Life lessons from doge

Today I took my dog to the vet to be spayed, and learned a valuable life lesson about the Internet.

Most important things first: Kaori is home and running around as if absolutely nothing happened, so that's cool. She's a little mini tank, NOTHING bothers her, she's like the honey badger. 

Yeah OK we get it, I hear you saying, you think your dog is so great. Well, I'll have you know, my dog is not just great, she's the greatest. She is objectively the best dog in the world. Sorry not sorry, joking not joking. The vet thinks so too. I love my vet because he loves my dog. Mostly because she stoically ignores all injections and similar indignities rather than trying to murder him, but also because she's a seriously beautiful dog. He was telling me, when I picked her up this afternoon, that "all" (direct quote), I repeat, all the people who came in to fetch their pets from the recovery area were staring at her. Because she's the best dog in the world. All right, I'll stop bragging and get to the point. They were looking at her and saying "That's a beautiful dog... what is it?"

That's also what the vet said when he first met her. And both the vet's receptionists. And the people in the waiting room. And I'm really used to it, because wherever I go with her we get the same reaction: that's a beautiful dog. What is it? And because my dog is the best dog in the world I never get tired of saying, she's a Shiba Inu. S.H.I.B.A. New word. I.N.U. It's a Japanese breed. Inu means dog. You can just call it a shiba. No, she doesn't mind the heat at all, she has a long nose. Yes, her fur is really soft. No, it wouldn't be a good idea to shave her. I LIKE people asking the same questions and making the same comments because hey, I've got an unusual dog, I chose to get an unusual dog, I love my dog, and I enjoy talking to people about her. 

I'm really used to people asking me what she is - there have been maybe two people ever who have seen her and said "is that a Shiba Inu"? - but it was only today that it actually struck me: No one knows what she is. Not one of these people in the vet's office, at the farmer's market, in the physical world I inhabit, has come up to me and "Doge! Shibe! Shiba Inu Puppy Cam! That Jezebel article saying no one should get a Shiba ever!"

Real life is not the Internet. 

Wow  

                                such profound

     so revelation

I am being a hundred per cent serious here. What I mean is not that the human interaction that occurs on the Internet is not real - it is absolutely real. And I don't mean that my online friends aren't my real friends, they are. What I mean is that I have had it brought home to me, profoundly and through the medium of Doge, that the generalised other that I have been living with lately and which has caused me a great deal of pain, is simply not representative of the people I interact with every day (online or in the physical world). And that has made me breathe one great big sigh of relief.

The Generalised Other (also known as Everybody) is a concept that I came across reading Martha Beck. There's a decently comprehensive article on the idea here. The short version is: My - and your - idea of what "everybody" thinks (and especially what they think of us) is an artificial construct that each of us forms from the stated opinions of only a very few actual people or groups - maybe about 5 or 6. My Everybody, for the last while, has been "everybody on the Internet", which means a composite of the most vocal denizens of the corners of the Internet that I choose to frequent, and this Everybody is seriously pissed off at me. 

She doesn't like me because I'm privileged (even though she falls into exactly the same group that I do). She's an extremely accomplished scientist who thinks I'm an idiot and a bad feminist for not going into an STEM field, a loser for being an artist, and a terrible oppressor for using the word "idiot". She thinks I'm rather stupid to believe in God, though she doesn't really berate me for it too often. She does berate me for having bought a dog from a breeder, because good people only have rescue dogs. She also side-eyes me for having a Japanese breed - she thinks that might just constitute cultural appropriation although she has conceded it's a borderline case. She thinks pretty much everything else in my life constitutes cultural appropriation. She lives in America. She really, really does not like me. She thinks my very existence is illegitimate and that the world would be a lot better off if I were to simply disappear. She thinks I should probably become a vegan. She says that my friends and co-workers are figments of my imagination, I am making them up, or perhaps I have intimidated them into pretending to think I am an acceptable human being. She looks exactly like me. She sadly wonders why I do not ask every new acquaintance their preferred pronouns before entering into a conversation. She thinks that maybe it is because I just don't care. 

