What should you do with it

Heard this song for the 3rd time today and was able to listen without bawling... not sure if this means am now de-sensitized to the message, or if I've internalized it....

Definitely a reality check, a call to live the examined life.

Artist: Tim McGraw
Song: Live Like You Were Dying

He said I was in my early forties, with a lot of life before me
And one moment came that stopped me on a dime
I spent most of the next days, looking at the x-rays
Talking bout' the options and talking bout' sweet times.
I asked him when it sank in, that this might really be the real end
How's it hit 'cha when you get that kind of news?
Man what did ya do?
He said

I went skydiving
I went rocky mountain climbing
I went two point seven seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chu
And I loved deeper
And I spoke sweeter
And I gave forgiveness I'd been denyin'
And he said some day I hope you get the chance
To live like you were dyin'

He said I was finally the husband, that most the time I wasn't
And I became a friend, a friend would like to have
And all of a sudden goin' fishin, wasn't such an imposition
And I went three times that year I lost my dad
Well I finally read the good book, and I took a good long hard look
At what I'd do if I could do it all again
And then

I went skydiving
I went rocky mountain climbing
I went two point seven seconds on a bull named Fu Man Shu
And I loved deeper
And I spoke sweeter
And I gave forgiveness I'd been denyin'
And he said some day I hope you get the chance
To live like you were dyin'

Like tomorrow was the end
And ya got eternity to think about what to do with it
What should you do with it
What can I do with it
What would I do with it

Theory vs. (not a threat but a) promise

The security guard stops me as I enter the building, wants to show me a picture of his 6 month-old daughter on his cell phone. I stop to take a look, and tell him she looks like him (me who can’t tell identical twins unless they’re dressed alike). He’s relieved to hear this because, he confesses, he wasn’t very sure that it was his child. I ask him “but weren’t you there my braadha? And don’t you know what you were doing while you were there?” to which he responds that yes he was there and knows what he was doing, but you never know with these young girls (and he isn’t that old himself).

Donning my “learned” hat, I remark: you know can always go for a paternity test to make sure… and he says he’s afraid of being taken to prison (as a deadbeat dad) so he just accepted it. I’m busy going on and on about the theoretical “but you can’t be jailed without proof” and he says “yes, the (baby momma's) mother promised me…. She promised me 4 times that she would send me to jail if I didn’t pay support for the child, so I agreed”.
I try hard but can’t stop the guffaw of laughter. The way he put it, I was waiting to hear of the good thing he’d been promised.

That’s the one thing I respect about South African men though, they are happy to accept their paternal responsibility. They may never marry the baby momma(s), but they will always have a place in their lives for the fruit of their loins.

Nursery rhymes banned in MP schools

It's about time! Long live hindu nationalism (that makes positive changes)! and may this spirit catch on in Africa.
So glad someone has finally done something about nursery rhymes (and hopefully the fairy tales) whose sole purpose in the developing world has been to brainwash little ones. Besides, how does twinkle twinkle little star/baa baa black sheep help you in life?

When God draws crooked/wrong lines in your life

Saturday evening, 6pm… furiously working on something that’s due Monday, and planning to go grab some dinner at the only grocery store open this late before they close at 8pm. I get a call from a guy I haven’t seen in a while, and after a quick internal debate over whether or not I want to speak to him, I pick up. He says he’s 10 minutes away from the campus local, he’s coming to watch the Trinidad/Tobago vs. Sweden game with a couple of buddies and would I like to join them for a drink? I hem and haw then decide, sure why not. I figure I’ll go and socialize for half an hour before I return to my business.

We meet up, chit chat while paying scant attention to Sweden and Trinidad/Tobago (except to note the awarding of the red card). The half hour turns into an hour and when I check the time, just 30 minutes left. Burn rubber to the grocery store which is about …10-15 minutes away and as I pull into the parking area… something doesn’t look or smell right. Two police cars, the “armed response security unit” car parked badly… the small groups of people milling around, police and security guys standing around talking… and the distinct smell of firecrackers. Since it’s nowhere near Diwali, it can only mean one thing in Jozi…

My first thought is “did they finally rob the bottle store?” The grocery store has a liquor store adjacent to it and there’s always a rifle-toting security guard at the door. Have never really looked at the make of the gun (definitely not an AK47 though – sure we can all recognize the ubiquitous AK47 even if only the muzzle is exposed), usually rushing past him on my way into the store, always fervently praying that he wont go postal while I’m in or around there. I’ve wondered on more than one occasion, how effective he and his rifle would be in the face of an assault. Ladies and gentlemen the results are in: he did not do very well when faced with a large gang of automatic rifle-carrying men. Clearly some security measures are to discourage the chancers, not the professionals.

