Living for Disco

God, blogging gets tough when nothing is happening on a daily basis. What to write about? Well, it’s cold. Been there done that – so 2006. Um, I could write about the depression I have not been feeling for the last few months , but you know, it’s a bit of a non-event. I could write about the fact that I have a date (ooh!), which I’m quite excited about. A blind(ish) date, in fact, in a couple of weeks. But I won’t. I’ll write instead about the last blind date I went on. Oh, it was a lark.

It was last year some time, and I think my friends were feeling a bit sorry for me at that stage, as it had been some months since the departure of the ex and they were concerned that I was not showing any inclination to get back in the saddle, so to speak.

So, one of them said to me, as friends do “My boyfriend has a lovely single friend, who’s ever so nice, and intelligent and I think you’d get on really well. I’ll set you up.” It seemed churlish to say no, although now I realise that if anyone ever says this to you, you must pretend to be horrified by something behind them, and run screaming in the opposite direction. It’s for the good of your self-esteem, trust me.

I got to the bar, which was closed. How to rearrange? I didn’t have his number. No matter, I thought. I’d just wait for him to arrive, and we’d have a bit of a laugh about it, thereby breaking the ice.

My phone rang. It was my friend.

“Rachie. Er, Grant just rang. He’s going to be a bit late.”

I sensed there was something she was not telling me. I’m good like that, and I winkled it out of her.

“Yes, well [her boyfriend] didn’t really tell him it was a date, so he thought we were coming to pick him up to go out for drinks. It’s ok, though. He’s on his way now.”

Oh, how absolutely marvelous. Hard to imagine at that point how I could look any more desperate. Anyway, we sorted out the venue, and were soon sat sipping a couple of glasses of wine and having a slightly awkward conversation about something banal.

“So, anyway,” he says, looking uncomfortable, “did you know this was supposed to be a date?”

There was nothing for it, so I admitted it, and explained my friend’s “Get Rachie back in the saddle” five point action plan. He looked embarrassed, and then guilty.

“So what happened?”

I gave him the concise version (ex bloke was an emotional cabbage), rather than the usual long winded rant. I was bitter there for a while.

“So, there’s no-one that you’re interested in?”

No, you imbecile. That’s why I’m on a blind date. By myself, apparently. Then I saw where this was going.

“No. You?”

Lordy, was he interested in someone. He almost fell over his tongue trying to get the message across. He spoke about this woman for some considerable time. He was very apologetic, despite my protestations that really, having known him for less than half an hour, I wasn’t experiencing any searing feelings of rejection or disappointment; however, in his eyes I was not only a desperate woman, but a desperate woman spurned. I think he thought I was going to slit my wrists with a broken wine glass or something. Poor bastard.

When he dropped me off outside my gate, he looked at me in a deeply pitying way and said “I might call you.”

“OK. Whatever. If you like.”

“No, really. I might give you a call.”

“Fine. If you like. I don’t mind.”

Of course he didn’t call. I didn’t expect him to, but the pity in his eyes. It’s how I imagine people will look at me when I’m sixty, wheeling my 700 cats around in a shopping trolley, and throwing empty beer cans at traffic. It still makes me shudder.

I’m fairly certain that this one will go differently. I mean, he does at least know that it’s a date.

I think.

Well, it seems I have been nominated for a prize in a competition! How exciting! Last time I won anything it was a My Little Pony when I was 11. I never, ever got the point of My Little Pony. Vile things.

Anyway, I don’t know what the prize is, but if you want to vote for me, go visit Moobs. Actually, you don’t have to vote for me, as there are some other tenuous connections that are pretty good.

It’s getting cold here, and I need closed shoes, as I remember from last year how frostbite feels. I decide to buy trainers. They are warm; they are practical; they look funky with jeans.

I go trainer shopping. Shop after shop offers me a dreary selection of running shoes with absolutely no funk at all. I do find one pair that I quite like, but they cost N$900, which constitutes a third of my monthly wage, and they really aren’t that exciting. Also, they make my ankles look weird.

I am starting to despair, and the shop assistants give my ancient and grubby N$10 plastic flip flops the hairy eyeball every time I ask try on a pair of shoes, as if it’s insufferable presumption to present myself in inferior footwear when shopping for N$900 trainers.

Feeling disgruntled, I decide to try one more shop. I go in and instantly my eyes alight on a pair of brown wedge heeled shoes with flowers stitched onto them. I turn within seconds from grumpy, slobby volunteer with cold feet to ditzy blonde as the phrase “OMG! Cute shoes!” springs unbidden into my brain.

I look around furtively to check that no-one’s noticed the embarrassing, if only momentary, Jekyll/Hide transformation. No-one appears filled with horror, so I try on the shoes.

Three minutes later, I leave the shop, shoe box under one arm. I wonder what has happened to me – I used to be a ‘one pair for every occasion’ girl. Now I’m having to commission a walk-in wardrobe to house all the fucking girly [gorgeous] shoes [which I love].

I think I will go to the doctor.

Right, continuing with the questions… Today I will be answering Uncle Did, who asked “Is your life and work like what you expected when you were still in London, if you expected anything. And are you thrilled to bits or disapointed, or both ?“, and Ann, who said “My big question for you is: Do you “believe” in the work (ie development) that you have been doing for the past couple of years? And can you see yourself staying in this line of work?”

