obrigado

Hi everyone!
This is Peas On Toast reporting directly from the Western Front, or rather transcribing via telephone as The Ant drives on towards the Mozambican border with The Gilb and some of her other mates.

Bless. She wanted me to inform all of you that she'll be back on Monday 13 November. She's doing the Mozambican thing for two weeks, the little bitch. (I love you guy, but you know, some of us are still stuck in an office with a dying plant and an editor that is out to destroy me.)

Her route starts off in Maputo, then they all head onto Inhambane-Barra, up to Vilankulos with a possible stint on the Bazaruto Archipelago...sigh. I did this exact trip December last year. It's lovely. And no doubt her peachy Itye skin will come back bronzed and beautiful.

So folks, my flatmate is MIA until then. She wanted me to say g'bye on her behalf. I'm impressed they left so early this morning too. Since she was at Winex last night as well.
I'm sure she'll have sme interesting stories to tell on her return.

Keep grooving and stay away from small dogs.
This is Peas On Toast signing off for Third World Ant.
xxxxx

Boxes are poor containers for people

People are seldom what they seem. You get to know someone, and slowly but surely – without realising it – you categorise their personalities, eccentricities, even expected behaviours under certain circumstances, into little boxes. Because that is the person as you’ve always experienced them to be, you make the assumption that that is the person they will always continue to be.

This assumption is especially invalid when the person is not someone particularly close to you, hence is likely to be someone you only see in certain circumstances (which is therefore one small experience of their presumably multifaceted selves).

A good example of such a person is a work colleague. You only see them at the office, befriend them in the context of your work environment, and feel little need to see them after hours. As a result, you build your whole mental picture of your colleague as a person based entirely on his/her demeanor/appearance in the office. The danger of doing this, of course, is that you end up only seeing what you want to see, even when evidence to the contrary is rapping you over the knuckles like a convent nun with a ruler (much like a parent in denial that their offspring has just come home from a party on ecstasy, even though they’re exhibiting the classic symptoms like their pupils being the size of N11 potholes and they’re anxiously grinding their teeth to a fine powder).

If you think I’m being deliberately cryptic about what I’m trying to say, you’re correct. It’s too sensational for me to write in this very public forum, but suffice to say I’m flummoxed – although not in a bad way, actually a pleasant one.

Ps: happy weekend y’all. Believe it or not, I’ve got my first bachelorette party tomorrow. And it’s going to be one of those gloriously cheesy lingerie parties, followed by a trip to TeasHERS (which I’ll not be attending due to the more promising prospect of oral satisfaction at a friend’s dinner party). No surprises for guessing that the bachelors’, also taking place tomorrow, will be ending at Teasers next door/downstairs. Quaint, isn’t it?

A calculation gone wrong; calling all physicists for help

3rm and I have now been diligently doing our morning running ritual for about 7 weeks (not all consecutively, given my propensity to fall ill from time to time) and it has reached that point where arguments ensue (which for me and him is an inevitability) about how best to improve.

His desire: to tone up. Mine: to get fit. His goal: to sprint 4.6 bloody kilometres (half of that is uphill). Mine: to run 8-10 km without feeling dead afterwards.

So, this research was all prompted by a huge (breathless) screaming match we had while lugging our exhausted bodies back up Oxford Rd, much to the bewilderment/amusement of commuters waiting for their public transport at the robot.

The argument

3rm: to tone your muscles, you’ve got to damage them with harsh exercise, causing them to build up scar tissue which is more solid than regular tissue. So we need to speed up our run radically, [insert unnecessary curse words here].

Ant: eeuw. Why? To get fit, you just need to run long distances, it doesn’t matter whether you speed up drastically, you just need to keep the heart beating at an elevated level for a reasonable period of time, [retort with equally vile battery of cussing].

3rm: No! We must go faster and do anaerobic exercise, $%*^(&$!

Ant: You can’t keep up anaerobic exercise levels that long buddy, trust me. Let’s do it the way nature intended, ok? There’s a reason that complex life evolved on this planet, and one of the main reasons for that is oxygen, you [bleep bleep bleeeeeeeeeeeeeep].

