What is a Dishwasher?

Something that most women in my world have never owned, let alone use or worse, believe in.  Or a washing machine  ... not to  mention a dryer!  Not a hair dryer mind you, but a clothes dryer.  Think of all those lovely little gadgets that people in the first world just cannot do without, and then take a woman from my world and the best they will do is look at the woman from the first world and automatically become subservient and wonder.  Woman in the first world is equipped with all these gadgets to make her life easier, fewer children, a voice in what happens in the house, consultation for planning purposes, access to insurance, policies - a clear life plan, from education, health, welfare, wealth creation to information and support.  

Women in my neck of the woods are expected to be the washing machine, the dryer, the hoover, the cooker, the microwave oven and they get one wonderful gadget as a sign of affection - a cellphone which will only be used to receive instruction from yours truly and some more fortunate friends who manage to forage enough air time to make life relatively easier by - gossiping.  Just look at what has taken over even from the television - Facebook.  Zuckerberg now becomes Zuckerbad for influencing women in my neck of the woods to explore and experiment online for the very first time in their lives, via the phone!  Wait and watch what will happen.

Its Calvin's birthday today ....

and here are nineteen reasons why I celebrate and continue to thank God for each precious year I have been priviledged to be Calvin's mum:-

1.  Calvin is crazy - like his mum.

2.  He dreams better than me and believes in each and every one of those dreams

3.  Calvin keeps me sane - even when its apparent that he should not bother.

4.  He has never given up on me, even when I gave up on myself.

5.  Calvin really and truly loves me - and it will be an honour for me to hand him over to his wife some day, (because I hope the woman will know she will be part of, or all of Calvin's harem ha ha!)

6.  This young man is strong, tenacious and full of sh..  When he has messed up big time, he comes to tell you himself, like starting to drink at age seventeen and asking you to take a sit so that he tells you straight out. 

(I am still furious but I appreciated the honesty  ... till we started talking about plastics!  I'm still wondering, was he pulling my leg or is he....?)

7.  Calvin is alive.  With all the ups and downs of his life, the guy should be a psychic case but no .... he talks of growing up with Mike Tyson and Evander Holifield (sp) and true, plates did fly and he learnt early on to duck but  these things happen, or do they?

8.  There was a time when I used to teach Calvin computers, now he slowly talks to me and explains gadgets, the way one talks to a very sick patient - because he cannot fathom how his once savvy mum is turning into this slow and gadget weary moron.  (People, I try, well he has a point about my slowing and I'm glad he mentioned it because.... long story)

9.  I am totally happy and grateful to have Calvin learn from me in turn and  for him to learn more than what I know and have him teach me (begging and threats work for this one).

10.   We have had real tough conversations this year and lucky for both of us, we still have enough honesty and respect for each other to find common ground and continue to be the best of friends.  (Some of my friends did not survive teen-age with their children!)

12.  I think this might make some parents angry but I think its alright for Calvin to drink openly rather than him do it behind my back and I'm glad that he speaks of plastics because much as one would like to say my child is innocent, there is a real and crazy world out there which is not as friendly as the environment I grew up in used to be so I thank God that we are able to talk, Calvin and I, or rather I am able to have my monologues with him when he is on Facebook and he occassionally looks up and repeats what I would have been saying!

13.  For a product of divorced parents, I see and acknowledge Calvin's anger, but he has turned out quite normally.  I am very proud of the fact that most of this is his own doing because Calvin is a fighter.

14.  Physically, Calvin has grown taller and he wishes for a beard!  Considering yours truly and his father, I think he is a reasonably good looker and while his self assessment (over assessment) used to bother me before, I realised that it was just a teenage pride thing and (hopefully) not a lasting part of him.  

15.  Calvin inherited my sense of humour but I worry because sometimes he can be cruelly honest.  The good thing is he can take the same if it is directed at him but I see that it costs him friends.  Funny enough, he has managed to retain the friends who are really close and dear to him and for that also, I thank God.

