(no subject)
Well, things have all calmed down a bit since my rather frantic birthday celebrations, which I'm glad about really. Things moved so quickly on the weekend, and I seemed to be constantly in the company a revolving cast of cousins, with various aunts, uncles and assorted others lurking around in the background. Well not really lurking, my family tends to be pretty loud. Still its pretty hard to remember everyone.
One of the things that makes this even harder is that in Shona there is no distinction between aunts and uncles and mothers and fathers. So pretty much everyone is mummy and daddy, which is pretty confusing. In some cases there are distant cousins my age who qualify as my grandmother apparently. Its odd finding out you have so many young, glamourous grannies after all the years.
Appart from the cultural confusion, my auntie Rumbi has been getting me up to date on all the problems of the family. Its really quite a mess, and I can't be bothered to go into it in full. Basically, various cousins have school, imigration, love etc problems, one of my uncles has discovered he had an adult child, and my dad and stepmother have been generally pissing people off. They threw Rumbi out of her house(they were renting it to her), a couple of months after she gave birth, basically because my dad dissapproves of her being a single mother and Sage found out that she could better rent from someone else. Yep thats how my dad is rich, pure ruthlessness.
Anyway, its all a bit of a mess, although everyone gets on at family gatherings. Its all a bit confusing, and at times I wish I could just go home, where my family is disfunctional on a more managable scale. The whole fact that I can't speak shona, and that the culture is so different also gets to me a bit. Its hard to fit into a family that have a totally different experience of life from you. After all isn't that the point of family, to be united by some sort of shared upbringing and culture, as well as blood? Its something I struggle with sometimes, being a bit of an outsider in both my families.
Not that I don't love my cousins, its just that they mostly speak shona, grew up in shona culture, listen to R n B and go cruising the churches on saturday to pick up girls. Its a bit of a culture shock. Speaking of R n B and all things black and American, I have developed a pathological hatred for R Kelly. If I ever meet that man I'm going to castrate him so that he can feel the pain I feel when I'm forced to listen to his "music". Yeah, the whole infiltration of black american culture into Zimbabwean youth annoys me too. I could go on for hours about that, but I'll spare you, if anyone is still reading.
Well that was a bit of a megabitch. Things really aren't that bad, its just I don't have anyone to bitch at. People here are just too nice about eachother. wheres all the hatred gone?
One of the things that makes this even harder is that in Shona there is no distinction between aunts and uncles and mothers and fathers. So pretty much everyone is mummy and daddy, which is pretty confusing. In some cases there are distant cousins my age who qualify as my grandmother apparently. Its odd finding out you have so many young, glamourous grannies after all the years.
Appart from the cultural confusion, my auntie Rumbi has been getting me up to date on all the problems of the family. Its really quite a mess, and I can't be bothered to go into it in full. Basically, various cousins have school, imigration, love etc problems, one of my uncles has discovered he had an adult child, and my dad and stepmother have been generally pissing people off. They threw Rumbi out of her house(they were renting it to her), a couple of months after she gave birth, basically because my dad dissapproves of her being a single mother and Sage found out that she could better rent from someone else. Yep thats how my dad is rich, pure ruthlessness.
Anyway, its all a bit of a mess, although everyone gets on at family gatherings. Its all a bit confusing, and at times I wish I could just go home, where my family is disfunctional on a more managable scale. The whole fact that I can't speak shona, and that the culture is so different also gets to me a bit. Its hard to fit into a family that have a totally different experience of life from you. After all isn't that the point of family, to be united by some sort of shared upbringing and culture, as well as blood? Its something I struggle with sometimes, being a bit of an outsider in both my families.
Not that I don't love my cousins, its just that they mostly speak shona, grew up in shona culture, listen to R n B and go cruising the churches on saturday to pick up girls. Its a bit of a culture shock. Speaking of R n B and all things black and American, I have developed a pathological hatred for R Kelly. If I ever meet that man I'm going to castrate him so that he can feel the pain I feel when I'm forced to listen to his "music". Yeah, the whole infiltration of black american culture into Zimbabwean youth annoys me too. I could go on for hours about that, but I'll spare you, if anyone is still reading.
Well that was a bit of a megabitch. Things really aren't that bad, its just I don't have anyone to bitch at. People here are just too nice about eachother. wheres all the hatred gone?