Of course, the answer is that neither of us is right nor wrong – the right type of exercise depends on what we want to achieve by exercising in the first place. I do like to think that I’m more right [naturally] but I can even justify my claim: aerobic (i.e. oxygen-burning) exercise is best suited for low-intensity exercise over a longer period of time, and I don’t think that a 4.6 km run can ever be short enough for people of our fitness level to be realistically maintained anaerobically (i.e. without burning oxygen).

The two types of energy consumption are also interchangeable, so that during a relatively fast-paced run, you’ll be using the lactic acid (anaerobic metabolism) cycle to some extent, with the aerobic cycle dominating (and vice versa for high-intensity burst of activity, e.g. a sprint, weight lifting, jumping). The trick is to find the correct exercise intensity level at which any lactate produced from the lactic acid cycle is rapidly and thoroughly consumed by your body – you don’t want this accumulating in the muscles as it leads to cramp, and thus has a detrimental effect on muscle function. The good news is that the more training you do, the greater this so-called lactate threshold (or anaerobic threshold) becomes – i.e. you will be able to train at higher exercise intensity levels before lactate builds up in your body, causing cramps. 3rm and I have certainly seen evidence of this, as we are now able to run the whole uphill portion without stopping to catch our breath anymore. I just don’t see the need to escalate our pleasant run to a sprint – I’d rather run further.

Out of interest, I also wanted to see what causes the greater consumption of energy (for a weight-loss perspective, a measure neither of us is using) – an increase in speed or distance. So I’m going to do the dangerous thing and put some equations up for all the geeky (and more scientifically adept) people to scrutinize. Warning: my physics is somewhat lacking (so if I’m using the wrong equations, please speak up and enlighten me):

For the effect of speed:

E = 1/2 mv^2 (energy consumed = 1/2 x mass of the body x velocity squared)

For a 10% increase in velocity:

E = 1/2 m (1.10v)^2

i.e. E = 1/2 mv^2 x (1.21) (taking the factor of 1.21 out to the end)

i.e. a 10% increase in velocity results in a 1.21 times greater energy consumption, which for those of you have forgotten all your high-school maths, is a 21% increase in energy consumption.

For the effect of distance:

W = Fs (Work done, which can be equated to energy transferred, = force x distance run)

What I’m going to be ignoring in my calculations is the effect of friction, which adds a significant amount to the extra work that needs to be done to keep moving)

For a 10% increase in distance:

W = F . (1.10s) (assuming your force, dependent on your mass and acceleration, is constant)

Therefore W = (Fs). (1.10)

i.e. a 10% increase in distance equates to a 10% increase in work done (or energy consumed, but like I said, this excludes the work done to overcome friction)

I guess these results make sense if you look at the equations – the speed equation is a power relationship between work and speed/velocity, whereas it’s a linear relationship for work and distance. You can even investigate this the lazy way – when next you’re in the gym, memorise your kJ consumption rate at each speed you run at, plot it on a graph and voila! You’ve plotted your first parabola since Matric.

Of course, I’ve just spotted a major omission in the velocity calculation – there’s no accounting for the length of time for which this velocity is kept up, which will obviously impact on the total energy consumed. I’m guessing you’d have to plot v^2 against time, and the area underneath it (multiplied by half your mass) would be equal to the total energy consumed – but this means the energy is a factor of 2 variables now, and… I give up. I hope one of you can help me.

So, it seems I’ve strayed from the original intent of this post – to disprove 3rm. I guess we’re both right, and if it is a weight-loss objective you have in mind, I’ve unsuccessfully sort-of proved that speeding up is more effective than running further, given a similar percentage improvement in either.

Oh bother. Being a bad scientist sucks.

I kill cute little puppies

The irony of the contrast of this post’s title with my previous apparently tree-hugging one is not lost on me, believe me. Once again, the universe selects a large unwieldy sombrero and shovels it down my throat. Oh yes creation, I noticed.

But let’s not let this be entirely morbid, for there are happy things to report too.

Spur of the moment birthday visits…

…are the type of event that end in puppy pancakes. An off-the-cuff decision on Wednesday morning last week saw me grab my toothbrush as I was leaving for work, and discuss later that day with the Gilb the possibility of me driving through to the Poenda that evening to celebrate his birthday with him. As luck / fate would have it, two things conspired to make sure it was possible for me to leave early enough to avoid the 4:30 East-bound traffic gridlock: my big boss wasn’t in the office that day, and my manager with whom I was meant to have a 2-4pm meeting was off sick. Score!

