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Had an interesting talk recently with this friend I ran into on the streets on my way to work. Apparently at some point she just up and decided to get serious with God, and she completely changed her life over. Stopped doing the things she used to do, you know, like rave, changed her music, now reads the Bible for fun et al. I dono if this makes me come across as psycho, but I've always been envious of people like that. You know, people who've been to the other side. People who had an (for lack of a better word) illustrious childhood. I've always felt in my mind that those people make better Christians than, say, someone who's always been brought up with Christian values. Someone like me. Because those people know the difference. They have a direct frame of reference between how their life is now and how it was then, and they can tell exactly what it is that was missing before they really got saved.
You know the way astronomers are always telling us how the earth goes round once every day and revolves round the sun once every year, but we never feel as though it's moving. The reason is it's been moving ever since we were born, so we don't know any different. It's like when you've been in the dark for a long time and then you suddenly came into the light, I think you're better placed to see how the light changes your life than someone who's always been in said light. For us, guys like that, it must partly be a case of familiarity breeding contempt, that we can never seem to have the fire that new converts have [well, at least I don't think I do]. Things that to me have become routine tasks like prayer and meditation, still hold that magic touch to these [new] people. They still do it because they want to do it, not coz they're used to, or coz they think they should. It's not a chore to them. So I think results to them come easier than they do to the rest of us - they still have that purity of mind.
When photographers want to make an object stand out better when composing a scene, one of the things they do is turn up the contrast. I think that's what I'm [and others like me are] lacking: contrast. I don't really know what it's like to not be who I've always been. I can't really point to the void the Holy Spirit fills in my life once I accept him, coz I've never been consciously aware of it. This other friend put it very philosophically: those who are forgiven much tend to love more [which is actually in the Bible]. I don't feel as though I've been forgiven that much, because other than the original sin I can't point to any other major misdemeanors [nevermind that there's no big or small sin]. I was born when my parents weren't saved, but they converted when I was four, so I've never known any other life.
I don't even know what kind of wishful thinking this is - basically it's like I want to have lived on the dark side so that when I met Christ I could see what's changed. I guess it would be much easier for me to just pray that He reveals His presence in my life every now and again in not-every-day ways. Just so I know He's still there and all this good stuff isn't happening to me just because. And so I can identify clearly where in my life He fits. Maybe then it will be much easier for me to put Him first, which is where He should be. And it'll be easier for me to maintain the moral high ground I've theoretically built over the years. This speaker at church last Sunday said that was the only difference between us and the rest of the world - everything else you achieve you can do so in a worldly fashion, but the morality, that one you need God for, and that's what will set us apart. Being salt to the earth is not easy, and it's even harder when you don't know how to describe the feeling. I'm supposed to be the salt of the earth, so ya, I guess I'm asking for a deeper understanding.
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When I went to NY that time in 2007, everything used to awestrike me. Even the carpeting on the ground. The clean and one-way streets. The food cart at the corner selling one dollar hotdogs for 80 cents. The downstairs pizza place that's individually owned but delivers and has a website for ordering online. The houses where someone upstairs needs to buzz you in so you can get through the front porch. The 5-floor waterfall running down the inside of Trump Tower. The Museum of Modern Art, and just Fifth Avenue stores in general. The subways. My Hostelling International room. Their flushing system (trust me, it's vastly different than ours). And the fact that they're so impressed we can even speak English they give us whatever we ask for (at least the people I met). I thought I'd never feel that way again. I thought it was only coz I was still [young and] impressionable. I was not right.
Johannesburg is a large city. I looked up some stats and turns out it's actually the largest non-coastal city. In the world! It shares square miles with Los Angeles as it is. It's the financial capital of South Africa, and maybe even of Africa given SA's muscle here. It's spic. It's span. It's vast. And it's a little slice of heaven. But in all fairness I hardly ventured out of Sandton.