I care, I care so much, and that's why she lives in my head, telling me that I'm a bad, bad person. Not all the time, but some of the time, my Generalised Internet Other makes my life a misery. I know very well that her opinions are not held by the majority of actual human beings. I know that I have invented her out of a combination of what I'm afraid people are thinking of me, not what they actually think of me. 

I also know that there are real people out there who do actually subscribe to those opinions. My boss, for instance, definitely thinks I should be a vegan. My sister thinks people shouldn't keep any exotic pets, like fish, and I do. But they don't yell at me, or "call me out" or think I'm an all-round rotten human being. They're just people. We have differences of opinion, and that's OK. 

What I learned today from my dog's hysterectomy is this: No one in the vet's office knows what Doge is. My co-workers do not know that I should not be wearing the geometric pattern on my T-shirt. The people I meet at an art opening do not know that I should be asking them their preferred pronouns. My husband does not know that we should never sleep together when one of us has been drinking alcohol, even though we are married - and I'm never going to tell him, either. And if they don't know these things, they are not judging me according to them. Real life is not the Internet. 

When I walk down the road with Kaori people say 

"That's such a beautiful dog, what is it?"

They don't say 

"Doge! Shiba Inu Puppy-Cam!"

They don't say

"I read a Jezebel article saying that no one should get a Shiba"

They don't say 

"You are bad for buying and not adopting"

They don't say

"You are culturally appropriating from Japan, you are a racist"

They don't say

"I don't like you and you are a bad person"

They don't say 

"Be grateful for the callout"

I have a Shiba Inu. She's the best dog in the world. I bought her from a breeder because I wanted a Shiba Inu and not any other dog. She's a Japanese breed of dog and I named her "Kaori" which means "perfume" or "smell" in Japanese. That's funny because she looks like a fox and foxes are smelly, but I chose the name mostly because it sounds nice. I don't speak Japanese. I am not Japanese, but I have a purebred Shiba Inu named Kaori, and she is the best dog in the world, and I am not ashamed. 

Public service announcement

Interested in archaeology? Don't miss your chance!

I'm so excited to show you this - 13-year old me would have been bouncing off the ceiling! Don't-ask-how-old me is still pretty darn excited, and is going to be in charge of one of the trenches.

And you absolutely don't need to be in high school. This course was originally targeted at high school learners - and is thus suitable for absolute beginners - but we've opened it up to anyone who's interested. The project is coming up soon, so get in contact with them and book your place. You do (naturally; unfortunately) have to pay - but it's only R1500 for the full, 7 day course including 5 days of fieldwork.



Interestingly enough, this fort is on a funny little hill that's visible from my house, and I have always, as long as I can remember, wondered what was there. I even had fantasies about being able to fly and flying over the hill to see it. (Somehow the idea of driving there never crossed my mind.) It's also a closed nature reserve, so this is your only chance of seeing the Mystery Hill in person.

So if you want to take part in a serious dig (and meet your favourite blogger ;D), don't hesitate!

Guest post on the BAASA blog

I wrote a guest post on the topic of "Inspiration" for the Botanical Artists' Association of Southern Africa. Please go and check it out, and if you're interested in botanical art, consider joining BAASA. We have workshops, courses, exhibitions and expeditions. It's great for networking, too.

Here are a couple of photos from our last trip, in November.

A white impala in the Kruger Park

Well, there we all are on our way to this year's dig, travelling up from Croc Bridge towards Lower Sabie, when we see some cars stopped up ahead.

Now sometimes of course you are the first to spot some amazing creature, or it steps out into the road with no one else around, just you and him. But for the most part, the first sign that you're going to see something exciting isn't a footprint or a sound, it's a traffic jam. You see cars stopped, your heart starts beating faster, you make haste slowly and as quietly as possible to where everyone's looking at... something. Then you try to decipher their body language. From which window are the camera lenses and binoculars pointing? Close to the road or hunkered down in the grass way off in the distance? Sometimes you wonder how the first person to stop ever figured out how that darker bit of bush, that flick of an ear, was in fact part of an animal. And most importantly, what is it?

