Seeing South Africa

Tonight I saw the film ‘District 9’. It’s a “sci-fi thriller” that takes place in a contemporary Johannesburg hosting a refugee of aliens. Actual extraterrestrials, not the legal sort -- though the distinction is largely blurred as the film progresses. Anyway, I loved this film. It made me angry, embarrassed, regretful and lonely depending on the scene. Mostly, the film provoked an (I swear, this pun isn’t intentional) alienation: I miss South Africa despite never setting foot upon its soil or the soil of its mother continent. The characters’ strong English South African dialect, the Afrikaans names and phrases peppered into the dialogue (“tot siens, tot siens!”), the clicking of the Xhosa and Zulu speakers mixed with the clicking of the aliens. Where is Nico DeVilliers, I wondered? Where in Europe is the tall Afrikaner musician? Alles van die beste, my vriend.

Tonight I brought the most recent edition of Harpers to read. Ah, South Africa you’re there as well! A new short story by J.M. Coetzee; another essay from Breyten Breytenbach. Coetzee’s story makes me laugh -- the old, crazy man. When is your next novel? Will it be set in South Africa? I never finished reading ‘Slow Man,’ because it bored me to death. Can you maybe write -- for me -- another Elizabeth Costello? Breyten, I liked your March 2009 essay “Obamandela” so much that I felt a double thrill when the Very Old Man’s foundation nearly accused you of slander. You won’t mind, you terrifyingly smart ex-convict, that I use your ‘seven months pregnant’ joke. Ek kan, ja?. Mooi bly.

I miss South Africa, terribly. Ek nie kom van Suid-Afrika af. Ek leer die literatuur Suid-Afrikaanse in Amerika. Mooi bly.

Tot siens, tot siens!

Addicted to nuts

I cannot stop eating. I cannot stop eating the almond/pecan concoction made by the True North snack company. This is not a shill. These nutty snacks come in adorable squares. Five of the squares is a single serving. Each day at the office I eat at least two servings. I lock the drawer in which they reside to prevent over-eating. They’re fucking addictive. Healthy and delicious? Hell, yes! Overdoing it? Shit, please no. I’ve never smoked or freebased heroin but I am reasonably sure that these nutty squares compete with those things in terms of a person absolutely needing to have it in their bodies.

A colleague had a bag of these in a box during a recent office move. I saw them, was very hungry, and sneaked out a few cubes. Immediately hooked, I snagged a handful, leaving behind an apologetic note and a request for purchasing information. Sorry for taking your snacks and where can I buy my own? She noticed a week later, agreeing to pick up two bags for me when she next went to Sam’s Club. A beautiful arrangement. I get delicious snacks while avoiding the horrible breathing Hell mouth of Sam’s Club. Everybody wins! I’m reminded that I’ve yet to reimburse her for the bags. I win!

Comparisons

I performed some perfunctory, grossly unscientific research into which foods are ‘fat burners.’ Supposedly, some foods are the metabolic versions of Devastator: individually they do exceedingly little but together they form a piss-your-pants terrifying juggernaut of fat annihilation. I plopped the words “foods that burn fat” into Google, which kicked back some depressing results: lots of generic, bland websites with loudly obvious URLS: www.burn-fat-now.com, www.e-diets.com and others. These domain names are designed not to promote education amongst the web-browsing public but, rather, to generate revenue for the site owners and their greasy-slick revenue-mongering advertisers. Some “scientifically proven” weight loss pill that the Norwegian population uses since 1930 to be beautiful; a vaguely Latin or Chinese berry mixture that “melts” one’s stubborn belly fat. Anyway, the sites did contain lists of food somewhere amongst the spam (no pun intended). The lists were not terribly surprising in their content. What surprised me was the scant overlap amongst them. It seems odd that sites culled together by Google’s search algorithm for this admittedly un-precise criteria had so little in common. Here’s a list of the foods the sites suggested burn away body fat, presented in no particular order: beets, Brussel sprouts, cabbage, carrots, cherries, orange-flesh melons, whole grains including oats, berries, asparagus, soybeans, apples, eggs, low-fat milk and cheese, beans, cayenne pepper, cinnamon, ginger, citrus, bananas, and garlic. The three items that made the list which surprised are the spices. Cayenne pepper? Look. I know that correlation is not causation but nowhere in my humbly huge breadth of experience is there a link to svelte bodies and Cajun cooking. Ditto for cinnamon (Cinnabon, anyone?). Ginger seems fine (in the interest of disclosure, I ate ginger stir-fry vegetables for lunch today. Please support Spice of Thai restaurant by purchasing their delicious foodstuffs. Tell Sue that Don sent you. She will not give a discount for any reason, so do not try). Anyway, the list is obvious. Eat fruit and vegetables, say school lunch posters and middle-upper class moms everywhere. Adhering to eating only the foods on this list requires one to be vegetarian, so, ahem, shouldn’t I be as thick as a toothpick? (now, in the interest of fairness, one site did mention lean meat but with the caveat that lean meat is expensive and likely outside the budgets of most people.) What interests me is the few items which overlapped from site to site: whole grains / oatmeal, 1% milk, apples, berries and soybeans.

I eat these by quantity of buckets. Good for me!