For obvious reasons, they are in the process of locking up the bottle store, though the main grocery store is still open, with two small groups of about 5 people each milling in front of its doors. Everyone looks shell-shocked. I approach one of the groups and listen in as a young man of about 25 exchanges tales of his experience in the bottle store, with a woman, about 50, who relates her experience in the grocery store. Her husband and daughter stand there quietly with eyes wide open with far away looks. She says they were told to lie down in the grocery store while the cash tills were emptied. He says in the bottle store they took everything: money from the cash tills, wallets, phones and handbags from customers (and I’m sure they weren’t averse to helping themselves to some spirits). Someone says "I think we should sue the store". I ask how long ago it took place, they answer: about 20 minutes ago. As a friend said when I shared this with her, “you may think that God has drawn a crooked/wrong line on the map of your life, but in the fullness (or in this case, the shortness) of time, it yields good things”.

I walk up to the deli section: they’ve already packed away all the food, and there is no chance that I can charm anyone to fetch anything for me... they’re all too busy marveling their narrow escape. At both the grocery store and the bottle store, the cash till attendants are black females, and they are all looking shocked and disgusted at how close they came to losing their lives. Thankfully there are no blood stains, blanket draped bodies, or ambulances that I can see, which means the worst that happened this time is psychological trauma. I forever get frustrated that most stores here close at 5pm, but in times like these it's easy to understand why.

As I exit the store I hear the manager tell the police “one man came over and threw me onto the floor…” Outside the doors, there’s a white woman crying and leaning on her husband telling him what happened and I catch the tail end of his comment “… that’s why I don’t want you out at this hour of the night dear”. The group with the young man and the woman with her daughter and husband suddenly breaks into Afrikaans. They have been waiting for a reporter from the Beeld newspaper which targets the Afrikaans-speaking population. I leave him busy scribbling down notes of the incident.

Can’t help thinking that come Monday there will be that many more white South Africans seeking to emigrate to New Zealand and Australia, there will be yet another story to relate about how things are just getting worse and worse, another metre added to our security walls, another security guard added to the perimeter of our high security apartment complexes [security guards have just ended a 2 month strike over wages. They are paid peanuts but are expected to face death daily in the line of duty, for those living behind the walls of upmarket, exclusive, world class complexes]. Too bad black South Africans don’t have a country waiting to welcome them with open arms. I’m sure judging from the looks on some faces quite a few people would choose to leave. The only option currently available though, is to stay and strive to make things better. But how?

I won't come back to SA, Irish cyclist says

Where placenta goes after baby comes

*warning: this might get a little ‘icky’ so steel yourself*

Placenta - an ephemeral organ present only in female placental mammals during gestation

After 2 weeks of “OMG it’s coming!” and then the embarrassed “oops, false alarm” after the hospital visit, I gave vicarious birth this afternoon. It’s actually technically more sound to say that I was present at a birth… ok, more precisely: I got there after all the labour, just in time to see the placenta come and the baby getting cleaned up (before the door was slammed in my curious face). It was a natural birth with an episiotomy, and the little I got to see looked like the midwife helping the placenta out. I was peeping in, did not have front row seats and like I said, as soon as my presence was noted, I was banished to the other side of the door.

I saw one of the nurses bring out the placenta and place it in a biohazard bin. Baby was giving healthy(?) wails, and the new mother little gasps of pain as the attending nurse (on the other side of the door) said “no don’t do that, otherwise I won’t see”… she was suturing the cut.

Let me just state here that as a woman who’s not a mother, I find it hard to understand why we women would go through all this, and then turn around and allow anyone to mess with us! A discussion for another day, no doubt.