Delirious with glee, I zoomed off (minor setback: caught in traffic after all due to almighty accident on the N12) and reached the delightful town at the thoroughly respectable hour of 5pm. I was overjoyed to see that he was legitimately making use of his birthday gift (I’m all for practical gifts these days, so I got him a goose-down duvet with tasteful yet very manly duvet and pillow case covers, even matching ones for me so that when I come through carrying my own pillow as I usually do, I can match the ensemble too. Décor geek!).

Anyhow, not having packed anything more than a toothbrush meant that I had to go to Gilb’s chosen birthday celebration venue of choice – Alley Catz, a dodgy pool club – in my corporate power-bitch garb while everyone else was wearing jeans and t-shirts. Teetering around a pool table in stilettos does not do wonders for the poor soles, I must tell you (and does even less for your pool skills, I’m convinced). Substantial drinking helped dull the pain, and the girls and I developed a new shooter which we called “October 11th”. If anyone ever offers you one, for the love of your tastebuds, don’t accept. Jack Daniels and Dalgado (creamy coconut liqueur) do not a successful concoction make.

After a really pleasant late night out, 4:45am came all too soon, so bleary-eyed after far too few hours of sleep, I was cruising down a quiet road just outside the Poenda at 140 km/h, to get back to Jozi before the traffic became unbearable. Out of the blue, 3 golden retrievers appear less than 10m ahead of me in the middle of nowhere, sitting in the road. Not just any golden retrievers, mind you, but specifically the kind that have gorgeously groomed silky shiny hair and rich chocolatey brown eyes that warm your heart when you stare into them. In a cold split second I made a calculated decision: if I swerved, my momentum would still carry me directly over the dogs, and I’d not be able to avoid losing control of the car either. If I continued… at least the latter could be avoided. And so I did. Two of the dogs got out of the way, one (the youngest, naturally) didn’t. So I hit it, grimacing at the sickening dull thud, and in shock, burst into tears. What disappoints me is less my hitting the dog (its owners should not let them wander around near a highway), and more the fact that I didn’t stop to assess the carnage. My thought at the time was that since there wasn’t a house within sight, there was no-one to inform that I had murdered their puppy. And worse, if the dog was really badly injured but not dead, would I have had the guts to do the humane thing and put it properly out of its misery? (I’m quite sure the answer is no). What didn’t occur to me then was that the dog may have had a name tag, so I could have at least contacted the owners, or I could have taken it to a vet, got it ‘repaired’ and donated it to the Gilb pet fund (Peas and I are technically not allowed pets in our building, besides it’d be cruel to keep a dog locked up inside all day). So I drove straight on, dwelled on my depravity for the rest of the day, and then got over it.

Dress: circa 1980’s…

…the theme for the party I attended on Saturday night with Peas ‘n pals. My outfit consisted of a lumo pink wool mini skirt; a black three-quarter sleeved, round-necked, shoulder-padded, Blingola-sized gold-buttoned jacket; a thin purple/navy/white/pink/yellow satin striped scarf; and gold shoes. The look: Amway executive – cum – Alitalia air hostess (although to my thorough dismay I was asked twice whether I was French!) I was bombarded with the highly creative pick-up lines of “Can I have the chicken, please?” and “What’s the onboard entertainment tonight?” and “Are we there yet?”, but then I did little to stem this irritating line of questioning with my please-locate-the-nearest-exit-to-you and how-to-use-your-oxygen-mask and Whoah-there’s-some-turbulence-up-ahead dance moves. Trés kitsch, I know. (And thanks to a dare from Peas, I’m actually wearing the outfit to the office today – have already received a compliment, if you can believe it!)

What was awesome about the party was the attention to detail: the hosts had stuck a Twister mat onto a wall, and lifted someone up to play on it – sideways and airborne, of course; they had got slush puppy machines to serve slush margaritas from; a bout of impressive breakdancing broke out; someone came dressed as Jacques Costeau (a rather liberal interpretation of the ‘circa’ of the theme there, methinks).