There's a definite hierarchy. Massive philosophical divide between those who stop for birds and those who get annoyed at them. You won't get a traffic jam for any of the more common herbivores: impala, warthog, wildebeest, zebra, kudu. Impala are the default setting, so common they don't count when you're taking bets on what you're going to see first. They're so beautiful though, when you really look at them. The most elegant antelope. You stop if they're right in the road, a nice photo op, or if you're Communing with Nature and Appreciating the Ordinary. Some old Kruger hands who think they're too cool won't even slow down. Giraffes, maybe a few cars if they're nice and close. Likewise for buffalo, simply because they're Big 5. Hippo. They're not so common, but they look it because you always see them in water.  Traffic jams form for elephants, if only out of necessity. Rhino, definitely, because they're so rare. And they're a cause at the moment, a war.

And then the apex, the predators. Lions, leopards, cheetah, wild dogs. Everyone wants to see a predator. When we stop to see what the cars are looking at, I'm disappointed when I see the herd of impala calmly grazing all over the place, on both sides of the road, because that means it, the thing they're all looking at, can't be a predator. And that means it's got to be something less exciting, because what's better than a predator, right?

We stop behind the last car in line and slowly edge forward. Everyone in the minibus is craning their necks and peering between blades of grass to try and figure out what everyone else is looking at. And then I see it, something that looks a little different, right in the middle of the herd of impala. It is not a normal impala colour.




It resolves into something like the picture in the last post. "Um," I say. "Um. I think it's -" I didn't want to sound stupid, but I was pretty certain of what I had just seen. "A white. Impala." I can't tell you for sure if anyone went "Nah, can't be" or if that was just what I was expecting them to say, but then we moved forward a little more and-




It is a white impala - and it's a young male. That makes him the African equivalent of that legendary creature, the white stag. Technically a boy impala is called a ram, as it's an antelope rather than a deer. (Deer have branched antlers and lose them every year, while antelope have unbranched, permanent horns. There are no native deer around here.)



He also seems to be a true albino, with no pigment at all. His eyes are pink. There has been another white impala reported in the park, a female with black eyes.



Here he is with a normal-coloured female.



And here he is pretending to be a unicorn. I swear that was what it felt like. Like we'd spotted a freaking unicorn. 

A legendary beast

I still don't quite believe this.

 

Here's a hint: What do thousands upon thousands of drunk students have in common with a couple of saints, Arthurian legend, Narnia, Harry Potter and... me!?

Chrissiesmeer photos, part two

The one evening we went frogging. Frogging - it's like blogging, but with more frogs.

That was awesome. There's not much I like better than running around in a swamp chasing small animals. Kind of like all the best parts of my childhood.

Also, cows:

And this gorgeous crablet I found climbing through a ditch in search of these:

(We were both in the ditch. I think I was the only one interested in the pineapple flowers, though.)

Chrissiesmeer photos, part one

Even if you live in these parts, I think, it's quite likely that you've never heard of Chrissiesmeer. Here's how to find it. Grab a map, and look just left of Swaziland. If you're on Google maps you'll start zooming in and there will suddenly appear, or coalesce, a scattering of lakes like a little blue rash - or perhaps, more poetically, like the Pleiades. West of Mbabane, north-east of Ermelo, south-east of Carolina.

It's very... countryside. Most of the time if you head off into the wild blue yonder, you're going to the bush, but this could never in a hundred years be called bush. It's grassland, wetland, pine plantations, farms. Countryside.

Rode on those horses around that lake at what felt to me like a flat-out gallop, although it was probably only a brisk canter. There were seven horses and although only four had riders, the others kept up with us anyway so it felt exhilaratingly like riding with a herd of wild horses, thundering through the long grass and reeds at the water's edge.

In the foresty area we saw a few shy duiker and a pair of new-to-me buck which I think were possibly reedbuck. It's such a treat to see an animal you've never seen before! All of them were too quick for my camera, sadly. But Chrissiesmeer is mainly about flowers and frogs. Oh, the flowers!

Why, yes, that is a couple of the fattest, healthiest Agapanthus inapertus you have ever seen, with a Eulophia leontoglossa orchid (yellow) and Brunsvigia natalensis in the background just for good measure.

And yes, that is a frackin' great field of the same agapanthus. What is this I don't even.

More botanical madness to come, but I'll leave you with this picture of the sweet pups belonging to the guest farm where we stayed (I highly recommend it). The border collie is my favourite, as he has heterochromia and can keep up with a herd of wild horses, but the pointer reminds me of Nosy in this book so I adore him (her?) too.