Sandton is the "it" suburb of Jo'burg. I think you can actually refer to it as a first world neighborhood. The roads are pristine. The traffic lights and public system in general work as they should, and people obey the law. The highway patrol are polite and there's an actual system of tickets so traffic offences aren't blown up to be more than they are - nuisances. Traffic jams move coz all the roads that matter are at least three lanes wide, with overpasses and underpasses as appropriate, and road markings showing you which lane goes where. Not a single roundabout in sight, or even a Vitz. There are official Aston Martin and Porsche dealerships, so it's safe to conclude the average person living in Sandton is rich. Every brand in the country is represented here, so if you live in Sandton chances are your office is also there, and you never need to go anywhere else. Except maybe to Gold Reef City in the mid-south which is a pretty excellent park and gamespot. And it's right next to Soccer City, although that's more a landmark now that the World Cup is over. Or to Woodmead where there's a Woodmead Auto who are the people who sell Lamborghinis if that's the sort of thing that tickles your fancy. New, of course! The street lighting is so comprehensive you can basically go anywhere at any time, but most places don't stay open past 11, with the exception of those McDonald's drive-thru's.
Sandton City is a mall complex that includes itself and the world-famous Nelson Mandela Square (which has that 20-foot statue of him in its center and a singing waterfall. As in the water rises, and as it falls back to the ground it falls in a pattern that creates music. Yes, believe it!) Inside Sandton City, unless you're looking for cheap bargains, there's nothing you won't find. There's two hypers that stock all home shopping goods. There's two Apple stores, and one of them has Geniuses inside it. There's a Digital Planet that sells authentic Beats by Dre headphones for the cost of a semester of uni. There's an entire floor dedicated to couture - LVMH, Chanel, Dior, Oscar de la Renta, Emporio Armani, Versace et al. The entire level 1 basement is taken up by this humongous cinema that has screens the size of football stadiums - 11 of them. There's every food joint you could be looking for, then there's one in the terrace on Nelson Mandela Square just next door that serves pork ribs in sweet and sour sauce with garnish, fries and veggies for R120 that will change your life! Semi-open air. With ambience to kill for. Right next to the singing fountain.
Morningside is one of the hoods in Sandton, which is itself one of the hoods in Jo'burg. Its main road is called Rivonia, and that's the road on which you'll find everything you want in Morningside. That's also where my hotel is. It's 10 minutes driving away from Sandton City, and 15 minutes away from the airport via the 160kph-without-flinching bullet train called the Gautrain. That ride is the ride of a lifetime, FYI! Across the road from my hotel there's a Harley Davidson dealership, where it's one of the employment requirements that a person have a goatee, moustache that stretches out, at least two tattoos, muscles, and those cowboy boots with spikes and stars at both ends. And tight-fitting jeans made of real demin - the original Levi's. And dark aviator sun glasses. Texas accents are an added advantage. Either that, or that's their official dress code, coz everyone who works there fits that description. One of those Harley bikes costs about as much a small child, so broke @$$es need not apply, it says on the door. [ok, not really, but ya, they're not cheap]
About 15-20kms out of Sandton on the N1 - the main road that goes to Pretoria - near Soweto in a neighbourhood called Ormonde, there's the Gold Reef City. It has the largest Ferris wheel I have ever seen, and each seat on it is shaped like a giant soccer ball. It's got a water slide that extends so high it's about 2-3 kilometers sliding down, but it's open so the chill factor is a little reduced. It's flanked by its own five star hotel that looks as though it was made out of gold, which is actually possibly the case because that used to be the epicenter of the gold mining trade until it became uneconomical to do it anymore, then it was converted into a park. It also houses the Apartheid Museum which is pretty monumental for a country like SA. And about a very small and light stone's throw away, in all of its glass-and-curvy glory, stands Soccer City. The stadium that put Africa on the map. When you drive through Gold Reef City at night (at that time almost nothing's still open - except maybe the casino which does not admit under-18's), you look up and you see the moon and the stars and then you look to your left and you see Soccer City glowing and it's like a celestial body has fallen down to earth.