A boys’ weekend of heavy drinking, smoking and some golf…

…leads to the best sex of your life thus far. Ever. ‘Nuff said. Perhaps I should not bitch about the Gilb’s birthday weekend gallivant to a golf resort with a whole bunch of guys (girls not allowed), but instead encourage it. Hmmm….

Who’s the biggest emitter of them all?

First off, happy birthday baby! Mwa mwa mwa mwa mwa mwa mwa! I spent a precious three minutes developing a work of art to mark your entry into the rank of the 26-year-olds:




Next up, an educational piece (I’m in the mood for personal knowledge enhancement, so bear with me). With all the hoo-ha about carbon emissions, the new buzzword is carbon footprints. So let me enlighten you all…

What is a carbon footprint?

Carbon Footprint is a measure of the impact human activities have on the environment in terms of the amount of green house gases produced, measured in units of carbon dioxide.

Carbon footprint = direct (primary) + indirect (secondary) footprint

The primary footprint constitutes our direct emission of carbon dioxide from the consumption of fossil fuels (for use in the home and transportation).

The secondary footprint measures carbon dioxide emissions from the whole lifecycle of products we use (during their manufacture and break down).

How do I reduce my footprint?

Primary footprint: aeroplanes = bad! Ground-based public transport = good! (and you all mocked the Gautrain, sis on you!). Bumming regular lifts with tjommies traveling the same route as you = good! Time to turn off the gas, sever your electricity connections and buy solar panels.

Secondary footprint: Bottled water = kak. You get quality water from your tap, so why encourage the unnecessary burning of fuel to make the plastic container and transport the stuff from Franschhoek to your mouth? Any food from another country = kak. For transport reasons (i.e. consumption of fuels) we should stick to food made/grown locally (perhaps the government should have used this excuse when putting quotas on imported Chinese textiles?) So local really is lekker!

This website lists a number of ways to reduce your emissions, most amusing of which is “See if your employer will allow you to work from home one day a week.” “C’mon boss! Do it for our planet!” Not in this lifetime, I’m afraid…

Third World Ant’s footprint is ginormous for such a little insect

Calculate your own carbon footprint



Seems like I’m naai’ing the world with my profligate use of a private car and holiday flights (the values for the secondary footprint have all been assumed by the calculator). Scarily, environmentalists claim that to stop global warming, the average individual carbon dioxide emission needs to be reduced to 2,500 kg/year. That’s a sixth of my current consumption! I’m going to have to ask to work from home from Monday to Friday at this rate! (I must say though, that scientifically, environmentalists are a dodgy lot – they fail to back up most of their claims with credible scientific experimentation. I certainly do not doubt the gist of their claims, just the empirical accuracy thereof).

So how now, thou polluting cows? I’m not sure myself – there’s so much talk about the need for global adoption of environmentally friendly processes, but no-one taking serious measures to cut their own emissions. The problem lies in the fact that being pro-environment is perceived to be expensive – operating cheap and dirty is seen to line the pockets of shareholders with much thicker wads of profit. Till that perception/fact is changed, I can’t see anything improving noticeably any time soon.

Jeeks, jeeks everywhere

Frightfully slow on the uptake, I wanted to tell you about the ‘Jeek’ Dinner Peas dragged me along to last Thursday, even though the hype has long since moved on (as it will, almost a week later!)

I do have a few brief comments to make on the event:

- Had a proud moment (every few minutes, in fact) when my blog was inexplicably shown on a large screen, along with some other blogs, although unfortunately always right after Peas’ one (it felt exactly like when you get called onto the stage for your varsity degree and the person before you has won all the prizes and their citation takes 5 minutes, while yours takes a mere 30 seconds). But momentary fame, nonetheless.

- Regaled to us was an awesome story about the power of blogging, as used in a world-first marketing initiative by our local wine label, Stormhoek. Read about it here. I was so enthralled with it, that I wrote an email to Wine magazine, recommending they write a huge article on it, noting that it certainly speaks to the young, IT-savvy market they are so desperately trying to appeal to. The editor’s response? “We have actually carried the story in Wine, albeit as a small news piece”. And this is a prime example of why the wine industry in SA has failed to cross the divide and appeal to broader markets than the dwindling population of wealthy old white folk – if the wine media can’t do it, then what hope can the winefarms have?