Malachite kingfisher

Things about this painting:

* I sold it a few weekends ago (yay!)

* It was painted on top of another picture I'd done earlier. I have a great fear of pristine surfaces. Go and look at this comic by Gingerhaze. And then go and read her entire tumblr, which to me is basically one great dramatic pileup of this:

* The style of this painting was inspired in part by the first Black Orchid graphic novel - the early scenes in the greenhouse are some of the most gorgeous images I have ever seen.

* Malachite kingfishers are among my favourite things. The second thing I drew when I began taking art classes, aged 9 or so, was a malachite kingfisher. (The first was a green pepper, halved.)

* They are much smaller than they look in pictures (malachite kingfishers, not green peppers). I've never seen a live one, sadly, but I saw a skin in the museum at the University of the Witwatersrand, and it was no bigger than a sparrow.

* Oh yeah, I've been working on and off in the museum at Wits, and if you're a fan of snakes, spiders, bugs, axolotls, or giant green iguanas that like hanging out on logs and watching people do aerobics (seriously) and if you'll be in Jo'burg any time between tomorrow and Sunday, you should attend this event.

* I know the last point has exactly nothing to do with my picture. But, the iguana! It really happened. I was coming in from lunch, and what appeared to be most of the museum staff were doing some sort of dance routine, and the iguana was on a log, sommer there on the floor, watching them. It was one of those great moments in life, the ones you know you'll treasure forever. And there was an enormous hi-fi, and an instructor, and I think some people had belly-dancing belts, the ones with the coins. And... and... the iguana. It was beautiful.

P.S. In case you're one of the 17 people in the world who haven't seen this clip yet, may I present another of those beautiful moments. I don't feel bad saying that, because the kid wasn't hurt. Just don't read the comments on YouTube. They are exactly as you would expect.

Happy St. Helena

On Saturday afternoon I returned from An Expedition. An Excavation. In fact, An Adventure. The reason why I put off posting about it until today is that on the way home the question came up of who, exactly, the patron saint of archaeologists is, and one of the awesome people I met on the trip later found out that the answer is Saint Helena. To our great joy we discovered that her feast day (in the Roman Catholic Church) was the 18th of August, just around the corner. So in her honour I decided to wait until today to publish my archaeological post.

Somehow, I managed to come back from the trip with lots of pretty pictures of birds and flowers, but none of people actually digging. Instead of posting my photos from previous years (which feels vaguely as if it should break some sort of Bloggers' Code of Ethics), I'll give you links. Go and look at this page for all the background on the dig and who we went with. Also take a look at this archaeology blog, which belongs to Lu, another of the awesome people I met on the trip. (Hi Lu!)

Here's our camp at night. What I'll miss most from this time is lying in my tent, listening to the night sounds: the hippos gronking in the river (that's my coinage for the noise they make, not some kind of obscure swear word), the Egyptian geese cackling, the haunting whoops of the hyaenas, and, every now and again and the best of all, the distant roars of the lions.

Isn't he gorgeous? I'm excessively pleased with the misty, hipstermatic effect in this photo. It comes from the golden light of early morning shining through the dust on our windscreen. I had to confess.

Elephants are the most photogenic of animals. Also the only ones you still need to be afraid of when you're in a car.

This is a Longbilled Crombec. He was so curious and unafraid.

Impala lilies! (Adenium multiflorum). I have them (only just) growing in pots at home. Here it's warmer and they grow wild, and all the camps have them planted in their gardens.

Nymphaea capensis, or Nymphaea nouchali var. capensis. People can't make up their minds. Either way it's our indigenous blue waterlily, closely related to the sacred blue waterlily of Egypt.

Look in the river for more elephants. Archaeology and Africa are similar in this: Traditionally, both have been wildly romanticised. Now, more often, you see people try very hard to dissociate from the traditional stereotypes of romance and adventure. It's not really like that, we say. It's actually boring to live here, to do this. I'm a serious person, take me seriously. And yet the romance, the adventure, are still there.

I mean, just look at it!

Stakeout!

So... the other evening I was sitting at the computer when my husband came home, said hello, wandered off to the kitchen, made himself tea, came back, and said "There are literally 11 police cars parked outside."

