The Parenting Minefield

I don’t do anything these days without consulting the internet. I no longer prepare grocery lists, but instead look up recipes online then wander the aisles of my supermarket tracking down what they tell me to buy. Buying a toaster has become a three-day exercise in checking reviews vs prices to get the best deal, and I won’t spend an hour streaming a random film in case it’s bad choosing instead to spend an hour online reading movie reviews. It’s making life untenable. Perhaps the most confusing place for this is parenting.

Every week someone somewhere is releasing a new study that seems to completely refute the study released last week, and I read them all. One minute you need to allow your toddler to make mistakes, the next actively engage in correcting them. One week it’s encouraged to keep them constantly engaged, the next you need to give them time to themselves, then engagement is necessary, as long as you are engaged with them. I am told that being overly relaxed as a parent can lead to my son lacking focus, and being incapable of finding the drive to succeed in life (see Mom & Dad I knew this was all your fault), while being overly restrictive can lead to him being unable to make decisions, and incapable of dealing with difficulties. Presumably being somewhere in the middle creates a blend of these two kinds of dysfunctions? It seems no matter how you choose to raise your child, the end result is always going to be an adult whose sense of depression, bewilderment and isolation has left them barely capable of functioning day-to-day.

Causing me particular aggravation is that kind of click bait particular to new parents, the “Watch out your child could die if” news story. Articles titled, “Ten things you should never do with your kids” always get me clicking, and include things like, “let them go online”, or “Let them play on the swings”, but never include the phrases, “Imprison them in a basement” or “Sacrifice them to a dark lord”. Those tips seem obvious candidates for me, particularly given that the articles are written in an era where fake medical professionals tell you not to vaccinate your child, and people not only do that but then also argue with others in their office about it.

“Maureen the article said we weren’t to let Koosie play on the swings, it said absolutely nothing about slathering him in bloody meat and chucking him in a shark tank!”

What recent studies do seem to unanimously agree on, however, is that people who have children are generally happier than those who don’t. Meaning the only way we will ever be able to overcome the general sense of confusion, sadness, and malaise that our parents forced on us through their own parenting choices is to have children of our own and do the same to them.

Predicting This World Cup

Shortly before the beginning of the World Cup former wife of John Lennon and renowned football pundit Yoko Ono unashamedly put forward her opinion as to who the eventual winner would be.

Even though I had “A child who believes in a peaceful world” in our football pool, I was delighted to see tears on his little optimistic face as he was knocked out on penalties in the second round. I am not sure what Yoko Ono was thinking trying to predict football, she is clearly no octopus.

In 2010 an octopus named Paul correctly predicted all of Germany’s results and that Spain would win the tournament. He died of natural causes with a prediction record stained by only a few bad decisions. This time a giant Pacific octopus in Japan named Rabio accurately predicted all three of Japan’s group stage matches, before being chopped up and eaten prior to Japan’s second-round clash. It’s a sad reflection of the times that we don’t even have enough respect for a magical octopus to wait until after the tournament to eat him.

Apart from showing that had Pikachu actually been discovered in Japan Ash Ketchum would probably have been unimpressed and, eaten him with lashes of soy sauce, this story of the Japanese Octopus is also something of a conundrum. For one thing, because he was an octopus, and therefore incapable of human speech, we will never know if he could predict his own grisly demise.

Was he a hapless, unknowing victim of his captor’s meat-cleaver? Or, was he, as I like to think, fully aware of what was to happen to him the whole time? Perhaps he knew that like Paul, psychic abilities only last so long, wrong answers were around the corner, and, true to his Japanese culture, unable to face the shame of his own inevitable failures, he orchestrated his own demise by peeing on his captor’s rug? It is a noble end, and, now that she too has been proven wrong, one another Japanese football pundit, Yoko Ono should consider. You broke up the Beatles Yoko! It’s time to go.

 

 

 

Lifetimes In One Place

 

Charity shops make me sad. Sectioned in small, out of the way complexes, they are stocked with boxes of unused donations and detail lives, and moments, that were once precious, but are now marked down to just R5. Edwardian wigs, a VHS titled “Diana: The People’s Princess”, pottery figures of once brightly coloured clowns, second-hand sex toys, a rhino horn ashtray, a taxidermied squirrel  – and this is only the stuff I brought in.

