[TONGUE IN CHEEK] Thank you to the nonapologising Mexican, I have a few extra banditos raging through my site, brandishing little pistols or pistolettes.
I would like to thank you all. As many of you may not yet be aware, according to a recent personality test I took, I am 98 percent masculine! (We just have to wait round for the final 2 percent to sprout and then there’s gonna be some changes here.)
I thought I’d say a thing or two about feminism whilst I’m at it. I like the failing to apologise-Mexican’s description of me, to wit: I am an astonishing hungry-headed femi-woman who terrorises sleeping males in the beds, whilst consuming little little pieces of their outer-edges for my breakfast.
None of this is true! I’m rarely that hungry and (as a rule) prefer to leave the Menz alone. For me to show any interest in a man at all, he first has to be gorgeous. This is a very difficult rule for most men to follow. There are certain physical specifications, and following that, there has to be an easy manner, a quality of comfort in his own skin, self-determination, independence of mind and spirit (the list goes on). So, if the men are going wild and crazy and I am making them so, if they are spitting chips or two, then there is no need for them to worry: I’m happy to leave most of the alone.
I make exceptions for the few, however. Can you talk to me like a human being — as one human talks to another? Can you show some loyalty that goes beyond your outer boundaries — beyond the simple and blind loyalty of saving your own skin? Well then you’re very unlikely to raise this feminist’s ire. Such men (whose names will be selected for a list) will be invited to an orgy in the future, at an unspecified location.
Finally –I’m not an advocate of Twisty Faster feminism. There is one great element lacking in this type of feminism, and the one great deficiency I spy is that such strident intellectual idealism does not leave room for treating individual men or women as human beings. This is a very monumental error, in my view — and I would not have come to recognise it had the owner and proprieter of this brand name, herself, not taken enormous strides to point out to me, personally, the theoretical flaws associated with her radical feminist views.
Thankyou, thankyou, thankyou!

Shamanistic literature is open to the accusation that "there is nothing there" (so far as content goes) or that the writing "is all about the author" (that is to say --it is that and nothing more). One critic in Nietzsche's own time thus deemed Thus Spoke Zarathustra to be an exercise in style and nothing more.  This critic failed to see that Nietzsche was writing about how to double oneself to be both the one who experiences and the one who observes one's experiences, to transcend one's limitations (self-overcoming, was his term).

Unique to Nietzsche's writing is that it does away with this moral and epistemic dichotomies by using material that would otherwise be "just about me" to understand cultural wholes.

He describes the process of gaining self-understanding, along with its greatest consequence as follows:

Whatever state you are in, serve yourself as a source of experience! ... You have inside you a ladder with a hundred rungs which you can scale towards knowledge. Do not undervalue the fact of having been religious; appreciate how you have been given real access to art ... It is within your power to ensure that all your experiences -- trials, false starts, mistakes, deception, suffering, passion, loving, hoping -- can be subsumed totally in your objective. This objective is to make yourself into a necessary chain of culture links, and from this necessity to draw general conclusions about current cultural needs.

This method is to create a link between one's own evolving state of mind and the broader cultural needs of the community. Thus, for the shamanistic practitioner "self-involvement" is essential, and not only because it is also the means by which society is served.

In other words, in terms of the shamanistic structure, there is no moral schism that opposes self-enjoyment from respect for the needs of others.  We are used to that either-or form of morality, but it is profoundly incorrect:

Truly, I have done this and that for the afflicted: but I always seemed to do better I had learned to enjoy myself better. Since humanity came into being, man has enjoyed himself too little: that alone, my brothers, is our original sin! And when we learn better to enjoy ourselves, then do we unlearn best to give pain to others, and to contrive harm. --Zarathustra.

Rhodesian schools were based on the Scottish system, because the Scottish education system was deemed to be one of the best.  Also, David Livingstone, the early explorer was Scottish.  We has to learn a language,  either French of Afrikaans.  The headmaster, who was also my teacher, reckoned that my Afrikaans was pretty poor.  'Jeeves' Hogard thought I should get some extra study in Afrikaans.   Dad had an Afrikaans man working in his office.  His name was Reddelinghuis.  He had a small holding outside of Salisbury.  It was virtually a farm, a he used to grow tobacco and other crops there and he had cows.