.

.

.

I think this particularly dramatic story needs to be told in the form of a, well, drama, and so from this point it will be.

ME: Literally as in "I literally died laughing" or as in literally literally?
HUSBAND: Literally. I counted.
ME: What?

ME peers out of the window. There is a police car. ME walks over to MOTHER.

ME: Mother, Husband says there are 11 police cars in the road outside. He counted.
MOTHER: Let's go outside and look!
ME: Are you mad?

We walk all around the house, peering out of windows.

ME: Let's go outside and look!
MOTHER: OK!

We open the back door, making sure that the dog doesn't get out, and creep round the side of the house. There are indeed a lot of police cars in the road. There are also heavily armed silhouettes standing in the bushes in front of the house.

HEAVILY ARMED SILHOUETTE: Hello?
MOTHER AND ME: Hello?
HEAVILY ARMED SILHOUETTE: Hello?
ME: Sorry, can you tell us what's going on?
HEAVILY ARMED SILHOUETTE: We're the police.
ME: Yes, um... what's happening?
COP: We're looking for a suspect.

Points towards a house. Happily, not our house.

ME: Thanks. Well... erm... I guess we'll go back inside now...
COP: I think that would be a good idea.

We slink back indoors.

And that was basically it. The cop cars stayed where they were for a couple of hours while we tiptoed around our house with most of the lights off, trying to get hold of my father and tell him to come home by the other road, and then they quietly drove away. We have no idea what happened, whether they got the suspect, who it was, what they did, or anything else. I just need to add two important things:

One, this is mainly for my international readers: Nothing like this has ever happened to me before! It was a really dramatic occurrence, particularly because it was so unusual.

And two, dear polite cop silhouetted in the bushes: Thank you for not shooting at my mom and me when we loomed out at you from the darkness. I would totally have shot me if I had been you. And much gratitude and support to all our police officers - your job is dangerous, difficult and disgustingly underpaid. And all the cops I've interacted with have been sweet, lovely people (see above). So yeah, thanks!

Sometimes,

nothing much interesting happens for months on end.

Other times, you get a rock concert and a stakeout in the same day.

Out of the attic: That thing you did in primary school

No, not the time you caught an outsized locust and kept it in your uniform dress pocket, so that when you had to say goodbye to the deputy principal who was moving to another school, you tried to shake hands with him using your left hand, because your right hand was fully occupied preventing the monster insect from escaping and jumping all over him. Oh wait, that wasn't you.
That was me...

No, I'm talking about that thing with the wax crayons, where you fill in the whole page with brightly coloured crayons, then cover it in black crayon and scratch through the layers to make your picture. Well, you know what?

Crayons suck.

While for the most part growing up tends not to be as great as we think it'll be (mainly, I think, because kids are never really taught to make meaningful choices, so as adults we just kind of drift into things), we do learn certain liberating truths, and this is one of the best: The art materials they give to kids are really horrible. The paints, the brushes, the coloured pencils, the crayons, all might as well have been specially designed to make us think we were no good at art. Those of us who persevered, learned something wonderful: out there, in the non-kid world, are proper paints. Proper brushes. Coloured pencils that actually leave a mark on the paper. And... no, not crayons. As far as I know, crayons pretty much always suck. But there's something much, much better - oil pastels!

So, if you're an adult and you don't think you're any good at art, try this: Go to an art supply store. Buy a box of oil pastels, or coloured pencils, or watercolour or oil paints and a brush or two. But here's the difficult part: get the most expensive brand of whatever medium you choose. Your well-behaved self will try to tell you that you simply can't. Don't listen to it. You're all grown up, you've probably blown more money than this on a haircut or a restaurant meal. You have no idea what difference quality makes, and here's the thing: it probably makes a bigger difference to a learning artist than to an experienced one. Picasso could create a masterpiece with one scratchy pencil, but bad materials quite likely taught you, way too young, that you're not an artist. Treat yourself to one box of really good oil pastels.

Now go home and play with them.

!

What's your favourite road sign?

I bet you don't get asked that question very often. I have a very definite favourite, and on my way to Verlorenkloof, I had the pleasure - nay, the privilege - of spotting it in its natural habitat.