I was eventually banished from the ward entirely (too inquisitive) and directed to sit waaaaay outside in the visitor section from where I would be called (at the right moment) to see mother and child as they were wheeled by to their room [only the contributor of the other 23 chromosomes is allowed into the ward room to see his progeny. The rest of us can only hope for glimpses. Why? To give the pregnant women privacy. At a public facility such as this one, the labour and post-natal ward are not seperated, so at any given moment there's a naked woman (hospital gown does not equal clothed) with her waters breaking, another walking the hall in labour... something the hospital feels should be witnessed by as few strangers as possible].

A few minutes later I went to check if "they were there yet" and was informed they were not ready yet.....A few minutes later.... I needed question answered:

“What do you do with the placentas?”
Nurse 1: they get incinerated

“So if I wanted to go home with my (baby’s) placenta I can’t just pack it up and go?”
Nurse 1: Nope. You’re not allowed access to it.

(me, incredulous)“Even when it’s mine??!”
Nurse 1: what do you want with the placenta anyway?
Nurse 2: yes, that would go against the human tissues act
Nurse 3: but the muslims go home with theirs

“What was that? The muslims take theirs home? Why?”
Nurse 3: Well, if you need the placenta back whatever your religion or reason, you have to arrange to get it back ahead of time. You can’t just show up, give birth and leave with it… you must have permission.

(then to Nurse 1) “Placenta is said to be a goldmine of stem cells, cells that have not yet decided what they’ll become and can therefore be manipulated to become anything.” [this from watching midnight reruns of law & order, plus I was at a clinic not long ago where I saw brochures advertising cryogenic storage of your baby’s umbilical cord blood , so I wondered what else – other than the TomKat stirfry suggestion - can be done with the placenta).

“You don’t use them for research?”
Nurse 2 (laughing): It would take a whole lot of money to do research on each and every placenta, and being a public hospital that would be pretty wasteful. The ones taken for histology are the abnormal ones, still births or abnormally large babies, that sort of thing. All others are incinerated.

So, briefly:

- You can’t take it home
- If you need to take it home for any reason, get permission ahead of time.
- If you give birth at home, come to the hospital with the baby and the placenta.
-They can tell a lot from the placenta e.g. if the baby is abnormal, you can tell what went wrong and at what point from the placenta.

Now, back to the whole cryogenic freezing of your baby’s stem cells so that your baby has spare parts if something goes wrong with their organs in their lifetime. Really great idea, costs you about R 6,500 (excluding VAT) to collect and process, and only R120 (excluding VAT) for annual storage. Small price to pay to ensure your baby’s future health, right? But back on the ranch, “genetic manipulation of gametes or zygotes outside the human body is absolutely prohibited by the Human Tissue Act of 1983”. Is the service a con, or are they keeping their fingers crossed that someday soon the act will change to favor technological advancement. hmmm.

PETS

Fascinating how some people lavish so much love and attention on their pets. You’d think the world had run out of humans in need! I hasten to add, though, that I can’t wait to get me a miniature dog. Yes, yes! it’s terrible that breeders have played with dog genes to that extent, etc. etc. However, now that they exist, I want me one.

Once volunteered at a Y(MCA) “in da hood” [where I met a 15 year old with what I thought were multiple pagers, but the one around his ankle turned out to be a house-arrest monitoring device, you know, the sort of thing that tells “them” whether you’re holding up your end of the house arrest arrangement; chaperoned at teenage dances, where someone kept turning the lights out –even with me parked right by the switch– and SCANDALOUS bumping and grinding going on the whole time; and the ultimate: a camping trip at a county park, 12 male teenagers, and one insane female “counselor”-what was i smoking??- (the male counselors had pulled out last minute and I didn’t want to disappoint the boys)… we ended up being banned from the county park unless we went back with a ratio of one MALE counselor for every 2 kids] where they had a therapy dog. My first exposure to that whole concept of a "therapy pet" and I witnessed first-hand what truly effective therapy he was. He was a miniature daschund who was loved by everyone, even the most hardened boys. He was toilet trained to ring a “desk bell” that was next to the outer door (one of those hotel reception desk bells) if he needed to go to the bathroom, and he’d run in circles ringing it until attended to. Those "hard boys" would fight over who was going to lavish love and attention on him.

I want me a miniature just like him.