- Met a sprightly German fellow by the name of Heinrich, who begged me to tell you all about his downloadable cellphone cartoons. So to all 0.00000083% of planet Earth’s population who browse here, be sure to check out his cute little cellphone dude at www.bunandbunee.com Hope this helps, dear boy!

- Peas and I were constantly asked if we were really geeks (or jeeks, as the cool geeks call themselves). I mean, what? Do we look like cool people or something? Does a jeek really have to be heavily IT inclined to be allowed into the clan of the cool uncools? And for that matter, do we not look heavily IT inclined? (okay, there’s no fooling anyone on that last point, you just have to look at my blog template to convince yourself otherwise)

In other weekend news:

Had my first-ever dinner out with the Gilb’s family (he’s come out often enough with mine, which is predictably a rowdy, overindulgent and expensive affair). I tell you, getting conversation out of his father is like pulling teeth! I rattled on about everything and nothing to fill the quiet void, until unwittingly, he saved me by saying to the owner of the restaurant: “Hey, you go to Mozambique often – any advice for these two?” This dude then launched into a 45-minute lecture on everything from accidentally running over little kids (“Whatever you do, don’t stop! There’ll be trouble if you stop!”) to how you need to deflate your 4x4’s tyres to 0.9 bar when riding up steep dunes. He spoke all the way through dessert, until we politely stood up to leave. He won’t ever know how grateful I was for the arb information…

My Saturday was pretty moody, 100% caused by myself. 3rm had asked me a while back to check with the Gilb if we could all go to Lollipop Lounge (strip club in Randburg) on Saturday, and after the Gilb put up a protest about not really wanting to go (he’s never been before, claims he doesn’t see the point), I basically forced him into it. I even made him ensure he had enough cash on him to get a lap dance. But as the day progressed, I grew less certain of my own desire to attend with him, for two reasons: a) no guy would truly prefer to have his girlfriend present at a strip club with him, it would seriously dampen the mood; and b) do I really want to see some (probably frightfully hot Eastern European) chick grinding her pelvis on his lap? For reason (a) I declared that I would not be joining him, and would rather find alternative entertainment plans for the evening, but for reason (b) I got more and more sulky. Yes, it was irrational and inconsistent of me, but logic could not convince me otherwise. By a small miracle, the plans were unraveled due to 3rm’s large night out on Friday, for vague details of which, kindly refer to the following point.

Four of my single friends had napovers this weekend (and yes, J, staying out with him until 6am is pretty much a napover). I’m not allowed to say more, unfortunately – gagged, not unlike the M&G frequently is. The point is, spring is in the air, hormones are running high, and my whiney mates are all shacking up, for which I’m eternally grateful – just shut the hell up about there not being anyone for you on this planet, and make the most of it will y’all?

Notwithstanding my Saturday protestations, I’m having a particularly “I love Gilb to bits” pining week – the kind where his being in Sepoenda sucks unbearably. The one thing that will help me cope of course, is the fact that the dolt decided he’d spend this entire up-coming weekend – no other weekend, folks, than the one immediately after his birthday, which is tomorrow – with a herd of boys playing golf near Hartebeespoort Dam. So, like, um, I’ll just cancel the nice treat I had lined up for you, then. Sometimes two wrongs do make a right. Muahahaha!

Doctors suck

Most of them, that is. And this is not a statement I can make without pissing off a number of my close friends, who are in their community service year of medicine and ready to be unleashed on the world to do the same thing as the protagonists of this post’s title (be doctors, hopefully not suck, that is).

It is my general aim in life to avoid going to the doctor (and I should be specific here: I mean the GP; my encounters with surgeons are thankfully rare, but in all cases, necessary) like the plague: not because I am afraid of them, not because I don’t fall sick from time to time, but because for the large part, I don’t believe they add any value to my life. The dentist, yes – he does preventative maintenance on my teeth, removes the inevitable plaque build-up, reinforces the enamel with fluoride and whitens them. I make twice-annual appointments, I go to his office, I wait about five minutes to see him, he does his work, I see the pleasing manifestations thereof, I pay him his rather large bill quite willingly. I am a happy dentist customer – in fact, I look forward to my visits.

