WARNING: Digressions will be rampant and arbitrarily placed throughout the course of this post. Peter! :o)

If you have been reading my blog, you have good taste, and you know that I’m the best maid for my friend’s wedding. You should also have been commenting, because how do 196 people follow the blog (you awesome people, you. Much like the author) and like, 10 people max comment? People. People. People. CaMAAAAAAAAAAN. Ok I’m done. No I’m not. How do I make it easier for you to comment? How do I make it juicy for ya? Bribes? Lap dances? World peace? I want to know what you think. It’s important to me. deep, soulful look A writer writes to write, but also to be appreciated, unless I don’t like your comment. HA. :o)

So in accordance with true wedding fashion, it was necessary to receive cows for dowry for the bride-to-be. Why do we give cows? Why do we give anything, really? I won’t have a dowry, whether it is 1.2 million (ridiculously calibrated by my pseudo-educated self) or 10 cows. You can’t really pay back what your parents did for you anyway, so why bother? Why attempt to bother? Why allude to the fact that your MP-like exorbitance cough highway robbery cough is a silly attempt to bother? For something that I can’t get a refund on or a guarantee? Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii. If you want to give a token, take us all to Zanzibar. Whoop. :o) How much is a cow these days anyway? Duuude. Yeah, definitely Zanzibar. My colleague (:o) was talking in our (cold) office about how your parents obviously did not educate you in the hope that they would be paid back in dowry at a later point. Is that then to say that they would not have taken you to school had you decided to become a nun? Mschw.

Sunday was the cow delivery day. I woke up at 6 to be on time, and of course no one else was. The problem with punctuality is there is never anyone around to appreciate it. We ate and went. I slept all the way, because frankly, road trips are really not my thing. I come from a land far far away where men are men and women…hehehe. (again. If you’ve been reading the blog.) The valleys and caverns, ditches and plateaus one traverses to get to my roots are have cultivated a healthy dislike for travel that is not air. Train, maybe. Cars? No.

We get there and it begins. The men walk the cows up the hill. We eat. We leave before the rain starts and we’re trapped there. Forever. Never to be seen or heard from again. Lost. (HA!)On the way back I notice huge stones jutting out from lofty crags above us. I begin to have fear in my soul that somehow the boulders will break off and crush us into dust. My heart palpitates…and I come to the realization that I am old. No longer can I simply enjoy a road trip. No longer can I pass a bunch of stones without thinking of mortality, or sit in a car with a window wide open and not leap to ideas about nine madmen a-flinging. Age AIN’t nothing but a number, damnit. The rave now seems like a gargantuan effort(well, I’m stretching the truth a little to keep the flow going, burram…), an effort to freeze and be overcharged, underclothed and underwhelmed by the number of Supras about.

One of the younger ones at said gathering was required to give a vote of thanks. He did it with a youthfulness and panache that made me regret not being as self-possessed, yet suposedly older and more…knowingy. He reminded me what it meant to just…be yourself, because that’s the coolest version of you you could ever hope to imitate. Does that make sense? This is something I need to constantly be reminded about, because secretly, I’m socially awkward. Go figure.

So God never had, like, a childhood? He never learnt how to tie shoelaces, or count till a hundred? Can you imagine God as a toii, figuring out how to mix colours so he could paint the world?

Moral of the story? No cows for me. I’d rather have a cat.

tSN

p.s. AllWoman.