Isn't it beautiful? Such purity of emotion. Such endless possibilities.

Usually, this sign is qualified by a sort of subheading affixed to the pole beneath it: !Falling rocks. !Pedestrians. !Potholes. A sighting of it in its pure form gives me intense joy. Look out! Look out for what? I don't know! But look out! With an exclamation mark!

The best thing about my favourite sign is the images it conjures up in one's head. Images like this:

Or this:

Or this:

I say we have a meme. Is anyone with me?

This is sooooo not what it looks like.

We have fleas.

The whole country has fleas, I think. I mean it: if you have a conversation right now, on any topic, with anyone who lives in my general vicinity, and that person has a dog, the conversation will at some point turn to fleas. Because of the hot, muggy, and unusually wet (blame those rain-dances of mine) summer this year, we are having a wave, a veritable Pharaoh-grade plague of fleas. They are on our cats, on us, but mostly on my poor little dog. And they're immune to all the normal remedies, it seems. In any case, none of the tablets, powders and spot-ons I've been encasing her in all summer have prevented her from becoming progressively more moth-eaten-looking from scratching them.

So, in desperation, and convinced that if I were to add one more chemical to the cocktail currently covering Kaori (phew!) she might actually keel over and die, I decided to research an old boereraat (folk remedy). Don't worry, I'm not under the fond delusion that "natural" necessarily means "safe, good and harmless". I did my homework on this remedy, and that's what inspired me to post about it. I was shocked, utterly appalled, at my previous level of ignorance about the marvellous plant known as khakibos (translatable as either khaki weed or frickin'-British-soldiers-weed).

update: a police van just drove past my window. I'm getting nervous.

Things I have always known about khakibos:

*It is named khakibos either because of its colour or because it was
brought over from South America in British soldiers' horse feed during the second Anglo-Boer war.
*It stinks.
*It's a weed.
*Everyone hates it.
*It is reputed to repel fleas.

That was enough for me to determine to rethink my relationship with the stinky stuff, and I turned to Google to help me ensure that it was safe.

Things I know about khakibos since googling it:

*It's actually a type of marigold, Tagetes minuta.

*People voluntarily eat it.

*People voluntarily farm it.

*You can use it to deworm horses.

*You can buy khakibos products online.

*According to the Wikipedia page on the genus Tagetes, khakibos
is the source of an essential oil used in perfume, called tagette, and is also
used as a flavourant in the food and tobacco industries.

By this point my mind was reeling. I was having a khakibos epiphany, and I immediately put on my hiking boots and went out, armed with a large pair of secateurs, to find some. There was none at all in the first place I tried, a plot where a house is currently being built, but after a lot of searching I found two fat, healthy plants in an open veld near my house. It was as I was bearing them home in triumph that I had another epiphany.

Things I know about khakibos since going out to find some:

*It is much less common around here than it used to be.

*It looks a heckuvalot like dagga (marijuana).

So, my triumph rapidly turning into acute fear that someone would call the cops to say they had seen someone carrying large bundles of illegal drugs around the neighbourhood, I slunk back into my house. I chopped it up. It looked even more like dagga. I felt guilty. I put it in a large pot. I thought "pot" and giggled, pathetically, to myself. Then I boiled it up, cooled it down, and rinsed Kaori with it.

It turned her fur a bright greenish-yellow. This is not too obvious on her usually orangey coat, but I'd really, really love to see it on a white dog...

Things I still don't know about khakibos:

*Will it truly defeat The Fleas That Were The Real Reason For Hosni Mubarak's Resignation?

Watch this space.

An expedition

So, for the past week I've been at the most wonderful place called Verlorenkloof. It's an annual thing where a few BAASA members from the Pretoria region get together and rent one of the crofts. I'm not really sure why they call them crofts. I think maybe it's because the people who go there tend to be into either hill walking or trout fishing, and that people who go to Scotland to stay in crofts tend to be into the same things...

Anyway, we go there to paint the plants, and there are always gorgeous things to be found. Look at these photos of the beautiful riverine forest:

The last one is the most beautiful little orchid, Stenoglottis fimbriata, that I'm working on right now. You need to rotate it to the right to see how it actually grows, but I liked the composition of the photo this way.