You can’t always trust everything you feel. I think we have all been in that situation before. I remember being convinced I would get at least one SAMA nomination. Shit, I felt it in every bone in my body and when the SAMA people followed me on Twitter I though “fook, it’s just a matter of time”. Of course nothing happened and for at least 10 minutes on the 4^th of March I felt really shit.

Then I remembered something a good friend said. “Always ask yourself if what you are feeling is really true.” Don’t you just hate it when people say cool and very profound stuff – after the fact? What he wanted me to do was get some distance so I could understand why I felt what I felt so strongly. If only I did this before the SAMA debacle I would have spared myself a lot of drama…lol!

Emotions are like a bladdy drug – especially the negative ones. They can make you loose your footing and do the craziest things. This is why I have decided to always be more honest with myself. Seriously though many times we don’t even question the validity of what we feel. The biggest problem is those feeling feel so real to you

If I am angry about a thing I have to ask myself what I am really angry about and then try to dissect the how’s and the why’s. If I really don’t get it I call up a friend and ask for insight. That usually works. Sometimes I reckon you just have to stop  -  take your head out of your ass and question if whether what you feel is real because sometimes it can be the biggest load of bullshit…lol!

“Men and woman can’t be friends” said my therapist. This was the first time I honestly felt like smacking an old man. I know that to be a complete lie. A friend of mine once said that you know within the first 5 seconds of meeting someone if they are a potential mate. And we all know whether we want to admit it or not.

Now in my mind there is nothing wrong with being attracted to someone. We are not nuns and priests here people, but we are not animals either. Not all of us will jump the first attractive thing we see. I do see the danger that the therapist was talking about. Sometimes it is just easier to talk to someone who doesn’t have to deal with all that messy stuff that you have going on in your permanent relations. Those relationships then seem so much more attractive. So you run the risk of getting attached…

Still I like to think that all my friendships add something special to my life. I do think it comes down to balance and knowing what’s important. I like sitting at the bar in my house and drinking cheap red wine with my sister and friends while we bitch and perv about men and the general state of the world. Those moments make my day a hell of a lot brighter.

And the most important bit is knowing  and respecting what your partner needs because we are all different. I go completely batty if I am left on my own or without music for too long. I transform into a Grinch of epic proportions who wants to burn people’s wedding photos and stir fry their kid’s toys…lol!

I remember the fist time I stepped on stage. I was in a complete state of shock and cried when I got home. I wanted it to be perfect. See, it’s always easier to look back at your past and focus only on the mistakes.

So what I did then was compile a little “wouldn’t it be nice if” list. At the top of that list was “wouldn’t it be nice if I had fun while singing”. I always made that my primary goal. I wasn’t focused on getting a record deal or even singing in front of a big audience. I just wanted to be at ease and feel some kind of peace…

I think it’s so easy to get fixated on the bad stuff. This morning as I got ready to sing live on the radio (not one but 3 songs) I had a moment of panic. Then I stopped myself and thought, “Hang on Auriol, you did this before.” So I did the only thing I could do….I prepared and prayed that my people upstairs would have my back – and they did.

This is the mistake we all make. We don’t look at our victories – the big and small ones. It’s always the crap that stays with you. Seriously, when’s the last time you made a list of all the great things you accomplished? I made a killer soup the other day…

So what? Appliances and cars break down, you run out of cash, make stupid decision – these things happen. Sometimes you just have a bad week or even month. I’ve always looked for small things to make me happy. A call from a friend at the right time, a dirty joke told by my daughter, a shared ipod at night. That is what makes a really bad day bearable…

So I don’t make plans anymore. Instead I write up a “wouldn’t it be nice if “list. Not only do I allow the universe to surprise me but I make allowance for the idea that I could end up surprising myself….lol! Hell, I never thought that I could sing live on tv and radio. Yet I did and did a great job of it too. Except that first time when I sang  on tv with my eyes closed…but hey…I was pitch perfect at least! Lol

We are all guilty of time travel and I don’t think it is a bad thing. When my mother spoke of how she met my father I knew that she would always be in love with the handsome man she met then instead of the crabby old man he has become…lol!

I remember listening to Jack Johnson when my daughter was little and imagining what my life would be like if it was filled with music. You must understand that back then I didn’t have the nerve to admit to myself, let alone other people, that I wanted to sing. The idea seemed so completely outrageous! So to make myself feel better I would imagine my future self on some stage somewhere while Jack whispered in my ears. All I wanted was to make those imagined visions real…

Now I don’t need to time travel that much anymore. At least not for music. I only slip back into my past during an emergency when I need to reconnect and remember…. that I wasn’t always this cynical and distrustful of people or myself.

The movie also got me thinking about how we cling to the love we have, especially when the people we love are always travelling – either moving towards an idealised version of themselves or further away from where they are. So in my mind the real the question is never “Do you love me?” but, “Can you really love me? Or will you always be yearning for someone behind or ahead of me?”

No one ever takes their dreams seriously – even the freaky ones. Every now and then I would dream of having sex with a number of people. Does this make me a pervert? Perhaps..lol! Still I know those dreams have absolutely nothing to do with sex at all!