These shops feel like forgotten places. Always inexplicably cold, they smell of moth-balls, dust, and Helen Zille’s Twitter account. The customers are a mixture of the kind of people you expect to see talking about past lives in a teepee at a music festival, and retirees who walked through the door in 1967 and have long since given up trying to find their way out. If you leave a rubbish bag filled with a deceased person’s clothes unopened in a charity store for long enough, it will gain sentience, stand up and start working the till.

Despite all this, there is a poignancy to charity shops. It’s difficult to see a Rosewood box of old silver cutlery gathering dust, and not think of the person to whom this was a treasured possession. Undoubtedly it lived in a locked cupboard and was only unpacked when special guests came over, yet now it competes for space with broken plastic kids toys, yellowing pulp-fiction paperbacks, and humorous paragraph ending punchlines.

I am reminded while in these spaces that treasuring things is pointless, as ultimately I will die and the items I keep close to my heart will just become someone else’s burden to be packed in a box and donated to charity. As a result, a visit there functions the same way a near-death experience must. I always leave blinking into the sun, thanking my lucky stars that I am both alive and mentally tough enough to avoid buying a dusty bonnet filled with plastic flowers. I do however miss that ashtray.

 

I’m Too Good For This

As a newly single person, I have naturally tried out Tinder – if by “tried out” I really mean, “swiped silently left for hours on end while descending into deeper and deeper pits of existential despair”. Wave after wave of potentially wonderful people pass beneath my grubby Nik-Nak stained fingers, swiped forever into some nameless void, from where they will inevitably only return a few weeks later, this time with a new profile picture of themselves stroking a lion cub.

“Don’t worry about the man next to me whose head I have cropped out of the picture in which I am wearing a wedding dress. He is nothing. A mere step towards the happiness we will inevitably be forced to endure,” the profiles all seem to say – their blank-faced yoghurt commercial faces covered in so many photo filters the rabbit ears are the most realistic part.  Some of them aren’t that subtle – “swipe left if …” they state openly before delivering a grocery list of previous grievances. “No married men, cheaters, poor people, fuck bois, liberals, conservatives, short men, posers, anarchist revolutionaries….”. I don’t even read them, I just swipe left assuming I inevitably fall into at least one of the categories on the list.

Why are any of us there? I doubt anyone downloads Tinder dreaming of the day they hear their best-man say, “I remember the day he told me they had met on Tinder”.  Why do we do it? Who are these people who, like me, have signed up to be swiped so far left they get berets in the post from the EFF?

Perhaps we all have too much self-esteem for Tinder? Maybe we really think that four-year-old photo of us holding aloft a fish on the one happy day of our lives will open up a world of soulful romantic connections? If we do, we are undoubtedly wrong. “I love wine and laughing,” says every single bio written by people either too boring to have any real interests, or prepared to cast the net out wide enough to snare absolutely every single person in the world.

Turning on the Tinder app should activate the front camera on your phone thereby forcing you to engage with the mess you have made of your life while you are busy judging others, or maybe, just maybe, we should abandon it entirely and start going on the dates our friends and family recommend?

How To Name The Airport

Politicians are the worst people. At 18 they head to university determined to join the various political party youth structures because at that stage they presume themselves to be already all-knowing, and capable. They leave school believing wholeheartedly that what the world needs is their input, as they know what’s best for you and I. At 18, with no world experience, they think they should be leading you. Over the years we load these mini-narcissists with money and power, and then we are surprised when things get more messed up than beer and candles night at a convent.

Politicians are single-handedly responsible for everything awful that has ever happened. Wars, corruption, apartheid, the Holocaust,  and this Jacob Zuma statue – all these things came about because of the decisions made by people who should never have been given power in the first place.

As a society, we repeatedly elect the worst of humanity, then watch as these mini-tyrants tear their countries apart, and celebrate their own greatness by naming everything after themselves, and their friends. Every government building, every airport, and every stadium gets to be named after them, inspiring yet more people who want things named after them to go into politics. Isn’t it time to stop empowering these madmen?

