My advice: stick to your shade of lipstick, pink is most definitely your colour.

Yes, I see it okay. I see the irony in my writing this post but I could not let this one go.

Few things in this world make me angry and one of them is complete ignorance. I’m sure a few of you may have seen The Christowitz Report circulating on Facebook and most likely ruining your Friday afternoon. Now I will admit when the first post came out I was slightly amused if not taken aback by the use of every swear word in the book.

Then came week two, I felt like I was watching an accident happen in slow motion and I still haven’t been able to look away. Then came the ‘I hate nature post’, I read it bemused and later discussed it with a friend of mine, both of us while reading it had felt inclined to write a blog post in reply to the rant but had denied ourselves the satisfaction. Having read this week’s report I simply could not resist.

The report claims that the point is to make people laugh “That’s the f&*king point. To the few of you who still don’t get the point of all this… maybe private school was a waste of your parents’ money.” The thing is that it’s not, perhaps it started out as funny, even I can admit that and sure parts of it are still rather humorous but where the report fails is where it dips its toes into the realm of actual opinion.

The reports uninformed rant about ‘down-the-middle-ness’ in my opinion is probably the most ridiculous thing I have ever had the misfortune of reading. A rant that stands against girls wearing pink lipstick, bad action movies and nature is standing for something? Perhaps you have a future in South African politics.

“Love some shit! Hate some shit! Make a decision and stick by it. Form an opinion and fight to defend it. Believe in something! Yank the double-sided dildo of mediocrity and indifference out of your ass and do something. Anything. It doesn’t matter if you’re right or wrong or if you fail or succeed, just do it.” Encouraging people to stand for something, anything is just plain idiotic. There was once a man who hated Jews and loved killing them, he stuck by that decision and we are all aware he fought to defend it, he sure as hell believed in it. I presume it doesn’t really matter if he was right or wrong?

Sure we are encouraged to have opinions, but these opinions simply must be informed or they are harmful or just plain annoying. Pray tell, what is the use of an opinion on ‘Mall Dawdlers’? Is that not closer to mediocrity than anything else we may encounter in this world and I’m assured that an irrelevant opinion is just as useless and indifferent as no opinion at all.

Anyone with half an education surely must be fuming at this insult to their intelligence, sure we can ignore opinions and blogs such as the aforementioned, sure entering into a discussion about it is ironic but surely that is the point?

They say that you are only writing something worthwhile if people are complaining about it. In this case they are complaining because it’s ignorant, sensationalist rubbish and that, is not worth a dime.

My advice: stick to your shade of lipstick, pink is most definitely your colour.

 

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Ways your life will change once you get a full-time job

 1. You’ll actually have $$$$.

Just kidding! No one has money. Ever! Having a job might just change you from being “poor” to “perpetually broke.” Who makes money at a job anyway? Unless you majored in “How To Be A Corporate Whore” at an Ivy League, expect to live paycheck to paycheck in your twenties.

2. You’ll feel less anxiety when people ask “So what do you do?” at parties.

I don’t care if your full-time job is licking envelopes at a nuclear waste plant, it’s an accomplishment if you’ve managed to secure a salaried position ANYWHERE. There’s no greater shame than when someone asks you what your job is and you have to respond, “Well, my main job right now is finding a job. It takes up a lot of time, if you can believe it!” Embarrassment needs to go out the window in this economy. Feel pride that you’re getting paid to do something at all!

3. It won’t be uncommon to not see your best friend for two weeks.

My best friend and I both work very demanding jobs and sometimes I feel like our friendship has been reduced to the old cliche of “Catch up at happy hour to talk about how busy we are!” Sometimes it makes me sad. I want to see him more but there honestly doesn’t seem to be any time. It’s crazy. In college, we would see each other almost every day but now that we’re working, time seems to literally get deleted from our lives. Two weeks feels like two days and all of a sudden, you realize you haven’t seen anyone besides your roommate and co-workers. It sucks you into this vortex and spits you out at the occasional catch-up lunch to reassemble the pieces of your social life.

4. You’ll kind of grow up.

Once you get a full-time job, you’ve officially become an adult. Barring getting fired and having random stretches of unemployment, this will be your life until you retire or die. It’s crazy to think about. I’m not a spoiled brat when it comes to working — I love to work — but it is nuts trying to understand that this is forever. You’ll be working full-time forever because you need to support yourself to live. Your whole life up until this point has included a new transition every few years. Things were changing all the time but now you’re here. Doing the same thing for an indefinite period of time. Whenever this thought starts to overwhelm me though, I just think back to the year I spent unemployed and breathe a giant sigh of relief. I made it!

 

When Did We All Get So Old?

