A few months ago, before we had moved into our new house, I decided that one of the small things I couldn’t wait to do was to install a knife rack.
Needless to say I grossly under-estimated the amount of critical work (cleaning, fixing etc) we had to do before we got to the luxuries like curtain rails and knife racks.
Anyway, last night I fitted the knife rack. It definitely feels like we’re making progress.
Please excuse the shoddy mobile pic!
A friend of mine has this boss who works till 9pm most nights. She’s doesn’t have kids and she’s married to a guy who lives in Joburg. She has achieved a lot. She is an achiever. She earns a fat salary. She drives a nice car. People know her name. She’s actually a nice person too.
Now she wants my friend to work late as well. My friend isn’t happy about that.
It all depends on what your priorities are. There are no wrongs and rights here.
On saturday I’m going to remove the kitchen door that has swelled slightly and plane it down so that it doesn’t scrape on the floor any more. For some reason that is a priority for me.
On saturday evening I think we’ll end up sitting on a couch and drinking champagne (it’s the day we move in after all)… That time, with just the two of us, is a priority for me.
The difference of course is that when I’m 70 years old I’ll have the memory of that evening we sipped champagne and that day I fixed the door on my very first house. I’ll also have all those evenings where we talked rubbish while cooking supper together, watched inane tv shows and played with the cat.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’d rather have those memories than a fancy car and a list of people who know my name, but I respect any person’s decision to focus on those things.
Years ago I worked for a large travel company. There was an old lady who worked there… her job, for the previous 25 odd years, had been to travel the world and write about her adventures. One night at a company dinner she was telling us stories about all the incredible places she had been. Another woman of similar age said to her, “Oh, I wish I had lived your life, it sounds so amazing!“… To which the jaded traveler replied rather seriously “I would trade you my entire life for one week with a loving husband and children!“.
I think I was 19 at the time… Those words continue to haunt me… and guide me.
In case you weren’t counting, the year is 2008… In the past week I have received both the Spier Wants To Give You Free Champagne email and, more recently, the Microsoft Will Track This Email And Give You $321.56 For Every Person You Forward This To email. Both of these emails came from people I ~used to know… People who do not suffer from diminished brain capacity, amnesia or bouts of uncontrollable binge drinking & emailing. I’m tired of being understanding. Ignorance is not an excuse for not using your logical faculties.
Find your own internet, this one is taken.
A while ago I created this for graphjam:
It should be obvious to most of the readers of my blog that the use of “Tigers” and the placement of “Sudan” was purposeful.
Unfortunately half the commenters seem to be dumb people called “Brittany” (guess where she’s from) who are just clever enough to check the wikipedia article on tigers and yet not quite clever enough to grasp the point of the map.
Um, shouldn’t this be on Failblog? There are no tigers in Africa.
and:
Perhaps this should be on failblog due to the completely inaccurate placement of the Sudan.
With first prize going to this gentleman:
Technically most countries in africa carry no international significance. that’s the whole point of this map. and my lol’s.
I only wish I could convince myself that he’s trying to be incredibly sarcastic… but I can’t.
:(
I have the luxury of not being a journalist.
Mail and Guardian on the other hand doesn’t have that luxury. That’s why when I saw this: “Krugersdorp school rocked by ‘Satanic’ killing” I sighed quietly to myself. The article would be perfectly at home in Die Son and uses phrases like ‘crazy-eyes’ and ’satanic-like ritual’
Here’s the deal. A kid who was obviously a little fucked in his head took a sword to school and stabbed a few other kids (one of whom died) and some of the school gardeners (who no doubt were trying to stop him). That is all. There is no need to try and justify his actions with claims of satanism or his music interests, or, for gods sake, the amount of time he spends on the internet. I’m sure he also played violent computer games; just like pretty much every other fucking kid in his school, who, for record, didn’t stab anyone with a sword yesterday.
