Tania.co.za

Her death

I didn't want to go to the funeral alone, so I asked Christopher to accompany me. Marius also went, but they were near the back, and they did not go on to the graveyard afterwards, so I did not speak to them. The Methodist church hall in Raithby was full.

Her aunt was nice; they actually reserved a seat specially for me amongst the family, and I was given her portrait after the ceremony. I was comforted to find out later from her aunt that when money was needed for her final treatment, her cousin had stepped in. Her aunt realised how I had been supporting her when they drew a statement after her death and saw the donations.

Judging by what her aunt said about how the swelling had increased from the last time I saw her, I think that the total load, including the coffin, may have weighed near half a tonne. Her body had swollen up so much more since I last saw her at the hospital that her arms stuck out to the side for several days before she died, and she could not put them together anymore. It was not fat, that had been established by a biopsy a couple of months ago already. And all those years of discrimination from people, even doctors and nutritionists, who kept on telling her not to eat so much... she would just keep quiet and listen to them, struggling with inward fury as they failed to listen or try to understand the real problem when she said she was not eating very much. The doctor who came to verify the death was surprised that she had lived at all for the last weeks. It did not make sense, he said; with the state that her body was in, she should have been dead two weeks before. No surprise for those of us who knew her well: She had a will to live that carried her for over a decade from the first time when she knew that she may not make it through the winter.

It took ten or twenty men to lower the large coffin into the grave, and it was not an easy job. We giggled as the men shouted to one another, fearing a collapse of some kind. Knowing her, she wouldn't have minded.

Her death had been terrible, with a lot of suffering and pain. For reasons which I will perhaps explain later, she looked so bad that they did not want to open the coffin for a wake. Her aunt, cousin and one or two others who had cared for her in her last days were by her side when she died, saying, with shallow breath, "Jesus... Jesus... take your daughter; Jesus, take your daughter..."

It was a risk I took...

Here is an extract of a longer blog entry which I had in draft yesterday:

This month, I stopped paying Carol's hospital expenses. I stopped buying her toilet paper, toothpaste, soap, bananas, and I stopped paying for her diagnostic tests. I realised that even if I didn't go out for coffee with friends and ate only lentils and carrots, I would still not be able to prevent myself from going into debt if I didn't hold back payments until December. So I took a calculated risk. I visited her in hospital at the beginning of November, and on that day, many of her relatives came to see her. In my mind I decided that if they pooled their resources, they could pay for a couple more days in hospital. However, they also know that she is dying; and they may have silently and individually or collectively decided to speed up the process. That is not what she wants. She wants to live longer. But they may have made a decision counter to hers. Or they may be hoping that I will come up with the money after all. But I can't. I simply don't have enough. I have taken a decision to risk the life of my friend rather than to go into debt. She is at home now. Thus far, they have not paid for a single further day in hospital. She cannot walk. She cannot turn herself over. She cannot wash herself. She can hardly breathe. She is in constant pain.

I just got a call to say that she is dead.

How easily we forget

How easily we remember when someone has harmed us. How easily we forget when we have harmed ourselves.

I have been taking good care of my body. I've never smoked, and I don't drink alcohol. I start each day with two vitamin B tablets, two Arthro-Choice tablets, two Osteo-Choice tablets, one Omega-3 capsule and one iron and Vitamin C tablet. I don't skip breakfast; usually it's either muesli or a protein breakfast which I cook myself from fresh ingredients. On one day this week, I actually ate salad for all three meals of the day. For supper last night I had fresh tuna with lemon rind, lettuce and nuts. I have been managing my low blood pressure by increasing my salt intake and occasionally drinking a cup of coffee. Last night I went out for a good hour of exercise in a well-ventilated place. Then I came home and sat in bed and ate approximately 150 g of chocolate with two mugs of milk, and went to sleep. In doing so, the only thing that concerned me slightly (but not greatly) was that I might gain a bit of weight.

I had a lot of work that needed doing today. How could I have so easily forgotten all those previous experiences that taught me that eating 150 g of chocolate just before going to sleep causes the most terrible hangover?!

