True friends stab you in the front

This blog has moved

2008-11-08T21:11:00.003Z

I've been meaning for a while to move across to Wordpress, which is where my other blog is hosted. From now on, this blog is posted here. Please update your records to the following URL:
http://relentlessabundance.wordpress.com

Cheers

Trust, luck and the STD lottery

2008-11-06T13:47:00.008Z

Less than a year ago, I wrote a post wondering aloud what people in South Africa's rural areas are thinking when they have unprotected sex. These days, I'm wondering what anyone's thinking when they do it.

First scenario this week: I'm at a clinic. A nurse is drawing blood from my arm for an HIV test. It's my fourth test in under 12 months. There were two during my pregnancy (first in SA and then again when I got registered on the NHS); then after my return home, I had another for my medical aid and yet another for my life insurance. None of these institutions - the private doctor, the NHS, the medical aid, the insurers - are prepared to trust the results of the other. Even though each one is wasting the extra R100 or so that the HIV test costs them, I can see why it's not in their interests to trust the results of the others. Why should they? Who's going to divulge honestly that they're HIV-positive when they're applying for medical or life insurance, if they think they're not going to get checked up on?

As it happens, I'm only too happy for them to run the extra tests, given my ex-partner's recent revelations about his behaviour during our relationship. Which would be beside the point, but inevitably this is part of what got me thinking about trust, luck and the ticking time bomb that is the spread of very serious sexually transmitted diseases.

Scenario two: I'm at a table with several women, some married, some not. One of the women is unhappily married, and her longstanding extramarital affair is common knowledge among those around the table. Let's call her Jane.
"How many sexual partners do you have?" I ask her.
Despite her usual bluntness about her affair, Jane seems nonplussed by the directness of the question.
"Two," she answers, and names the husband and the lover. She laughs somewhat harshly, and I can't place the laughter - whether it's self-consciousness or pride, or a mixture of both.
"And do you have safe sex?"
No, Jane tells us, because she's allergic to latex. "So until they produce non-latex condoms, I'm condom-free," she says, with a similarly difficult-to-read laugh.

So Jane is protecting herself against whatever allergic reaction she might get from latex. An excuse which is perhaps reasonable, perhaps convenient, perhaps true, perhaps not. But the excuse isn't protecting anyone in the dubious chain of trust in which she's entangled.
Jane's lover knows about her husband, obviously. The husband does not (as far as we know) know about the lover. And what does Jane know about her husband?
"Oh, he's not having sex with anyone else," she says. Confidently.

It's the confidence that fascinates me. My ex was confident that he wouldn't get caught. He was also confident that I wasn't cheating on him. Jane is confident that she's the only one in the scenario forming an open link of trust - and risk - with both her sexual partners. How well-founded is their confidence? What is it based on?

Well, Jane is confident for a number of reasons. She doesn't find her husband all that attractive any more, so she finds it hard to believe that anyone else does. She regards herself as the sexually adventurous, attractive one in the relationship. She knows she has needs, and she knows her husband is not meeting them. She is not interested in her husband's needs, so it's hard for her to think that anyone else is either. In addition, her lover makes her feel a bit more attractive. All of these conspire to give Jane an imagined edge of power over her husband.

In order to keep her affair from threatening her sense of herself as an okay, lovable person, it also suits Jane to ignore the needs or feelings or experience of her lover's wife. Or the fact that the invisible wife is now effectively one of Jane's own sexual partners (assuming that the lover occasionally services said wife.) Do we know whether the lover's wife is faithful? It suits Jane to imagine the wife as sexually nonexistent; in fact, it probably suits Jane not to imagine the wife at home. But let's imagine that she is, in fact, human. She is left at home quite often while the husband is out and about with Jane. Who knows what she's up to?

I know very few people that haven't, at some point, cheated or been cheated on. I know that in the cases it's happened to me, the culprits have always demonstrated complete confidence in my own fidelity. As though a lack of suspicion or jealousy is evidence of fidelity. Either they are correct, and they are the only ones capable of cheating and dissembling successfully. Or, perhaps, their trustworthy-seeming partners are simply even better at it than they are. How can they know which it is? And given that they know that they themselves are capable of cheating, how can they doubt that anyone else is?

Interestingly, those that cheat tend (in my experience) to have more concern about the perceived betrayal of romantic trust than about the far more pressing risk that they may well have exposed their partner to potentially life-threatening disease. In other words, they are more worried about being found out to appear untrustworthy or dishonest than about the possibility that they may have condemned another person's health irreparably. What other people think of us is, in this case, more threatening than serious, potentially chronic illness. It's a weird (but consistent) weighting of personal concern.

The nurse at the clinic asks:
"Has anyone discussed with you the implications if your test showed positive?" No, I say, but I have a fair idea of the implications.
"Do you get many people testing positive here?" I ask. After all, this is an office block in Sea Point, one of the most affluent areas in Cape Town. We're in the epicentre of the HIV pandemic by virtue of being in South Africa, but this is still a zone where most people will be wrapped in the idea that It Can't Happen To Me. She looks somber.
"It's a ticking bomb," she says. "Put it this way, there are a lot of people out there that just don't seem to keep to themselves."
Don't I know it, I think. And I can't help wondering whether Jane wouldn't better off with a bit of an allergic reaction to latex than something a whole lot worse.

The rise and fall of the extraordinary relationship that allegedly never happened

2008-11-02T20:35:00.003Z

I have, after some consideration, removed this post. If you still want to read it, please email me at greensteinDOTlisaATgmailDOTcom and I'll send it on. Thanks to those whose comments and emails have provided much sane perspective on this outrageous turn of events.

Suggestions please

2008-11-01T13:13:00.003Z

I used to like the name of this blog. But it occurs to me this week that whilst enemies stab you in the back, and perhaps friends might - if they had to - stab you in the front rather than the back, the people you really want to keep in your life are those that don't stab you at all. So I'm looking for a new name for the blog. Suggestions welcome.

Family resemblance??

2008-10-31T14:48:00.002Z

Passing it on

2008-10-27T13:26:00.004Z

The events of last month, sadly, necessitated an urgent departure from London for me and Kolya. Whilst there is not much I'm missing about London, I was sad to abandon the little allotment plot I'd taken over earlier this year. So it was with great joy and delight that I received these photos from the fabulous Kelly and Rosanna, who've been taking care of the veggies!!

Julian among the giant pumpkins:

Beans, beans:

On dropping positive judgement

2008-10-24T11:49:00.006+01:00

"How did I fail to see it?" I asked a friend recently.
"We need to see things As They Are, not As We Want Them To be," she replied.

Later that week, I was given one of those brainteasers where you have to join the dots using a limited number of lines. You've probably seen it. If you haven't, it's pretty simple: just join the dots using no more than FOUR straight lines, without lifting your pen from the page:

I had seen it before, but it was fun to see the other people given the brainteaser struggle with the field of dots in front of them. The field implies a shape, but the implied shape is not actually there. The brain imposes a familiar shape, and the familiar shape prevents you from seeing the other possibilities. (Out of interest, there is more than one feasible solution.)

Of course, the notion of a paradigm shift, of "thinking out of the box" is not unfamiliar to most of us. I've seen this exercise (and many like it), I thought. I've facilitated workshops of my own where I've given this very exercise to other people. It illustrates terribly nicely how our own pre-existing assumptions limit our ability to solve utterly soluble problems. Don't impose judgements. See what is there, not what you think you see. Yeah yeah yeah. We've all heard it before. I already know this stuff, I thought. But then it occurred to me that all I was doing now was the same thing, dressed in a new guise. The revised value judgement? The familiar is of less value than the unfamiliar. I'd seen it before, therefore it had nothing to show me.

Is this so? What happens when we overlook the familiar simply because it is familiar?

The work of cultivating awareness is largely the work of listening carefully, paying careful attention. Labelling situations or events as positive or negative is, in a sense, a way of washing over the reality with value judgement. I like it - so I see it through the gleaming pretty wash of my own preference. I don't like it - so I see it through the dark, distorting colours of my own dislike. Both positive and negative judgements are a distortion. The opposite of the voice of judgement is not the sweet voice of love and appreciation. The opposite of the voice of judgement is attentive, receptive silence. And writing off the familiar is simply another, insidious face of our tendency of not seeing what's in front of us.

All too often, in the literature and encounters of self-development, we hear the injunction to "drop judgement", to "listen unjudgementally." But all too often, that becomes code for "be positive and appreciative"; applaud everyone. We particularly welcome and respond to the familiar. I identify with your story; you must be just like me; I have empathy for you. I do not identify at all with your story; you are so different from me; we have nothing in common; I cannot empathise at all. Identifying positively with others is not evidence of non-judgement at all. In fact, it is often the hallmark of yet more judgement - although it's the kind of judgement that we find comforting and enjoyable to entertain.

But what is the point of dropping judgements if they are fun and enjoyable? Why not simply delight in positive identification when it coes up?

The point is that positive judgement is no less destructive than negative judgement, it's just more insidious. We live in a society where we are trained from an early age to perform for approval. I see it with my little boy, who is constantly told how "good" he is. "Good" being code for quiet, well-behaved, convenient for others. Crying is "naughty"; quietness is "good". This is where it starts. Later it will graduate towards enforcing being "nice", being "polite", doing what "you're supposed to"... And how many of us have had to unlearn this coded, deeply internalised judgement in years and years of therapy? And how many more of us live lives fraught and unhappy, locked beneath a facade of doing what they think they should do, with people they should like, partners they should love, when underneath it they don't? Living a little more authentically than that - that is the point of dropping the judgements.

It is constant work, this work of awareness. Wishing you all a week - or a day, or perhaps just a moment - of seeing things As They Are.

Cornucopia

2008-10-20T12:36:00.001+01:00

Quotation on mindfulness

2008-10-17T23:08:00.004+01:00

By being with yourself, by watching yourself in daily life
With alert interest,
With the intention to understand rather than to judge,
In full acceptance of whatever may emerge,
Because it is there,
You encourage the deep to come to the surface
And enrich your life and Consciousness
With its captive energies.
This is the great work of Awareness.
It removes obstacles and releases energies
By understanding the Nature of life and Mind.
Intelligence is the door to Freedom,
And alert attention is the Mother of intelligence

- Nisargadatta Maharaj

Two down, one to go

2008-10-16T21:50:00.002+01:00

The cousins, and the cousin-to-be...

Who is Kgalema Motlanthe?

2008-10-16T13:34:00.003+01:00

An acquaintance recently broke up with the guy she's been dating. The reason? He didn't know that South Africa had a new president. Now, you could hardly blame the guy if he hadn't heard of Kgalema Motlanthe before he was suddenly president. I mean, Motlanthe was the VP, but let's face it, he was not exactly high-profile. (Which is not altogether a bad thing, considering that high-profile South African politicians tend to be in the news when they're up on rape or corruption charges). But I see the girl's point. You want to be able to have a conversation in public with your man, and know he's not going to expose himself as utterly oblivious.

Still, I have to admit, I'm amongst the many that had never heard of our new president before he was, uh, our new president. So I asked one of my more plugged-in friends, who is this guy, where does he come from? And she sent me an article, appropriately titled "Who is Kgalema Motlanthe?".

The article tells you a fair bit about Motlanthe. But it tells you far more about the state of South African political journalism.

It starts with about seven paragraphs of dry biographical detail, and an outline of Motlanthe's history in the anti-apartheid struggle. We read about his surprise when he first met white people that washed their own dishes and did social work, and about the cameraderie he experienced during his years on Robben Island. In other words, this bit is code for - this guy was involved in the struggle. Fair enough, but isn't his stance on, say, HIV and Aids more relevant? Only about sixteen (yes SIXTEEN) paragraphs later (and how many people read past the first two, I have to wonder?) we start to encounter a few shreds of Motlanthe's peculiar vision.

For example, he expresses admiration for a book on the Broederbond, entitled Super Afrikaners. He is quoted as saying:

one can't help but admire their determination because they were exactly more or less in the same situation that we find ourselves in today..." [They knew] "what political power means, and how it must be utilised to advance the cause of the Afrikaner. They were very meticulous, they understood that they were now in power and that these levers of power must be utilised to advance their cause.

A somewhat disturbing view, I think, for someone now in the driver's seat of our country. Nearly as disturbing as this (also from the same article):

In early May 1998 Motlanthe told the Sunday Times that the ANC wanted to review the constitutionally protected independence of various institutions - if it won a two-thirds majority in the 1999 election - so that it could govern "unfettered by constraints". This initiative stemmed, apparently, from growing frustration within the ANC that "it has been unable to grasp the key levers of power."
Among the institutions the ANC wanted to review, the article stated, "are the Judicial Service Commission, which advises the President on the appointment of judges, the auditor general, the attorney general and the Reserve Bank." Motlanthe was quoted as saying, "you need people in these positions who buy into the value of the new nation."

These are not the noises of someone committed to the cause of a free and healthy democracy. They are also not the noises of someone committed to safeguarding against the dangers of corruption and eventual dictatorship that have threatened other African democracies. But what does the journalist do next? Scratch at the surface of these worrying quotes? No, he goes onto ... more biographical detail.

Several paragraphs further on, we learn that Motlanthe is firmly in Mbeki's AIDS-denialist boat, and also explicitly supported, until only a few years ago, Zanu-PF's reign in Zimbabwe:

In an interview with O'Malley in September 2004 he stated that in "our analysis" the MDC was in essence "not a political party, it was a protest vote." He criticised the EU and the British whose interest, he said, "was to exert pressure so that they can see a regime change" in Zimbabwe. The ANC's fear, he continued, was that if the West was allowed to get away with this across the Limpopo, very soon they would be trying the same thing in South Africa.

In a country where you have to agree with the reigning leader in order to avoid being stamped as a traitor, perhaps it's unsurprising that Motlanthe has backed up Mbeki's peculiar views up til now. Certainly, in the South African press, whenever someone expresses a view at odds with the party line, they get squeals of racism in protest. But I find it annoyingly difficult to learn anything about South African politicians and their views when our journalists present them in such insistently fuzzy light. Is it just incompetence? Or is there a fear at play: do South African journalists (or, for that matter, politicians) enjoy the freedom to comment critically on our political leaders? It does not inspire much confidence.

Rob took these great pics this weekend!

2008-10-12T22:23:00.004+01:00

Reasons we're glad to be back in Cape Town...

2008-10-10T22:22:00.006+01:00

(in no particular order)
1. Sunny days that are getting longer, not shorter.
2. Never having to wait for the 161 or 486 buses. (Or the tube or train.)
3. Unlimited cups of tea with warm and wonderful friends.
4. Shabbat dinners and lazy weekends with family.
5. The whales still calving along the coastline.
6. Friendly petrol pump attendants. (I don't care if it's a throwback to the bad old days - I love having someone else fill the tank for my unliberated nonfeminist self.)
7. My great car.
8. The illuminating Greg.
9. Kolya's little friends: Noah, Max, Kate, Catherine, Sam and Adam.
10. My book club aka baby club girls who didn't replace me (woo hoo).
11. Sushi. Sushi. Sooooooo-sheeeeeeeeeeee :-)
12. Seeing Kolya get to know his adoring grandparents.
13. Letting Kolya's adoring grandparents do plenty of babysitting.
14. Drives to Kalk Bay, Hout Bay, Muizenberg, Noordhoek, Simonstown.
15. Impromptu arrangements on already-busy days.
16. The bagel deli in Sea Point, and Giovanni's, and decent homely Italian restaurants.
17. Open spaces and houses that aren't all crammed on top of each other.
18. Woollies veggies. And Woollies underwear. And those soft chewy gum things. And the chocolate puffy things that blow Maltesers out of the water.
19. My tango partner, who did replace me, but is still prepared to dance with me (woo hoo!!)
20. My climbing partner, who got the fear and a promotion, but still has a rope and ambitions...
21. The Sea Point pool, which is nearly warm enough for morning swims.
22. Real mountains and friends that aren't afraid of climbing (or walking) them.
23. The Woodstock market.
24. Swimming and surfing at Muizenberg.
25. New friends and adventures clamouring to find us.
26. Waking up to the sight and sound of the sea stretching out all around us.
27. Diesel at about 60p per litre.
28. Bumping into old friends and familiar friendly faces wherever we go.
29. Kirstenbosch picnic concerts.
30. Walks along the beachfront between the joggers and the grannies and the rollerbladers.
31. Weekend visits from my lovely extended family.
32. Limnos Bakery.
33. The blazing quality of light you only seem to find in southern Africa.
34. Tons more that springs to mind each day!!

In retrospect, I'm amazed that I survived as long as I did in the UK, starved of so much that makes each day worth waking up for. Each day I'm back, I wonder whether I will ever be able to take Cape Town for granted again.

We're in print...

2008-10-07T12:12:00.001+01:00

For those of you in the UK, Kolya and I are featured in this month's Practical Parenting magazine, on pages 20-21. Hopefully someone will send us a copy!!

Kolya: 5 month pics

2008-10-06T22:38:00.005+01:00

It's not potty training, it's... elimination communication

2008-10-05T17:28:00.008+01:00

We were on the plane to Cape Town. Over the engine noise, Kolya started fidgeting. There was a queue three-deep to get to the toilet. No way is this child going to wait that long, I figured. But the signals were hard to ignore. I stood in the queue, baby in arms, wishing that the other passengers wouldn't take so goddamn long. Eventually the little door sign clicked green. We popped into the loo, and I whipped K's nappy off, convinced it would be a complete disaster zone. Nothing there. I held him over the tiny airplane toilet, feeling like a freak. "Chhh chh" I whispered sheepishly. "Just in case you want to go."

And, super-matter-of-fact, 4-month-old child did just that. Did his thing in the aeroplane loo, probably with better aim than most adults on the flight. I tried hard not to feel smug, but the truth is that one of the best parts of being a parent is feeling that you've succeeded in meeting one of your child's needs, especially when he's too young to spell them out to you verbally.

Elimination communication - otherwise known as natural infant hygiene. Big terminology for a fairly basic concept. I first heard about it while I was pregnant, and (like so many of the ideas I read about, and later ended up taking on board) it sounded weeeeeeird (no pun intended). But intriguing.