So why can it not be the same with the GP? Not having been since 1999 (except in the case where I needed a renewed prescription for something) I think I forgot all the reasons why I despised them so much, but I will now relate these to you, so that you can share in my ire (do not attempt to appease me please, I want to be pissed off. Thanks).

What time was my appointment again?

I arrived at 9am (technically 8:55am) yesterday morning for my 9am appointment – that’s what people in the business world do when they make meeting times. If you want me there for 9am, then I’ll be there for 9am. If you don’t want to see me until 9:40am, then kindly inform me before the fact that this will be the case. I was told mine was the first appointment of the day, so why on earth was he seeing another patient before me? (“Was it a sudden emergency?” I asked of the receptionist. “No, just his first appointment,” she replied.) Oh. So you book two people, make one wait while you see the other one, boot them out after a certain amount of time, shuffle the next one in, see them for some amount of time, kick them out, herd the next one in ad infinitum (actually, only until 4:30pm. Heaven forbid you expect your doctor, who is actually a businessman trading in his medical services, to put in the occasional late evening. Only people in the real business world have to do that, you see. Us poor lowly un-MBBCh’d creatures.). What really grates my cheese about this was the nonchalance of the receptionist – she looked at me in a very surprised fashion when I suggested I might have other important things to do that day, and acted like I should have expected to wait for the appointment. She didn’t come anywhere near offering an apology for the delay (neither did the doctor, for that matter). If I’d left, they’d probably still have had the nerve to charge me my consultation fee for failing to cancel the appointment less than 24 hours before it occurred, but I’m pretty sure I’d not be able to convince them to pay me for my lost time – it’s not like I don’t have an income to earn, after all. Or is it that my job is less important than yours?

I’m going to prescribe something for you, whether you need it or not

My doctor friends have confirmed this for me – a GP will bow to your whims and prescribe drugs whether you need them or not, because it feels psychologically better as a patient to know you haven’t forked out your consultation fee for nothing – you’re getting hard-core schedule 5 stuff to zap your ailment, whether or not you need it. Antibiotics for a (virally induced) cold? “In case you develop a bacterial infection now that your immune system is a little down” they’ll whimper. In my mind, drugs are usually designed to treat stuff, not prevent it from infecting you. What you really need to be told is “stop whining, if it’s a sick note you want, I can write a fake one up for you” or “stop dressing like an Oxford Rd hooker at night in the middle of winter – put on a goddamn jersey!” or “take Medlemon and sleep it off, you big baby.”

And we wonder why it is that super drug-resistant bug strains develop (hello XDR!) when we prescribe strong drugs to people who don’t really need them, hence don’t take them properly, hence expose their existing bugs to weaker-than-required levels of the drugs, which in turn develop immunities to them.

[But I must be fair and say that this wasn’t the case with my infection yesterday – of course, in some instances, drugs are truly required (although I did pose to him that it was entirely possible my body would clear itself of the infection on its own, that’s what our immune system is for, after all, isn’t it?)]

I’m going to get all self-righteous on your wayward ass

Now, I expect a GP to tell me all the possible pertinent information about the drugs he’s just so happily prescribed for me. I shouldn’t have to conjure up for him some rather likely scenarios that might be happening in my life to check whether or not the drugs will affect it. Unfortunately, the only way I ever really learn the contraindications of a drug is by reading the package inserts, which are vastly more informative (if somewhat too liberally peppered with medical jargon). See, I’ve learnt that some medication doesn’t go too well with other medication. A while back, when I went on the Pill, the doctor (gynae in that instance) never bothered to tell me that antibiotics reduce its effectiveness. Knowing how frequently doctors prescribe antibiotics, and knowing that people generally fall sick with colds/flu once or twice a year, it is not a highly unlikely event that I’d be taking antibiotics at some point in the future, and accidentally find myself pregnant because the Pill suddenly stopped working. Fortunately, that didn’t happen because I have learnt always to read the damn package insert and look up the words I don’t understand.