Many of my friends say they don’t dream or they don’t remember their dreams. Of course there are ways to fix that but I find the reason why that happens a lot more interesting. When that happened to me, my life was spiralling out of control. And honestly, I didn’t want to remember my dream because that meant looking at my life a great deal closer….

Sometimes dreams are just an accumulation of end of the day thoughts. Just junk – not worthy of any deep contemplation. I get more concerned when I wake up with a “what-the-hell-was-that-about?” dream. I once heard it being said that your dreams can show you where a great deal of your thoughts are going to.

Nothing scares me as much as my “dark man” dreams. This scary dude is always lurking in my house…his body littered with tattoos and he is wielding a huge ass hammer. I have learnt what his guest appearances means trouble of some kind. But nothing annoyed me more than the Twilight dreams. Partly because I hate that movie and everyone in it. In the end I had no choice but to call up a friend who is a Twilight expert. And once I got it – certain things made sense and thankfully the dreams stopped.

I don’t think you always have to run to a dream dictionary site to get the meaning behind your dreams. Sometimes all you have to do is just think about what a certain things means to you. That logic does not always work mind you. The other day I dreamed of a SA soccer player, Mathew Booth, cheating on his wife. Damn you World Cup Soccer…damn you is all I have to say!

I remember watching The Exorcist with my mother (during the afternoon) and being scared shitless. Of course she did not explain a single thing to me after watching the movie. I also don’t think I slept very well that night either. And so it started…my deeply passionate love affair with the supernatural. Many years later and a brief stint in a witch’s coven only intensified that feeling of excited curiosity.

There are questions that I still don’t have answers to… For example how do the Muslim community deal with things that go bump in the night? What rituals are involved? Don’t even get me started on the Tokoloshe stories I heard from some of my friends….

Having just watched The Fourth Kind I am left with a “hmm” feeling. I remember a friend in high school once telling me that there are no aliens. It’s just the devil messing with you! I taught my daughter that there is no devil – just the power of collective belief. And that collective belief houses all our fears that gets mirrored back to us.

I love teasing her by saying, “Come – watch a horror movie with me.” I know she will run to her bed immediately…but I knew she was ready to watch The Craft a few days ago. Sure she a little scared but I turned down the music just a bit. The next day we talked about paganism and spells. And she got what I was talking about. Although she is getting sick of my “lectures” she says…lol!

The movie The Fourth Kind ends with the words “In the end what you believe is up to you.” I think I will tell my daughter that but I am certain she will find a way to turn that against me somehow…

“When I wanted to know more about sex and what to do I watched porn.” That was the first thing one of my friends did when she got a TV in her room, she told me. When I heard this back at university I was shocked! It would have never occurred to me to do that. Horror and sci-fi was what I was into when I was a teenager.

My parents never told me anything about sex or porn beside, “Don’t you even think about that!” And they are not conservative people at all. For some it’s okay to watch lesbian porn and get lit up like a Christmas tree but it’s another matter altogether when a family member announces that they are gay! “You are going to burn in hell for your sins!” Come on, we all either know people like that or we are people like that…lol!

I really believe in balance of some kind when it comes to sex. If you are going to watch porn watch good quality porn. I don’t want to be pure or aspire to godliness of any kind. I am interested in being completely and fully human. I wouldn’t want to always have nasty, dirty sex. Sweet wholesome love would become boring after a while – if that was all that was on the menu. It’s about finding your own balance.

Life is filled with so much contrast and variety. Why not learn to be accepting of that? I like that I have gay, straight and just plain curious friends. They make my life a lot more interesting. Having great sex, just like living a great life, has a lot to do with how you respect yourself and others. And no one ever gets the balance right all the time….lol!

There was once a time when I was convinced that I would be able to do the right thing at the right time. Only “certain” kinds of people have serious lapses in judgement and end up with their asses on the floor – I told myself. And you know what happened next? My life took a turn for the bad and terrifically terrible. Yes, someone, somewhere was looking at me and saying, “Just how the hell did she not see that coming?”

Now I am certain of very little in my life. This does make me a pessimist I realised… and dammit all I am okay with that! I would rather live with uncertainty than be arrogant and fall on my ass. So in order to learn just how I got there I put myself in rehab – the emotional kind. It’s not that I wanted to be nice or a “good girl”. I just wanted to always be honest with myself about what the hell was going on in my life…

And just when I thought that I was doing well in the program – my life took another turn for the tremendously appalling. Sure, I picked myself up and dusted myself off and learnt many things along the way. One of them being that my pessimism is justified…lol! It just gets so much harder at every turn…

Just the other day I ended up being a complete bitch to a friend. And while I was being a bitch I felt completely and utterly justified. It took a phone call and a great amount of reflection for me to see that I was projecting and being a self righteous cow.  Yepp, back to rehab for me. I was nowhere near ready to be unleashed on the unsuspecting public.

At least I am honest enough to own up to my mistakes – even if they did not seem like mistakes at the time. Other people can and will lie to me – this is just part of life and more so in the music industry. I can accept that fact. But knowing when I am full of shit and being an outright bitch is a skill I am learning to appreciate. Now I just have to learn to do something about it…