See, the commonly held western view about babies is that they can't control their pee or poo. Leave them alone and they'll squirt the stuff liberally all over everything. Enter the nappy industry. A baby therefore must be wrapped up for about the first three years of its life in a nice, tightly-fitting absorbent nappy at all (or most) times.

Question is: what about those aeons that passed before nappies were invented and marketed (a mere 200 or so years ago)? And: what about all those children in places where people don't have access to - or can't afford - nappies?

The answer is elimination communication. Except that in the places where it's most commonly practiced, it doesn't have a name at all. It's just what people do.

Turns out that this idea that babies have no bladder or sphincter control - it's something of a myth. They don't have great control, but they do have an awareness about when they need to go. In a nappy-wearing culture, this awareness will be trained out of the child within the first six months. (Then, ironically, about two years later, the parents will embark on the project of trying to re-establish that awareness in order to "potty train" the now nappy-trained child.)

However, in cultures that don't rely quite so heavily on nappies, children are given opportunities to pee or poo when the mother gets the sense they need to go. Usually the mother will hold the child in a position that encourages them to go, generally holding the baby's back against the mother's stomach, with fingers hooked under the knees so that the child is in a deep squat facing away from the mother over an appropriate receptacle (toilet, bowl, potty etc). The mother makes a "pssss psss" sound for a pee and might make the same or different (e.g. grunting) sound for a poo.

So, when Kolya was a day or two old, we tried this - holding over the basin, making the "pssss" noise. Pretty soon, he was taking the cue to pee into the bathroom basin, or into the toilet. For the first couple of months, we wouldn't do it all that often - a few times a day, at nappy change time, or when he seemed particularly restless or fidgety. Because I was the one staying with him most of the time during the day, I was also the one most familiar with his daily rhythms. So I tended to have more regular success with this than his dad (who claimed "yeah, well, economists predicted 11 out of the last 4 recessions" - as in, if you pre-empt enough of them, you'll catch a few).

But here comes the interesting part. At around 4 weeks, Kolya started having nightly crying sessions. You might even call them screaming sessions. They would last anywhere between half an hour and two hours, and they were the dreaded bit of my day. They would usually happen sometime between 7pm and 9pm. We could usually calm him for a while with a bath, but afterwards it would start up again. Long walks in the sling, singing, rocking, feeding - sometimes one or the other would calm him down and lull him off to sleep. Sometimes not. It looked pretty much like the mysterious "baby colic". I have to admit, I don't really believe in colic. Colic seems to be the doctor-name for the phenomenon of "baby crying without known cause". It's a peculiarly Western phenomenon, which does not seem to affect babies in rural or traditional societies. It has something to do with digestive discomfort, but no one really knows what. And no one really knows how to alleviate it, either.

The screaming (colicky?) sessions continue on and off for around three months. It doesn't seem to make much difference what sort of a day we've had - whether it's been hot or cold, whether we've been out and about or stayed home, whether he's eaten or slept much or little. Some days are screamier than others. We count ourselves lucky that it's only for an hour or so a day, and we get on with the business of taking care of baby.

Until, at around 4 months, I decide, what the hell, I'm going to give this EC thing a bit more of a concerted bash. After all, I'm alone at home with Kolya most of the time. I should be able to leave him without a nappy for at least a few hours a day. I subscribe to an online mailing list that offers support for parents who are "doing EC". I chat to a couple of other mothers I know who are doing it. I buy a little potty. I ignore Nikolai's looks of skepticism when I'm holding Kolya over the potty for the third time in half an hour.

The change is phenomenal. Within a few days, we're getting 9 out of 10 poos in the bathroom, instead of in the nappies. (For a family using exclusively cloth nappies, this is a massive bonus - it's never all that charming sticking loads of shit into your washing machine.) Kolya also starts signalling more clearly when he needs to pee - he'll get a bit fidgety, or whimper a few times. We don't have anywhere near a 100% hit rate, but he's getting loads of time out of nappies, which is better for his skin, better for the environment (fewer nappies to wash), and great for our communication. And - weird but true - the screaming sessions at night just stopped.

I kid you not. I don't have the research to back this up - I have nothing but my own experience and a comment I read by a doctor who said that she suspects that colic might be nothing more (or less) than babies reacting with upsetment to their unmet elimination needs. Dunno. But happy, clean, chilled-out baby makes it thoroughly worth all the effort involved in holding him over loos (and potties and flowerpots and airport basins) - and worth withstanding all the funny looks from other parents.

For more info and support about trying EC, there are some useful books out - I got Christine Gross-Loh's The Diaper-Free Baby, which was hugely helpful. Also, there's a mailing list on yahoo called eliminationcommunication.

The eliminationcommunication group has tons of useful resources, including a list of reasons to EC. Here are a few:

Health reasons - less irritation for child's skin by keeping urine and excrement off body, so less chance of nappy rash; children learn how to urinate on cue (is not only convenient, but can prevent healthy problems due to holding urine or bowels)

Attachment parenting - encourages the development of a trusting relationship with children through communication about a basic human need; it's more comfortable to carry a baby not wrapped in a big nappy; fosters greater security in a baby - "Mummy and Daddy listen to what I am saying and respond when I need to go."

Environmental reasons - reduces the use of disposible nappies, a major contributor to landfill; reduces the use of water and detergents used to wash cloth nappies; reduces the use of disposible wipes used to clean baby's bottom

Fun - pottying is more fun than changing diapers; teaches parents how to trust their intutions; baby bottoms are only tiny for a short time; why cover up the cuteness?

Common sense - conventional toilet training starts with learning to "hold it" while EC starts with learning to "let go" - this can make a big difference on a baby's perception of elimination and and of life in general; contrary to the promises in advertisements, diapers don't keep the baby clean and dry, but only his clothes and environment. Who would want to wear their toilet?

Apples and honey

2008-09-30T22:25:00.002+01:00

So, it's been a dramatic couple of weeks. Nikolai decided that married life was no longer for him, so I decided that London was no longer for me. Which means that Kolya and I get to live in Cape Town with my lovely friends and family, great weather, mountains and oceans and penguins and all sorts of other things. The shock of change is still sinking in, but we're finding our feet. Which meant that, unexpectedly, we were with the family for Rosh Hashanah, and Kolya got to hang out with his little cousin, Adam Chad.

Lesson hard learnt

2008-09-27T18:30:00.004+01:00

Beware the man that falls in love with you by betraying someone else. Chances are, he'll do it again, when you're someone else.
Beware the man that betrays you often in your dreams. Chances are, your intuition is more powerful than you know.
Beware the man that tells you too often you're the only one. Chances are, he's trying to convince himself of something.
Beware the man who believes he is always right. Chances are, he will be unable to listen to anyone, including you.
Beware the man that calls you a good girl. Chances are, he inwardly wants a bad one.
Beware the man that wants to cast you as his slut, his whore. Chances are, when you become his madonna, he will adoringly leave you.
Beware the man that has no appreciation for his mother. Chances are, in the fullness of time, he will cast you off.
Beware the man that values reason over compassion. Chances are, when his cold reasoning knocks you down, he will fail to help you back to your feet.

Gratitude

2008-09-24T22:46:00.002+01:00

To the seven people that offered me and my son a place to stay, thank you.
To the friend that left a manic office and cancelled an entire day of appointments and arrangements to make sure we were not alone, thank you.
To the friends that travelled across London and stayed late into the night to offer quiet fortification, thank you.
To my family that checked on us nearly hourly - even when I couldn't answer all the calls, thank you.
To the attorneys and family lawyers that offered lucid and valuable advice, thank you.
To the lawyer that worked late on a Friday night to make sure my son's passage home would never be threatened, thank you.
To the friend that sacrificed a long-awaited holiday and instead navigated shock and turmoil with equanimity and levity, and patiently reminded me to feed myself and my child, thank you.
To the couple that hosted a tiny, meaningful satsang on my last night in London, thank you.
To the Art of Living teacher that quietly asked before offering her blessing - I don't want to give you blessings that you do not want - thank you.
To the friend that did not hesitate to take responsibility for my car and other practicalities, thank you.
To the Polish guy that sorted out the luggage with half a ton of plastic and a smile, thank you.
To the airline staff that quietly found us a place to lay down in the business class cabin, thank you.
To the acquaintance I barely knew who offered her warm and clear-eyed view to help clarify my own, thank you.
To my parents that never once said We warned you as they closed their arms around me, thank you.
To everyone in Cape Town that has reminded us that we are where we belong, thank you.
To my child for retaining his Buddha laugh, calming and charming, thank you.

Spring solstice

2008-09-23T21:53:00.003+01:00

The length of day equals the length of night for only one night. After that, the light will grow and grow again in the south, and up north, days will darken.
Cape Town seas still stormy, but the whales are coming.
I didn't think I'd be back here this fast.
No time to say goodbye to the twisted purple beans at the allotment, weighing down the beanpoles with the heavy growth of two weeks.
No time to start the mum-and-baby salsa classes we signed up for in Blackheath.
Time only to zip two lives into three suitcases and a heap for fast shipping.
Time only for a short sharp shock to the heart and a change of direction.
Time only to keep a baby fed while winding down the vision of a shared home, a shared future, and excising ourselves from a small room of broken promises. It took a year and a half to grow all this, and less than an hour to shatter it. Sweeping away the pieces and preparing to leave was peculiarly simple.
Beware Greeks bearing gifts, said one friend.
Beware the dangerous cocktail of fickleness and conviction, said another.
Eat, said the third.
Look to the next thing, said a child with an unusual gift for clarity.

Allotment August 2008

2008-08-19T10:17:00.004+01:00

Frilly lettuce, with some beets in the background, and several weeds peeking through...

Purple climbing french beans...

We harvested the first sweetcorn yesterday. YUM!!!

First few tomatoes are starting to go red..

Hundredweight pumpkin... about 2 weeks after fruit first appeared

Blue pumpkin... a gift from an allotment neighbour that's just started fruiting...

The pitfalls of self-obsessed parenting

2008-08-13T22:02:00.002+01:00

For some reasons, parenting is the domain of horror stories. If you survive the pain of childbirth, the mythology goes, followed by the agony of constant sleep deprivation and the tedium of endless crying and peeing and pooing, what lies ahead is several years of monosyllabic conversation and unfettered expense. I have a friend, in fact, who declares that when her friends give birth, she refuses to see them for at least the next four years, as they are so unbearable to be around.

I recall once, when I was in my mid-20's, seeing a cluster of new mothers gathered and exchanging the arcana of motherhood at a braai. My boyfriend at the time attempted to get involved in the conversation. One of them turned to him and snapped: "Do you have kids?" He shook his head. "Then you can't possibly understand," she sighed, turning her back to him.

Determined not to be sucked in by a vortex of sighing and complaining, I set out to find likeminded mums-to-be, the ones that approached their children as fellow adventurers, not as energy-draining pets that required training. And, with gratitude, I discovered that in the universe of childcare, there are alternatives to everything. Just like there are alternatives to hospital birth (see here for the story of my lovely home birth), to prams and buggies (slings and baby carriers), to cots and cradles (co-sleeping and babywearing), there are alternatives to every parenting strategy under the sun. For those who have faith in routine and discipline, there are the Gina Fords of the world; for those of us that believe that you can treat children like humans (and friendly ones at that), there are the Sears books and Alfie Kohn and Jean Liedloff and the like.

A while ago I was around a lovely crowd of of what I'll call alternative parents. The ones that know all those alternatives and embrace them. They're cheerful and relaxed, as friendly to their children as they are to one another. You never hear them yelling "No!" or "Stop that!" We met in a lovely garden in the middle of a big, open park. The idea was to go for a walk, but the skies were filled with heavy clouds. Two three-year-olds ran around happily yelling at each other as they got themselves full of mud and rain. The mums found some shelter under an arbour at the edge of the garden. It all seemed idyllic. Well, except that I was a bit cold and wet, and a little anxious that Kolya was getting cold and wet. No one else seemed anxious in the least: it was as if their babies played delightedly in the rain every day. I had to suppress the urge to make a beeline back to the warm, dry car.

It was encouraging and reassuring to be around women that recognised the resilience of their children. Children don't melt in the rain, and there's a lot to be said for spending the afternoon tromping around in a muddy garden.

But something jarred, and badly. After about half an hour, I realised that these parents talk about little else besides... parenting. Don't get me wrong, it's a big and worthy topic. But not the only one, surely. The conversation was peppered with little morsels of code: "It's very CC"; "Oh, we're EC-ing"; "Yes, she's another carrier"; "I mean, you're aiming for NVC, but it's not always possible". After a while I was gasping inwardly for someone to mention, like, anything... be it the credit crisis or Revlon's latest nail polish colours... anything besides all this parenting jargon.

It reminded me of when I was 15, and used to make sure that in any conversation I mentioned that I was Vegetarian. God, did I ever want everyone to know. Later, when veggie food was simply part of the normal run of things in my life, I wished that I DIDN'T have to discuss or explain it every time I met someone new.

I'm proud of my parenting choices (so far so good, anyway), and I will happily discuss them and consider them at length. But justifying oneself over and over again is oh-so-tiring. The next T-shirt I get printed will say DON'T TRY SO HARD.

Allotment July 2008

2008-07-24T12:10:00.004+01:00

Four months on, and it's all looking wonderful. Nikolai built me a shed, which you can see on the left of this photo:
Leafy greens (spinach, lettuce) in the foreground, potatoes behind them:
The corn is nearly as tall as me now, and it has tassels where the corn is forming:

We've been harvesting potatoes and onions. This was the very first potato plant we dug up, an early variety called Robinta. You plant one potato, you get 14 out!! Next year, I'm going to try Maris Piper and Pentland Javelin potatoes. The Robintas are the earlies - we still have lots of Desiree and Homeguard varieties waiting to be dug up later this month.
Onions looking healthy:
You pick them when the leaves are all yellow and fallen over, which is about now. Next year I'm planting hundreds of onions!!

These are the runner beans and purple climbing french beans (foreground):

I built this stick support for some borlotti beans. A bit of an experiment, as I planted them quite late in the season. On the right hand side are two crown pumpkin plants. The idea is that they'll creep along the ground and suppress the weeds around the beans. Let's see...

And there are tomatoes:

Why I love Freecycle

2008-07-15T23:00:00.003+01:00

I thought I had discovered the cleverest thing when a friend told me to "go find it on freecycle", and I did. But, of course, the cleverest thing had already been discovered by everyone else, which was exactly why it worked so well.

For those that have no idea what I'm talking about, go to www.freecycle.org. It doesn't take long to figure out. This is from the front page of their website:

The Freecycle Network™ is made up of 4,543 groups with 5,477,000 members across the globe. It's a grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement of people who are giving (& getting) stuff for free in their own towns. It's all about reuse and keeping good stuff out of landfills. Each local group is moderated by a local volunteer (them's good people). Membership is free. To sign up, find your community by entering it into the search box above or by clicking on “Browse Groups” above the search box. Have fun!

The more I've used it, the more pleasing I've found it. Here's why:

1. Freecycle provides the vicarious thrill of seeing what other people throw out and pick up.
2. Freecycle satisfies your acquisitional consumerist urge AND your urge to be a green eco-bunny at the same time.
3. Freecycle gives you the opportunity to feel generous and helpful and to make others feel happy and appreciative, for absolutely no cost to anyone.
4. You can get some really cool stuff.

Happy freecycling!

Right speech

2008-06-03T18:44:00.002+01:00

"There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about." - Oscar Wilde

"Be careful of the words you say, keep them short and sweet. You never know from day to day which ones you'll have to eat." - Anonymous

I remember, when I was about 13 or 14, spending a lot of time wondering and speculating about what my schoolmates thought of me. Perhaps it was just the average self-consciousness of being a teenager. Perhaps I was more self-absorbed than most. The flip side was that I also spent ages scrawling into my diary long, convoluted analyses of what I thought about everyone else. Judgement. If there's anything that defines adolescence, it's an obsession with personal judgement.

Thankfully, although the nasty corridor of adolescence seems endless at the time, we do eventually leave it behind us. Well, one hopes. And hopefully, along the way, someone teaches us some more fruitful ways of handling personal judgement. I developed a personal checklist to use as armour against the fruitless urge to submit myself to others for judgement, or to stand in judgement over them.

1. Screw what other people think. Stay true to yourself and let the rest follow. Whatever you are, whatever you do, you'll always elicit someone's disapproval. Trying to defend yourself is a pointless pursuit; smile at their disapproval. They can keep it if they wish.
2. There are only two kinds of criticism. The criticism you can learn from and the criticism that doesn't help. There's no point fighting criticism. Listen to it. If it's the first kind, you can be grateful for it for teaching you something. If it's the second kind, you can be grateful for the opportunity to smile and practice your personal strength.
3. As for your own judgements of others, there is a fine calm to be reached in recognising them clearly before reacting to the impulse to share them. The more carefully you recognise and listen to your judgements, the more you will realise how fleeting they are, how little there is to be gained by sharing them.

Of course, then I knew nothing of the Buddha. Now I wouldn't call myself a practising Buddhist, but I do draw inspiration and instruction from several teachings of Buddhism, simply because they make sense to me. Between these and the principles I have learned from Sri Sri Ravi Shankar's Art of Living course, I have repeatedly found a rich reserve of wise teachings that have helped me weather many personal storms.

Right speech is the first principle of ethical conduct in Buddha's Noble Eightfold Path. Right speech is defined in Buddhist texts as: "abstaining from lying, from divisive speech, from abusive speech, & from idle chatter: This is called right speech." The Buddhists are not the only ones that define right speech negatively, or according to the kind of speech that should be avoided. Similar doctrines are echoed in Jewish teaching, which forbids "Lashon hara" (literally, "evil tongue" or "evil language"). Islam likens talking about others ("backbiting") to eating the flesh of the dead, who cannot defend themselves. Buddhist teaching does, however, go into detail about what right speech is, not just what it isn't.

Right speech is spoken:
- at the right time
- in truth
- affectionately
- beneficially
- with a mind of good will.