Starved to death on the streets of Cape Town

Occasionally you hear something on the news that just hits you while all the other stories of pain and woe pass over as part of the way things are. A Zimbabwean refugee starved to death on the streets of Cape Town. Oh yes, maybe someone will want to tell us that the real cause of death was complications due to some inflection, or some other cause that takes away the focus from the fact that the man hadn't had a proper meal in weeks. I don't want anyone to starve to death in my city. It's not right, it's not right. I don't know what to do yet, but I must do something.

AIG running an extortion racket? Thousands involved...

I recently received an SMS from the insurance company AIG, telling me that I should expect a sales call from them, but that if I wished to prevent such solicitations, I could pay my cell phone service provider a fee to cover the price of an SMS, and my name would be removed from their list. I didn't see why I should pay anyone anything to protect my privacy, so I sent AIG an e-mail message telling them that they should tell me where they got my name, and thereafter remove my details from their database, or face possible criminal prosecution in terms of section 45 of the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act (Act 25 of 2002). I got a call from today, and I thought this would be their apology. Unfortunately it wasn't. Unlike Nedbank, who very humbly aplogised to me for a similar tactic some time ago and removed me from their database, AIG were still trying to sell me something. If I wanted my details removed from their list, they said, I could call some number which they would give me. I interrupted, saying that I should not have to make such calls, since I never asked to be troubled in the first place, and while I was still talking, the salesperson decided to hang up.

Here, then, is a recipe for extortion on a massive scale:

1. Decide on something to sell. Anything. It could be used toilet paper, Congolese horoscopes, farmland in Antarctica or the Emperor's new clothes.
2. Form a working relationship with as many mobile serice providers as possible. Tell them that you will ensure that users of their service pay them for more SMSes; in return, ask them to give you a small fraction of what their customers pay for sending SMSes to your number.
3. Contact people — a lot of people, otherwise it won't work — giving them two options: "Buy something from us, or be removed from our database. No charge... except for the teeny-weeny fee which you have to pay to your mobile service provider for that one teeny-weeny SMS." (Of course, cumulatively, the teeny-weeny fees paid by a huge number of people is quite a lot of money, so the kick-back which you get if you have enough people on your list, is pretty big.)
4.  If you like, you can also try to make additional money from selling your actual product (i.e., your used toilet paper, insurance policy or whatever it is that you claim to be the real focus of the business).

Is this what AIG is doing? Maybe not. But they are still contravening the spirit of the Act. The Act says, inter alia, that consumers have the right to know where you got their information. (AIG's representative told me they got my details from the National Consumer Database. I Googled it, and couldn't find any information about this database, so I still have no way of getting off the list, unless I bow to their extortion by making a call at my own expense.) The Act also says that the consumer has the right to opt out, and that the consumer should not have to pay for this. By shifting the payment away from themselves to the mobile service provider (don't pay the gangster boss, pay his henchman), they can say that they are not benefiting directly from the opt-out request, so their hands are clean. Oh yes, and there may be other ways of getting off the list, by phoning some toll-free number; but they won't give you that number in the first SMS, so somehow you would still have to hear out the salesman first, or spend your own time searching for that number. So, come on... why not simply pay that teeny-weeny SMS fee, hmmm?

I believe that annoying and intrusive forms of marketing should not be rewarded by sales. The cost of the time which it has taken me to write the e-mail message to AIG, to argue with their salesman and to write this article is more than the cost of paying the extortion fee. And my pouty "but-it's-the-principle" attitude is not going to make a dent in their profit. But let me ask you this: Do you SMS marketers to opt out of their lists? Do you pay for those SMSes? What if I told you that you were part of a mob of supporters of this system, that it is your fault that you are still receiving solicitations via your cell phone? We don't have to take these people to court. It is only because so many people bow to their systems that marketers still use them. If enough people got angry with them constantly, making their system unwieldy due to the number of complaints and balking targets-which-don't-turn-to-customers, marketers would try something different, something less annoying. After all, they don't want us to be annoyed -- they want us to like them. They want us to buy their products and to enjoy the experience so much that we come back to buy more later. And their products may actually be good! If they hadn't annoyed me, I might have actually examined what they have to offer someday, and bought something from them.

