Regrets? I’ve had a few

• I don’t regret the rosé with a light lunch at the hospital (a few slices of cheese on French bread and some baby tomatoes, which left a definite hole in my tummy only partially filled with chocolate cake). But I do have other regrets – social ones, work ones.

• What got me onto this subject was watching the latest episode of the wonderful ZA News here (along the lines of Spitting Image). Former president Thabo Mbeki is funny on the subject of regrets. I love Zapiro’s puppets and all of them are good – Tim Modise as the presenter, Tutu and Mandela, Manto, former prez Mbeki and the others. This was initially intended for the SABC but they chickened out so their loss is the web’s gain.

• I’ve almost reached 150 posts here at the Couch Trip and I’ve realised that I’ve fallen into the habit of blogging about once a week (mostly on a Monday). I don’t think I’ve lost my blogging Mojo just yet but I have been wondering about how long I’ll keep going and whether I should focus it a bit more on psychology rather than the general whatever-I-feel-like format that it currently has. When I’m busy and/or stressed I don’t do the rounds of usual blog-reading that I would like to. But I do think my life is a lot richer for the blogging friends that I’ve made and I always come away from my regular blog-reads with some good ideas and grateful for the sense of shared experiences.

• I also know that I need to shake up my real-life social interaction. I’ve fallen into a bit of a rut where friendships are concerned and reading Sandy’s blog-post (over at Blogging Behavioural) about making friends made me realise that I can do something about it.

• Today is the day that I got an offer of more permanent employment with the military. Part of me is relieved that the offer finally came through but I’ve also got used to being temporary here so it’s with mixed feelings that I will sign the acceptance letter and fax it back to them. I’m almost ready to leave again and so it feels quite weird to be signing a letter saying that I’m going to stay.

• I’m working on a short talk for my group on Tuesday about literary representations of Cape Town. I intended to draw on ten novels about Cape Town but I think that I will find more than enough material in the excellent A City Imagined by various authors and edited by Stephen Watson from the UCT English department. It’s interesting that while Cape Town is such an incredibly beautiful city many people (and writers in particular) react to it with such mixed feelings and with a sense of tangible disappointment. I’ll post on this next week when my head is a bit clearer.

• Friday is generally not a good day for me. I’m not exactly sure why but I think the friendship drought has something to do with it. I enjoy the solitude and the chance to read and recover from the week but I’m also wishing for more stimulating company. I nearly went to a book launch this week at the excellent (and independent) Book Lounge but P was busy with her taxman and I just wasn’t up for it. I felt like a bit of a coward and the trip to the gym only put me in a worse mood.

• I have a low cringe threshold for John Cleese in Fawlty Towers. I bought the complete edition for P for her birthday and we watched the first episode the other night. Basil Fawlty is sooooo awful. It’s that similar feeling I get when I watch The Office. I can appreciate the humour but the awkwardness of it makes me want to curl up into a ball and start rocking! One DVD series that I AM loving is Planet Earth. The visuals alone are breath-taking.

Rattled

It started with an email this morning to my tenants. I’m trying to sell my house in Joburg and my tenants have been pretty difficult. They wanted to buy and we agreed on a price and then they couldn’t get credit because they were blacklisted. So I waited. And waited some more. And gave them a time-limit which came and went with no word from them. So I made plans to put the house on the market and they came back to me and said they didn’t want the house anyway.

Cut a long story short – now that the time is approaching for them to move out, they suddenly want to buy again. But that ship has sailed and now they suddenly want to jump on it again.

The sorry bottom line is that I just basically don’t trust them. So I emailed them this morning saying sorry, I just can’t go back to our original agreement. Which is fine. But I know my tenants. They have so much justification now just to dig their heels in and be obstructive about providing access for show days. First they “forgot” and then they needed to change the show day because a guest was coming to stay and then there was their grandchild’s christening. Fine. I can be flexible.

But when I got a desperate call this morning from an estate agent I don’t know wanting to rush through an offer for an “out of town” buyer (who could, it just so happens, buy and then rent to my current tenants for two years) I smelled a rat. It comes back to trust. So now I sit with only a sniff of a buyer in the immediate vicinity (he’s talking to the bond people) and a pissed-off tenant and estate agents trying to pull fast ones and I’m 1400km away from having much control over this. I’ve just got to trust the process and trust the estate agents whom I do have a relationship with. It will happen in due course.

I’m also feeling rattled because I would really love to do tons of reading on Cape Town (for a post I want to do on Cape Town novels) but I can’t do that at work. And now my group wants me to do a presentation to them next month on this as well. Plus mercury retrograde seems to be playing havoc with my appliances. The DVD player, the cellphone, the microwave – they’re all pleading for help.

And I’m still recovering from the various outward cashflows that accompanied the buying and moving into of the house.

Anyway, what this means is that when patients don’t pitch for their appointments, I’m secretly a bit pleased. Not all the time. I like my patients and would like to help them. But just sometimes (like now).

Incidentally, I can also report that blogging can make you happier. According to the knowledgeable and well-connected John Grohol of PsychCentral, a Taiwanese study by Ko and Kuo (2009) found that blogging increases your sense of connectedness and wellbeing. Now if only I could find a blog that reduced my house-related anxieties and also did my Cape Town-reading homework for me.