16.  While Calvin does not laugh much these days, I still find it good going when he does.  I am hoping that the coming year will hold a lot of happy moments for him because he needs to laugh more and that laughter has made many a bad day turn beautiful for me over the years.

17.  Calvin has matured and grown so this last year.  The young boy has been replaced by a serious young man, too serious, me thinks sometimes.  He is determined to work hard to succeed and now he actually is disciplined so much about work I am totally amazed and pleasantly surprised!

18.  For a whole while there, I thought Calvin had become tough and uncaring and that he had become, but now, he has gone back to being the pleasant and caring human being he once was.  Of late, there is even a lot of thoughtfulness about other people and I know he is totally and madly in love with one girl, (lets keep our fingers crossed here!)

19.  There is a part of Calvin that is constant, unchanging and consistent, and that is his love for the people he cares about, not judging, just accepting them, faults and all and that, makes this young man special.  I wish I could loan my son to mothers who wish to have sons who care for them so that they know that there are still such human beings on earth.    

Happy birthday Calvin, from me .... with love and the twins .... with love ..... and wishing you many more!!!!   

Of white and other hairs

Is it good to dye your hair?  Is it good to diet?  Is it good to dress a certain way?  At what age is one supposed to become comfortable enough with who or what they are enough to do exactly as they please?

I watched the Miss World 2011 Beauty Pageant and the first thing that struck me was the low budget of the intertainers they chose for the occasion, - a local group from London and a group which did a rendition of a song they co-performed with Sir Elton John.  Given, the London group was good but  I think they got more mileage out of the event than did  the pageant.  Impressive to note that most of the beauty queens had a degree or were studying towards getting one and really outstanding the work of the Ghana contestant and her colleague who won a truly deserved award for their work with the children and the deformed.  Such young people, such beauty and such a caring and giving heart!  

Which reminds me of Dr. Oz and the new virus XM something.  Has all, if not the same symptoms as the HIV virus except its not AIDS and 10 million people already in America having it, tests already available on the market at was it US$300 per test?  Now look at my neck of the woods, most people do not have US$20 so where on earth would they get the money for a test such as this.  If it costs US$300 in the States, at current rates, would mean, cheapest places US$700 in my neck of the woods.  Now how many of my people do you see with that kind of money?  If its being spoken about on television in the States, chances are a lot of people in my wood will get to know about it maybe some time early next year and by that time, a sizeable number would have died and it would have to be an epidemic first, like bird flue, before one agency or another then gets in with billions of dollars to make sure this is available  the people who need it most, but in the meantime, why not let the pharmaceutical companies make their millions and let a few more millions die.  After all, life, like death is good business.

African Science

I still cannot say whether the heads were of a reptile other than a snake and the yellow stuff, that must have been sulphur. Given, the rest was definitely innards of some reptile, difficult to say.  I did use a stick to separate just to try and find out how on earth this could have landed on the verandah.  Must have been put during the night because the blood did not look fresh.  

Then there was the rat and dismembered birds all tied and piled together.   Same spot, second day running. Third day, something else.  Fourth day, a whole snake one and a half metres long.  Of course, all this could be coincidence .....but.  Personally, I am not afraid of this stuff, but I did get concerned, mostly for the sake of the twins.  So, I went back to running this by different people and they all, with one exception, agreed that this was definitely African Science at work.  And there was more.  Stories of witching syndication.  All within the family, of course.  Different versions and "proof" from different people.  Its like opening a real pandora's box. This happened because of abcdefghijklmn.  Names, places, incidences, some absolutely matching and different versions from different people with striking similarities.  I tell you my head turned white overnight. Well, almost. Solutions, counter, reverse fire, burn and grill, fight, etcetera.  People, a mind is a terrible thing to mess with.  That is why you hear of so many tragic stories of people axing each other and whether all the stories are true or not, its your decision what to believe and what not to and why.  