Now there are calls to rename the Cape Town International Airport and, unlike Britain who would no doubt have wanted it hilariously named Airporty McAirportFace, our suggestions are 99% in honour of other politicians and freedom fighters. If we want to encourage the right people to go into power, we need to avoid honouring them. We need to switch off their access to the front pages, tune down the honorifics we pay them, and have them do more work, and less talking. Let the humble seek power. The only things we should name after politicians are natural disasters because like politicians they are brutal, expensive, and infinitely worse for the poor.

Instead, we should be honouring the people that make us proud to be South African. Like me. As someone who has tirelessly, and humbly worked to achieve acclaim, I think we can all agree that I deserve something way bigger than merely having my name on an airport. So while we wait for the inevitable 300-metre high statue to me to be constructed on Table Mountain may I suggest that we name the airport, and all future buildings, after those who through their endeavours have lifted our country’s name high around the world?

I would love to land at Hugh Masekela International, or indeed any airport named after legendary artists, sportsmen, scientists and authors. Who would argue that Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Ingrid Jonker, Brenda Fassie, Nadine Gordimer, Athol Fugard, Caster Semenya, Hashim Amla, Vusi Mahlasela, Aaron Klug, Abdullah Ibrahim, Sydney Bremmer, and countless others would deserve to be remembered, and honoured in this way?

I understand the need to respect people who dedicated their lives to give us the country we currently have, but our inability to honour anyone other than them reveals a gaping, and dangerous one-dimensionality in our thinking. By my estimates, two-thirds of things in this country are named after Nelson Mandela, but we don’t have a single significant tribute to Miriam Makeba. As long as we honour only warriors and politicians, and neglect those who bring beauty to our country we tacitly tell our children that the arts, peace,  and scientific endeavour are unimportant. We need to do something to ensure this is not the impression they are getting urgently, and the gigantic solid gold, mechanised statue of me just isn’t enough.

Missed Opportunities

Paarl resident Tamaryn Green was this weekend named Miss SA, and while friends, family, Western Cape locals and most of the country was lauding the medical student for her achievements, a small minority were wondering how in this day and age we could still be celebrating something as archaic, and fundamentally wrong as Paarl. Apparently, Tamaryn took home Miss SA, and Miss Universe South Africa, while the runner-up Thulisa Keyi won the Miss World SA title, which makes about as much sense as the fact that these things exist in the first place. Doesn’t being the best in the universe also necessitate being the best in the world? Tamaryn is the best in the universe from South Africa.

Being the best in the universe from South Africa must feel like a special achievement, even to someone who is going to become a doctor one day, and whose old boyfriends are currently clamouring to be recognised on Twitter. That’s the kind of respect I crave, and as such, I started investigating whether or not 2019 could be my year to become Miss SA. It seems not. While at first, I was excited, “You must have no visible tattoos or criminal record”, my hopes were quickly dashed by the fact that you can be no older than 27 and must have never been married.  So I started looking at the requirements for the notoriously low budget, old people’s version of the competition “Mrs South Africa”. Again I am afraid I struck out. While I am between the ages of 24 and 49, and like to think I am “A role model for married women in our country” I am unfortunately not “Beautiful inside and out”, “Hard working and ambitious” or “A strong, successful woman”.

Probably the best part about being the best in the universe from South Africa for anything is that when you die you are guaranteed to get a mention in a newspaper. Some journalist who hasn’t even been born yet will smash out a quick 200 words on the fact that you won, had three marriages, eleven kids, and died walking into the sea. It must be a comfort to her to know that the sooner she dies the longer the story will be.

At 39 I am already too old to be Miss SA and other doors have shut on me permanently too. For starters, I have missed the 27 club by more than a decade. Johann Ackerman was 37 when he became the oldest person to ever play rugby for the Springboks, meaning my total lack of interest or sporting talent are no longer the only things excluding me from the green and gold. I will never be a child prodigy and unless Prince Phillip dies soon I will also never be likely to marry into the British Royal Family.

No, I am afraid the only way left to me to guarantee myself a spot in the newspaper when I die is to form a suicide cult. So if you aren’t doing anything else send your cult application to warren@warrenrobertson.co.za. Sadly, fellow old people, applications are restricted to those who are young, beautiful, and not from Paarl.