You know what? If you kick up a fuss with the next company who contacts you this way, and the next and the next, and you suggest to your friends to do they same, then eventually other companies will learn. "SMS marketing?" they'll say, "No way, we can't use that! Did you hear what happened to AIG? They got tens of thousands of irate responses, they lost thousands of man-hours due to call-centre operators taking leave to go for therapy, they had to quadruple the staff on their complaints lines, and hundreds of bloggers said terrible things about them, so that in the end they had to spend a fortune on counter-ads just to get their Google ranking up again. The one thing we don't want to use is SMS marketing! It cuts into the bottom line and erodes your brand."

Stats

Bloedsuiker	4.9
Cholestrol	5.09
Bloeddruk	112/60 (Dis die probleem.)

The Poisoned Fairies

Introduction

One fine summer afternoon in Willowdale, Edna, Harry and Sam wandered down to the railroad station to see if anything was doing.

To protect the identity of the hapless innocents in the following true story, their names have been changed to those of characters from Edward Gorey's The Willowdale Handcar. Of course, anyone who knows me or my friends will be able to figure out who I am really talking about anyway.

Chapter One: One Not-So-Fine Summer Morning Nowhere Near Willowdale

One dreary summer morning, Edna, a teetotaller, woke up with a hangover from not having consumed alcohol the night before.

A week or two before, she had suggested to Harry, Sam and numerous others that they should all go to an open-air party where there would be dancing, swimming and camping. Having mustered enough enthusiasm from Harry to single-handedly make up for the lack of enthusiasm from all the others, she now regretted having initiated this excursion, as the weather did not appear co-operative. Unfortunately on this particular morning, Harry, a man given to bouts of extreme optimism alternating with bouts of extreme pessimism, was experiencing an annoyingly intense bout of optimism, and arrived at Edna's flat gleefully pointing out occasional spots of blue in an otherwise grim-looking sky, determined to rescue poor Sam from a mood which rivalled the gloom above.

So Edna, Harry and Sam threw tents, lamps, blankets and clothes into the car, and followed the signs through the countryside to the campsite. A sign at the entrance said that NO ILLEGAL SUBSTANCES would be allowed, so Edna invited the security officer who was handling admissions to search the vehicle. This proved unnecessary, the trio later discovered, as the sign served only to politely deter patrons from bringing their own, much in the same way as it would be bad manners to take one's own beer to a bar. (Either that, or the illegal substances they were hoping to curtail were TNT and plutonium. After all, the gathering was aimed at fostering peace and brotherhood.)

Chapter Two: The Welcoming of the Hapless Three

Within a minute of having arrived, a friendly gentleman approached Edna, Harry and Sam, and asked them whether they might like to buy some dope or something beginning with M, which Edna had not heard of before. She declined on behalf of the group, but within about three minutes a second gentleman came along with an enhanced menu consisting of dope, crystal meth or mushrooms. Harry, wishing to appear clever, told the merchant the taxonomical name of the mushrooms (which the merchant already knew, adding the word 'Capensis'). Finally, a third gentleman appeared, offering an even larger portfolio of options, including dope, crystal meth, mushrooms and LSD. Edna then remembered that in haste she had grabbed a 1.5 litre bottle just before leaving the flat and suggested that if any more peripatetic salesmen should pass that way, they should tell these gentlemen that the group already had its own Coke, thank-you.

Had they been interested in sampling any of these wares, it would have been perfectly possible to get a full dose of the complete cocktail simply by standing for two minutes in the tent which sold smoking paraphernalia. The air was so infused that Edna departed before taking a second breath, for fear that she might temporarily lose the use of her legs.

Any purported harm which might have been done to the bodies of those who participated in the use of these substances would, however, surely have been obliterated by the fact that the food on offer was vegetarian, and the face-paint was, as empasised in the signage, non-toxic.