"One should speak only that word by which one would not torment oneself nor harm others. That word is indeed well spoken.

"One should speak only pleasant words, words which are acceptable (to others). What one speaks without bringing evils to others is pleasant."

It's worth noting that Buddhist teachers define "pleasant" as "not bringing evils to others", not as simply charming or easy. The teaching is not, therefore inviting us to speak euphemistically or in flattery. Rather it is only worth speaking when the words are not going to bring damage, torment or harm.

Whilst the dark days of adolescence are long gone, the daily challenge to approach right speech is never far away. It is a constant practice, only ever to be approached.

Everything's growing!

2008-05-13T18:01:00.006+01:00

Granny Anita takes time out from admiring her new grandchild, and gets weeding the onions...

Onions:

Potatoes:

Lettuce and spinach:

Sweetcorn:

Broad beans:

And Kolya (with tired mummy just back from allotment):

Friday's child

2008-05-05T07:43:00.009+01:00

Kolya Nathaniel Segura, born 10.53 am on Friday 2 May.

It was about the most tranquil, peaceful birth we could ever have imagined. My waters broke on Thursday morning, followed with a few intermittent light contractions. On Friday morning I woke up around 4.30 am with more pronounced, regular contractions. An hour later we called Paula (the doula who would assist with the birth) and midwife. Nik started filling up the birth pool (which we'd inflated a few days earlier).

At first, we were watching election results on TV, but quite soon, the labour pains had me needing to shut out everything except a quiet, single-minded focus on getting through each one. It took me straight back to the experience of my long-distance swims: simply taking one breath at a time, keeping everything very immediate. Besides some quiet background music, the room was almost entirely quiet.

The warm water was amazingly soothing as the contractions became more intense. Paula and Nikolai talked me through each contraction - focusing on breathing and visualising the cervix gradually opening and the baby making his way out. The midwives arrived by about 8.40 am - they persuaded me to get out of the pool long enough for a quick internal exam. They didn't really intervene much more than that though, besides to say that I was 8 cm dilated. I was surprised: after all the birth stories I'd heard, I was still gearing myself up for hours and hours more labouring.

By about 10.30 or so, Kolya's head started appearing, and he slowly eased himself into the world. He took his time: we spent about ten minutes with him underwater waiting for the last contraction to push his body out. Then I lay in the water with him on my chest, Nikolai splashing warm water over him to keep him warm, my fingers full of the rich waxy vernix from his skin.

Huge gratitude to the Meadowside midwives, my lovely doula Paula and, most of all, my ever-astonishing and marvelous Nikolai. And of course to Kolya for making it out with such grace. L x x

What I've learned in 39 weeks

2008-04-29T11:17:00.002+01:00

The baby's due date is 3 May, so he could arrive any day now. I've been meaning to write some of my experience of pregnancy, but have managed to procrastinate for a whole 39 weeks - unless I blame deadlines and the more immediate demands of the new allotment. Either way, I'm thinking back on the last nine months. Here are the main things that stick out.

Lesson 1
"Worry does not rob tomorrow of it's sorrow. It only robs today of its joy."

I can't remember where I heard that quotation, but the first few weeks of the pregnancy was a sharp learning curve in not letting other people's worries bring me down. However strange it might look in retrospect, falling pregnant was a surprise for me. I just didn't expect it to happen at the time it did. It came as even more of a suprise for my parents and Nikolai's parents. I guess I hoped for delight and excitement. At the time, though, there was a lot of shock and worry. Maybe parents are programmed to worry. Nonetheless, I knew that as time went on, their worry would be replaced with excitement and joy at meeting their new grandchild. Glad to say I was right. I only hope that I can remember this for future times when I choose to worry needlessly. Whatever for?

Lesson 2
You don't need an instruction manual.

There is way too much literature on the market for expecting and new parents. Tons of it. Looking at the shelves and shelves full of reading material, it's all too easy to forget that the humans have been having babies quite successfully for more than 200,000 years, and only the last 50 years or so have seen us believing that we need experts to teach us how to have babies and what to do with them once they're born. The information is all in your body already. The most popular title on the market is "What to Expect When You're Expecting" (so ubiquitous that it makes an appearance in both the big pregnant-themed rom-coms of the last year: Knocked up and Juno), which might as well be titled "What to Worry about when You're Expecting". Am I the only person who hated this fear-and-anxiety approach to pregnancy and birth? See lesson 1 above, damnit.

In fact, the best books I've read while I'm pregnant have been those that emphasise trusting your own intuitions and having the confidence to ignore most of what's currently on offer. The best books I read were:
Three in a Bed, by Deborah Jackson
Unconditional Parenting, by Alfie Kohn
Ina May's Guide to Childbirth, by Ina May Gaskin

Lesson 3
The stuff on TV and in movies is made up.

Morning sickness: I thought I wasn't actually pregnant because I never got morning sickness. Fact is, only 1 in 3 women suffer from it. That's a minority.
Cravings and aversions: I got kind of fond of yogurt and fruit and went off chocolate and coffee. I didn't wake up at 3 am demanding weird combinations of deli produce. Your body will tell you what you want and need.
Exhaustion: No one told me I'd need 2-hour naps daily for the first ten weeks or so. They were the best, though, feeling the wave of exhaustion creep up on me, and then curling up in bed, simply because my body was giving me strict instructions to do so. I think what I liked best was the strong sense of simply knowing from my physical state what I needed to do.
Rushing off to hospital: This is the biggest myth - that women go into instant and agonising labour, and need to pile into a car and screech off to the hospital before anything goes wrong. Screenwriters love it, because it's an excuse for instant dramatic action. Actually, these days, most hospitals want you to stay at home for the first stage of labour at least, and giving birth at home is (thankfully) returning to its rightful place as a normal option. Which brings me to

Lesson 4
Hospitals are not the best places for labour or birth

For most of this pregnancy, I was planning a hospital birth. Friends asked: what about a home birth? I shook my head. I would feel safer in a hospital, thank you.

It wasn't until quite late in the process that I stopped and thought about where I'd gotten this idea that birth was "dangerous" and that hospitals were "safer". Turns out that all the research points in the opposite direction. Birth is only risky to mother and/or child when things go wrong. Which should be very uncommon. Hospitals are places that are full of people who are ill, injured or traumatised. They are not soothing or comfortable environments. If you ask someone where they feel most relaxed and safe, chances are that they won't say "at a hospital".

Instinctively, a labouring mother - like an animal in labour - seeks out a place of comfort and safety, preferably somewhere reasonably private, and not too bright, where she can be closed in and feel safe and enclosed for the labour. Big open spaces, bright lights, a sense of the unfamiliar - anything that makes the mother feel instinctively threatened - can shut down the labour process or even reverse it (as Ina May Gaskin documents in her book recommended above). Even the NHS, these days, supports home birth and documents better outcomes for mothers that give birth at home (shorter labours, fewer complications, fewer medical interventions) than for those who give birth in hospital.

It took me months to realise that the idea of going to hospital for an uncomplicated birth was making me anxious and uncertain. I don't have any problem with going into hospital if I need to - but going into labour is not enough of a reason to need a medical setting. If the day comes, and there's some sort of complication, I'm quite open to having medical technology available to me. But for now, the plan will be to have the baby at home.

Lesson 5
There's no need to rush

Pregnancy can be a delight. It slows you down immensely, and without much choice, you have to do things at a manageable pace, forgive yourself if you're less productive than usual, and let it all go, because of course all this slowness and gentleness is simply in the interests of the little life inside you. It's a lovely reminder to be present in each action, and it's also a somewhat sterner reminder for those of us that forget to do so for ourselves the rest of the time. I know many women who only go the extra mile for others, not for themselves. Women who are extraordinarily gentle on every person around, except themselves, on whom they are extraordinary harsh. Pregnancy is great practice for being gentle on yourself. I've found myself eating with care, moving with care, thinking carefully before I do things that might make me tense or pressured or tired or anxious. I've smiled at myself and forgiven myself more often than I usually might. I only hope I remember this practice of gentleness when my body is separate from my child's again.

Allotment progress!

2008-04-05T16:25:00.003+01:00

So I've managed to put in a couple of hours each day, just a little digging (and a lot of meeting the neighbours and making new friends). Even Nikolai got into it today, and we're well proud of our progress after a week...

By Friday afternoon, I'd dug most of the far plot, and with some help from Martha, found a few scrap boards with which to start some very basic raised beds:

Nothing like getting the man involved:

We've planted potatoes in the big middle area, and the two end beds are ready for some onions to go in soon.

My allotment!

2008-04-01T17:48:00.004+01:00

So you want people to be friendly to you on British buses? Try being 8 months pregnant and carrying a garden fork. (Wearing wellies helps too.) Everyone smiles. Old ladies ask you whether you've planted tomatoes yet. Old men will talk about anything. Children stare (but then, children always stare.) And all this because I've managed to secure myself half a plot on an allotment not far from here.

I know sweet f***-all about gardening, of course. But the internet is my friend - there are several wonderful online chat forums where I'm gathering all sorts of new ideas. Bought a spade and a fork. And off we go.

The whole plot:

I decided to start with the end next to the beanpoles. The pictures show before - and then after yesterday and today's few hours of digging.... more progress to follow :-)

Meditation

2008-03-22T09:46:00.002Z

I am not a meditation teacher - or any kind of teacher for that matter. However, I strongly believe that meditation is one of the most powerful tools for clarifying the mind, strengthening your sense of self, and increasing your awareness on many levels: physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual. I meet so many people who, although they have heard of meditation and vaguely like the idea of it, never go near it. There's something cool and mysterious about meditation, as though it's something reserved for monks, or people that have special serene sanctuaries in which they can go and practise it. Or, even if it's something quite ordinary, it's something they "don't know how to do". In the next few blog posts, I want to look at meditation as part of an ordinary modern life.

I'll use some questions to structure this: What is meditation? How do you do it anyway? Where do you do it? Isn't it boring? What about if I LIKE thinking and don't want to clear my thoughts? Is it some sort of New Age or Eastern religious thing? If there are any other questions you think I've left out, please leave comments and I'll happily respond.

1. What is meditation?
I have an admission to make: I meditate sporadically. I do it when and where I can, or when and where I remember to. I don't follow all the precepts taught by my various meditation teachers, simply because if I only meditated in the way they advised, I'd never get round to it. Sure, the more regular my practice, the stronger my sense of equilibrium, my peace of mind, my connection to the simple flow of human experience that brings an uncomplicated joy in daily life. But even an irregular practice is significant.

How, though, shall I define meditation? What do I mean by 'practice'? And why isn't sitting still simply a waste of time that could be better spent doing other productive things?

Here are a selection of some broad definitions of meditation from various internet sites that talk about meditation:

a state of focused attention through which one emerges into an ever-increasing clear awareness of reality
techniques that focus the mind and promote a state of calmness so that the mind and body can be brought into greater harmony to facilitate health and healing
the act relaxing the body and focusing one's mind on a specific target or goal
a means of focusing the mind to reduce or eliminate conscious thought, to bring the mind to stillness or rest
to contemplate or reflect in a state of relaxed focus

You will notice an immediate contradiction in these definitions. Meditation is both relaxed and focused. This is the first of many contradictions raised by meditation. Another contradiction: meditation deals with clearing the mind, and yet, through doing so, we bring the mind to sharper awareness.

Don't worry too much about the contradictory nature of meditation. These contradictions are the first of many that you will start noticing as you meditate, and in fact, accepting the difficulties and the contradictions of the world around us is one of the reasons to meditate in the first place. Which brings me to the next topic:

2. Why meditate?
Ah, the crunch. What can it do for you? Well, meditation raises your sense of awareness. It is a a way of practicing recognition and acceptance of yourself and the world around you. This may sound a little odd; after all, most of us believe that we already recognise and accept ourselves and the world around us. But a lot of the time, we live in our thoughts - either our memories of the past, or our projections of the future.

Where does tension come from? Where do your anxieties and worries come from? Are they located in the present? Hardly. Most of our anxieties come from conjuring up various pictures and thoughts of the future, and worrying What if... And those that don't come from the future, come from the past: we recall negative experiences and events and chew over them, on and on. Because meditation brings our awareness to the present moment, it allows us to let go of the past and the future, and in doing so, to realise that we are not living in the grip of their phantoms.

Meditation is a little like exercise: you can't really locate exactly when and how it's benefiting you. When you think about doing it, your mind will produce lots of excuses, lots of better ways you could spend your time. When you actually get round to doing it, you might spend a lot of time having thoughts like This is difficult, This is pointless, I'm not good at this, I'm not doing it properly. And when you've done a bit, you might wonder what all the fuss was about, and whether it's made any difference to you at all. The trick is just to do it and to trust that the benefits will creep up on you gently and slowly. Of course, if you want proof that it's going to benefit you, I can go into all the evidence - some studies, some anecdotal evidence - but perhaps let's leave that for later. For now, let's look at:

3. How do you meditate?
The definitions above may make meditation sound quite obscure. You may also notice that while some definitions consider meditation a state of mind, others consider it an activity or technique. There are lots of ways of meditating, just as there are many ways of preparing a meal.

The simplest way I can suggest is: sit somewhere quiet, close your eyes, and focus on your breathing. You might be parked in your car, sitting on the tube, waiting for someone on a park bench; you can give yourself a few minutes of meditation. Or perhaps you have given yourself ten minutes, or maybe 20, in a quiet place at home. It doesn't matter. Sit, quietly, and relaxed, and listen to yourself breathing for a little while. That's all there is to it, really.

You don't believe me, do you? That's why you're still reading. You want a more detailed guide. OK. Here's a bit more detail:

Sit somewhere quiet. It can be in the bedroom, the garden, the living room, the balcony, it doesn't matter. The traditional posture of meditation is to sit cross-legged on the floor, on a cushion or mat. If this is comfortable for you, great. But you don't have to sit on a mat or a cushion or a hard floor. If you prefer, sit on a chair. You do, however, want the position to be both relaxed and focused, so make sure your spine is upright, your head facing forward and your shoulders relaxed.
Close your eyes. Again, this isn't a hard and fast rule; some illustrious yogis meditate eyes open. But for newcomers to meditation, closing your eyes is a sure way to bring your attention inward.
Focus on your breath. Again, there are millions of ways of doing this, and numerous books are available to tell you marvellous things to visualise, ways of breathing, different patterns of extending either the incoming or the outgoing breath. Again, I think for anyone that hasn't meditated before, it's important to know that none of the theory matters. Listen to your breath. Feel it travelling in and out of your body. Visualise it if you like.
Notice any physical sensations in your body. Notice which parts of your body are warm, and which are cold. Perhaps a leg is uncomfortable or stiff. Notice your body as though you are observing it impartially, gently, the way you would watch a playing child. Don't fight or resist your observations, but don't wallow or rejoice in them either. Remind yourself that you are increasing your own awareness of each cell in your body.
Extend your observations to the world around you. Notice sounds, subtle changes in the temperature, the movement of the air around. Keep bringing your attention back to your own breathing.
Observe your thoughts. Quite soon, you will find your mind wanders onto some topic you want to think about. Your next meal; that thing your mother said; what time the football is on. For many people, this proves to them that they are not meditators. No! The trick here is to notice that you are having thoughts. Notice and observe them. It may sound corny, but for each thought, observe it the way you would observe a child getting fixated on a small object: Look, my mind is wandering towards the football. Picture yourself putting the thought down the way the child would eventually put down the small object. And bring your attention back to your breath.

4. Where do you meditate?
You don't need a special meditation room, a Zen garden or a Buddhist temple in order to meditate. A quiet place at home will do just fine. And as I said before, there's nothing to stop you meditating sporadically in the space of a normal day.

It does help to make sure that you're somewhere that pets won't come bounding up to you and curiously licking your nose, but if you choose to meditate in your garden, don't worry if they do. It can also help to set an alarm clock that will let you know after your 5 or 10 or 20 minutes has passed, as you don't want to sit for your whole meditation wondering whether you've been sitting for a minute or an hour. (Sometimes your mind will wander down this How long has it been already? avenue. Observe the thought with the same gentle recognition that you observe other thoughts, and bring your attention back to your breath.)

5. What about other activities that I might find meditative?
There are many activities we might describe as relaxed (sleeping, watching TV, lying in the sun) but which are unfocused. They are not meditation. Similarly, activities that require us to focus (thinking, working, making things) are not necessarily both relaxed and focused They are not necessarily meditation either. Yet it is possible to DO things in a meditative way. I think of this as meditation in action.

Say you are washing the dishes, or chopping vegetables, or changing a plug. While you do it, focus on your breathing. Once you have brought your attention to your breath, notice the details of what you are doing. Notice the weight and texture of the items you are working with. Observe the particularness of the task the way an artist observes the particularness of an apple or a pear as he draws it.

Some repetitive activities, such as running, swimming, and even housework, lend themselves to this kind of meditation in action. The activities themselves are apparently dull - nearly as apparently dull as just sitting. This makes them perfect for focusing your attention on your breath, your body and your surroundings. In fact, even in each mundane everyday task - brushing your teeth, washing your body, preparing meals, you can find many meditative moments.

The nice Onken people...

2008-02-15T14:37:00.002Z

sent me some goodies in the post and assured me that they're launching new yogurt flavours soon. (This in reply to my earlier letter to Onken.) In the meantime I've discovered that Sainsbury's do a really great hazelnut one. Now I just have to sort out some of the mysteries of supermarkets in the UK including:
- why can't you buy bags of bran in supermarkets here? (the stuff you add to bran muffins)
- why is buttermilk a rarity?
- where do you find ordinary white spirit vinegar?
Funny, all the things you'd find in the most basic general dealer in the tiniest outpost of southern Africa seem to be regarded as oddities here.

Why the anti-vaccination brigade hasn't convinced me

2008-02-14T00:47:00.006Z

I don't have kids. Yet. But, at six months pregnant, I'm discovering that the path of the parent is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the various parenting-related industries, and the tyranny of other parents. In the past few months, I've learned terms I never heard before: attachment parenting, controlled crying, sleep nazi, elimination communication, baby signing - and vaccination injury.