 

 

 

Koping With Stupiderity

One of my biggest problems I have realised is that I expect too much from humanity. My natural inclination is to assume that anyone I meet, and people I speak to, are rational, thinking, and reasonable people. When I put it to paper – website – like this I realise how foolish such a notion seems, but I can’t seem to help myself when I am out there in the world.  In my experience the great-majority of those people (the readers of this column exempted) haven’t got the sense to scratch their balls without first consulting a Youtube video.

This is of course alright. It’s absolutely okay to be the kind of person who eats corn flakes by stabbing at them with a fork. It’s something that could have happened to anyone at birth, but I shouldn’t expect the people I meet to be anything other than that. I could save myself endless hours of frustration if I just lowered my expectations of those around me. Harnessing this great power could see me breeze through traffic, smile benignly as the old woman in front of me in the Pick n Pay queue counts her coins for the fiftieth time, and sigh serenely as I hang up on call centre salespeople. At the core of this realisation is that I am seldom irritated with animals. Dogs are stupid. They spend most of their time walking in circles in an attempt to sniff each other’s behinds. The most one can expect from a dog is that it doesn’t poo on the carpet, however because my expectations of them are limited I rarely find myself frustrated. On the other hand I tend to expect so much more from the people than that they simply do “their business” outside, and this leads to disappointment.  For starters I used a public toilet the other day, and discovered that someone had in fact done their business outside the toilet. Cue existential despair.

Probably one of my favourite examples of epic stupidity occurred when in a moment of youthful exhuberance I accidentally found myself at a Boksburg nightclub I now believe was called Masquerades. I was confronted at the bar by a large bald headed man who told me that he “headbutted concrete pillars”. I smiled and asked, “Why?”, with a look on his face bordering on condescension he said, “For fun”. To which I replied, “You have had a lot of fun this way” taking my life in my hands. Naturally he laughed, said “Ja!” before smashing his head against a concrete pillar.

Lowering one’s expectations in these situations is admittedly easier said than done, but I have at least found another angle to understanding those among us who are so simple they believe white privilege isn’t real, but white genocide is.  A 2012 study led by Richard West at James Madison University reveals the stupidity that resides in each and every one us, by indicating our numerous thinking biases and errors.  Among a series of questions he uses to reveal these biases is this one:  A bat and ball cost a dollar and ten cents. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

Naturally most people respond that the bat is a dollar, and the ball ten cents. This is incorrect. The real answer is that the ball is 5c and the bat is $1.05. It’s what West called a thinking bias, a quick route our brain has been trained to take over time, that we use because it’s simply easier than doing the actual maths. These biases affect every facet of our lives, and are there to give us quick shortcuts to save time in our day-to-day lives. One of the most powerful of these is called the “self-serving bias” in which we tend to think we are better than others.  Most people for instance believe they are above average in intelligence – even whose who think that vaccinations cause autism.

West further found that we are amazingly good at spotting when others make these errors and are terrible at recognising them in ourselves.  The reason for this is that we judge others logically and based purely on their actions, while when judging our own behaviours we factor in emotion, motivations and intentions. In each instance, we readily forgive ourselves our mistakes, but look harshly upon those of other people. And it gets worse. The study further found that the more traditionally intelligent a person is (the more “cognitively sophisticated”) the more likely they are to make these errors. Essentially: we are all dumber than we think we are, and even if we aren’t, that just means we make more mistakes.

Of course while this does explain some of the daily stupidities we are all made to endure, and  allows us to climb down off our high-horses and view the perpetrators in a kinder light leading to peace and forgiveness, I still think the guy who did a poo on the floor of the Douglasdale shell garage right by the hand-dryer is an asshole.

Anything But Selfies

I hate social media, and the reason I hate it, is because hating things on social media seems to be the best thing about it. It’s a confusing paradox. Last night someone pissed me off cause they hated something I also hate. I hated them, because they hated the thing I hate, in a snarky and off-putting manner that wasn’t in keeping with the more dignified, and quirky way in which I hate things. At least I thought so. I hope me saying that doesn’t make you hate me.

