He’ll fall for you in fall’s luscious new lipsticks!

If I have any readers left after over a month without posting, you may be wondering why there are such long spurts between posts, and why a novel’s worth of posts show up after weeks of nothing. It’s because the internet has been down for about the last 3 weeks of the past month. It works intermittently, but I haven’t managed to get anything posted because I need to get my journal from home and stay after work to type it up. I didn’t manage to do that over the couple of days we had net access, especially since when it has been up it sometimes crashes again before evening.

We’ve been without a connection for a solid week now. We paid some company to pay the ISP for us. We paid until January. They paid until the end of October. We got cut off. They told us it would take 3 hours to get the service reconnected. That was 3 days ago.

I have yet to find an internet café that’s not achingly slow. Usually I check only a couple of email messages before logging off in frustration. I needed to send a single email the other day and it took me a full 20 minutes. Suffice it to say I’ve decided to wait and see if we ever get the connection back at work before I post again.

I can’t email anyone. I can’t call anyone because I can’t afford the $1.67 a minute rates. I feel completely cut off. My radio doesn’t even work. I am almost finished the novels that were supposed to last for my entire trip. I got some mail the other day though. I tried to download some music sets off my friend Laurence’s website but failed. So Matty in Canada downloaded them for me, put them on a disk, and mailed them. Three to four weeks later, they arrived. So by some miracle, DJ Sneak has dropped into the middle of Africa to play in my living room. I’m told there is another package coming. It may have sugarless gum, ginger candies, or green tea! Kraft Dinner would be nice, or any fake food that reminds me of home. I wish I had thought to ask for those little pantyhose ankle socks you wear with dress shoes. Oh well.

I also have a British Cosmopolitan magazine. In my former life I absolutely abhorred such magazines and made a point of never looking at them. Here, I’ve been anxiously waiting for over a month as it got passed from hand to hand. I am transfixed by the ads and the people in make-up and non second-hand clothes. I read 10 pages of man grabbing tips before my brain hurts and I have to put it down and go back to my serious literary fiction. After years of self-imposed snobbery I actually find it easier to understand than the magazine. But I put the magazine away carefully, knowing I will pick it up tomorrow, treasure it slowly, page by page, like candies melting on the tongue. I still don’t understand why anyone would care to read articles telling her how to please some mangy halfwit she picked up in a bar, but I am fascinated by it now. It’s like reading the National Geographic about some exotic place you once visited. Members of the fabled tribe of the Western Consumer, glittering in their native habitant. One language the world over. I believe all the lies the magazine tells me and I wonder if maybe, some day, I can go to that place too.

My friend was in Nairobi a couple of weeks ago and was totally culture shocked by how developed it was. If Nairobi is shocking, imagine what London is going to do to me four months from now! I’ll show up in late March, wearing light flowing trousers, a similar blouse, and sandals. I’ll have nothing but a thin scarf to guard against the cold, and will be sporting a variety of beaded jewellery and strange twists in my hair. I will eat with my hands. I will eat a hamburger with my hands! Yum!