These sorts of things happen, and they are tragedies, and they are possibly preventable, but not by censoring the kind of music your kid listens to, or freaking out because they bought a cheap sword at the Chinese knock-off shop around the corner, or banning the internet in your home. The only way to (possibly) prevent things like this happening is to be more aware of your child’s emotional well being, and, should you think your child might be a little nuts, get them to a psychologist who can either help them, or send your paranoid parent ass home because your kid is actually normal.
It seems like society is always looking for an excuse to justify our behavior. We blame MixIt for infidelity and computer games for violent kids… but we forget that a 70 years ago kids were being exposed to far more violence in the form of a World War and had access to more artillery than our current defense force, but they didn’t go to school and shoot up the classroom.
There’s also a stupid trend where people claim an unstoppable addiction to idiotic things like smoking, pornography and alcohol. They claim they have a disease because they can’t not buy that next box of smokes, or drink that next glass of scotch. Like Kyle so brilliantly said to his father in South Park, “No dad, you don’t have a disease, you just need to stop drinking so much”. If you don’t have the willpower to stop smoking, rather just admit to having no self control than muddying the waters for people with real problems.
So please, journalists of the world, stop looking for reasons… back in the old days people were just plain old nuts if they stabbed their school friends … I liked those days. Can’t we please go back?
————–
Update: After a long discussion with Gavin, who knows a thing or two about mental issues, I must note that I agree that kids are doing this more now days than they were 100 years ago, and that the reasons for that must be something societal.
So maybe modern society (and everything that entails from bad foreign policy to violent movies) is to blame as the catalyst that triggers kids (and people) who are completely fucking nuts, to do stuff like this… but the key is, they were completely fucking nuts to start with.
The crux of my post was this; Journalism like this is likely to have a few thousand mothers confiscating their kid’s swords and slipknot CD’s, only further increasing the divide between them and their kids, which, will no doubt make them far less able to detect real signs of the kind of insanity that actually drives kids to kill their school friends, not to mention just plain old bad parenting.
Like Terri says, we want easy answers, not hard, complicated ones like ‘perhaps it’s a mixture of bad parenting and George Bush’s unjust war that kills thousands of innocent people every month, and violent movies and economic depression and the chemicals in our food and a bad case of ‘insane in the membrane’.
I made this for graphjam, but here it is in case they think it sucks.
It’s a sad thing that we live in a world where a single mom is a slag who probably fell pregnant in high school and a single dad is a fucking hero.
Mad props to all the single parents out there. You’re all heroes.
j.
Serve with whichever pasta floats your boat and beer.
Graffiti is and always has been a part of society… go read up about it. We’re talking thousands of years… even before Jesus.
Now obviously my title is rather exaggerated and designed for the express purpose of increasing my readership, but the thing is, I really am starting to get pissed off at those “Jesus Saves” people walking around painting over what they deem inappropriate.
First there was the international graffiti competition held in Cape Town where some of worlds best contemporary artists painted f-ing amazing murals on walls that made you want to stop your car and take a deep breath. 2 days later the Jesus Saves people painted that incredible wall full of art work grey. Not white, grey.
I was willing to tolerate that since graffiti is supposedly against the law… never mind the fact that supposedly these guys got permission from the owner of the wall.
Then there was “FREE ZIM!“, a piece of artwork so poignant and powerful that it made me seek it out and photograph it. It said everything that needed to be said and was a constant, daily, reminder to thousands of Capetonians of exactly what had to happen in Zimbabwe. It was also beautiful, with stencilled birds taking flight reminding me of the phoenix to our north.
Then in the height of the xenophobic attacks against Zimbabweans (and other foreigners) the “Jesus Saves” crew painted over it in a dull grey that angers me intensely every time I drive past.
Which leaves me to say, like some graffiti artists mural’d on a nearby wall: “Jesus must hate art”.
ps. For the kids out there who are going to start screaming about tagging. I am not talking about tagging. I am talking about art. Tagging is the equivalent of taking a shit on the pavement and expecting people to think you’re cool for doing it.