Probably the thing that I hate the most about the internet is the “selfie”. Not anyone specific’s selfie, just the concept. When I went to Japan way back in 2001 I took a few “selfies”, because I travelled there alone and needed proof I had been. It was awkward and uncomfortable, and I felt like a bit of a loser for having no friends who could take these pictures for me. A man alone taking pictures of himself, was viewed with the same suspicion as a trenchcoat owner in a play park. That was how it should be. Why was he alone? Was he a murderer? A lunatic? A Backstreet Boys fan? Turns out he was likely none of those things, just a normal, narcissistic arsehole like the rest of us. The only thing that prevented us from taking nothing but selfies back then was apparently the stigma, and once that evaporated so did our dignity. Now every second Instagram account is just pictures of the owner’s face blocking the view.

We should have seen it coming. It’s not like we haven’t always been narcissistic. Ever since the days of nobility spending hundreds of peasant’s worth of salary on oil paintings, we have wanted nothing as much as to look at our own faces. Coke had its first sales increase in more than a decade when it introduced the idea of adding names to their cans and bottles. We as a species are so self-involved, so desperate to be recognised as special, we will actually spend extra money just so we can drink from a can that says we have a common enough name to make printing it economically viable. It’s our biggest, most easily exploitable failing. We are idiots, little more than apes. Want proof? What was the first thing a monkey with a camera ever took a photo of? Itself.

I am more than willing to bet that if that ape had access to a computer it would also be posting that it has an IQ of 172 according to the test it just took on Facebook. Taking an IQ test on Facebook should automatically qualify you to fail it. “Only the smartest will be able to spot the…” If that sentence doesn’t end with the words, “data mining capabilities of this test”, then once again, finding the solution means you don’t qualify for the descriptor.

Facebook’s entire business model is based around selling our predictability. They are only able to promise that an advertiser will get x number of likes per x amount of cash they spend, because they know exactly what we will click on and when. That’s how mundane, and predictable we each are. If you see something on the internet that claims you are special it’s probably just selling your data to sex-traffickers or worse, McDonalds, cause you aren’t. You, like me, are a number.

We aren’t special so we need to stop acting like we’re among the most intelligent and handsome, just cause an app told us we are smart, or that we look a lot like the celeb Selena Gomez. No matter how many filters you use you don’t look like Selena Gomez – you look like the selfie monkey. So stop photographing your face, and turn the camera outward. At least then you’ll likely get a better view, and I will have one fewer thing to hate.

How To Judge A Parent

There is a new saying, that one should never judge another parent. The idea is that anyone with a small child, no matter how attentive, is likely to experience melt downs and moments of almost monumental shame for no reason while raising their young one. I say this is bullshit. Judge away. If my child is lying on the floor of a store thrashing his legs and arms, you would be only be right to judge me. If I don’t hear hear you whisper about what a bad parent I am, then at the very least I know you and I have nothing in common, cause that’s what I would be doing.

Probably the worst side-effect of being a parent is that one is forced into contact with other people’s children. My toddler and I like to go down to the park – he to run and climb, and me to be told to run and climb by him, like I am on boot camp and the drill sergeant calls me “daddy”.  Having a job done in odd hours, I often get to take him on week days when the park is silent, but when it isn’t I find we are often confronted with the worst specimens of childlike humanity. And on those days judgement comes in handy.

The other day a boy, who I was assured was five, but who looked as if his beard was coming through,  backed my son into a corner on a jungle gym to tell him a story. The tale went as follows, “And then the people died, and do you know what happened next?” he said. My kid, being 20 months old, polite, and having never heard a story of this kind before dutifully answered, “no” thereby encouraging young Shakespeare to continue.

“Blood came pouring out of their heads and they turned into bats, and do you know what happened next?” he asked, the gripping cliffhanger dangling in the air.

“No,” my son said again, not yet having learnt from his previous error. “They were made into stone, before exploding, and guts went everywhere. Do you know what happened next?” the elocutionist enquired, while I stood starring at him like shit smeared on a new rug.

At this stage the child’s mother must have finally noticed what was going on as she bustled over and told her young thought-leader that he probably shouldn’t be terrifying the baby. He drooled on his chin, screamed something nonsensical and dived head first down the slide. My son turned to me, shrugged and demanded I run to the swings.