To answer the first question – no. Not in the slightest. In London I had hazy ideas of a healthful and serene existence, in which I would float about in a gauzy haze, probably doing yoga under the plam tree in my yard on a daily basis while children ran about shrieking with mirth, and neighbours popped round for a cup of rooibos. I would rarely feel the desire to buy things, as I would realise that I did not need them, in an airy-fairy Buddhist ‘free yourself from desire’ sort of way. Workwise I think my expectations were even more hazy, but naturally I was going to change the world.

Instead, I live next door to an aging couple, whose idea of socialising involves rapping on my burglar bars and handing me the phone bill. The only thing that runs about in the yard is an overly priapic dog with sinus problems and the mental age of a retarded puppy. I am rarely healthful and serene, although I am getting better at this. Instead I spend far too much time drinking wine with my friends, gossiping and cackling like a fishwife, and I have accumulated several pairs of high heels.

Workwise, I have failed to change the world. I think I have failed at this rather dramatically, which should be considered an achievement in itself. I didn’t expect to have to charge one of my colleagues with sexual harassment, certainly, or to find that trying to fundraise in this environment would be so enormously challenging and frustrating. Mind you, nor did I expect to find myself on such interesting work assignments as this and this. So weirdly, I am both thrilled at the diversity and weirdness of the experience that I’ve had, and the fact that I’ve found out so much about myself, and disappointed that I didn’t achieve as much as I would have wanted.

As to whether or not I believe in development work, that’s a tough question. I think the answer is yes, I do. Despite the fact that in some ways I have become very disillusioned with the whole idea of international development as it stands, I also think that it’s changing in really positive ways. From my own experience, I think that it’s easy for organisations and funders in the North to have an idealised view of how development should work, and it’s often difficult to see why sometimes things are so difficult on the ground. My opinion, more and more, is that you can’t simply go into a community, ask them what they need and then try and give it to them. It has to come from inside, to be done by the people it’s going to benefit, otherwise it’s never, ever going to work. Much grassroots development work, particularly in terms of funding, is so tied up in bureaucratic red tape and administrative nit-picking that sometimes the project changes out of all recognition, simply because the donors require it to be a certain way. This simply does not work. At the same time, perfectly viable projects find it hard to get funding because they don’t have certain components, or look the way people think they should look. I could go on, but I don’t want to send you all to sleep.

I could see myself staying in this line of work – I enjoy fundraising generally, and I’m still really passionate about some aspects of international development. My problem is that I don’t want to go back to London, and London is where the international development jobs are. So, I may have to do something else. I don’t really know what, but I like the sense of freedom that not being restricted to a place or a career gives me. I can do whatever the hell I want, wherever the hell I want to do it.

That strikes me as a pretty good place to be.

A couple of days ago, Heather A asked me whether insects have muscles like we do. I like a challenge, especially when I get to show off about how clever I am at the end of it, so I looked it up on the internet, which is the source of truth and light, as we all know.

What I found out from the internet is that this is a very difficult question, particularly for someone who didn’t even do GCSE biology.

I did a bit of reading, and then I realized that I don’t actually know much about human musculature, so I looked that up. Did you know that the tongue is actually sixteen different muscles? And that the uterus is the strongest muscle in the human body?

Anyway, I digress. There are basically three types of muscles in humans (excuse me if you already know this): skeletal or striated, smooth and cardiac. Skeletal muscles are the ones we control in order move around. They contain fibres that are arranged into tight bundles, like drinking straws tied together with string. Skeletal muscles are further broken down into fast twitch and slow twitch muscles. Slow twitch muscles contract more slowly and with less force than fast twitch muscles.

Insects have three kinds of muscle – tubular, fibrillar and microfibrillar (found in moths, apparently). Tubular muscles are found in insect legs. Fibrillar muscles are usually used for flight , and are characterized by large spaces between the fibres. Each fibre is a single multinucleated cell, and so I guess this would answer your question about how many muscle cells they have. Humans have densely packed fibres, whereas insects, at least in fibrillar muscles, don’t, ergo they have fewer muscle cells in each muscle. I hope that this is the case, as I couldn’t confirm it anywhere. It’s purely conjecture. Any entomologists out there?

There are some insects (moths, for example) that have tubular and microfibrillar flight muscles, and they tend to have much slower wing beats – between 4 and 20 a second, as opposed to bees, which beat their wings around 190 times a second.

Also, insects don’t have haemoglobin, so their muscles tend to be grey, or translucent.

So to answer your question, vaguely, I think the answer is yes, they have skeletal muscles, but no, they’re not like ours. I had to stop though, because I kept coming up against paragraphs like the following, which I found on this highly informative website, and which make my brain twitch in distress:

In the presence of calcium, which is released from the sarcoplasmic reticulum due to nerve impulses, myosin ATPase splits ATP during oscillatory work. Stretch itself increases the activity of calcium-activated myosin ATPase - here stretch acts like an increase in calcium. This is also consistent with differences between myogenic and neurogenic systems. In neurogenic systems, each wing beat may be associated with a contraction-relaxation cycle, with substantial movement of calcium out of and back into the sarcoplasmic reticulum. Asynchronous muscles are less sensitive to calcium flux, which is also correlated with reduced development of sarcoplasmic reticulum.

Anyway, it was all very interesting, so thanks, Heather, for that. I will certainly never look at insects the same way again.