Love Storys and Internet Dating

I recently finished reading, "The Time Travellers Wife". It came highly recommended by a reader I trust. It's a great book, with an improbable and fascinating story line and the obligatory love story. Yet I found it less than entrancing and not a book that I would put anywhere near my top ten. Everyone else, who has read this book, has been entranced and it makes me wonder about my own levels of cynicism.

And there's the rub... I find that I cannot view this love story with anything less than cynicism and that just makes me sad. The end of my own relationship (a sad and sorry fading away), has left me feeling rather heartless. Which leads to the second topic for today's post, internet dating...

What a horror! You fill in these awful forms with these awful questions that are supposed to reveal something about yourself. You trawl through pages and pages of other people's answers to these awful questions and somehow you are supposed to be able to make even the vaguest decision about the person. In addition, you're expected to post a picture of yourself, which is nothing if not humiliating. The whole process, designed to help people meet each other, appears to be designed to achieve the reverse.

In cyber-dating world you can send "winks" to people, send messages and etc. It all seems so random, yet contrived and so un-organic. And maybe that's where my problem lies, I am used to meeting people as part of my daily life, of talking with them and making decisions based on real human interaction, in cyber-dating world it feels more like bingo (and everything that implies).

And so a beautiful book, that will probably become a modern classic, has failed to move me because I am the inhabitant of a place that I don't want to be in. I may have to get angry with myself for missing one of life's important literary moments.

Where to begin other than the beginning?

Where to begin? With a head full of thoughts and ideas it's hard to find a starting place, a point from which to proceed. The idea of a blog, as with a journal, inside my own head appears to be quite good. But finding the impetus, a thread, a place from which to launch is far harder than I thought it would be.

Any place is as good as any other, to begin from. And as a whole new phase of my life teeters on the brink of beginning (at least it feels like it might be), getting the thoughts and ideas out of my head will have to serve as my starting point...

For the past ten years I had been living my dream, fulfilling the promise I had made to myself back in 1996. I was living and working in Africa, not as a tourist on holiday but a bone fide member of society.

Ten years ago I believed.

I believed that Africa needed people who were willing to invest their lives in building economy, building business, raising standards. Ten years on I no longer believe.

It is a type of psychological rape to have your beliefs destroyed by the actions and greed of others. Especially by the very people you had hoped to help.

There is a reason why the collective global perception of Africa is as a place of corruption, greed, poverty and war. Because that is exactly what it is. There are the occasional glimpses of hope and light but they are swiftly and routinely stifled by the greed and corruption of Africa.

It saddens me to think like this. It breaks my heart to realise that I have come to this place, but like a rape survivor I'm not yet ready to trust again, if I ever will be.