going away for a while ; )

Are Babies the New Black?

“Just say no” prevents teenage pregnancy the way ‘Have a nice day’ cures chronic depression."

Girls and by girls I mean females under 20. Grab your Blackberries, your Gucci shades, your Louis Vuitton and... Your baby.

Has having a baby become some sort of bizarre fashion statement? Has it strutted off the Red Carpet and into our communities? Is having a baby as desirable as having the latest cell phone or pair of to-die-for Nine Wests? According to an article I read in The Times, there’s no denying that there seems to be a baby pandemic sweeping through schools throughout South Africa, leaving 5000 Gauteng girls pregnant, the bulk of which are aged 17 to 19. In the Eastern Cape alone it’s estimated that a teenage girl falls pregnant almost every hour! And if this is happening at our schools, even after the government spends about R180 billion on educating our youngsters, what’s going on?

It’s not been long since I graced the Sex Ed classroom, listening to the teacher pile drive the seriousness (not to mention painfully embarrassing) consequences of engaging in unprotected sex into our sponge-like brains. At the end of the lesson there was no denying that my classmates and I felt the same way: Unprotected sex could easily equal unmentionable things growing on your private bits or worse, a baby! Granted teen pregnancy is in no way an invention of the 21 century. My mother had a baby when she was 17, however when I was 17 I didn’t know of anyone having babies and I went to a school where I was the only, uh, white girl in the glass. So in six years what’s changed?

In more recent times British girls started a trend of having babies to get a state-issued house and financial aid, allowing them to move out of home without the pressure of getting a job. And the more little people they produce, the more money they get. That kind of makes sense. However, this is definitely not the case in South Africa, where social aid can barely buy nappies. And if money isn’t the catalyst, then what’s prompting the procreation? The latter part of the last decade has seen phenomenal technological advances, leading to a change in our social and economic lifestyles - Facebook iApp anyone? It’s made us more modern, more progressive. And in our very progressive way of thinking, we’ve opted to give our children cell phones instead of bicycles and let them browse the internet because it’s viewed as some sort of educational super tool (obviously we’ve blocked the porn sites, we’re not stupid). This results in children having the world at their fingertips, and by world, I mean the world of social networks and gasp, the influential world of celebrities and fashion... The Bling Culture.  Now if you have celebrities like Jessica Alba, Kate Hudson, Ashley Simpson, Kourtney Kardashian (Khloe’s still trying), Mirander Kerr and Victoria Beckham accessorising their Armani Prive with a baby bump, you’ll soon have thousands of teens wanting a mini-me too (and if you think about it, falling pregnant is free and relatively easy, unlike getting your hands on a Prada purse). Celebrities have turned babies from sweet, burping bundles of joy, into a trend, a must-have in your winter wardrobe. Obviously, this isn’t a bad thing, especially if you’re grossing a couple million dollars a year. But if you’re a 17-year-old girl, who lives in one of South Africa’s more impoverished areas, we might have a problem. And we have an even bigger problem because that girl is part of a group of girls in Soweto, who when asked why they insist on having babies replied: “Because it looks cool”! Yet this is not just a Soweto-inspired way of thinking, it’s fashionable and as fashion goes, it knows geographic boundaries, it’s not prejudiced against colour nor does it have cultural preference. And like a fashion paradigm, this baby fashion faux pas is destined to become “Like so last year” but unlike last season’s died skinny jeans you can’t just get rid of it, well not for the next 18 years at least.

So how do we fix this? We could follow in the footsteps of a North Carolina University, where they’ve developed an enrolment programme which pays its female students a dollar a day, that’s $365 a year, not to have a baby. Brilliant! Perhaps we could reverse the misconceptions of early parenthood by our fashion-forward youth, if we took the portion of the education budget allocated for Sex Ed and a started a No Baby Reward Scheme. For every year they remain childless they get a designer bag. Or a Blackberry.  Or front row seats, for them and their childless posse, at the Johannesburg Fashion Week.

Last Night

I drew this picture to help illustrate my story, which is 100% true and accurate. Admittedly I may have embellished a bit with the drawing, I don't really look like this, my boobs aren't that big.

The thing about drunk girls is this... They're drunk. And unlike their male counterparts, who you could just punch when they get out of hand, with a girl, apparently this isn't an option. So dealing with a loose, out of hand goose, is tricky- especially when the girl is nearly three times your size.

This is what happened.

