dreams. She think it's her treatment she's been taking, she says the dreams started when she started taking the pills. None of the medication she's on is known to cause bad dreams, at least not according to the South African Medicines Formulary.
• I don't know what to say to the 8 year old who's been raped by her brother.
• I don't know what to say to the 6 year old girl who's got HIV and TB, she's been on treatment for the TB for the last 3 months but it's still not getting better. She now has a hole in her neck draining pus (for the medics: a draining sinus from her TB infected lymph node) and she weighs around the same as a 2 year old. She's on antiretrovirals for about a month, but her baseline CD4 count was 3,3%*! She's not really eating anything and everytime anyone who works in the hospital comes close to her bed she says: I want to go home, please can I go home! Maybe it would actually be better for her to go home to die.

I have no idea what I could tell all of these people that would help to make it better. I am struggling to sort out my own life, what qualifies me to be able to fix their lives?

Last night, however; I actually discovered something that I do like on TV: James Bond!
Now, I've never been much of a Bond fan, I find the action genre of movies mentally unstimulating and somewhat far-fetched. I think I've watched 1 of the newer Bond movies and it definitely didn't excite me. But being at home on a Friday night and all that, I watched Dr No and part of From Russia With Love.
To my surprise, I found that the idea of what constitutes a sexy woman has DEFINITELY changed over the years. The Bond girls had curves! Bond bumps into a girl called Honey Ryder on the beach in Jamaica, she's wearing a bikini and she has meat on her bones. I definitely thought she was attractive, and Bond seemed to think so too.
I think the problem is, that these days the entertainment and fashion industry is run mainly by homosexual males and women with low self esteem!% Because I'm sure the majority of straight men don't find the stick insect, Calista Flockhart look-alike, breath takingly attractive, but it's the image we're seeing and being told to aspire to.

I've decided that I like the old James Bond movies! The women were gorgeous and don't look like they've got drug habits, the fashion is almost exactly the same as what's in magazines now just 2 to 4 sizes larger, and the young Sean Connery is not at all bad to look at!



*CD4 cells are a type of white blood cells in the body important in fighting off disease. In HIV these cells are depleted. In South Africa the criteria for starting antiretrovirals is having a CD4 count of less than 200 or stage 3 or 4 HIV. A healthy person has a CD4 count of above 500. In children we use a percentage instead of an absolute value; children 1 year and below with a CD4 below 25% should start on ARVs, children from 1 to 12 years with a CD4 below 20% should start on ARVs or any child with Stage 2 disease or worse.
**Blood tests: FBC- full blood count, counts the red and white blood cells and platelets
U&E- urea and electrolytes, an indicator of kidney function
LFT- liver function test, self explanatory
^Hb- haemoglobin, part of the FBC, it's often low in HIV positive patients, but if it's below 8, we have to look actively for TB before starting antiretrovirals. In healthy people the Hb is always above 10.
^^CXR- chest xray
%This is obviously a general statement, I have nothing against homosexuals and I know some people in the fashion industry who don't have low self esteem!