Chapter Three: A Night of Dubious Celebration

The party started, but to Edna's dismay, the dancefloor consisted of a field strewn with straw. This would have made it difficult for her to perform pirouettes, glissades, and other dance movements, so she located herself on a large flat piece of metal functioning as a bridge over a ditch, and danced there for a while, while Harry, a man whose dancing style consists merely of shifting his weight from one foot to the other, found a spot in the crowd, and Sam, an Environmental Scientist, observed the movements of the various primates with interest. Having left behind their torches, they all bought glow-sticks, which they rather naughtily hoped to later submit to their respective physicians as radioactive urine samples.

Eventually it began to rain, so Edna decided to go to bed, followed shortly by Harry. Unfortunately an earlier attempt to erect two two-man tents, had failed, leaving only one two-man tent to be shared by two large men and one medium-sized woman. So Harry, being fine and upstanding, decent, sacrificial and odd in several other ways, decided that he would sleep in one of the door-wings of the tent, so that Sam and Edna might have the luxury of the tent proper. It took him approximately an hour to zip himself up into one regular sleeping bag surrounded by one waterproof bag, so by the time that Sam came along to settle down, Harry was fully exhausted from the struggle. However, the fact that the music was being imparted via double-storey speakers meant that the ground was reverberating to such a degree that Harry could not sleep. So at three-thirty, he went and joined the other revellers on the dancefloor once more. Sam chose simply to lie awake in a daze of exhaustion, thinking about work, while Edna, who lives in a block of flats inhabited by students, was accustomed to having to sleep through the noise, and was kept awake instead by a busy bladder and occasional lumps in the turf below a spread-out sleeping bag.

Sometime in the middle of the night, they overhead Harry guiding some lost people back to their car. ("Do you remember walking through a puddle?" asked Harry. "No..." said one. "Yes!" said another. "In that case, if you walked through the puddle, and the farmhouse was behind you and the speakers in front of you, then that is your car." "Bruuu! Thanks!")

Chapter Four: Another Grim Dawn Breaks Noisily

The sun eventually dragged its sorry butt from its tent, covering itself with a thick blanket to cope privately with its hangover. It was drizzling. The music was still thudding. There were still people on the dancefloor. Edna, Harry and Sam strolled up the embankment to observe the scene from above. A smart 4x4 had driven into a ditch, and the tow vehicle which had been summoned to assist, had failed to extricate it. The vendors of vegetarian food, face-paint, dreamcatchers and other religious items typically sold in the forecourt at a neo-hippy Feast of Tabernacles, were dozing off. But the fat, friendly couple selling tea were pretending to look wide awake and cheerful as they served a queue of bedraggled worshippers.

So Edna, Harry and Sam drank tea and departed, happily unified by the separateness of their perspectives from one another and their cognitive dissonance from the experience they had shared. Although Harry, being a bit mad, did occasionally feel an inexplicable urge to go back.

Leaving behind the noisy, poisoned countryside, they headed for the quiet of the city.

Nagmerries

Die afgelope week kry ek nagmerries. Nie sweet-en-opspringdrome nie, maar nietemin onaangenaam.

Ek droom ek moet 'n klomp groot goudvisse in 'n tenk voer. Ek sit 'n bol gedroogte grasse in die tenk, en glo dat dit vir die visse heerlik sal wees. Dan ontplof dit, en die visse word teen die wande van die tenk gegooi. Die water is troebel. Ek kan nie sien of die visse nog leef nie.

Ek het nie regtig meer honde nie, maar ek droom ek het vergeet het dat ek honde het, en ek het vergeet om hulle te voer en vir hulle water te gee. Hulle lyk darem nie te erg nie -- dis nog betyds -- maar ek begin besef daar is meer honde as waarvan ek aanvanklik bewus was, en wonder watter ander diere ek nog verwaarloos het, waarvan ek nie weet nie.

Ek droom ek staan op 'n bult bokant 'n plein. Onder is daar 'n KFC met skoorstene. Ek was vroeër in die dag daar. Daar kom nou groot vlamme by die skoorstene uit. Skielik bars daar vuur deur die hele gebou. Ek kan dwarsdeur die mure sien hoe die meublement helderkleurig verlig is binne-in. Ek wonder hoeveel mense in die gebou was. Ek probeer die persoon onthou wat my in die oggend bedien het.