My dad came up with the solution to stay with Reddelinghuis. for a week.   I was duly dropped off at his farmhouse.  In the house was Mrs Reddelinghuis whom I remember as a large, overweight Afrikaans woman with the sweetest nature.   She was grossly overweight.   The fat on her legs wads like in rolls to my thirteen-year-old eyes.  The flesh above the knees would hang down over the bottom part in a big shape.  She had a daughter who was similarly sharper at eighteen.   Her son's shape was reasonable.

I could not understand a word they were saying.   They used to serve biltong as a side dish to the main meal, which was inevitably mealie pap and gravy.  One day I heard a lot of screaming and I went to see what was going on.  The woman was cleaning out her son's room and he had a rod with a hook on it.  The hook had gone through her finger.  They had to cut the hook part off and shove the hook all the back though the finger.  

Another night Mr Reddelinghuis came in and said there was a bush fire threatening his tobacco.  We would all have to go and fight it.   We ended up being driven a couple of miles into the bush on the back of the truck.  There were several Africans with us.   We hopped out of the truck and that was the first time I saw Africans hitting the base of the fire with branches of trees.  The fires would go up in the air and go out as they were separated from their fuel source.   I had just been wandering around in a distracted state of mind and got lost.  I found myself surrounded by flames at least twenty feet high.

You could find an exit path by walking on the parts where the ground had already been burnt.  I was totally on my own and didn't actually know what I ought to have been doing.  Then I heard voices and managed to join up with them.   I must have wandered no more than one hundred metres or so.  I don't think the others ever realised I had been surrounded by flames.

The Reddelinghuis's were very strict Dutch Reformed Church.  They would sell tea or coffee at local agricultural shows.   I offered to make signs for the stall, because it was just a bunch of tables,  nothing to tell you where you were or what was going on.  I bought unbleached calico, called kaffir sheeting.  I wrote coffee and tea in English.

That was a similar situation to when an aunt and uncle invited me to stay for a couple of weeks in Mozambique.  I spoke no Portuguese.  My mother spoke Portuguese.  Again, Katrina was raising funds for her church, which must have been a catholic church.   She suggested I paint a sign for their stand.  She wrote it out on some paper and handed it to me.   I got myself some unbleached calico and paint and started to put on the letters.  Some Portuguese youth, at least I thought they were, came and stood around me.  On reflection, they must have been Rhodesians. They were taking the Mickey out of me because they could not speak Portuguese and they thought I was Portuguese.  They started making jokes about me, and when I had had enough, I looked them I the eye and said I speak English as well as you do.   In hindsight, I would have found out why they were there and seen if I could join them.

I once joined up with people like that.   I was staying in the Estoril campsite in Beira when I was 18.   The beach was a kilometre long and then if you were looking toward the sea, the campsite was behind you.  On the right was a pavilion where you could get food and they played music.   In front of the pavilion was a wreck.  People would walk though it as the waves used to crash against it.  The waves were dangerous.   I settled on the beach feeling alone.   I had taken three weeks leave from my new job and drove down to Mozambique in my new Volkswagen.  I had never driven any distance on my own before.  I'd set off from home at six in the morning, stopped in Umtali for a cup of coffee, and set out full of enthusiasm to drive to Mozambique.   Umtali was on the border with Mozambique.   As soon as I left it, I was in Mozambique and had to go through customs and immigration. I cleared customs easily.  It had cost me a week's wages to get the triptik, enabling me to take my vehicle into a foreign country.

I drove thought he forest, which was on fire, smoke blowing everywhere.  The road was ten-foot tarmac with sheer edges.   It was very hard on steering track rods.   The Portuguese army knew about these steep edges and used to drive playing chicken,  which meant they would hold the middle of the road and force you to get off.   It was very dangerous.  If you just touched the edge, you would go off into the bush.  The Portuguese vehicles were Unimogs, big jeeps.  They played this game all the way down to Beira.

The first moment you know you're on the plunge flats is when your car drops down suddenly.   Every time you came down, you thought that was the end of your shock absorbers.

I made my way to the aunt and uncles household.  I was offered prawns that had been cooked whole.   One of the women ate a whole prawn including the head and legs.  I felt sick watching that.

When I went down to the beach, I noticed some young people fifty metres behind me and fifty metres to my right.   I joined up with them as a gatecrasher.  It wasn't easy to leave and join up with them again as I would have been spotted as an outsider, so I just stayed with them.