What is a vaccination injury? A slip of the needle? No, say the proponents of the anti-vaccination lobby, there's more to it than that (1, 2). Their objections to the vaccination industry are somewhat more serious. They regard routine vaccinations as a disturbing extension of pharmaceutical companies and government strategies who would profit from making sure the greatest number of people get injected with their drugs, whatever the risk. It’s a minefield, and a compelling one, especially when you’re a parent and you want the best for your children. What follows are their claims, and a discussion of how seriously we can take them.

CLAIM #1: Children today are sicker - physically, emotionally, educationally and developmentally - than ever before. Since the 1950s, most children have been getting routine vaccinations. In the same time frame we've seen exponential rises in obesity, diabetes, asthma, autism, allergies, ADD and even nutrient deficiencies. Therefore the aggressive vaccination schedule must be (at least partly) to blame.

This argument is the starting point for most vaccine-risk literature (1). Drawing a link between increased vaccination rates and raised illness levels is a fast way to get an emotional reaction out of a parent. Do you want your kid to be sick? No. Do you know EXACTLY what was in that injection? Of course not. Do you see the stats about increased juvenile disease all around? Um, yeah. Feeling nervous yet? Well, yes.

Not so fast. Noticing that two things both happened within the same time frame does NOT imply a causal relationship between them. To do that, you'd need some research that carefully examines the incidence of these diseases and conditions both in groups that were and weren't vaccinated. I've never seen vaccine-risk literature that provides this evidence. At best, you'll get a quote from a paediatrician saying that parents should know the risks, or the name of an article or a book (seldom even an active URL).

You'll certainly never see them point to other major changes that have taken place over the last 30 years: the massive injection of sugar, fat and processed additives into fast food and convenience food, and the aggressive marketing of those products to children (a much better-researched area, and one which IS more convincingly linked to juvenile diabetes, obesity and allergy levels). Or, say, the massive increase in the time kids spend sitting in sedentary and isolated activity watching TV or playing computer games instead of outside developing muscular and social co-ordination through games and activities.

What about autism? Well, a scout around the National Autism Society will get you some of the statistics about autism rates in the UK (3) and possible causes of the little-understood condition (4). Vaccines themselves do not come into it (aside from the suggested link between the preservative thimerasol; see claims 2 and 3 below). Genetics do. But try telling that to someone that watched their child develop autism and believes it was caused by a vaccination. Which brings us to the next point of argument:

CLAIM #2: When you meet the parents of a child who mysteriously developed regressive autism within 2 to 3 weeks of his/her MMR vaccination, it's hard to discount their story as anything but 'proof' of links between vaccines and autism.

Once the literature has frightened you with juvenile disease stats, it’ll point you in the direction of a family whose child reacted badly to the MMR vaccine, and, typically, who developed regressive autism within a few weeks of their vaccination. Is it heartbreaking? Yes. Is it frightening? Yes. Does it provide sufficient evidence to link the vaccines to the condition? Unfortunately not.

Around 95% of children are vaccinated in the first 2 years of their lives. Regressive autism, which occurs in around 6 out of every 10 000 children, usually becomes evident around 18 months. What is the probability that this is going to happen within a few weeks of a vaccination? You do the math. It doesn't make the individual cases any less upsetting for the families of autistic children. Three medical studies (one of which has been officially retracted by its authors) have claimed a link between the MMR vaccine and autism Twenty-three medical studies have refuted this link, finding no convincing links between the vaccine itself and the development of the disorder (12, 14).

Still, faced with their personal tragedy, parents whose children developed autism within weeks or months of receiving a vaccination tend to draw the conclusion that there is a link. They find other parents in a similar situation, and conclude further that autism rates are on the rise. In fact, they are not. Before 1980, about 1 in 2,500 children was diagnosed with autistic spectrum disorders. Today, the figure is closer to 1 in 250. The subtle fact behind this stat, however, is the fact that the increase in diagnosis comes from a broader definition of autism, and wider recognition of symptoms rather than an actual increase in incidence. (5) The incidence of regressive autism - the type of autism allegedly linked to the MMR jab - has not changed.

Furthermore, while the more widespread recognition of autism may mean we see a rise in actual case numbers, it does not prove links between vaccines and autism rates. In fact, in recent studies, Hiroshi Kurita, of the Zenkoku Ryoiku Sodan Centre in Tokyo, said genetic factors were the most important cause of autism, but "no study has ever clarified the rising prevalence of pervasive developmental disorders from this aspect" (6).

CLAIM #3: Vaccinations may contain dangerous stuff.

You will find these very broad claims about the dangers of 'animal proteins' and 'animal virusus' in most vaccination risk literature. These sorts of statements are so broad they barely contain any useful information. Yes, vaccines are cultivated in animal cells. Some vaccinations, including MMR, influenza and yellow fever vacs, are made using hens' eggs. (Strict vegetarians might have an ethical problem with this, which is a separate issue.) But where exactly are medical researchers supposed to cultivate vaccinations? Which precise dangers are these fearmongers referring to? Trying to pin them down to evidence usually leaves blank trails.

The one closer-to-accurate point made under this point is that vaccinations contain toxic chemicals. The culprit here is mercury - specifically, a compound called thimerasol, which is 50% ethyl mercury (a derivative of organic mercury) by weight and has been used as a vaccine preservative since the 1930s. Thimerasol was commonly used in the DTP (diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis shot), as well as vaccines against hepatitis B and haemophilus bacteria. By the early 90s, these were both routine vaccinations for American infants. (9)

Studies into the use of thimerasol have not shown it to have any safety risks, but it came under the spotlight in the late 1990s in the midst of environmental concerns about mercury-tainted fish and worries that increased vaccination schedules for American infants might mean that they were getting exposed cumulatively to dangerous mercury levels.

Although organic mercury is indeed a neurotoxin, thimerasol contains ethyl mercury in such trace quantities per million parts of the relevant vaccines that most vaccinologists are convinced that there is no danger of mercury poisoning from it. Most cases of mercury poisoning require levels of mercury hundreds to thousands of times higher than those to which routinely vaccinated infants are exposed. There is simply no research that conclusively links the preservative to any known danger.

However, around 1999, there was a spike in reported cases of regressive autism in the US. One of the hypotheses put forward to explain the sudden increase in the number of cases was the widespread use of thimerasol as a preservative in several vaccines plus the presence of higher-than-usual mercury levels in fish consumed by pregnant mothers (11). Although the link was, at most, an untested hypothesis, in 1999 the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Public Health Service urged vaccine manufacturerers to remove the preservative from their vaccines, and advised pediatricitions to postpone hep B shots. Inevitably, anti-vaccination crowd leapt on the story with more triumph (and lawsuits) than was warranted by the evidence. They did not focus on the cost of the decision, which created vaccine shortages and led some babies to become infected with hep B.

Today, most vaccines are free of thimerasol anyway, as manufacturers quickly sought to free their products from the much-maligned mercury derivative despite the fact that the claims have NOT been substantiated in any conclusive way. (7, 9)

CLAIM #4: Vaccine injuries/deaths are underreported; many children have adverse reactions to vaccines. Immunisation programs either ignore or suppress these reports, assuming that "it is good to sacrifice the wellbeing of a few for the many".

The most common reactions to vaccination is some itching or swelling at the site of the injection. This IS a common side effect of the vaccination itself, with no lasting ill effect. Yes, a vaccine does involve injecting toxins into a healthy child in order to stimulate an immune reaction. Many parents will balk at the prospect of injecting toxins into their healthy child's body: why introduce a risk of any sort into a perfectly healthy child?
Dr Stephen Basser, in his excellent analysis of the arguments put forward by high-profile campaigner against immunisation, Dr Viera Scheibner, points out that ‘the paradox of a successful immunisation program is that the more widespread immunisation becomes the more attention will be given to vaccine-related illness’ (15).

Vaccination, like any medical procedure, does carry an element of risk. One in every million children immunised can have a more serious reaction known as anaphylaxis (severe allergic reaction) to the vaccine (10). Basser says:
“I am prepared to agree that, like any medical procedure, there are occasional individuals who suffer a seriously adverse reaction to immunisation. This reality, though, is not an argument for cessation of all immunisation, just as the occasional tragic outcome from coronary bypass graft surgery is not a valid argument for stopping all such surgery.”

Anti-immunisation advocates like to wave this point away, calling it mainstream propaganda, designed to value ‘herd immunity’ over individuals whose lives get placed at risk. However, if you look astutely at the evidence (and Basser does), it becomes evident that the risks faced by unvaccinated children are greater than those faced by vaccinated children. The only factor that reduces their risk of catching contagious diseases is the rate of vaccination amongst their peers.

Conclusion
There are articles, there are reports, there are studies, and there are arguments. The only material about vaccination that can really tell you what works and what doesn’t are the studies. The rest offer little more than invective. The studies are all available (14) – many of them online – but they aren’t what you’ll find on the anti-vaccination sites. What you’ll find there is a blurry mix of emotion from parents of mentally and physically ill children, pseudo-science and ill-substantiated arguments. The one point they have right is that parents have the right to be informed about the risks they’re taking when they vaccinate. Where they fall terribly short is in overlooking the far greater risks that parents take when they don’t.

References

1. The National Vaccine Information Centre website, February 2009.
http://www.nvic.org.

2. The Vaccination Risk Awareness Network website, February 2009.
http://www.vran.org

3. How many people have autistic spectrum disorders? National Autistic Society, May 2007.

4. What causes autism? National Autistic Society, May 2007.

5. Autism rates 'not rising'. BBC News. 15 February 2001.

6. Autism could affect twice as many children as previously believed. The Independent, 14 July 2006.

7. Doing the right things for the wrong reasons. www.blissfulknowledge.com

8. A Population-Based Study of Measles, Mumps and Rubella Vaccination and Autism. New England Journal of Medicine. November 7, 2002.

9. 'The Not-So-Crackpot Autism Theory' by Arthur Allen, published in the New York Times, 10 November 2002.

10. NHS Immunisation information. February 2009.

11. 'Autism Rates Drop After Mercury Removed from Childhood Vaccines' published in Medical News Today, 3 March 2006.
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/38784.php

12. 'Mercury and autism: a briefing,' the National Autistic Society, March 2006. http://www.nas.org.uk/nas/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=115&a=3227

13. Offit et al. ‘Addressing Parents’ Concerns: Do Multiple Vaccines Overwhelm or Weaken the Infant’s Immune System?’ published in Pediatrics, 1 January 2002.
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/full/109/1/124

14. ‘MMR vaccine does not cause autism’. A full list of the 23 medical studies that refute the link between MMR and autism, and the 3 articles that claim a link (1 of which has been officially retracted by its authors). This is as a downloadable .pdf file from:
http://www.immunize.org/mmrautism/index.htm

15. Basser, Dr S. ‘Anti-immunisation scare: the inconvenient facts’. Published in Australian Skeptics, Vol 17 No 1.
http://www.skeptics.com.au/journal/1997/1_immunise.htm

16. Allied Vaccination Group
http://www.vaccine.org/

Facebook-free

2008-02-12T12:05:00.002Z

I wonder how many people went and killed their Facebook accounts after yesterday's article in the NY Times (1) about how difficult it is to get out of the site's sticky grip. Perhaps nearly as many as the time that the Guardian took a look at the guys behind facebook (2), and what they're doing with the profit and power they gain from all our incessant social networking.

I've been meaning to get round to it, but somehow it was easier to log on and check my Warbook level than it was to opt out. It's been a while already since the constant barrage of status updates lost their lustre. The latest sleep and poo updates of friends with newly borns; the latest hangover and party updates from those still on the rave circuit; the American Psycho quotes. Occasionally funny or thoughtful; mostly banal.

Eventually, though, I decided that for every reason to use Facebook, there is somewhat more compelling reason not to. Feel free to add yours to the list.

Reasons to use Facebook:
1. It's fun. Well, for about a month or so. While you get unexpected emails from old school and varsity friends you've always wondered about.
2. It's cool and funny. You can track who's connected to whom. While they throw the occasional sheep at you.
3. It's useful for mobilising groups. You can set up an event and invite a bunch of people along. As many or as few as you like. You can publicise big events. In other words, you can be clever and use it for networking.
4. You can avoid work and other stuff. Facebook provides premium work-avoidance opportunities. Spend hours posting notes and photos, and playing Warbook or Scrabulous. If you can bear the slow download times for the heavily framed FB pages.
5. If you're a software developer, you can get loads of people using your applications really fast.
6. You like feeling like you're part of the wired generation.

Reasons to quit Facebook:
1. You've had enough fun. You've remembered that there's a reason you lost touch with some people. You don't actually care about your colleague's newborn's latest nappy change.
2. It's not actually that cool or that funny. Actually, it's boring and a waste of time.
3. If people actually want to invite you to something, the ones that matter tend to have your phone number or email address.
4. You're wasting more time on it than you'd like to admit.
5. You're not a software developer, are you?
6. You've heard enough about FB's dubious privacy policy (or lack thereof), and you're starting to get uneasy about quite how much personal information they have about you, and quite how much revenue your internet traffic is generating for the sites owners.

Still, there were so many reasons to put it off. Not least the groups and events applications. How will I know when the next extraordinary flash mob event is? What if a bunch of people I know are organising, I don't know... a house party. Yes, well. Maybe they'll get in touch via email or phone. Maybe I just won't know about the next Big Underground Happening. I'm sure I'll find something to fill the time.

References

1. Aspan, Maria. New York Times, February 11, 2008

How Sticky is Membership on Facebook? Just Try Breaking Free

2. Hodkinson, Tom. The Guardian, 13 January, 2004.
With friends like these...

3. How to break out of Facebook's sticky grip.
http://www.wikihow.com/Quit-Facebook

4. Jason' Preston's somewhat more subversive approach - getting out of it by violating the terms of service.

5. Randall, David and Richards, Victoria. Facebook can ruin your life. The Independent, Sunday 10 February 2008.

Five reasons to stop saying"Good Job" - an article by Alfie Kohn

2008-01-20T08:46:00.000Z

NOTE: An abridged version of this article was published in Parents magazine in May 2000 with the title "Hooked on Praise." For a more detailed look at the issues discussed here, please see the books
Punished by Rewards and Unconditional Parenting.

Para leer este artículo en Español, haga clic aquí.

Hang out at a playground, visit a school, or show up at a child’s birthday party, and there’s one phrase you can count on hearing repeatedly: "Good job!" Even tiny infants are praised for smacking their hands together ("Good clapping!"). Many of us blurt out these judgments of our children to the point that it has become almost a verbal tic.

Plenty of books and articles advise us against relying on punishment, from spanking to forcible isolation ("time out"). Occasionally someone will even ask us to rethink the practice of bribing children with stickers or food. But you’ll have to look awfully hard to find a discouraging word about what is euphemistically called positive reinforcement.

Lest there be any misunderstanding, the point here is not to call into question the importance of supporting and encouraging children, the need to love them and hug them and help them feel good about themselves. Praise, however, is a different story entirely. Here's why.

1. Manipulating children. Suppose you offer a verbal reward to reinforce the behavior of a two-year-old who eats without spilling, or a five-year-old who cleans up her art supplies. Who benefits from this? Is it possible that telling kids they’ve done a good job may have less to do with their emotional needs than with our convenience?

Rheta DeVries, a professor of education at the University of Northern Iowa, refers to this as "sugar-coated control." Very much like tangible rewards – or, for that matter, punishments – it’s a way of doing something to children to get them to comply with our wishes. It may be effective at producing this result (at least for a while), but it’s very different from working with kids – for example, by engaging them in conversation about what makes a classroom (or family) function smoothly, or how other people are affected by what we have done -- or failed to do. The latter approach is not only more respectful but more likely to help kids become thoughtful people.

The reason praise can work in the short run is that young children are hungry for our approval. But we have a responsibility not to exploit that dependence for our own convenience. A "Good job!" to reinforce something that makes our lives a little easier can be an example of taking advantage of children’s dependence. Kids may also come to feel manipulated by this, even if they can’t quite explain why.

2. Creating praise junkies. To be sure, not every use of praise is a calculated tactic to control children’s behavior. Sometimes we compliment kids just because we’re genuinely pleased by what they’ve done. Even then, however, it’s worth looking more closely. Rather than bolstering a child’s self-esteem, praise may increase kids’ dependence on us. The more we say, "I like the way you…." or "Good ______ing," the more kids come to rely on our evaluations, our decisions about what’s good and bad, rather than learning to form their own judgments. It leads them to measure their worth in terms of what will lead us to smile and dole out some more approval.

Mary Budd Rowe, a researcher at the University of Florida, discovered that students who were praised lavishly by their teachers were more tentative in their responses, more apt to answer in a questioning tone of voice ("Um, seven?"). They tended to back off from an idea they had proposed as soon as an adult disagreed with them. And they were less likely to persist with difficult tasks or share their ideas with other students.

In short, "Good job!" doesn’t reassure children; ultimately, it makes them feel less secure. It may even create a vicious circle such that the more we slather on the praise, the more kids seem to need it, so we praise them some more. Sadly, some of these kids will grow into adults who continue to need someone else to pat them on the head and tell them whether what they did was OK. Surely this is not what we want for our daughters and sons.

3. Stealing a child’s pleasure. Apart from the issue of dependence, a child deserves to take delight in her accomplishments, to feel pride in what she’s learned how to do. She also deserves to decide when to feel that way. Every time we say, "Good job!", though, we’re telling a child how to feel.

To be sure, there are times when our evaluations are appropriate and our guidance is necessary -- especially with toddlers and preschoolers. But a constant stream of value judgments is neither necessary nor useful for children’s development. Unfortunately, we may not have realized that "Good job!" is just as much an evaluation as "Bad job!" The most notable feature of a positive judgment isn’t that it’s positive, but that it’s a judgment. And people, including kids, don’t like being judged.

I cherish the occasions when my daughter manages to do something for the first time, or does something better than she’s ever done it before. But I try to resist the knee-jerk tendency to say, "Good job!" because I don’t want to dilute her joy. I want her to share her pleasure with me, not look to me for a verdict. I want her to exclaim, "I did it!" (which she often does) instead of asking me uncertainly, "Was that good?"