Miskien droom ek hierdie dinge omdat ek bang is dat ek nie almal vir wie ek omgee, kan red nie. Ek hoor die refrein van 'n lied in my gedagtes: How fragile we are, how fragile we are.

'n Inbreker wat Vrydagnag in my woonstelblok op heterdaad betrap is, het die volgende dag aan sy wonde beswyk. Die inbreker het die woonstelbewoner  met 'n mes gesteek, en hulle het gestoei. Die beseerde woonstelbewoner se meisie het hom probeer hospitaal toe vat, maar die armed response se voertuig het in die pad gestaan en hulle kon aanvanklik nie uit nie. Hulle het vir Robbie ('n nagwag, met wie ek bevriend is) gevra om intussen die woonstel te beveilig, maar Robbie word deur sy firma in die parkeervlak toegesluit sonder 'n kommunikasiemiddel en hy kon nie uit nie. Later het iemand hom wel uitgelaat en teen daardie tyd was die polisie ook daar. Hy het gesê hy kon die inbreker se niere deur die gat in sy rug sien.

Dié gebeurtenis was nie een van my drome nie, maar waarskynlik wel 'n nagmerrie.

'n Week of twee voor dit het ek vir Salvador op die trappe raakgeloop. Hy was dronk. Hy't gesê hy't opgehou dwelms gebruik omdat dit sy niere opgemors het. Hy't die donker kringe onder sy oë daaraan toegeskryf. Hy gaan nou net baie alkohol drink, het hy gesê. (Ja, en dan gaan jy jou lewer net so opmors soos jy jou niere opgemors het, was my antwoord.) Hy wou weet of ek 'n stylist soek, en het aangebied om my hare te doen. Ek het die aanbod van die hand gewys, en nie direk na my woonstel toe geloop nie; ek het gedink hy sou my dalk wou volg, en ek wou nie hê hy moes weet waar ek woon nie. Daarna het hy blykbaar direk na 'n woonstel gestap, en 'n DVD-speler probeer steel. Hy was nie suksesvol soos met sy vorige inbrake nie -- jammer, ek moet seker sê vermeende inbrake, totdat die hof bewys het dat al daardie dinge waarvan ons hom nog altyd verdink, wel sy handewerk was. 'n Klomp stewige jong mans het dit reggekry om hom vas te hou totdat die polisie gekom het. Ek reken dit moes maar moeilik gewees het, want hy is ex-Special Forces. Hulle het sy vrou se woonstel deursoek en dwelms gekry. Borgtog is nie toegestaan nie. Nou kan sy by hom kuier sonder dat hy haar kan slaan.

Vrydagaand het ek vir Sponskop nugter gesien. Ek weet nie hoekom hy by my kom aanklop het nie; sy maatjies was waarskynlik nie tuis nie. Hy het na bewering opgehou dwelms verkoop, en het nou 'n proper job.

Ek het my huurkontrak verlede week hernu.

Maar ek dink nie dis hierdie dinge waaroor ek my bekommer nie. Dis die broosheid van al die ongelukkige siele, die mense wat knak onder hulle werkslading, en dié wat nié werk het nie, en wat eensaam lewe. En sterwe.

Preparing for the Night of 1000 Drawings

I spent last night preparing for the Night of 1000 Drawings, an event that I saw on Facebook. It's a fundraiser in which members of the public contribute A5-sized drawings, which are then sold at a special event on the 7th. Of course, the prospective buyers are also members of the public, so they are not going to buy something they don't like. I tried to make pictures that would be enjoyable to make and that I hoped might appeal to people, including semi-abstract landscapes, and anatomically incorrect pictures of women using acrylic paint, pencil and Artline markers on Masonite board.



I reckoned that if people like these pictures, perhaps I could make some more and sell them at galleries. If I could make and sell one a day, or even one every two days at the right price, I could pay for Carol to stay in hospital indefinitely without going into debt.