I judged that mother that day. Her inattentiveness lead to a really awkward situation. What was I supposed to do? Remind her son he was speaking to a baby? Shout at him? Wade in and toe punt the hobbit over a swing set? Socially we are not allowed to do those things anymore, and so I judge. Giving some sense of shame to the parent is our last defence in the face of a badly behaved child, and if this bothers you, if you are worried that one day it could be you on the end of my glowering silence remember, “you will never experience a public tantrum if you just keep them locked in a cupboard at home.”

A Bully’s Downfall

Cyberbullying is a great term for what happens when our inevitable robot emperors throw us to the world’s last starved lions in their murder dome circuses, but we have wasted it to describe people dehumanising others on the internet. Personally I have never really had much respect for cyberbullying having undergone a lot of real world bullying while I was at school, and generally believe that while I was being shoved in a rubbish bin a rude email would have seemed like a carnival, but I leave it to you lot and the comments section to prove me wrong.

Being one year younger than most of my peers at school, and about five years physically less developed, I suppose bullying was inevitable. *

The main protagonist was a boy by the name of Chris Taylor**. Chris was blessed with the facial features of a smashed clam, and the physical prowess of Stephen Hawking circa 2019, but he did manage to carve himself a rather niche school career as capering jester to the A Team rugby guys – he made them laugh at the expense of the smaller boys, and was rewarded by being able to kiss their girlfriend’s unattractive mates. From standard six to eight there wasn’t a class I was in where he wouldn’t call me “gay” – the all boy’s school equivalent of an Oscar Wilde retort – to peals of laughter from his friends.  I wasn’t left with much option, but to put my head down and endure it as he, and those who wanted his space as gibbering marmot to the rugby set, tore into me with an enthusiasm they usually only reserved for rubbing themselves off around a soggy Marie biscuit.

It all ended one physics class in Standard 8 (Grade 10 for younger readers) as Chris once again attempted to mock me over something or other. Fully aware that retorting would probably result in violence being done unto me, I snapped and slowly, piece-by-piece, feature-by-feature, began to dissect Chris’s failings much to the uproarious delight of his friends. It wasn’t hard. His face looked, as I mentioned before, like the bloated carcass of a beached whale that had recently been dynamited by a group of hillbilly villagers whose hatred of each other was only outdone by their, until recent, hatred of the whale. At first he stared at me with shock, and then anger, before, tears welling in his uncomprehending eyes, he stood up, came around to my table and punched me. I laughed out loud, and the captain of the A-Team stood up, took him by the shoulder, guided him to his seat, and told him “you aren’t coming back from that. Sit down”.

It should have been a moment of huge delight. Years of being bullied ended in one terrific torrent of shame and humiliation for my antagonist, but instead I was just sad. I felt bad for Chris as he sat having my best lines zinged back at him for the rest of the class. He looked utterly defeated, hunched in his chair, like the gargoyle rejected from the crenellations of Notredame cathedral for being too ugly. I had won, at last, and not by a small margin, wasn’t that reason enough to feel something more than dejected relief? Instead I just felt like I had been dragged down to his level. I was part of it, polluted by it. And it did not feel good.

It was a feeling I only became associated with again this week as South African cricket arch-nemesis Australia were brought low by their own hubris. No doubt the blows I dealt Chris would never have hit so hard, had he not been as arrogant with his taunts in the past, and likewise it is the same with Australian cricket. Sitting at the top of the pile, morally judging those below them, the team has been brought crashing to earth, not only by the media, but on the pitch where the Proteas utterly humiliated them, and once again I feel bad. I mean who cheats and still gets thrashed by 322 runs?  I wish this had never happened to them, and that the age old rivalry could continue unsullied by this nonsense. I already miss the Australian teams that we hated for their arrogance, but respected for their sheer sporting class. Steve Smith and his travelling team of angry cheats haven’t a patch on the touring teams of the past, who weathered the animosity and even added occasional moments of humour, and grace on the rare occasions they lost. Instead of feeling delight at a crushing victory, I just feel sad that what we as South Africans had in an arch nemesis has now gone, and we have been polluted by association with their downfall. Will we ever fear Australia again or will they, like Chris after that fateful day in Physics class, never hold the psychological upper hand again?

* In the telling of this, some facts have been stretched for comedic effect, and revenge.

**Absolutely his real name