4. Losing interest. "Good painting!" may get children to keep painting for as long as we keep watching and praising. But, warns Lilian Katz, one of the country’s leading authorities on early childhood education, "once attention is withdrawn, many kids won’t touch the activity again." Indeed, an impressive body of scientific research has shown that the more we reward people for doing something, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward. Now the point isn’t to draw, to read, to think, to create – the point is to get the goody, whether it’s an ice cream, a sticker, or a "Good job!"

In a troubling study conducted by Joan Grusec at the University of Toronto, young children who were frequently praised for displays of generosity tended to be slightly less generous on an everyday basis than other children were. Every time they had heard "Good sharing!" or "I’m so proud of you for helping," they became a little less interested in sharing or helping. Those actions came to be seen not as something valuable in their own right but as something they had to do to get that reaction again from an adult. Generosity became a means to an end.

Does praise motivate kids? Sure. It motivates kids to get praise. Alas, that’s often at the expense of commitment to whatever they were doing that prompted the praise.

5. Reducing achievement. As if it weren’t bad enough that "Good job!" can undermine independence, pleasure, and interest, it can also interfere with how good a job children actually do. Researchers keep finding that kids who are praised for doing well at a creative task tend to stumble at the next task – and they don’t do as well as children who weren’t praised to begin with.

Why does this happen? Partly because the praise creates pressure to "keep up the good work" that gets in the way of doing so. Partly because their interest in what they’re doing may have declined. Partly because they become less likely to take risks – a prerequisite for creativity – once they start thinking about how to keep those positive comments coming.

More generally, "Good job!" is a remnant of an approach to psychology that reduces all of human life to behaviors that can be seen and measured. Unfortunately, this ignores the thoughts, feelings, and values that lie behind behaviors. For example, a child may share a snack with a friend as a way of attracting praise, or as a way of making sure the other child has enough to eat. Praise for sharing ignores these different motives. Worse, it actually promotes the less desirable motive by making children more likely to fish for praise in the future.

Once you start to see praise for what it is – and what it does – these constant little evaluative eruptions from adults start to produce the same effect as fingernails being dragged down a blackboard. You begin to root for a child to give his teachers or parents a taste of their own treacle by turning around to them and saying (in the same saccharine tone of voice), "Good praising!"

Still, it’s not an easy habit to break. It can seem strange, at least at first, to stop praising; it can feel as though you’re being chilly or withholding something. But that, it soon becomes clear, suggests that we praise more because we need to say it than because children need to hear it. Whenever that’s true, it’s time to rethink what we’re doing.

What kids do need is unconditional support, love with no strings attached. That’s not just different from praise – it’s the opposite of praise. "Good job!" is conditional. It means we’re offering attention and acknowledgement and approval for jumping through our hoops, for doing things that please us.

This point, you’ll notice, is very different from a criticism that some people offer to the effect that we give kids too much approval, or give it too easily. They recommend that we become more miserly with our praise and demand that kids "earn" it. But the real problem isn’t that children expect to be praised for everything they do these days. It’s that we’re tempted to take shortcuts, to manipulate kids with rewards instead of explaining and helping them to develop needed skills and good values.

So what’s the alternative? That depends on the situation, but whatever we decide to say instead has to be offered in the context of genuine affection and love for who kids are rather than for what they’ve done. When unconditional support is present, "Good job!" isn’t necessary; when it’s absent, "Good job!" won’t help.

If we’re praising positive actions as a way of discouraging misbehavior, this is unlikely to be effective for long. Even when it works, we can’t really say the child is now "behaving himself"; it would be more accurate to say the praise is behaving him. The alternative is to work with the child, to figure out the reasons he’s acting that way. We may have to reconsider our own requests rather than just looking for a way to get kids to obey. (Instead of using "Good job!" to get a four-year-old to sit quietly through a long class meeting or family dinner, perhaps we should ask whether it’s reasonable to expect a child to do so.)

We also need to bring kids in on the process of making decisions. If a child is doing something that disturbs others, then sitting down with her later and asking, "What do you think we can do to solve this problem?" will likely be more effective than bribes or threats. It also helps a child learn how to solve problems and teaches that her ideas and feelings are important. Of course, this process takes time and talent, care and courage. Tossing off a "Good job!" when the child acts in the way we deem appropriate takes none of those things, which helps to explain why "doing to" strategies are a lot more popular than "working with" strategies.

And what can we say when kids just do something impressive? Consider three possible responses:

* Say nothing. Some people insist a helpful act must be "reinforced" because, secretly or unconsciously, they believe it was a fluke. If children are basically evil, then they have to be given an artificial reason for being nice (namely, to get a verbal reward). But if that cynicism is unfounded – and a lot of research suggests that it is – then praise may not be necessary.

* Say what you saw. A simple, evaluation-free statement ("You put your shoes on by yourself" or even just "You did it") tells your child that you noticed. It also lets her take pride in what she did. In other cases, a more elaborate description may make sense. If your child draws a picture, you might provide feedback – not judgment – about what you noticed: "This mountain is huge!" "Boy, you sure used a lot of purple today!"

If a child does something caring or generous, you might gently draw his attention to the effect of his action on the other person: "Look at Abigail’s face! She seems pretty happy now that you gave her some of your snack." This is completely different from praise, where the emphasis is on how you feel about her sharing

* Talk less, ask more. Even better than descriptions are questions. Why tell him what part of his drawing impressed you when you can ask him what he likes best about it? Asking "What was the hardest part to draw?" or "How did you figure out how to make the feet the right size?" is likely to nourish his interest in drawing. Saying "Good job!", as we’ve seen, may have exactly the opposite effect.

This doesn’t mean that all compliments, all thank-you’s, all expressions of delight are harmful. We need to consider our motives for what we say (a genuine expression of enthusiasm is better than a desire to manipulate the child’s future behavior) as well as the actual effects of doing so. Are our reactions helping the child to feel a sense of control over her life -- or to constantly look to us for approval? Are they helping her to become more excited about what she’s doing in its own right – or turning it into something she just wants to get through in order to receive a pat on the head

It’s not a matter of memorizing a new script, but of keeping in mind our long-term goals for our children and watching for the effects of what we say. The bad news is that the use of positive reinforcement really isn’t so positive. The good news is that you don’t have to evaluate in order to encourage.

Copyright © 2001 by Alfie Kohn. This article may be downloaded, reproduced, and distributed without permission as long as each copy includes this notice along with citation information (i.e., name of the periodical in which it originally appeared, date of publication, and author's name). Permission must be obtained in order to reprint this article in a published work or in order to offer it for sale in any form. Please write to the address indicated on the Contact page at www.alfiekohn.org.

What are you thinking when you do it?

2008-01-04T19:35:00.000Z

I spent December in South Africa with Nikolai. It was his first visit to SA, and although I was eager for him to see my home country and everything it had to offer, I was all too aware of the many things he'd see which would have him shaking his head and thinking, thank the Lord I live in Britain. Like so many South Africans, I've learned to smooth over the rough edges of my country with a fat dose of pride and optimism. I wanted Nikolai to see the best the country had to offer, although I was gritting my teeth in anticipation of the questions about the insistent poverty, unemployment, crime. But the one question that came up over and over on our trip was not about racism or poverty. It was about health. Specifically, the invisible spectre of HIV. Why was it invisible? Where was it lurking? And why was it still so threatening - why, in more than 10 years of knowing exactly how the disease is transmitted and how to avoid it, why are people still getting it?

According to current statistics available on the Internet, by 2005, approximately 10.8 of all South Africans over the age of 2 were living with HIV. Prevalence differs widely according to racial groups: around 13% of black South Africans carry the virus, whereas 0.6% of white South Africans, 1.9% of coloured South Africans and 1.6% of Indian South Africans carry it. Figures also vary for the different provinces:

Province	Number surveyed	Prevalence %
KwaZulu-Natal	2,729	16.5
Mpumalanga	1,224	15.2
Free State	1,066	12.6
North West	1,056	10.9
Gauteng	2,430	10.8
Eastern Cape	2,428	8.9
Limpopo	1,570	8.0
Northern Cape	1,144	5.4
Western Cape	2,204	1.9
Total	15,851	10.8

(Figures taken from http://www.avert.org/safricastats.htm for 2005)
Around 600,000 people per year die from the virus. That's around 1.2% of our population dying annually of HIV.

Now, Nikolai's unusually well-informed, and he asks questions. He wasn't all that surprised that the disease is not visible among the affluent, educated still-mostly-white suburbs of Cape Town. But out in the rural areas, he asked, do people know how it's spread? Yes, I said, I believe they do.

There's enough information available in every clinic, every hospital, every doctor's surgery, to tell them. Despite the government's attempts to deny the pandemic, there have been the efforts of the Lovelife campaign, and the TAC's drives to increase awareness. You don't need special access to special information to know that HIV is a deadly virus. You don't need to live in a particular suburb or city to know that you can prevent it by using condoms when you have sex. The information is out there. The country is awash in condoms, leaflets, billboards. Why, then, is the disease still spreading so fast?

We didn't meet anyone on the trip that could answer the question. It was only a couple of days after Nik had left, that I was having lunch in a little cafe in Kalk Bay, overlooking the Indian Ocean. The waitress was a cute twenty-something black girl, with funky dreads and a T-shirt with a photo of Nelson Mandela and the logo from the 46664 concert. Under the logo, in big letters, the T-shirt said: "ASK ME ABOUT HIV/Aids".

I pointed at the T-shirt. "Do a lot of people ask you about that?" I said to her. "About HIV and Aids?" She looked at the T-shirt as though she'd just remembered she was wearing it. "No, I think you're the first, you know."
"Why're you wearing it?"
"I used to work for Lovelife, you know," she said. She had a lovely clear husky voice. "We used to talk to people about Aids."
"And do you know anyone that has it?" I asked.
"Oh, yeah, lots," she said.
"Do they know about the disease? I mean, do they know how it's transmitted, and how to stop it from spreading?"
"Oh, yes, people know all about it. The thing is, their attitudes. Even though they know how you get it, they have this attitude that it can't happen to me. And then, a lot of people that have it, they have this idea that they should spread it."

So is that what it is? A combination of knowing the facts plus not caring? Is that enough to infect hundreds of thousands of people? What I want to know is, who are you? Are you having unprotected sex freely, or is someone forcing you? Are you admitting to yourself what's going on? What are you thinking when you do it? If you're reading this, please write and let me know. Cause I'm finding it very difficult to understand.

All in a day's work

2007-11-25T03:07:00.000Z

I was on a plane to Belize, on my way to an author workshop, reading an in-flight magazine article about some high-flying London investment banker. Reading it made me think that when I grow up I should don black court shoes and expensive corporate couture and earn tons of money for brandishing something mysterious called power. Of course, I shouldn't. And here's why.

I'm here in Belize working with a team of teachers. That's one of the things I do for money (there are several): get teachers together and coax publishable textbooks out of them. It's sometimes fun, and occasionally it takes me to out-of the way places like Belize. (Map below for those of you that think I'm talking about somewhere in France.) But that's not why I shouldn't become a corporate ballbuster like Nicola Horlick.

Thing is, I heard today that one of my authors won't be able to complete the job. "There are serious problems at his school," said one of the others. The others looked up, with grim expressions, nodded and shook their heads with the kind of concern that tells you this is something a touch more serious than petty thievery or bullying or cheating on tests. In South Africa that expression means that the school is having issues with heroin or tik. In the US it means that a kid came to school armed with an automatic rifle. In Belize, however, we weren't talking drugs or homicide. We were talking...

"Demon possession."
I look carefully at the faces around me to check whether they're having me on. But no.
"Several of the children at the school have been possessed," I am told. "The demon seems to be near to the pit latrine," he adds helpfully.

He's not kidding. The school has been closed for several days, entire community in an uproar. It made national news. (For the article, click here.) Children have been hospitalised. A high-profile exorcist has been brought in at great expense (8000 dollars, I am told); the money has been raised from the concerned Belizean public. After all, what can one do when your community has been stricken with a nasty demon? Collect some cash and pay to get it taken out, that's what. The exorcist reportedly found a box containing - surprise, surprise - some dolls with pins stuck in them, and some sand with "a very particular odour". To prove that she wasn't "a mock", as my source called it, she led some representatives from the school to a graveyard, where she showed them some sand with a similar odour (although, being older, it obviously had a different colour).

Of the ten Belizeans in the room, not one had any degree of scepticism about the story. I wondered whether mine was written all over my face. Or whether they could see the other thought: you just don't get that in boardrooms in London, man. You just don't get that good voodoo shit up there on the 47th floor.

Belize
(the tiny country between Mexico, Guatamala and Honduras)

Chocolate brownies: three takes

2007-11-23T23:13:00.000Z

OK, up til now I've resisted writing blog posts about cooking. Partly because I had an idea of devoting a whole blog to the activity of bread-making. But let's face it, I'm just not conscientious enough a blogger to get another whole blog off the ground given that I keep forgetting to write on this one. And, to steal a turn of phrase from Padma Lakshmi (who I'd never heard of til I flicked through Vanity Fair this morning in an airport) - I am too the kinda girl that starts thinking about what to make for dinner more or less when I'm eating lunch.

So. Chocolate brownies. I've made a lot of these this year, in a variety of ways. The revelation about chocolate brownies was a thing I read by Nigel Slater, who points out that if you stick a skewer (or knife or whatever) in your brownies and it comes out clean, you have screwed it up. Really truly. Just start again. I mean, the thing in the pan might taste quite nice and chocolatey, but it will not have the magical squishiness of a true brownie, ok? Yes, you can redeem it with ice cream, but in the long run you'll have to make more because the first lot won't have fulfilled that special brownie thing you were after.

So in this post I'll give you three brownie recipes, starting with the muddiest and richest, and ending with the lightest (though there's nothing really light about any of these).
1. Nigel Slater's recipe - the richest, darkest heaviest brownies imaginable. Closer to pudding than to anything like a chewy cookie.
2. A slightly cakier brownie - still rich and squishy, but closer to something you'd keep in a cookie jar (as opposed to the fridge).
3. Mollie Katzen's Moosewood Fudge brownies - a classic, that strikes a heavenly balance between lightly cakey and slightly chewy.

Nigel Slater's brownies
(I can recommend Mr Slater's fabulous article about these.)

300g golden caster sugar
250g butter
250g chocolate (70 per cent cocoa solids)
3 large eggs plus 1 extra egg yolk, beaten lightly
60g flour
60g finest quality cocoa powder
1 tsp baking powder

You will need a baking tin, about 23cm x 23cm, preferably non-stick, or a small roasting tin.

Set the oven at 180°C/Gas 4. Line the bottom of the baking tin with baking parchment. Cream the sugar and butter well til it's very, very white and fluffy.

Meanwhile, break the chocolate into pieces, set 50g of it aside and melt the rest. As soon as the chocolate has melted, remove it from the heat and let it cool a bit. Chop the remaining 50g into gravel-sized pieces.

Sift together the flour, cocoa and baking powder and mix in a pinch of salt.
With the food mixer running slowly, introduce the beaten egg a little at a time, speeding up in between additions.
Mix in the melted and the chopped chocolate with a large metal spoon.
Lastly, fold in the flour and cocoa, gently and firmly, without knocking any of the air out.
Scrape the mixture into the prepared cake tin, smooth the top and bake for 30 minutes. The top will have risen slightly and the cake will appear slightly softer in the middle than around the edges.Pierce the centre of the cake with a fork - it should come out sticky, but not with raw mixture attached to it. If it does, then return the brownie to the oven for three more minutes. It is worth remembering that it will solidify a little on cooling, so if it appears a bit wet, don't worry.

The second take is a fraction less like chocolate pudding. When I say a fraction I mean a very small fraction.

Brownie recipe #2

340 g dark chocolate
250 g butter
3 eggs
250 g dark brown sugar
110 g flour
1 tsp baking powder
pinch of salt

Preheat the oven to 170°C and line a baking tray with baking parchment. Grease well.
Sift together the flour, baking powder and salt.
In a small bowl or jug (or double boiler) melt the chocolate and butter together.
In a separate bowl, beat the eggs and slowly beat in the sugar. Beat in the flour mixture and lastly fold in the chocolate mixture. Scrape it all into the pan, and bake it for about 17 minutes, then keep checking every 3 minutes til it's done just well enough to be midway between gooey and cakey. But not liquid.
Take it out and leave it to cool before cutting.

The last lot is Mollie Katzen's recipe, taken from her lovely classic, "The Moosewood Cookbook". She has a lovely blog which you can find here. I've been making these since I was 12 and I LURVE them. I've put the metric measures in though the original recipe is in non-standard and imperial measures.

Moosewood Fudge Brownies

Let soften: 1/2 lb. (250 g) butter (don't melt it)

Melt: 5 oz. (150 g) bittersweet chocolate. Let cool.

Cream the butter with 1 3/4 packed cups (about 200 g) light brown sugar and 5 eggs. Add 1 1/2 tsp. pure vanilla extract. Beat in the melted, cooled chocolate and 1 cup flour.

Spread into a buttered 9 x 13"(23 x 33 cm) baking pan. Bake 20-30 minutes at 350 degrees (180).

Optional: chopped nuts, or 1 tablespoon instant coffee, or 1 teaspoon grated fresh orange or lemon rind, or 1/2 teaspoon allspice or cinnamon, or a mashed over-ripe banana, or none of the above.

Yet another option: instead of uniformly blending in the chocolate, you can marble it. Add chocolate last, after the flour is completely blended in and only partially blend in the chocolate. It looks real nice.

I hope you like these. I know I also have a recipe for vegan (!!) brownies somewhere at home in Cape Town - I will dredge it out and link it into this post soon.

The quest for the best yogurt in the land

2007-11-23T23:07:00.000Z

Life in the UK has its upshots. Like yogurt. My current favourites are Onken, followed closely by Yeo Valley. More suggestions welcome, as the little one seems to have a thing for yogurt. But hopefully Onken will take note of my nice letter and broaden the range. We live in hope.