Towards the east of Sandton (but still North of the entire city), there's an exclusive golfing estate with housing units inside it called Dainfern. Trump would be proud. It's so large and exclusive it's got it's own address system all inside it - Cortona Drive. The security checks before you're admitted into Dainfern take about 10 minutes, so you better believe if you're carrying molotov cocktails in the trunk they're gonna be found. If you come in and you're a resident there you have your own entrance where you wave your door key and the gate lets you in. The houses are huge. They're double-story, but judging by their height they should have 3 floors. That means high ceilings. Chandeliers as tall as fern trees. The living area (without distinct walls and doors i dono if you can actually call places rooms) alone has 7 bulbs. The small circular kind that are usually depressed into the roof. They can be dimmed for ambience. There's motion detectors in every room. The entire ground floor around the living area is literally made of glass, and the house has sliding doors as standard both to the front and the backyard. There's of course an Infinity pool in the back, heated and internally lit. There's a built-in barbecue grill just outside the dining area - South Africans like meat (a running joke is that they typically eat meals wholy composed of beef, with a little chicken on the side). It comes with a wired surround system and flat panel TV. Different furnishings for the living room than for the dining. Wholy fitted kitchen. Open plan partitions. And a dog. A terrier. Just for the hell of it :) This is where my boss lives. And that's who I want to become.
There's a neighbourhood west of Sandton called Westcliff where the average house is R30 million. Not coz it's palatial and on 17 acres of land or anything grand like that, no. They're actually bungalows on about a half acre each. But they're R30 million just because. So the who's who know there's no riff-raff mixing in with them. It's for Fortune-500-type old money people. People who sip English tea and play squash on Sunday afternoon and watch the Discovery Channel and CNN and attend theater and are thrilled by 6-day golf games. And serve their guests Dom Perignon coz they probably have a wine cellar downstairs in the basement. Whose children do weird things like music theory in college. Where everyone has a private security guard outside their compound 24/7 in addition to Cobbs Rescue (which is for them what kina BM Security are to us).
Like I said, Jo'burg is a huge city. It's a beautiful city. I've been impressed at each and every turn, bar none. Conclusion: those people who say money can't buy everything probably don't live in Sandton.
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They say the life unexamined may not be worth living. But then the life too closely examined may not be lived at all!
So I got this new job, as by now I'm sure you know. And now they're shipping me off down south for two weeks, training. Anyway, I called this friend of mine up about an unrelated matter, and it came up and he had all these questions. Apparently, it has been a while since we last met and there's all these things we don't know about each other, starting with that he was mugged, and I left my old job. So he went and created a checklist, things I've done since last year. And we started going through it ticking off things one by one. Wow, it was a lot of stuff, as it turns out.
And that's even before you count the new horizon that's just opened up. I started last week, but so far it's just been reading manuals, getting oriented and feeling out of place coz it's a really close-knit office and everyone's got all this history (also I'm gonna be like the only person here in my department - everyone else works in SA). Perhaps I should also ask myself these questions my friend was asking? I went bowling with people from my old job during the week, like a sort of farewell. Then today another one was wedding so I also got to meet a few other ex-colleagues. Gotta say, a bunch of them looked happy still, and I know for a fact life has really improved for them since I've been gone (read upto 50pc increases in salaries). But I still don't think I made the wrong choice moving.
It's a whole new field, so I'm like an empty pitcher of water, just waiting to be filled up. The first thing my new local boss told me when I got in is that there they depend on a culture of trust between employer and employee. Trust that when given a task, it'll be done when you say it will be, or when required. Trust that meetings scheduled for 10 will start at 10. Trust that when you have to cut out early, you really do, and you're not just taking advantage of the freedom. Trust that when you charge an expense to the company credit card, you made sure it was business-related first. In other words, you're expected to deliver, and you're given a lot of autonomy. I swear, he was saying all these things, and all I was hearing was music. Sweet, beautiful music. [oh, ya, in case it was missed somewhere in there, I get a company credit card. With an obscenely large limit].
You could say I'm well on the way to making it. So my friend then moves to the next item on his checklist of me - girlfriend? Huh. Now he's got me thinking about relationships. Do I need someone to hold my hand? Do I need someone to share my joys and sorrows with? Do I need someone to hold me together when I come apart at the seams? Do I need someone looking closely at me, watching over my every step, and asking me all the questions that will [in Anderson Cooper's words] keep me honest? I'm drawing a blank, so let's just say I'll know when I get there. However, I've heard this before, and I agree "...The most challenging and significant relationship of all is the one you have with yourself. And if you find someone who loves the you you love, well, that's just fabulous."
I'm leaving for SA on Monday, which is very exciting. So obviously for now, I think it's enough that I have the promise of a new job. What's it offering, you ask? The world. Only the world.
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