Later, I went up to the pavilion and ordered per-peri prawns to give them a try, and loved them.

How much leeway is there for a revision of one's behaviour through culturally conditioning when one is already predisposed to act in a certain way?

There is the issue of changing one’s thought processes, which often cannot be done effectively. When I was a a preschooler, I was dragged away from playing with bricks in order to play house. I didn’t understand the rules of playing house, which seemed to me at the time much more complex and mystifying than playing with bricks. You could see the bricks and what you were doing to them but you couldn’t see the rules which told you how to act when you were playing house. As a three year old, I felt really put on the spot at having to improvise a drama, when I couldn’t understand the gender roles we were to play out. Also, there didn’t seem to be any point to the playing out of these gender roles, since there was no defined objective to the ‘game’. I became very bewildered by the situation, although I tried to hide this by keeping calm.

At various other times in my life, I’ve had the same experience. I can’t undestand the point in playing certain social games when the objective hasn’t been defined for them. Why try to keep up with the Joneses or attempt to become Miss Perfect, when the meaning of that objective hasn’t been defined? I am bewildered by these situations, and my mind goes on a constant error-check cycle, as if I’ve missed some vital piece of infomation from my consciousness. In some instances, when it seems really necessary for me to solve “the problem”, I can end up emotionally exhausted and overwhelmed.

For example, school teaching. To be an effective female school teacher, it seemed to be necessary to read some very subtle emotional signals all the time. This was not impossible to do, with some effort. Far more difficult was the task of trying to nourish my own mind and to keep myself emotionally above water in a situation where I couldn’t compete against myself to achieve a well-defined objective, but had to narrow my ears to listen for subtelties all the time. I began to feel like my head would burst because I was trying to keep all sorts of pieces of information, which were not intrinsically important to me, in my head at all times. It felt like everything that I should be focussing on in this job was somehow in my peripheral vision, but that when I turned around to face it, it had already gone. In short, I had trouble developing the social sensitivity to understand my environment.

Accent: Soft English, often mistaken for undefined European.

Booze: I prefer Shiraz or a very dry Chardonnay.

Chore I hate: Putting on my armor and getting ready in the morning. I am never sure if there is something stuck to me – dregs from the food last night, loose hairs, cat smudge, the bathroom door....whatever. I’m never sure if I look ironed enough. I’m bothered that the limited makeup I’m wearing might be smudging.

Dog or cat: Cog. Well actually, a big dog — bull terrier or German Shepherd preferably.
Essential electronics: Computer with a link to the Internet.
Favourite cologne(s): A variety of French fragrances bought for me by Mike.
Gold or silver: Gold.
Hometown: As yet I have no home. Can I have yours?
Insomnia: Rarely. I tend to sleep through anything, no matter how loud, although I will wake up to check it out initially if and when the noise is loud enough.
Job title: Worker
Kids: Go well with goats.
Living arrangements: I share my homestead with two or three barbarians

Most admirable trait: I don’t give in.

Number of sexual partners: I’m going to regret, when I am well-aged, that I had too few.
Overnight hospital stays: Being born, tonsilitis, appendicitis, ass-hole surgery.
Phobias: Black wall spiders which move fast. That my brain will rot in a clerical job.
Quote: Better to die standing on your feet than to live on your knees!
Religion: Just say no.
Siblings: They do.
Time I wake up:  now and then
Unusual talent or skill: sadza measuring
Vegetable I refuse to eat: This isn’t a vegetable, but I don’t like those eggs of Cod.
Worst habit: Over-preparation for each single engagement.  (e.g.  I’m not sure if what I put on has since got dirty, or if I’ve forgotten to take with me something essential, like my credit card.)
X-rays: Knee, gut.
Yummy foods I make: God makes all my food.
Zodiac sign: Up there in the sky — under my pyjamas

I need to get at least one more part time job, to boost my income.  Here are my reflections on what I've learned from the past.

I feel myself exceptionally fortunate at this stage in my life, because I'm pretty much established what I'm good at and where I generally tend to fall short.   Not having an objective understanding of this in the past used to perplex me a great deal.    I tried out for quite a few different jobs, some that suited me and others that were nothing short of disastrous.