Dear nice Onken people

I recently moved over to the UK from South Africa. I did it for love: I fell in love with someone that lives in London, and realised that come what may, we had to be together. I hadn't really thought I would leave sunny, beautiful, friendly Africa for soggy, cold Britain. But here I am, gradually finding my feet in this city and discovering little unexpected and pleasing things about this initially strange place.

One of my happiest discoveries was your yogurt. Specifically your Wholegrain Biopot yogurt. I didn't used to be so crazy about yogurt, but a couple of months ago, my partner and I discovered that we're expecting a little one early next year, and pregnancy has done peculiar things to my appetite. Put me off chocolate, for one thing. Given me an enormous daily desire for fresh fruit and yogurt. So I sampled a lot of different kinds. Not all of them, mind you, but quite a few. And kept coming back to yours.

Now, there's only one problem. For an enthusistic yogurt eater like me, your range of flavours is *just too small*!! The wholegrain range (which I admit is my favourite) only seems to come in three flavours - and of these, I can only usually find the strawberry one at most supermarkets. And the fruit range seems to come in a few more flavours (according to your website), but again, only a few of them only seem to be stocked at my local Sainsburys (and believe me, I've looked at both the nearest branches - Woolwich and Eltham!).

My suggestion to you is: how about broadening your range? Here are a few suggestions:

- apricot
- apple
- passion fruit
- lemon (as a mild variation on vanilla... though I've never seen your vanilla in a supermarket, I would happily buy it)
- stewed fruit
- muesli
- hazelnut
You might even branch out into sweeter flavours like caramel and chocolate.

I hope you like these ideas. Because I really like your yogurt.

Best wishes
Lisa Greenstein
5 Hurricane House, Gunyard Mews
Woolwich
SE18 4GE
email: greenstein.lisa@gmail.com

PS. I would be more than happy to sample new flavours in process of research and development!

Africa is not one country

2007-11-16T08:26:00.000Z

The darkest thing about Africa has always been our ignorance of it - George Kimble, geographer, b1912.

I took a screenwriting course last year. We were told: In Hollywood movies, you don't specify that your characters are black, unless there is a Reason - in the plot or character - that makes them need to be black. White is neutral. Black carries meaning. Black implies underdog, underprivileged, marginalised. Black cannot be neutral. Hollywood, I thought. Americans, I thought. And then I came to Britain, and discovered that a similar set of assumptions apply.

Last night, I was asked what road safety is like in South Africa. And when I’d said that I thought it had improved in recent years with stricter laws around drunken driving and speeding, the next comment was: “But there can’t be much traffic, can there? I mean, most Africans can’t afford a car.”

It’s not the only comment I’ve had like this. My partner tells me repeatedly that the most valuable thing he’ll ever give me (aside from his undying love and devotion) is a British passport. “Africa is fucked,” he likes to say; “HIV and Aids are decimating your workforce, which is going to screw up the economy. Your crime rates are off the scale. And if that doesn’t finish Africa off, global warming will do the job.”

It’s as though “Africa” (the world’s 2nd largest continent, by the way, at 30,065,000 sq km) – all 54 countries of it – is actually one homogenous problem that can be summed up in the image of a single, starving, disease-riddled child. It inspires a mixture of pity and resignation in the British, who love solving the problems of others, but can’t come up with a solution. Do we feed, clothe and treat Africa? Or do we leave it to die? Whatever we do, we don’t take a closer look at the fact that the “Africa” brought to our TV sets and newspapers is NOT the one experienced daily by most of the people on the African continent. I’m not denying that Africa is home to a lot of suffering. I’m just saying that’s not all there is.

Moreover, what the British seem to find difficult to grasp is the fact that South Africa has been – and continues to be – a country of continuous, if gradual, change. The government currently in power may have many flaws (their embarrassing views on HIV prevention; their refusal to take a stand against Robert Mugabe), but there is no denying that they have brought substantial improvements to the lives of millions of South Africans over the last 13 years.

So here, for the uninitiated, are some of the facts and figures of my country. I'm not seeking to answer big questions here, just to give a few basic facts, the ones I'm afraid I can't quote offhand without checking online databases. I can't help thinking that the information below tells you very, very little. Much less than a photo essay or film might. There are a lot of people living here. A lot of different people. The figures will tell you a little, but meeting some of the people would tell you a whole lot more.

Population: almost 48 million
Race demographics: Black African 79.6% (38 million); White 9.1% (4.3 million); Coloured 8.9% (4.2 million); Indian/Asian 2.5% (1.2 million)

Don’t be fooled by the homogenous appearance of that pale purple section of the graph. Within that black African population, there are distinct linguistic and cultural groupings. If we look at the population in terms of language groupings, it looks like this

("Coloured" is a contentious term still used for people of mixed race descended from slaves brought in from East and central Africa, the indigenous Khoisan who lived in the Cape at the time, indigenous Africans and whites. The majority speak Afrikaans.)

Facts in brief about South Africa at November 2007

EDUCATION
SA has about 12 million learners, 366 000 teachers and around 28 000 schools, including 390 special needs schools and 1000 registered private schools. The government has allocated 5.4% of its 2007/8 budget to education.
Total adult literacy rate (2000-2004) 82
Net primary school enrolment/attendance (2000-2005): 89
Phones per 100 people (2002-2004): 47
Internet users per 100 population (2002-2004): 8

NUTRITION
% of infants with low birthweight (1998-2005): 15
% of under-5s suffereing from underweight, moderate and severe: 12
% of under-5s suffering from underweight, severe: 2
% of under-5s suffering from wasting, moderate and severe: 3

HEALTH
Life expectancy at birth (2005): 46
% of population using improved drinking water sources, total (2004): 88 [99% of urban populations; 73% of rural populations]
% of population using adequate sanitation facilities (2004, total): 64 (79% of urban populations; 46% of rural populations)
% of routine EPI vaccines financed by government, 2005, total: 100
% of 1-year-old children immunized against (2005): TB 97%; DPT 98%; Polio 94%; Measles 82%; HepB 94%
Estimated adult HIV prevalence rate (15+ years), end 2005: 18.8%
Mother-to-child transmission, estimated number of people, all ages, living with HIV, 2005 estimate 5 500 000

ECONOMY
Economic growth, as measured by GDP, has increased from around 3.3% (1999-2004) to around 5% per annum.
Employment has risen by about 2.7% per year since 2001. By March 2007, the estimated unemployment rate was down to 25.5% (from 28% in 2004)
The number of South Africans living in poverty has dropped steadily from 52.1% in 1999 to 47% in 2004 to 43.2% bby March 2007.
The government has built more than 2 million homes and electrified more than 3 million homes. More than 16 million people have been provided with first-time access clean water.
Free basic municipal services are now provided to more than 70% of South Africa’s population
The Finance Minister, Trevor Manuel, Medium Term Budget Policy Statement, October 2007

Information in this posting taken from:
www.southafrica.info
www.unicef.org
www.wikipedia.com
www.cia.gov
www.afrol.com

Why is Michael Moore so darned irritating? - A review of Sicko

2007-10-25T07:07:00.000+01:00

Like any skilled polemicist, Michael Moore makes his message easy to watch and simple to translate. Put crudely, this film tells us: the healthcare systems in civilised countries aim to take care of people. The healthcare system in America aims to make a profit. You could’ve worked that message out from the trailer, or, if you were at the gala screening at the Odeon in Leicester Square last night, you could’ve worked it out from the letter of apology sent by Mr Moore, who was supposed to be there for a Q&A, but couldn’t make it. It’s a plea for a return to socialised (or state-run) health facilities in the USA, a plea to echo the systems of Britain, France or Cuba. A reasonable plea, made in Moore’s now-recognisable brand of ram-it-down-their-throats docu-satire.

a reasonable premise
This year, 18 000 Americans will die because they can’t afford their healthcare bills, Moore tells us. We meet a man who lost the tops of two fingers in an accident; because privatised healthcare sticks a hefty price tag on all procedures, he had to choose between a $12 000 ring finger and a $32 000 middle finger (he went for the cheaper option). His counterpart in the UK, a man who chopped off several fingers in a similar accident, got them all sewn back on for free. We meet ex-physicians from some of Moore’s health insurance corporates (Cigna, Blue Shield, Humana and the like), who tell us their salary bonuses were directly linked to the number of medical cases in which treatment was denied. We meed a dozen or so other ordinary Americans who had treatment denied in the US, including volunteers from the smoking remains of 9/11. It’s all contrasted with the happy, free medical care available in the UK and France, where Moore interviews well-paid, affluent doctors and their happy, satisfied patients, including ex-Americans contemplating their good fortune to live in countries with free medical care.

the sincerest propaganda
It was somehow unsurprising that Moore sent a letter of apology to his British audience. The generous assumption would be that Moore’s family commitments back home were real, and the letter was one of genuine regret that he couldn’t make the screening. But to be cynical just for a second, the letter-in-lieu-of-appearance also came across as a masterly ploy. Firstly, the filmmaker got in the first – and last – word. Secondly, he got to pre-empt the potential criticisms that would inevitably arise in the audience, given his uncritical depiction of the NHS. And thirdly, nothing disarms a British audience like a good, self-deprecating apology.

Indeed, Moore’s mood palette consists primarily of apology, self-deprecation, and of course, contained indignation. It all comes across as disarmingly personal and sincere: Michael apologises for the havoc his country wreaks in others; Michael winces at his own desire to reclaim his national pride; Michael sighs and shakes his head in outrage at the wronged little people – those routinely denied treatment. Michael apologises for wanting to reclaim his national pride and fly his flag.
In his signature cap and oversized T-shirt, and staggeringly overweight frame, Moore makes a point of never prettying up for camera. If anything, he wants to appear Ordinary, The Little Guy, though he sure ain’t physically little, and nor is his influence something to be toyed with; one respondent to his online request for information waved the filmmaker’s name his health insurance company, only to get his denial swiftly overturned by the CEO.

Still, the discourse of sincerity carefully offsets Moore’s calculated use of good old agitprop. His favourite trick is to raid the archives for charming, grainy clippings – old news clips, snippets from Cold War anti-communist propaganda, bits and pieces of Hollywood classics – and splice them together wittily. Of course, it’s all under the guise of Irony and Satire, and the audience laps it up. We’re all far too visually literate to take in this kind of imagery in any other mode than the ironic. Or are we? Isn’t Moore just shoring up the same set of layered emotional responses that propagandists have used in every other generation, coating it in a palatable and fashionable layer of irony?

not quite documentary
Most documentary film-makers I’ve encountered will tell you that documentary-making tends to start with a question. And through the making of their film, they thrash out the complexities of the question, sometimes arriving at an answer, sometimes not. The principle of documentary is that of investigation. Moore, on the other hand, sets out with an argument, and constructs anecdotes and a ton of imagery to make you listen. It’s remarkable that his work still gets billed as documentary. Perhaps, like so many of the questionably categorised medical procedures mentioned in the film, it’s ‘experimental’. Perhaps he’s just constructed a genre of his own, and when he gets the guns out for the same repertoire of usual suspects (all our woes can be traced back to George Bush and the war in Iraq), it’s no different from the director of Rocky including the showdown fight at the end, or the director of James Bond making sure there’s a decent supply of car chases and gadget play. It’s what we’ve come to expect of the genre. Still, I have seen dozens of variations on the idea of documentary (indeed, some say that every documentary film-maker has to explore what it is they mean by documentary), and none leave me quite as irritable as Michael Moore does.

conclusion – a convincing prescription, if you can stomach the dosage
Inevitably, I find that I have the same experience during the last half-hour of any Michael Moore film: I’ve had enough. Someone let me out. It’s fun to watch, but after a while the guy is just too annoying for me. But even if you want to slap Michael Moore by the end of it, and tell him to lose the floppy cap and whingy tone, there will be few – if any – audience members that leave the cinema feeling that he has gotten it wrong. If anything, he leaves you feeling grateful to be in Britain, land of the glowing NHS, and wondering whether, if healthcare privatisation gets out of hand here, you might consider emigration to Cuba.

To have and to hold til death do you part?

2007-07-19T04:46:00.000+01:00

You spend a lot of time thinking about it - how it feels, how hot or cold it is, its state of health, its levels of perfection or imperfection, how toned or flabby or marked or decorated or improved it's looking. But how long do you intend to hold onto your body? Can you face the idea that once you're dead, it's no longer of any use to you, and you might as well pass it onto someone that has some use for it?

Although 70% of the British population agree with donating their organs in principle, nowhere near that number of people are actually on an organ donor list. Which puts Britain (like other countries, SA included) in a tough position: thousands of people waiting for transplants, and not enough organs.

I read today in the Independent Online that Britain's chief medical officer has made a "radical" suggestion: that, at death, everyone should automatically become an organ donor - unless they've chosen to opt out. Known as a presumed consent system (or "opt-out" system) this is the reverse of the current "opt-in" system. At present, in Britain (as in SA), you're only an organ donor if you've gone to the trouble of thinking about it, deciding to do it, and then getting yourself a sticker for your ID.

On the opt-in system, the UK had a donation rate of just over 12 people per million in 2003. Other EU countries which have switched to opt-out systems include Belgium, and the Czech Republic, with donation rates just over 20 people per million in 2004, and Spain, whose donation rates went up from around 17 to over 35 per million. The stats don't really paint the picture clearly enough though: for every additional organ donated, someone gets a chance to have an operation that'll most likely save their life. It's hard to believe anyone could argue against this.

Ironically, the organ donor crisis in Britain (according to the Independent) is due in part to the success of increased road safety. Cars are safer, people are wearing seatbelts, the airbags are working and - I'm guessing - the strict DUI laws are paying off. Predictably, the healthiest organs come from those that died (or find themselves kept alive on life support systems)in the aftermath of a road accident. So increased road safety means less roadkill means fewer organ donors. Kinda creepy illustration of how one man's meat is another man's poison, but in the meantime, thousands of people wait for kidneys and other tissues which are getting buried in the ground.

And yet, as things stand, it looks highly unlikely that anyone will bite the opt-out line. The main argument against the opt-out system is that "protecting individual autonomy is more important than boosting transplant rates". I wonder, though: what individual autonomy do you have after you are dead, though, over your physical body? And why would you want to take this body - that you've (hopefully), for so many year, lavished with so much attention and concern - and bury or burn it, rather than giving it back? Perhaps it's the insistent myopia of my non-recyclable corneas, but I just don't see the argument.

Quotation

2007-07-13T23:52:00.000+01:00

Much energy is wasted in trying to charm others. And in wanting to charm - I tell you, the opposite happens.
(Sri Sri Ravi Shankar)

What about Switzerland???

2007-07-13T12:05:00.000+01:00

Neutral in every other sort of war, the Swiss would be the immediate victors of any battle for pre-eminence in matters of chocolate making. Weird, then, that they don't get a mention in this article in todays online New York Times:

Bryn Dyment, a Web developer in the Bay Area who grew up in Canada, said he was shocked when his parents took him to a candy counter in the United States. He found out that not every child in the world was eating the same chocolate bars he was.

It wasn’t until he moved to the United States as an adult that he realized just how vast that divide is.

“You get in these religious arguments with people,” he said. “I haven’t met a Canadian who likes a Hershey bar, but Americans think you’re crazy when you say that, because they think everyone loves a Hershey bar.”

(See "The World's Best Candy Bars? English, of Course" in today's NYT)

I can never decide when I love it or hate it when faraway journalists pre-empt my story ideas. The differences between British and American chocolate have been a matter of great personal consideration for me over the past two days. But how could they write it without mentioning Switzerland? Weird, man.

Things I'm loving about Central America

2007-07-13T02:35:00.000+01:00

OK, granted, I'm seeing little more than airports and aeroplanes and generic hotels for three days, but even so, there have been some highlights:

1. The easy-going chaos of the airports. Teeming with people, loads of airport officials, but none of the paranoia of Heathrow. Sounds like a tour-pamphlet cliche, but everyone's so friendly, even the security staff and passport control.

2. Immigration at San Salvador. You know the usual no-man's land feeling of arrivals; those sanitised carefully regulated corridors that lead from aeroplane to passport control to customs, manned by tight-faced uniformed matrons? Not in San Salvador, man. Arrivals and departures are all one thing. People milling between the restaurants and the duty free-shops and the departure gates, going in all directions. Oh, immigration, yes, that way - follow the yellow signs. Families streaming in to hug people while they're queuing to get their passports stamped. The mystified-looking guy at the front of the immigration queue that peered into my face and asked whether I was in South Africa for a holiday or for work, then seeing the confused look on my face, just waved me through, what the hell. And then, when I went outside to wait for the bus to the Quality Inn, found the airline staff, their ties and top buttons loosened in the after-flight heat, smoking and chatting while they waited for the same bus. Is there an english word for gesellig?

Arriving at San Salvador

3. Peruvian chocolate. It's dark, bitter, slightly crumbly and you can taste they make it with unrefined sugar 'cause it has the smoky metallic edge of molasses. Totally different to the milky Swiss stuff I usually love, but when in Peru...

Chocolate de leche - milk chocolate, but almost darker than most stuff that passes for dark chocolate in SA - mmm

4. The way the air of San Salvador envelops you in a sleazy, hot embrace the second you're outside any air-conditioned zone. Hot countries, man I love them.

5. Business class. Yes, notwithstanding the reservations expressed in my last entry. This is day two of the mammoth transit adventure, and I'm actually just grateful for the steady supply of fresh orange juice and quietness and internet access.

6. The sound of Spanish.

View from my hotel room in Belize

Business and class

2007-07-12T02:21:00.000+01:00

Greetings from Lima, Peru, from a hotel room conveniently situated exactly 5 minutes walk across from the baggage claims and customs declaration area at the airport. Yes, once again, I'm on one of those ludicrous professional (mis)adventures where you spend more time in high-pressurised cabins and air-conditioned airport terminals than you spend at your destination. By Friday, I'll have taken four flights, each to a different country in an absurd South African dance known as Avoiding-The-USA-Because-They're-So-Damned-Sticky-
About-Awarding-Transit-Visas. This dance only seems complicated until you come across its not so distant cousin, attempting-to-Connect-via-The-USA-Although-They're-So-
Damned-Sticky-About-Awarding-Transit-Visas*.

