A different life

I watched a documentary with my Mum the other day. It was great, an hour long and almost entirely in French.

Mum doesn't speak any French, the only word she understood was Bochimans (Bushmen). I tried to learn French six years ago, so I understood a random word here and there. Not that being able to understand "three giraffes" while there are three giraffes on the screen and someone pointing at them makes that much of a difference.

So we didn't really understand what was being said, but we loved it nevertheless. It was the documentary about Tippi Degré and her childhood in Namibia. She was born there to a French couple of wildlife photographers and lived there among wild animals. Needless to say that I see it as a pretty awesome childhood and that I'm horribly jealous. I can't really complain about my childhood, but I didn't have an elephant to ride or a giant bullfrog to snug. And trust me, normal frogs are not as snuggable (let's pretend that snuggable is an actual word) and are way too easy to squish.

Frogs definitely should be harder to squish.

Anyways, Mum suggested that not all is lost yet. I could always move to Africa and raise a child there. While this sounds like a brilliant idea (doesn't it? doesn't it?) I think I might struggle to convince my partner just how awesome it would be. I mean, if I said we should have a baby or that we should move to Africa he would probably think that this is still within the levels of my inherent madness, even if it's more extreme than normal. But I fear that let's have a baby in Africa might be a little bit too much, even for him.

No place like home

There is something in the water, there is something in the air. And in the food for that matter. It's all different here.

Being home is busy, but lazy. I try to do all those things like relaxing and being helpful and getting work and reading done and I fail miserably. My Mum even plans work so that the important things  get done before I get here. Otherwise they don't get done as my presence makes everyone (and especially my Mum) lazy. But somehow it's ok and it's a part of it now.

My dreadlocks are apparently still a novelty here. The woman queuing behind me to get on the plane told her grandson to sit as far as possible from me once on the plane so that he doesn't catch something. What was he going to catch, good manners? The lady on the plane on the other hand was super interested in the dreads and was asking lots of questions. In Ukrainian or maybe it was Slovak?  Anyways, I don't really speak either of those, so it was an interesting exchange where we just talked at each other using our respective languages. Once I got home I had a slightly less pleasant experience - I made a boy crash his bike. He cycled past me and kept looking at my hair while cycling ahead, then run over a cat, crashed his bike and scraped the hell out of himself. I felt bad. Generally people still stare and whisper, I thought that they would be used to it by now. Oh well. I'll take the whispers as compliments, bad press better than no press, right? Put some controversy into their lives!

I also watch lots of older and cheesy movies, usually the ones I've seen before - which I try to avoid otherwise, as there are still so many movies I want to see. We have a whole list of movies we watch when I get back. This is caused partially by the fact that the same movies are on tv over and over again and it's just easy this way. And partially by the fact that my Mum has her favourites and Dad "has never seen that movie before". It doesn't matter what movie we are talking about and how many times we watched it together, he just hasn't seen it.

Food is different too. Great home cooking. Not to mention that we have a garden and so a bit of our own, fresh and really good produce. It's great to be able to get outside and water some plants, to pick strawberries, raspberries or tomatoes, to sit down under a tree and pick on sunflower seeds from a whole sunflower head.

I also get to plan and dream and talk through all those weird and silly ideas I have. I can do it knowing that it doesn't matter whether I go through with it or not, whether it works out or not, whether I change my mind, give up, or come up with something different. I rarely get specific advice, more of the "it's your life, do what you want" sort of thing, but even then it's good to know that the family is supportive no matter what I do and no matter how weird and silly it is. And I've been testing them over the past 10 years with more and more ridiculous ideas. They either became immune to the craziness or figured that there is no point in trying to change my mind and it's easier to wait it out. Whatever the reason, I'm glad. It's both refreshing and reassuring.

Being home is great, even if I don't get much done. Even if it's not super exciting. It's great, because it's so different, but so familiar. There is just no place like home.

Like falling in love

In my head, I'm an ornithologist. I don't know whether anyone else would agree, especially taking into account that I've had considerably less contact with birds in the last couple of years.

But it doesn't matter. I just am one. Period.

Why? Because I get this feeling in my stomach, half way between indigestion and butterflies, every time I see a bird. It's similar to falling in love. Somehow birds manage to creep into my life, no matter what I do and where I am. They manage to make my serotonin levels drop and push me straight into a state of obsessiveness. It happens every time I go back to the parrot world - it's like a drug. I'm fine for a while and then I see a photo, a video, or Merlin forbid, a live parrot. All of the sudden my brain is not only choking on the parrot beauty and intelligence, but also starting to pick and choose which parrots I should keep, what would the dream aviary look like, where in the world are the best places to go to see those amazing creatures in their natural environment. From there it's straight into forums, articles, conservation initiatives, books, whatever I can get my hands on.

I wonder whether others get that, maybe not necessarily with birds, but anything at all?

Currently birds are creeping into my attempts at art:

Blue-and-gold macaw; chalk and coloured pencils

Goldfinch; coloured pencils

Orange-bellied parrot; watercolours

Maybe I really should push for a PhD involving parrots... Hmmm... Then I could obsess on a daily basis for three full years!