The three of four jobs I've recently had or presently hold have suited me far better than those I took on when I first finished my undergraduate degree, when I simply applied for any job that had became available.  Those I've succeeded in have been being a graduate student (on scholarship) and completing my PhD, working as a teacher of English as a foreign language and now teaching boxing for fitness.  Before that, I produced advertising copy, wrote as a freelance journalist for a martial arts magazine, did part time cleaning jobs, designed web pages when the Internet was just starting up,  taught school subjects as a tutor, edited fiction and worked as an administrative assistant and public relations assistant, all with varying degrees of competence.

What the current jobs have in common is a component of novelty.   To continually engage with novel ideas, novel practices, or novel people keeps me alert and on target.

Jobs that suit me least are those that require strict attention to detail.    Since I think primarily in abstractions, I find it difficult to follow procedures according to linear logic.    My visual memory is also rather poor, especially when fatigued.   That's why it's useful for me to take videos of my martial arts classes, so I can recall the lessons.

I find from situations where I have pushed myself beyond my normal limits, I don't recall geographical orientations or the arrangement of a number of objects in one place, on the basis of visual memory.   It remains possible that visual memory can be trained, and this is what I'm trying to do through my martial arts.   At the same time, this was the factor letting me down as an army recruit and a teacher trainee.  In the first case, lapses of memory grew worse, the more I was pushed to my limit:  "Where is your bayonet, recruit?  I'll tell you where it is.  You left it in your locker and now the enemy has got it and all of your platoon are dead!"

In the second case, I wasn't even tired, just too bored to focus on the children in the class.  They all looked the same to me, and ultimately I used a female pronoun to refer to a male, which immediately cooked my goose.

In many ways, my mind wanders quite a lot.   I retain the power needed for a concerted effort, and can continue to make one when I train my mind to obsess about one topic until I start to make breakthroughs with it.   To train my mind to focus on something boring is extremely difficult.   My past experience indicates that even when this is extremely important, I cannot do so.   It seems as if I don't have the brain power, developed from an early age, to focus on concrete details for a prolonged duration.

I've had many successes in life -- above all, researching and completing my PhD, which finally assuaged my lifelong thirst for knowledge.   I've also re-established my links with Zimbabwe and taught self defense across the country, there.  My enduring relationship with Mike is a long term success that few women could dream of matching. I've established the concept of intellectual shamanism and continued to develop my ideas in relation to it.   I've achieved brown-belt in my martial arts style and am moving like a snail towards my next grading.

In terms of leisure activities, I've made a thorough investigation of Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Bataille and Dambudzo Marechera, and understood them inside and out, including from the perspective of the theoretical platform I've developed, which transcends them in some ways.   I've been skydiving nine times, with one jump from a static line in Zimbabwe.  I've written a memoir, and assorted other material, much of it posted on blogs or available as E-books.  I've traveled via the public transportation system all over Zimbabwe, stayed in a rural township there and been on horseback safari through the north-eastern wilderness there. I've slept rough.  I keep attuned to Zimbabwean and Western political situations.  I publish poetry or articles.  I'm a mentor for other Zimbabwean gender activists and a really reliable friend.  I use the Internet for networking and jaunty explorations of territory that may still still elude me.

Always the luke warm temperature — the artificial aquarium forms the school itself. All input, chemical and energetic, must be measured. The mood must be maintained on an even keel. All negativity ignored. The interesting element of abounding intrigue is that all human interaction is totally eliminated. Instead are ersatz human relations: The magnificent edifice of behaviourism — a structure (or obstruction) of immense totemistic reliability. In the classroom, it prevents the teachers from having to have anything to do with the students, and the students themselves, once accustomed to it, can’t handle anything else.

WE ARE NOW APES

Miniature rewards of positivity tumble forth, as if from heaven. The dragon’s mouth opens wide. No negativity allowed (or rather, lots of negativity, but beneath the radar and denied a meaning.)

WE WANT TO BE GIANTS

Behaviourist regulation allow no human spirit to evolve. There are monkey-like, ape-like gestures, males posture whilst females simper, but generally one hears no human noise nor distant echo of reflecting minds.

WE ARE OKAY ABOUT IT

This is also adult culture: the norm. It is only an aggressive totemistic culture that develops out of bland, behaviorism. Only peckings are distributed in pure malice. Pecks are the order of the day, and there are often hours — days — when the whole barnyard is all a fluster.

CHICKENS!

The inability to communicate: a common cultural state of being due to never having come in contact with a human being. An ape preening on top.

CHICKENS.