I didn't have time for the second dance, so I'm caught up in the first one. Blessings and gratitude to my publisher, though, who's sent me business class (by mistake, I suspect, but he still deserves blessings and gratitude for this).

Now the lovely thing about traveling business class is not that it's marvelously luxurious. Actually, it's not. I mean, yes, stretching out in fully reclining business class seats makes a trip a whole heap less stressful than cramming into economy class pigeonholes. (And, yes, I was charmed by my little personal salt and pepper shakers, each with a tiny stopper on top. Not quite Alessi, but not far off, for an airline meal.) No, the real luxury of business class is all about the myth of luxury.

Luxury is a relative notion. Relative to the norm. And on aeroplanes, the norm is so dire that the more luxuriant classes (business, first, whatever code names they give it) makes you feel special. You feel pampered and privileged when they serve lunch on real crockery, and the food has actual taste and texture. These are things you'd take for granted in the most basic cafeteria. But airlines have gotten us so used to plastic plates, fridge-hard (or microwave-overheated) food, brusque treatment and minimal leg room that a little bit of fresh and spacious goes a long way. You feel like royalty when the staff treat you like someone doing very big business with them. But the truth is that all those economy class tickets are the biggest part of their big business. All the people behind the snootily whipped-across curtain that separates the stretchy business-class section from the piled-in economy barracks behind - they're the ones keeping the airline afloat. (Well, maybe afloat is the wrong word to use in relation to an aeroplane. But you know what I mean.)

Now I could interpret this in a couple of different ways. For one thing, I could use the experience to remind myself that things just feel better all round when we don't take them for granted. But I'm not Oprah, and I know you can figure that out for yourself. Anway, like I said already, that scale of luxury is so, so relative.

This time, the experience got me thinking about the myth of class. Human beings love to differentiate themselves from each other. We live in an age of overzealous individualism, caught in a weird cycle between wanting to be unique, and wanting to belong to our own (er, special, unique) group. But nowhere is this undermined quite as radically as at the airport, where you are a generic body, labelled with passport number and ticket number, shunted along various conveyer belts til you're transported to your destination. With the material evidence of your daily requirements folded into a suitcase that, let's face it, looks much like every other suitcase there. Open up any suitcase there, and you'll find that your collection of jeans and jackets and mobile phone charger and iPod and underwear don't look all that different to the next one. And yet, we're each special and individually unique, we know it. Which makes the airport experience disturbing. We know it, and more importantly, the airline companies know it.

So what do they offer? They offer you a range of ways to buy into an idea of class. You can do it at duty-free (and in a telling typo, that almost read beauty-free): you can buy radically expensive branded items that'll let you associate yourself with the rarefied air of glamour and celebrity and international allure that hovers mysteriously and invisibly over international terminals. You can do it by purchasing first or business class tickets that'll let you into special lounges, give you special treatment. Extra leg room, liqueurs, those cute salt and pepper shakers (I really liked them!) Comfy, sure, and I'm not knocking it. The extra comfort has made the difference between a near-unbearable trip and one that's downright pleasant.

Here's the crunch, though. When you get wherever you're going, you're going to be glad to be there, or not. You're going to be looking forward to going home again, or not, depending on how your life is right now. What will change after these few hours of flying? Little, it seems to me. And that hovering air of glamour and class that's promised in their plush lounges - it's nothing but OTT trimming on an oversized waiting room. I'm having a wonderfully easy trip, I guess I'm saying. But the most exciting part of it is that in a week's time I'll be on my way home, where the salt and pepper isn't individually packed.

[*The dance goes like this: you need to go somewhere relatively near to America, about two weeks from now. The most sensible route is to fly to Miami and connect to your destination. Then you remember that you have a South African passport. You go to the US Embassy's website and discover that the Americans require you to get a transit visa. To arrange this, they require you to go to Pick N Pay and buy a $10-voucher. The voucher entitles you to 9 minutes on the phone to a consultant at the US embassy. During this 9 minutes you must book a compulsory personal interview at the embassy. The interview schedule is generally backed up 1 to 3 months in advance. If you go over 9 minutes, go back to Pick N Pay for a new visa. And start again. If you get the appointment arranged, you can go to the embassy in a month or two, along with a pile of admin: bank statements, hotel bookings, fully paid-for plane tickets. Then they need 14 working days to process your visa. And all this just to go in transit...]

So you think you're a metrosexual...

2007-07-06T00:13:00.000+01:00

OK, I've had enough of these goddamn false claims to metrosexuality. If you were a metrosexual, honey, I wouldn't be sleeping with you. But you don't believe me, so I've devised this clever little test for you and all your friends.

1. You set your alarm extra early...
a) ONLY on those rare days you have a meeting before 9 am.
b) Most mornings. Work commitments...
c) Every morning, to facilitate your extensive cleansing routine. You allow an extra 45 minute sleep-in on weekends only.

2. Your magazines of choice are:
a) Anything to do with movies or IT. And the TV guide is a magazine, right?
b) National Geographic and/or New Scientist.
c) Wallpaper, and you're occasionally tempted by Men's Health. Oh, and there's that nice one they're doing now that focuses on men's holistic wellness.

3. When you have your hair cut, you secretly wish:
a) That your close shave on 2 will take more than 6 weeks to grow back so that you don't have to waste another hour doing this until next season.
b) That the head massage would go on for another 25 minutes, preferably in a private room.
c) That you could ask the hairdresser to tutor you to do that gel-and-fingers maneuver as skilfully as she does. Oh, and you must remember to get the name of that hair treatment she used this time.

4. You're out one Saturday with your closest guy friend. Your ex sends a weird sms. Your reaction:
a) You don't notice over the noise of the ten pin bowling.
b) You read the sms, then get back to ordering the next round.
c) You read it. You show it to your friend. You both spend three hours speculating your friend about the motivation and psychology of this behaviour.

5. The movie you went to see this week was:
a) Diehard
b) Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
c) Moliere

MOSTLY A's: Uh, your feminine side is safely kept under wraps. Only brought out on special occasions and when absolutely necessary. Maybe. You have a decently strong handshake and when you eye a girl, she gets that primal thing that your metro acquaintances can smell but not understand.
MOSTLY B's: You know how to wash out the bath. But you don't colour code your cupboards. You're still mostly guy. Women notice you, sometimes, but you're a little oblivious to them.
MOSTLY C's: You've got it bad. There are petite, clean-minded girls queuing up to date you. Unfortunately, most of them suspect that you're gay. But they love talking to you.

Little Miss Make-Me-Beautiful

2007-07-03T12:13:00.000+01:00

I read a magazine article recently that cited a growing phenomenon among 20-something girls. Increasing numbers of young women are forking out thousands and thousands of dollars (or rands or pounds, depending on where you are) to keep their faces youthful. Skin wraps, laser treatments, Botox injections. Plastic surgery as required to keep lips fuller, eyebrows higher, noses straighter.

Now, my kneejerk reaction to this kind of thing is to shake my head at this sad, limited idea of beauty. Are arched eyebrows and airbrushed golden skin really the cornerstone of physical beauty? And if your opinion of yourself is so low that you believe you need to stitch yourself into the shape of beauty, are you really going to feel any more beautiful by the time the scabs heal? But I was reading this article in one of those magazines in which every 100 grams of "Thou shalt cultivate thy inner beauty" is offset by 15 tonnes of "Thou shalt hate thyself for not resembling Kate Moss". Where every ad is based on the unquestioned premise that happiness and fulfilment lie in the magical promised land of Looking Better, and no matter where you are, you aren't there yet.

So I can hardly squish these young creatures for buying into the idea that they might Look Better. And if prevention is better than cure, and they have the disposable income for unadulterated prevention... well, good for them. But the article went on to point out that the women in question were usually offsetting their treatments with a heavy-duty lifestyle: all-night partying, bingeing on alcohol, coke and other party drugs.

OK, so we have a generation girls that are worshipping at the altar of Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan. Nihilistic hedonism is where it's at. They're well-heeled enough to know that the lifestyle will make them look haggard and withered well before their time. So they pay someone to patch up the damage, smooth it over, for a while anyway. The cosmetic surgeon knows that Little Miss Make-Me-Beautiful is wasting her money. But he isn't about to tell her that. He has big mortgages to pay. And she's not the kind of girl you'd want to get into a fight with. She might think it cool to scratch your eyes out.

So no one tells her. No one tells her that it's temporary. No one tells her that what you do leaves an imprint on your body. No one tells her that she's wrecking herself from the inside and no amount of fixing from the outside can fix that. No one tells her that she could head off to a meditation retreat for ten days, breathe some fresh air, feed and stretch her body, and she'd do more to get rid of those circles under her eyes and to refresh the prematurely slack, sagging skin on her young face than any nipping and tucking could ever do.

Why doesn't anyone tell her? Because the people that are in the business of doing the telling are the people that have something to sell. Selling cosmetics. Selling treatments. Selling accessories and appliances and clothing. And selling magazines. So it wouldn't really pay to let her know that this is an endless and pointless cycle. There is no beautiful end to it. So they take her money, and the convince her that she should tell the laser guy to remodel her gleaming youth into Younger and Better. And the people the wrote the magazines that idolised the brainless celebrities write articles like the one I read, shaking their heads. Wondering why she does it.

Lily white Olympians and other bedside stories

2007-06-21T22:23:00.001+01:00

You know, I deal with fractions quite often. I write maths textbooks, so me and fractions have quite a close relationship. I can write neat little exercises that'll teach your 6-year-old to define fractions, compare them, convert them to a different form and whip them through any mathematical operations. Fractions, as far as I know, are useful little buggers as long as you're lining up a set of equal parts of a whole.
Now, according to IOL yesterday:

Next year's Olympians will be the last "lily white" team to represent South Africa at the world games, according to Butana Komphela, chairperson of the National Assembly's sports committee. This was after several MPs baulked at the 74-member team's racial composition, expressing concern that it was 37 percent black and 63 percent white.

Right. So we're dividing up a sports team according to percentages. How very useful. A percentage, in case you've forgotten, is a fraction with a denominator of 100. So this little piece of journalism is really telling us that:

37/100 x 74 = 27,38 black people
and
63/100 x 74 = 46,62 white people

Terrifically useful. One wonders what 0,38 of a black person (or 0,62 of a white person) is; no doubt Dulux could put together a consulting team from the Old Guard and come up with a range of earth tones ranging from Titanium Albino to Ebony Stallion, with a fine mid-range of Skinny Lattes (with and without wings?) to guide us. Or am I being petty? Is the use of percentages so commonplace in defining the demographic breakdowns of human groups that we should overlook the fact that, really, people are different? OK, OK. Moving along. Now that our MPs have embarked on this useful mathematical endeavour, they offer the following little gem:

They also regarded the team's gender make-up of 62 percent male and 38 percent female as being "unpalatable".

62/100 x 74 = 45,88 males
and
38/100 x 74 = 28,12 females

I'm tempted to wonder about that 0,12 of a female. Is that the really effete guy on the rugby team? Or the gymnast whose prepubescent body is so pumped up on hormones that you can't really distinguish it from a young boy's?

Yes, yes, they're stats, I hear you say. But why the hell convert a real team of 74 people into a hypothetical team of 100, I want to know. What USE is it? What would happen if you lodged the complaint without resorting to the obfuscation of mathematics?

I'll tell you what I think. As soon as you word it sanely, you're complaining that 74 people are going to the Olympics. The gender ratio: 46 men to 38 women. The race ratio: 27 black people to 47 whites. We're talking about 74 exceptional individuals, each at the top of their field, each of whom has sacrificed most of their life to training and reaching a level of sporting excellence so finely tuned that most of them will only be able to maintain it for a few short years, at most. We're not talking achievers, we're talking super-achievers. These are the obsessive, tenacious, never-say-die few. They have genetic advantages. They have talent. They have the peculiar blend of mental attributes required to go the distance and train til they want to die and then train some more. They are lunatics. They are NOT average.

And Butana Komphela, bless his lily white socks, wants to apply a law of averages to them.

He said the team would have to get to the airport quickly as it would be the last time an unrepresentative team would be allowed through immigration.
He added that it was time the sporting federations felt the government's whip after they had in many instances failed to transform their teams voluntarily.
It was not until people were severely punished that they would know that there was a rule of law in the country, Komphela said.

I'd like to challenge Mr Komphela to go to a school playground. Go play PT teacher for a day. (Sorry, make that Arts and Culture educator in charge of Phys. Ed. or whatever the OBE-speak is for that post these days.) Check out how fairly talent gets spread out. God doesn't queue children up and dish out talent and commitment in equal measures. Sure, provide the opportunities as equally as you can across the board. Teach girls to throw and catch and kick balls; teach black kids to swim. Redress the balance, go for it. But don't pretend all kids are created equal. Don't pretend that we're all equal parts of the whole. Equality is based on maths, not on humanity. Life doesn't divide well into fractions. Life's not fair, Mr Komphela. And you can't severely punish anyone for that.

Quotation

2007-06-15T08:05:00.001+01:00

Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.

(Robert F. Kennedy)

My favourite break-up line ever

2007-06-15T07:58:00.000+01:00

Watched "Secretary" again last night. What a fine film. Worth seeing for the best break-up line of all time:

PETER
You're my fiancee!
LEE
I don't want you. Get out.

I mean, poor Peter. But when you know, you know, right? I wish more people had the balls to say it out loud and clear when they do want you. And when they don't. Makes things so much clearer, doncha think?

Radical participation

2007-06-11T21:07:00.002+01:00

I remember the first time I heard the name "Burning Man". I was on a boat in the Red Sea. We were diving three times a day. There was barely time for anything besides getting our dive kit on and off between dives, eating and sleeping. The occasional game of 30 Seconds. And several good conversations. I wasn't having a rough time. I wasn't premenstrual. I wasn't even homesick. I was certainly not susceptible to unbidden tears. But the words "Burning Man" sent a shiver down my spine. And when Richard described, in a few broad strokes, what the event was about, I almost cried at the thought of it.

Now, I've never been to Black Rock. I've never seen the Man burn; I've never partaken of that magic. I've only heard of it, and wondered what it might be like. The photographs tell me one thing only: that I can't tell til I'm there. I'm not sure I'm ready to go there. But, it seems, there is ready to come here.

(If you've never heard of Burning Man, I am not the person to tell you about it. Rather go read this:
http://www.burningman.com/whatisburningman/about_burningman/experience.html)

Last week, I discovered that a friend his helping to organise Afrika Burns, which bills itself as "an art festival heavily inspired by Burning Man". In other words, a little bit of Burning Man comes to Africa. Ambitious, I thought. Fucking awesome, I thought. Damnit, I'm going to be away in July, I thought. And then: Thank God for that. I mean, how the hell would I, within a month, come up with a creative offering that was equal to the task of radical participation that Richard had described that day in Egypt?

Out of curiosity, I checked out the website, and then checked out the Facebook group that the organisers have set up to keep participants in the loop. As I skimmed through the online information, I couldn't help getting the sense that the organisers haven't quite gotten their point across. I see a lot of people lining up to buy tickets to the rave of the decade. "I hope this isn't gonna be another crappy hippie trance party," says one. I cringe. Depends, I can't help thinking. Are you going to make it more than that? What are you bringing, besides those cool expectations?

See, Burning Man isn't about going and getting wasted in the hippest, most spectacular and most wildly creative setting you could imagine. It's not about going and being entertained. There's nothing passive about Burning Man. My descriptions should adhere to E Prime here, in fact: everything about this event screams ACTIVE. Do it, make it, bring it, and give it. Freely. Think of surviving in a harsh place. Then think of doing that while simultaneously sustaining others - not just with bread and water. With art. With flowers. With buildings. Think of generosity of spirit. Multiply it by 1 000. That's how I think of Burning Man. Think radical freedom of expression. Multiply that by a whole lot of powers of ten too. Getting there.

So. Burning Man comes to Afrika? Amen. You're thinking of going? Amen. Just grant me one wish: Go without expectation. Go with arms full of your gifts, and palms open, expecting nothing. And make it something beyond any of our wildest dreams. Everything you're hoping for, take it with you and give it away. That's the only way it can ever come back to you, and even it doesn't, you'll find it already has.

Internet dates that didn't happen #1

2007-06-04T17:32:00.000+01:00

Dear M______

I hardly know you very well, off these few emails, and you seem, you know, genuine. I imagine your friends refer to you as "such a sweet guy". I imagine you get along passably well with ex-girlfriends. But. M_______. Forgive me for taking this liberty - but, as we're unlikely to meet, it seems pointless to miss the opportunity to point something out to you, with all the best intentions. Take a look at these:

"If you would prefer to cast this tentative friendship adrift for any reason, then please let me know." ??!!

"I'll expect an email if/when I receive one." ??!!!

"If you would prefer to keep things virtual, that's also cool." ????!!!!

Read them a couple of times.

You wrote them.

Did you see what you were writing?

Do you see what I'm trying to tell you?

Do you know what's coming?

It's your interpersonal proactivity dial, dude. You seem to have set it to 0. As in Radically Tentative. Houston, we have a problem. I mean, I'm all for considerateness and sensitivity in men, but you're taking it to a new level here. Out of the thousand-odd matches that datingbuzz threw at me, you're one of a tiny handful that had something at all to say. And yet, here you are, running out a line in tentativeness like nothing I've ever seen before. It's like driving with your handbrake on, dude. Ease up. I mean, I'm taking myself out of the loop in any case ... but I'm pretty convinced you're one of the creatures that would find himself hooked up in a heartbeat if you could just take a deep breath and put yourself on the line. Do you know what I'm saying?

Now. I'm really in two minds about sending this email. Will I press send? Or will I simply delete it, and let you go on your gentle way, out of fear that you might find my point of view a little uncomfortable, a little prickly? You might take offense. You might simply be hurt. And I don't like hurting people. What am I trying to achieve here, I wonder?
Well, I'd like to think that I just might inspire you to do something out-of-the-ordinary. So I think I might just hit the send button. Go on. Stretch yourself. Risk something. Pursue someone. Put yourself on the line.