I was out. A song I could vaguely enjoy played and I got my ass on the dance floor and tore that shit up. For about five minutes. The song ended, I lingered and the next thing I knew a heffalump (it's a nice way of saying a fat girl) was all up in my grill (I presume a 'grill' is a face?). I can't remember what song came on next but she was gyrating like she was trying to hula hoop. This would have been rather amusing, had the chosen object on which she was gyrating against been anything other than my leg. I felt sorry for her (God knows why). I smiled and kinda bobbed along. Then she shoved her drink in my hand and waited for me to have a sip. Reluctantly I did. I gave it back. She pushed it into my hands again, a little more forcefully this time and again, I drank. This repeated a few times. Now in between bottle thrusting, there was a lot of bottom thrusting. And in between that she would spin around and look at me, I think it was meant to be seductively, but it looked like she had something stuck in her eye. I don't know, maybe she was winking? And in between that, there were times when she, um, threw herself onto the floor, literally. Now I know what she was really trying to do. It's a dance move that goes something like: You bend over, ass out, then bring yourself back up, arching your back in, swinging your head back, and stand up straight. It's kind of like a ghetto move. It has potential. But you've got to be flexible and this unfortunate girl wasn't. So her move went more like this: She splayed herself on the floor. Picked herself up into a crouching position and, with understandable effort, stood up. I guess it was the thought right? And, although on the outside I smiled sweetly, on the inside I was like N**** please! Anyway the song couldn't have ended soon enough. But the ordeal wasn't over yet.

At one point I remember muttering something, promising I'd be right back and hot heeling it off the dance floor and into the girls' bathroom. I locked the cubicle door, and stood on the toilet seat. For a second I felt like I was in a thriller. I got this bright idea that I could stay hidden until she lost interest, but to do so I would need to have a visual of the situation, so I'd know when NOT to exit from my hiding place. I decided to try and peer over the wall to see if she had followed me. I was inching my way up the walls and just about to peer over when there came a BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM! Oh my sainted aunts she was beating at my cubicle door! I had no choice. I feebly opened the door and weakly said "Yes?" And she said "Oh it's you!" (Like she didn't know). Before I knew what was happening I had been grabbed and forced back onto the dance floor, where she sandwiched me between her gigantic ass and some guy's woo woo-who hopefully was too drunk to remember, I wish I was. There was fumbling, touching and at one point I almost burst into tears. I looked pleadingly around. No one came to my rescue, instead to my horror, the few people scattered around looked on, amused.

Finally at around two am I escaped, emotionally scathed but otherwise unharmed. Only a King Steers burger could quell the wave of thoughts and feelings from that evening...

On a lighter note. What is brown and sticky?

Answer: A brown stick!

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

waiter there's a crab in my soup

One day I was at a seafood restaurant. And I ordered a mussel pot (I can never say that without laughing). Hmm mm mm was it good. I ate it all up in seconds and as I was eating my last mussel my teeth impacted against something hard. "A shell" I thought.

Only it wasn't.

It was a teeny little crab.

I took it home and he soon became my new best friend for life (well after Jen and Yol, so he's my third best friend ever). I call him Jefferson.

IT JUST GOT BETTER

Yes, this truly is my morning. I found something else to bitch about. G put his banana peel in his coffee cup. The dustbin door is marked with an X in the picture above. I counted the steps it'd take to effectively dispose of said banana peel. Steps = 5 girl steps, which = 3.5 boys steps.

On the bright side, at least he brought his cup into the kitchen. There is a god.

Girly Tip #5 Boys are allergic to hanging up wet towels...

This picture was taken this morning. Earlier on in the day, g had a shower, he put this very same wet towel on the bed, then proceeded to sit on it. I asked him to remove it, because it's wetting the bed. You'd think that much was obvious. Fast forward to this morning and I wake up to the SAME GOD-DAMNED towel lying on the chest of drawers right next the printer. What the f****? I felt it and it's still wet and it smells damp. Which means it has to be washed. Which means more unnecessary washing. Which means more water. Which means more electricity, neither of which are renewable resources. Which means, thanks to Eskom's latest increase, more money. Which means more arguments. Especially because now I have an unexpected towel to wash. Which means less space on our already too small washing line. Which means some things that really have to be washed may now not have the appropriate space to dry, successfully. Which means that I might mean have to separate whites from lights and do two more washes. Which means...

Which means that no matter how hard I try and understand the complex workings of the male psyche, and believe me I try (my you bunch are tricky) yet no matter how hard I just can't seem to figure out the aversion to hanging towels up. Granted your ability to locate the washing basket leaves much to be desired, however I can always pick up your bouquet of clothes on my way to make you coffee in the morning... (P.S. note the profound use of sarcasm in the last statement) But not airing your wet towel? Are you scared of it? Does it make you feel uneasy handling a wet towel after you've used it? Like having to deal with a used condom or tissue covered in your uh... jizzness ( I was going to say business but I thought that dropping such a subtle hint might have gone unnoticed)?

