Chocolates and Charcoal

Today I feel especially blah.

I didn't sleep enough last night because the bulldozer the city of Maputo uses to clean up the heaps of trash around the city rolled around to our block and started to work at about 3am. There were all sorts of industrial-type crashes and bangs, lots of glass shattering, and that annoying bip-bip-bip-bip construction machines make when they are going in reverse. I was envious of Rico and the kittens as they slumbered through the entire thing and I lay awake for the entire hour it took for the bulldozer to do its thing.

I am also having a bit of a food hangover/addictive cycle prompted by our anniversary dinner at Costa do Sol on Friday evening. Rico and I are friends with the owner of the restaurant and he knows that our relationship started at one of the tables on the veranda this time last year. To help us celebrate, the owner personally selected our dinner menu. I'm talking baby clams and shrimp cakes for an appetizer, then a gargantuan platter of fresh fish, grilled squid, and butterflied king prawns with plenty of french fries and garlic sauce alongside. Then we had chocolate mousse for dessert. And, of course, a bottle of white wine and some coca-cola to ease the digestive pain once we were at home.

Since our extravagant anniversary celebration, it's like my stomach has doubled in size and I just crave food at every possible minute. Today my weakness was chocolate, which is strange since I don't really even like it that much. But since I'm tired and PMS-ing, I decided to-hell-with-it and ate a Mars bar and a Cadbury's mint chocolate bar all by myself (thins being after a proper lunch at our neighborhood Lebanese restaurant). I've been feeling out of control with food the last couple of days and am quite frankly too tired to really do anything about it. I'm just hoping that things will regulate themselves once our contract is signed with the IFC and we put our noses to the grindstone Wednesday (our contract was delayed by a week).

In the interim, this has all got me a bit depressed and feeling moody in general. I don't know what it is, but when I get depressed I get creative. So after pigging out on chocolate this afternoon, I took out my charcoal pencil and journal with the blank handmade pages and started to sketch. I don't usually draw (it's been over 2 years since I last did a drawing!), although I love to do art in general. I just usually stick to the more crafty things like knitting and jewelry making. But today I wanted to draw, and there's something about when I'm in the mood to draw that I almost always am satisfied with the results.

So I sat outside on our little veranda set about sketching the Vila Algarve, the massive Portuguese mansion across the street from our building that is in ruins. Here is a photo of the Vila, followed by my drawing. I did the whole thing in about 30 minutes, trying to use the drawing as a meditative practice...turn off my mind, shut out the voices in my head, and just draw. Don't judge my drawing, don't start over because an angle is wrong, don't try and be a perfectionist - just draw.

(Now the trick is to pick up the charcoal pencil and start to sketch before attacking the chocolates. In the long run I feel so much happier and more satisfied after drawing than after eating sweets.)