All the best
Lisa

Quotation of the weekend

2007-06-03T07:52:00.000+01:00

"Silence is usually understood to be something negative, something empty, an absence of sound, of noises. This misunderstanding is prevalent because very few people have ever experienced silence. All that they have experienced in the name of silence is noiselessness.
But silence is a totally different phenomenon. It is utterly positive. It is existential, it is not empty. It is overflowing with a music that you have never heard before, with a fragrance that is unfamiliar to you, with a light that can only be seen by the inner eyes.
It is not something fictitious; it is a reality, and a reality which is already present in everyone - we just never look in.
You inner world has its own taste, has its own fragrance, has its own light. And it is utterly silent, immensely silent. There has never been any noise, and there will never be any noise. No word can reach there, but you can reach.
Your very centre of being is the centre of a cyclone. Whatever happens around it does not affect it. It is eternal silence.
Days come and go, years come and go, ages come and pass. Lives come and go, but the eternal silence of your being remains exactly the same - the same soundless music, the same fragrance of godliness, the same transcendence from all that is mortal, from all that is momentary.
It is not your silence.
You are it.
It is not something in your possession; you are possessed by it, and that's the greatness of it. Even you are not there, because even your own presence will be a disturbance.
The silence is so profound that there is nobody, not even you. And this silence brings truth, and love, and thousands of other blessings to you."

(Osho, Meditation - The First and Last Freedom)

Go find me a verb please - one that works

2007-06-02T13:00:00.000+01:00

I know this might lose a lot of you off the bat, but how often do you think about the verbs you choose? A while ago, a friend told me about a language called E-Prime. Simply put, E-Prime refers to the sum of the English language, minus all versions of the verb "to be". In other words, E-Prime contains all the same words as English, except for the following: be, being, is, isn't, am, are, aren't, was, were, weren't.

It sounds like an interesting thought experiment. Except that various academics have written extensive papers explaining the significance and virtue of a language minus the pernicious verb "to be". And I find myself wishing that more writers - journalists, especially - would take note.

Why use E-Prime? Several reasons spring to mind.

Firstly, E-Prime jettisons the passive voice. No longer can you construct sentences using is seen, was said, was killed, will be found, was written, will be done. Instead, E-Prime forces you to ascribe agency. Who sees it? Who said it? Who killed it? Who will find it? Who wrote it?

So what? Well, it results in clearer, easier to read, and - most importantly for me - more accurate and specific writing. Too many unexamined assumptions lurk behind that passive voice which has become the ubiquitous construction of so much so-called information these days. In my role as editor, I spend a lot of time excising the passive voice from new authors' work. Changing apparently simple textbook statements like Gold is mined underground to We mine gold underground. What difference does the change make? A lot, I'd say. Apart from the fact that students, especially second-language students find the passive voice confusing. The change subtly ascribes responsibility to the statement, subtly imparts a deeper level of understanding: Things do not simply happen, passively, then wait for us to observe them. People make them happen. Someone chooses to mine that gold; someone sets up the infrastructure and someone else goes down with a light on his head and sweats his way along the coalface. The first statement does not open this awareness to the reader. The second statement does.

Secondly, E-Prime encourages you to take responsibility for your own subjective opinions. The rose isn't red, darling; the rose appears red. The movie isn't great, sweetheart; we watched it; you liked it; I loved it, and those other silly people walked out. What is the movie? It's a movie, that's all. If you want to say something about it, E-Prime nudges you closer to clarifying your opinions accurately. E-Prime cannot eliminate opportunities for spouting dogma and unexamined prejudice. But it can encourage the speaker or writer to acknowledge and "own" their point of view.

So. I wouldn't advocate that you rewire your brain to yank out any versions of "to be" from your everyday usage. But next time you want to write something, think carefully about what you want to say. And take a little meander into your brain, and find a suitable verb for that sentence.

"It's just like the 60s, but with less hope."

2007-05-29T15:38:00.000+01:00

I guess a film about a pre-orgasmic protagonist is bound to be a little anticlimactic. But in the case of John Cameron Mitchell's recent film Shortbus, the anticlimax is both relief and disappointment.

Many will rage and roar that it's porn. Certainly, there's porn out there with a lower body count in terms of sheer fornication. But there's nothing about Shortbus that's designed to turn you on. Rather, it'll make you laugh, and wince. Unlike most mainstream films, this one doesn't mystify or demystify sex. It doesn't cast sex as mysterious collateral for the main plot. Instead, sex - in all its forms, from masturbation to twosomes, threesomes and wild orgies - is simply part of the story, part of the question that each character is trying to answer for themselves: What do I need? How am I going to find it?

Like any ensemble comedy, really, this one deals with people in pain. Specifically, a fringe bunch of New Yorkers who find their way to the lounge-cum-pleasure-palace called Shortbus, where they play out the extremes of their sexual fantasies. But, at the heart of it, they are people in pain, people looking for solace and solutions, looking to connect with others, to turn on their lights, as it were, in a city where the lights keep going out. Heironymous Bosch would turn in his grave: here's sexual deviancy that's not just refreshingly real - it's uplifting, playful, fresh and unimpeded by moralising overtones.

It doesn't exactly get there in the end, I must admit. I could have done with a more convincing turning point for the main character, a more emotionally satisfying ending. The closing scene felt a little like a pantomime encore pantomime, with the cast gathering for one last rowdy number, almost tearful at the imminent farewell, but mostly celebrating what a fine old time they'd had making the show. Which, no doubt they had.

Quotation of the weekend

2007-05-27T20:24:00.001+01:00

"Don't get sad. You're in your best place. You have peace of mind. You have self-respect. And you have creative ideas for hand-cuffs." - the lovely LDH.

An eye for an I

2007-05-27T12:13:00.000+01:00

I must admit, I don't like thinking too hard about disease and injury. Yes, hospitals make me uneasy. The thought of surgery makes me squeamish. The details of my death are something I figure I can ignore. And I've had the good fortune of decent health and a relatively accident-free existence. Lucky me. But I'm feeling quite proud of myself of late. I finally got round to looking my internal organs in the eye, as it were, and registering as an organ donor.

It's easy - you can register online, they send you the stickers to put on your ID and driver's licence, you let your family know, and that's it. There are currently 3 000 South Africans awaiting organs for transplants that could save their lives. Because of shortages of organs, fewer than 1 in 3 of them will receive those transplants.
This from the Organ Donor Foundation's website:

Research has shown that organ donation is acceptable to the majority of South Africans and contrary to popular belief, a grieving family takes great comfort from the knowledge that they are able to help others through the donation of their loved one's organs and tissues.

With excellent long-term survival rates of over 80%, transplantation can no longer be considered experimental and is accepted as the treatment of choice for most patients with end-stage disease.

I'm not going to apologise for the proselytising tone of this post. Sometime, when you need an eye, a kidney or a heart, I really want to know that you're going to get one. The only way that can happen is for more people to get the little red sticker.

South Africa: www.odf.org.za
UK: www.uktransplant.org.uk
Europe: www.transplant.org
USA: www.shareyourlife.org

When I grow up...

2007-05-25T14:00:00.000+01:00

Just back from my big adventure to the soggy island known as England, and the slightly smaller, but no less damp island of Arran in Scotland. Where I discovered that you can never tell what's going to happen when you grow up.

This isn't Arran. It's Holy Isle, which is the view from Arran.
When I grow up I'm going to be a Buddhist monk there. Well, in one of my other lives.

When Nicole grows up, she's going to be a doctor during the week, an artist on the weekend and a sailor around midnight. No, wait. She already is...

Dani, my favourite piece of she-fluff. I would've voted her least likely to juggle radical chic with domesticity.
But my prescient skills are really quite shite.

Me and Nicole. After 20 years of not seeing one another, we had a lot of catching up to do. When we grow up, maybe we'll get to be the Scrabble equivalent of John Turturro in Quiz Show.

And when Nikolai and I grow up, we are going to be notorious co-authors. Of something. Watch this space.

Airports and nationalism

2007-05-22T23:29:00.000+01:00

Because I come from South Africa, and not, say, the UK or US, I need a visa stamped into my passport before I can set foot in most countries on earth. When I travel to the Caribbean on business, I go via London instead of Miami, because the Americans won’t even let me pass through their doors in transit without half a ton of paperwork and an expensive visa application process. I have friends who’ve gone through the mill of proving that their grandparents were born in Lithuania in order to get a Lithuanian passport. Which amounts to EU citizenship. For the sake of sidestepping their travel visa headaches. (Or, in more cases, to allow them to live and work in the EU.) I can’t help wondering what their ancestral connections really prove to the powers that be. What on earth makes that individual a more palatable entrant to these countries than someone whose passport has a different country name on it?

I guess I could say, quite confidently, that I really don’t get nationalism. In fact, I get it less now than I did at school. Whenever I cross a border post by car, I’m struck by the absurdity of the wire fences that divide countries. Erected by labourers, manned by civil servants. The official dance of stamping bits of paper barely conceals the absurdity of it. What is this, exactly? Why do we need to do it? I can’t say I understand.

The last time I crossed from South Africa into Namibia, I mistakenly took my old passport, which had been invalidated when the new one was issued. The woman working at the desk didn’t notice. Relief for me. But also silent triumph. This is how significant the paperwork is. Its only significance is bestowed by the people handling it. Today, at Heathrow, I watched an official toss my make-up remover and body oil in the bin, because of some rule about containers that can hold more than 100 ml of liquid. She knew it was body oil, not napalm or whatever. She knew it was make-up remover. I knew the rules. She didn’t make them. Dumbly, we both complied. Dumbly, the liquids got tossed in the bin. Did this do something to advance national security in Britain? Somehow, I think not. I didn’t feel safer for it. I simply felt that some sort of tyranny of idiocy was at play, and neither of us had the power to do anything about it.

The soft and the spiky

2007-05-17T14:13:00.000+01:00

cactus flower, Nieu Bethesda

"It is my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues." - Abraham Lincoln

Choices and choicelessness

2007-05-17T00:31:00.000+01:00

Two years ago, a teacher from India told me: "When you are truly free, you do not spend your energy making choices. True freedom is choiceless." I argued with him. Daily, we have to make choices! Doesn't taking responsibility mean making choices, and making them carefully? He shook his head. "Be choiceless," he said.

It was anathema to the crowd. Which shoes go with that top? When exactly should I text that guy from last weekend? Who will I invite to next Saturday's party? Or would it be better to go alone? How can I tell your partner she's not doing it for me in bed? Should you tell her? Should I tell him? Should I look around for someone else? Trade up? And while I'm looking around, what about my career? Which job will catapult me further along my trajectory to ultimate career fulfilment? Choices, choices.

Perhaps I'm starting too big. The tyranny of choice starts at the banal level of our daily machinations: what we eat, where we sleep, what we buy and what we use. Over and over, we teach ourselves to step back from the options before us, appraise them with a cool, objective eye, make lists of pros and cons, merits and demerits, advantages and disadvantages. Splice them neatly into good, better and best, and then go for the one that tips the scales in the superlative direction. And yet. Stepping back means disconnecting. Appraising means judging. So you find you've ticked checkboxes, but you end up unconvinced. All you have to do is cast your eyes back in the direction of the choice you gave up, and you know what you get? Not satisfaction. Not contentment. You get regret. 'Cause you're never really sure you've gone the right route.

Mr Barry Schwartz, in his book The Paradox of Choice (subtitled Why More is Less) argues that a culture of abundance robs us of satisfaction. He has a point, though I'd say he spends way too much time analysing in detail exactly how rotten we can make ourselves feel by buying into a culture of choosing, comparing, striving for the best choices, and falling into disappointment later when we compare roads taken with those that might've been. And not enough time getting to the crux of it. So. Stop losing sleep over it. Here's the deal:

Most choices are a whole lot less significant than we give them credit for. Let it go. Do the one that feels right. You might not know the exact reasons. You probably don't need to.
Once you're on it, love it. You're already there. Your life is not around the corner. This is it.
Stick with it. Follow through.
Be grateful. The grass may well be greener on the other side. But seeing as you're here, you might as well notice it's pretty spectacular on this side too.
There's a path you're going to take. Sniff it out. Gut feel is a good thing. Trust yours.

Go on. Be choiceless.

Quotation of the weekend

2007-05-14T00:16:00.000+01:00

"Anything worth doing is worth doing full frontal." - DdB, my favourite piece of girl-fluff.

The Polytheism Pop Quiz

2007-05-10T09:36:00.000+01:00

Current reading:

The Iliad by Homer
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

Which have made me wonder why, considering the prevalence of consumerism in the 21st century, that there's quite so much enthusiasm for a measly one-god-fits-all idea. In the context of divine powers, how can less possibly be more? No, the Greeks had some fine ideas. You want gods? We'll give you gods. A whole extended network of them. Choose the one that suits your needs. Moreover, we'll give each one a unique selling proposition, as well as decent dose of proactivity.

The Greek gods weren't afraid to march into a war zone and slap mortals about for buggering up an invasion (we could do with a bit more of that). Nor were they shy of replying to requests (could definitely do with a bit more of that too). A couple of heartfelt pleas to the heavens could rustle up a supernatural hero with impressive six-pack and arrows bristling, striding down a mountain in your direction, ready to draw arms on your behalf. (Or a moonlit goddess if required.) And if one god got a bit nasty, you could go and make friends with another that was more understanding. Such a practical approach. And so MANY of them, too. No matter how specific your prayer requirements, there was likely to be a god or goddess that could fit it into his/her portfolio.

So, So. In the interests of offering you more bang for your deistic buck, please consider the offerings of the polytheistic pantheon. Please note that this is an abridged list. More gods available on request.

Zeus. If you're coming from a Christian background, Zeus may be the god for you. Think booming voice, anger, judgement, thunderbolts. Big daddy.
Poseidon. For those interested in alternative lifestyles, Poseidon might be your man. Has a really sexy trident and lives under the sea.
Hades. Goths, CLAWS members and anyone with a fondness for self-pity might go for Hades. He's known to be unpitying and invisible, so you'll get to do all your wallowing in solitary misery, and pine for the underworld.
Hestia. For the domestically inclined among us: the virginal goddess of the hearth. Warm, homely and a little boring. But won't hurt you with arrows or anything.
Hera. Think you test the boundaries of your sexual identity? Hera's got a few up on you. Wife AND sister of Zeus, famous for getting the other gods to tie him up. Go Hera.
Ares. Feeling down? Take comfort - you're not as disliked as Ares. He's considered a murderous coward. His symbols are the vulture and the dog.
Athena. Overachievers, look no further. What doesn't she do? She's a fierce, brave warrior; goddess of city, handicrafts and agriculture. She allegedly invented the bridle, the trumpet, the flute, the pot, the rake, the plow, the yoke, the ship and the chariot. And she was Zeus's favourite and got to play with his thunderbolts. Yeah, a bit irritating, I agree.
Hermes. No more unanswered prayers. Hermes is messenger of Zeus, known for swiftness. Get it, on time, direct from the skies, delivered in cool winged sandals. We think Amazon.com should consider a subscription.
Artemis. Guys that are intimidated by women: Artemis has you dialled. She's virginal, hunts with arrows, and wild animals are afraid of her. We just can't guarantee she'll help you get over it, but you can worship her if you like.
Apollo. For those that prefer natural blonds. Not much imagination; only tells the truth. But does stuff with a flute. He reminds me of that guy from Blue Lagoon. But, by all means, if blond does it for you, go ahead.
Aphrodite. Goddess of lurve. Something tells me she's gonna be the most popular.
Haphaestus. A good choice for those that believe in the mythology of Shrek, Beauty and the Beast. Anyone who's had the "You're a really nice guy, but I just want to be friends" speech. Ugly and lame, but he knows how to make stuff out of metal. And a nice guy. Why doesn't he get more air time, we have to wonder?

Who's the one for you?

Photograph

2007-05-08T20:03:00.000+01:00

One of the many faces at the Owl House. I think Candice took the photograph.

Why I liked Venus

2007-05-08T19:34:00.000+01:00

because Peter O'Toole gets the gleaming, soulful heart of a dirty, dirty old man
because Jodie Whittaker's smoky scowl is as convincing as her legs
because two old men dancing and weeping made me want to dance and weep
because it has grimy, damp, poky interiors
because love isn't always young, airbrushed and gorgeous
because I should be so lucky. Lucky, lucky, lucky.

Invitation

2007-05-08T13:42:00.000+01:00

So a close friend looked deeply into my eyes (hers blue into mine hazel) and asked:
"Do you view all your friendships romantically?"
If we hadn't been laying back on the grass, too comfortable to move, I would've had to walk around in a circle to think about that. Instead I turned it over a few times. Being the kind of friend that knows you sometimes have to rephrase the question so that it'll fall into the hole you're aiming for, she put it another way:
"Are all your friendships really, at the heart of it, love affairs?"
And there it went, like a ring, twirling round and round as it scooted down. Into the heart of it.
Of course they are. Of course I treat my friendships as grand passions. The surprise of the question was that it made me realise there's a world in which there are other ways of wearing it. There are lighter friendships, ones made of utilitarian fabrics. The ones that are there to stave off rain; the ones that are there to let air in. There are the flimsy, flashy ones that you can wear out at night, but will never keep you warm. There are the thick ones that will always keep you warm but stifle your inner beast. There are the leather ones you wear to belong to the group, but sometimes bother you with their herdlike smell. There are many, many, many. I admire those who can survive the variety of them. But the question - so astute! - made me realise I'm not one of them. I make it hard for you. So I'll start this thing off with a word of thanks. If you've found yourself here, it's probably because you're in my treasured constellation. You're one of the beloved. Or you've found your way here by chance, by invitation, by coincidence. Surviving my love is no mean feat. It's demanding, intense, unrelenting, unswerving, brutal. True friends stab you in the front. This is your invitation to stay for the ride.

All my love
L