In closing I can only come up with two conclusions:

1. You do it to screw with my head or to piss me off.

2. ......

F*** the toilet seat, that's easy I can put it down myself, it's not like I have to run around the house looking for it. As for your wet towel. Hmm...

Oh and P.S. I'm not just finding something new to bitch about. Guys'll think "If it wasn't the wet towel it would be the shoes left lying around or the dirty ashtrays". However this is really just about the towel. I've already bitched about those things, and .........

My point exactly.

The Ex Effect

Thanks Philosoraptor.

This is how it goes (not necessarily in this order): You meet. Sparks fly. You fall in love. You date. You fight. You fight a lot. You fight too much. You break up....

The cycle repeats, only this time there's an extra added element: You meet (someone new). Sparks fly. You fall in love. You date. You get a call from your ex. Depending on how you handle it, you may either (a) not fight with your new squeeze or (b) fight.

This in turn begs the question. Can you really be friends with an ex?

Hmm let me think about this. No.

Now obviously there are some exceptions to the rule, namely:

1. You work together

2.You have had a child together

3. Your children have had children

4. You never actually dated, or did the nasty

5. You're related, somehow

That's it, I can only get as far as five. Other than that I don't see how ex's can remain buddies and here's why.

1. You've not only fucked, but you've made love.

2. You've seen one another naked-not only that but you've seen every inch of them, the good, the bad, the ugly.

3. You've shared toothbrushes and goodmorning/goodnight kisses.

4. You've met the parents.

5. You planned a future together.

6. You said you would "love them forever".

7. You compromised.

8. You fantasized (well up till about year 1-then you started fantasizing about someone else, ha).

9. You shared your most intimate secrets and thoughts.

10. You shared your life.

Now having shared all of the above with a few people, I can tell you that once it's over, personally I never want to see them again. What's the point? Seeing the ex can be as awkward as bumping into your gynae, at a family gathering, after he diagnosed you with having crabs (yuk), only to find that he and your father are golfing buddies. The odd "Merry Christmas" / "Happy Birthday" text is about as much as I want to share with someone who knows me. Wait. Knew me inside out, so to speak. Add a couple of years to the mix and you have your emotionally charged past blaring into your future. Is this healthy? Can we delude ourselves into thinking we can be purely platonic after so much fucking, talking, sharing, being so entwined at a stage you were unsure where you ended and the other began?

Sure you could argue "Yes-we can be friends, I've dated my ex for 8 years and we can still be buds". Now for all the yes sayers out there, here's why you're pursuing your friendship:

1. You are still into your ex and hope that one day you two could sort it out. You hold onto the past, you often take a trot down memory lane and reminisce. You remind your ex of said memories. You call. You skype. You suggest meeting up for lunch. You're the protagonist. You're the pursuer. And quite frankly you should just get the fuck on with your life, because you're pissing the new girlfriend/boyfriend off.

2. You are being chased after. You know it. Your new partner knows it. Your ex knows it, but whether or not he/she'll ever admit to it... Either way, you feel good to have someone call you. Text. Skype. Suggest meeting up for lunch. You're playing the game, you love to feel pursued and it's an easy one to deny to your new beau/lady. Sadly it's diaphanous. And the question you should be asking isn't why isn't my partner being understanding? But rather, what the fuck am I really doing here?

If you're going to persist in this rather benign and ridiculous friendship and you simply have to meet up for coffee, be polite, be respectful, be open, bring your new date along. After all they should have a chance to gauge the situation, and who knows maybe you could all be mates...

Um sure...

What the Bleep?

There I was pondering between a Red Espresso, Apple and Ginger juice or an organic Latte when I came across these...

Apparently it's water infused with positivity. It's all based around "words affecting water", considering that we're made up of 70% water...bla bla bla. Now I haven't been able to tell whether this water is spring water, sparkling or just plain tap water.... ? No offense to the hippie brethren but I can't see the point in buying this for double the price of ordinary bottled water (isn't bottled water bad for the environment anyway?) when I could grab a glass of filtered water from home and infuse it with my own peace loving vibrations?

I don't know whether people are becoming more gullible or are hippies trying to make some quick cash before Africa Burns or Vortex?

Either way...

Bzzzz...Sending out good vibes.... See anyone can do it, you don't have to be a trance-loving, hemp wearing, raw food eating hippie to be irie.

(Hey, I think I just sent peaceful vibes into my tap water just through thought-amazing-wonder if I could sell it...I need a new pair of shoes?)

I should be blogging, but I've been very busy.