One of the funniest things that is totally true about life is that if you are bent on believing anything, it becomes fact and truth, because it is what you want to believe.  Whether or not you are presented with facts which belie whatever you would have seen, heard, experienced or gone through, at the end of the day, you have a choice.  You either take whats said and act on it, or dismiss it.  In fact, there is so much good and bad that most of us will never know enough about, but to waste life believing such and being influenced by the bad  is a decision one makes.  Its a pity the number of people who spend their lives believing otherwise in my world. Even if you catch a witch red-handed, what are you going to do about it and when you are done, what value is it going to add to your life?  So what if its your own mother, brother, cousin etcetera.  Me, I just wish them well with their chosen profession and tell them I'm no one's puppet.  Full stop, end of the story and what will be ...... will be.

Oprah

I admire this woman.  For good reasons too.  I know that I am not a fan of talk shows and frankly, I have caught just a few of the thousands she has done over the years but the few that I caught were worth catching.  I remember the episode she spoke to members of the Ku Klux Clan and they exchanged insults so politely, on air, I just had to give it to the woman for taking it without even batting an eyelid.  We all know, rightly or wrongly that she favoured Mr. Obama, who came on to be the first American President of colour and its not just about the colour here, its about people from my neck of the woods because overnight, every disadvantged child could be anything and everything.  Every human being with parents of lowly descent suddenly, overnight, became human beings capable of making the same decisions, the same actions, as everyone else in the first world.  No matter how much anyone would like to down play the humble cook who sent his son to school overseas, there is no denying that the actions of that lowly man, put billions of people in the limelight overnight, because it ceased to be a race just for the Presidency, but a validation and vindication to all the lies, petty comments, idiotic remarks and uninformed and biased reasoning about a vast majority of people whose only deficiency in life, is poverty.

While Oprah had the voice, she lacked the power.  You need the two to make sustained and lasting change. Mr. Obama will go down in history as the first American President of colour, but to the vast majority of people in my world, he will be remembered for proving that all men are equal.  

Then You Continue with the View

Either slowly, cautiously, or fast like you know how some drivers are, never giving way and always bent on getting there first - where exactly?  Nowhere, or somewhere  Take this programme, a successful programme done by women.  I said women, not woman.  The View.

CastSeries cast summary figures:

Joy Behar ... Herself - Co-Host (302 episodes, 2000-2011)

Elisabeth Hasselbeck ... Herself - Co-Host (292 episodes, 2003-2011)

Sherri Shepherd ... Herself - Co-Host (285 episodes, 2005-2011)

Whoopi Goldberg ... Herself - Host (269 episodes, 2005-2011)

Barbara Walters ... Herself - Host (183 episodes, 1997-2011)

That is work done by five women of different potential and sensibility and temperaments over a .... long period.  The point is, they are a team, for better or worse and they have stuck it out and done what they continue to do despite everything.   Now I caught this episode where they announced that one of them is getting married and another where a more powerful woman (Oprah) interviewed them and Whoopi said an interesting thing.  She confessed that at one time she was a functional drug addict.  Another of these women introduced herself in one episode, said she was an alcoholic then said sorry, wrong meeting!  I'm not sure if I enjoyed this more than Oprah herself in hair curls doing the back screen rendition of one of her closing of series issues.  She belted out an aria but her 'staff' were too emotional to even laugh.  Whats my point and what has this got to do with my fourthworld?  Simple.  We have the same choices these women have.  We have the same ability, capability.  The only difference, if any, is our belief in ourselves.  Wait a minute please. I know you say people in the first world, especially women, have it easier, and thats true in some instances and debatable in others but and this is a big but,  if you do not take the initiative and think the environment will do it for you, I think you will wait forever.  I know I am coming across muddled (I'm drunk on watching too much Television yesterday and today) and more importantly, I am motivated, by women, who are not only smart and hardworking, but who also are not afraid of their weaknesses and who they really are. 

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were created for a purpose, not just to enable a logical and orderly progression of movement, both human and vehicular, but also to afford the anxious drivers a moment to pause.  Yes, pause, because in the numerous pauses we take through life, sometimes, sanity prevails.