Anyhow, back to my appointment yesterday: I waited for him to ask what other medication I might be on, or what other medical problems I might have, in the event that there might be some contraindications for my prescribed drugs (I also asked for anti-malarials, I’m going to Mozam in late October/November). I know for a fact that Larium should not be prescribed to people with certain mental problems, but he wasn’t concerned enough to ask about my mental health. I also know that 10-20% of people on anti-malarials (that’s 1 in 5, not a small percentage at all) suffer side-effects from them, but I had to ask what the side-effects were before he thought to tell me. And the cherry on top, I asked “don’t some antibiotics have any possible effect on any other medication I might be taking?” So he replies: “no, not really, you’re not on the Pill are you?” in a disapproving voice. Now that’s one hell of an assumption to make, and one hell of a judgement to cast. Incompetence is what we call it in the real world.

All things fnu-related

If you don’t know, don’t ask.

1. I have some kidney-related illness. It must be terminal – this amount of pain cannot be survived, surely. It feels like someone is using my kidneys as punching bags, my pee is electric highlighter pink and is accompanied by a stinging sensation. It all started while I was sitting on the loo – more about that in point #2 – at the Jolly. Being marginally inebriated, I thought that I must have stretched funnily when I stood up, because there was a bolt of pain in my lower back, on the left side. That pain persisted all through the night, which kept poor Gilb up (when he’s in Jozi over weekends, on extremely rare occasions he’ll spend Sunday night here too and leave on Monday at 4:30am. Being a creature of comfort, it is extremely important to him that he feels he has a good night’s rest. Being a creature who enjoys his company, I aim to ensure he’s as happy as can be when staying over on a Sunday night – my rolling around and constant getting up last night did little convince him to entertain the idea on an on-going basis. But I digress, vastly). Knowing how concerned you all are about my wellbeing, I’ll keep you painstakingly informed of the developments. Hopefully getting a chance to see the doctor tomorrow.

2. At a birthday lunch on Sunday, the topic of conversation turned to the use of public toilets, largely because I admitted to needing an urgent pee at the Zoo Lake the other day, and remarked on how all the loo seats had been stolen. “You didn’t actually use the toilet, did you?” some girls asked, horrified. “Hell yes, when you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go. Fortunately I had some old used tissues on me to serve as toilet paper – there was none in the bathroom.” What emerged was one of two possibilities: a) I am far, far too lax about hygiene concerns in public places (as you’ll remember, my chief concern is about being heard doing my business in the toilet) and risk picking up hepatitis or some dreaded venereal disease (ohmygod! I just realised – what if the infection described in point #1 is a result of this callous excretory behaviour?); or b) some girls are just far too ahem, anal, about using public loos. Two of the girls carry a spray from Dischem that you can use to clean the seat – and one of those girls still then hovers over the toilet bowl! Another drives home from work about twice a day to potty in the happy comfort of her own bathroom (admittedly only 10 minutes away from her office). What this kind of behaviour is making evident to me is the reason for the phenomenon of very long queues always found in ladies’ loos in public places – girls are frantically spritzing, wiping and hovering – a small fraction of this time is actually consumed with the business of relieving oneself. And then there’s the saga of not touching the toilet door handle, washing your hands without touching the taps, drying your hands thoroughly, and barging through the bathroom door by kicking with your foot (this handle is also dirty) while hoping no-one is going to be knocked out on the other side. It’s almost a better idea for these lasses not to wash their hands at all after using the loo, methinks (okay, just joking – if there’s one hygiene practice I’m fussy about, it’s that. Wash your hands. Always.)

3. Our new office development, which our company will occupy from the beginning of next month, have abnormally low toilets. I never noticed it at the beginning, but my boss took one look at them the other day, and declared them unfit for grown-up use. Turns out there are SABS standards for the height of a toilet seat from the ground, and ours are 2cm below the minimum accepted height. So for the time being, we’ll be practicing the bathroom limbo. How low can you go?

4. I have decided I hate La Senza underwear. While it looks gorgeous, it’s scratchy and uncomfortable. The little extra crotch piece (this must have a proper name – anyone?) is cut wrong and sewn in at 6 precarious points. The underwear inevitably shuffles its way right up your backside, too – if I’d wanted a g-string, I’d have bought one, thank you very much. Ugh. (random aside: the toilet crew of point #2 inform me that La Senza is a Canadian brand. I thought that Italian designers would have had more design prowess, so I’m relieved that they have been absolved of this fashion crime.)


May all your bathroom endeavours be clean and peaceful, y’all…