I was at a party recently where I spoke to a guy about his job. Having recently graduated college and settled into a rather prestigious career field, he mentioned that, though the money was good, the actual job itself was kind of draining. He wasn’t sure if it was for him, and had long since stopped enjoying it, but doubted he could do much better. It’s the kind of field where you work extremely long hours, especially when you’re new, and don’t get a whole lot in the way of recognition. As the party was beginning to heat up and we all decided to take some shots, he declined and said that he needed to go home — on a weekend, at just before midnight. When we teased him, he reminded us with a bit of a sigh, that “his crazy party days were behind him.” This is a guy who was once preceded by the reputation of being the life of every party, who now eschewed going out for the most part because he’s “too old for it.”

He’s 24.

And this is far from being a unique case. Even a brief trip around Facebook to take a look at people you rarely talk to anymore can confirm that, in their early-to-mid twenties, people are already settling into careers they rather dislike, staying with the same person they’ve been with for years even though they’ve occasionally voiced their desire to see elsewhere, giving up on dreams of travel or adventure, and deciding that they are now “too old” to enjoy the occasional real party. There are even those who have transformed from party girl to sanctimonious mommy whose life is now “so meaningful,” all at the ripe old age of 24. Beyond giving up on the crucial time for experimentation, there are those who openly look down upon the people whose careers have yet to really be selected, who are traveling the world, who are remaining steadfastly single — essentially, anyone who is taking their twenties to make the mistakes they may not be able to make in the future.

 

Of course, we all know people who have been rather “serious” their entire lives, who have always gone home early from parties, turned down offers of travel and experimentation, and have chosen the straight-and-narrow. But what’s crucially different about them is that that is just who they are. They enjoy the safe, the familiar, the reliable — and frankly, we need people like that. There’s nothing wrong with those who have always been, in some way or another, an “old soul.” But the people to whom I am referring here are those who feel, whether through societal pressure or their own sense of competition, the need to grow up far too quickly. They have put some kind of social premium on keeping jobs they hate simply to say they are on a good career path, on cutting adventure nearly completely out of their lives, on settling down into a relationship that may not be right for them simply to avoid being alone at too “sad” an age.

 

As you begin to enter the world of social media and peer interaction where a huge amount of everything people your age have to say has to do with how much they love their significant other, how stressful their job is, how drinking is now too much for them, or the various dimensions of their children’s excrement, it can feel incredibly stifling. You have this sudden urge to yell at the top of your lungs, “Is this all we have left to talk about?!” And it is certain that behind these people who’ve chosen such “stable” life paths in their early-to-mid twenties, there are often parents and competitive peers who nod in approval and muse on how much more “adult” they are, but at what price? Do we not owe it to ourselves to make the decisions — and mistakes — that we want to, while we have the youth and the means with which to do it? Should we force ourselves into a job we dislike or a relationship that doesn’t fit us to fill out some model of adulthood we’re not even sure we want?

I have been to brunches and happy hours amongst acquaintances who, at the tender ages of 23-25, will spend the entire time talking about their problems at work and their desire find a bigger apartment. It’s almost like watching a bunch of children put on their parents’ clothes and shoes and shuffle around the house like grown-ups, a kind of caricature of boring adulthood. It’s hard not to see your life flashing before your eyes at moments like this, a chilling feeling that if, in the dawn of your adult life, you’ve already limited your conversation topics to the rigors of responsibility and commitment, things can’t get too much better from here. Not when the people who choose an alternative lifestyle or follow their dreams, even while clearly young enough to do so, are spurned and mocked by these peers as being “irresponsible,” or “immature.” Not when conversations of sex, politics, art, culture, or even the weather have been replaced by a comparing of notes about the varying degrees of adulthood one has attained.

We live in a world now where we can see our generation’s successes and failures in real time. We know what every friend and acquaintance is doing, we know where they live, we know how things are working out for them. And though we no longer have the intense societal pressure to marry and spawn, as well as have a good job and own a house all by your late twenties, we have an enormous amount of pressure we put on ourselves. In many ways, this constant comparison to those around us has replaced the traditional rules of becoming an adult, and now these restraints and objectives are ones we largely put on ourselves. “If my friends are all getting boring 9-5 jobs and settling down right now,” we think, “I’d better be doing it, too.” But few things are more disheartening than watching someone so young actively put aside the things they long to see and do in this world for a perfect, adult kind of happiness that they’re not even sure exists. Don’t we owe it to ourselves to live life, and above all, be young, on our own terms? Who is telling us what to do anymore, and more importantly, why are we listening?

South Africa is the ‘old’ France.

More than reading the Daily Sun and Boerewors, South Africans love to complain, protest and strike.

Listen to Talk Radio 702 for a few minutes in the morning and you will here at least ten people phone in and complain about traffic lights, traffic, their elderly neighbour who has an affinity for small yapping dogs and of course an all time favourite my dear friend Julias.

Listen to 5fm and you are sure to hear some witless young woman call in and complain that the line was too long to get into Tiger Tiger or something irrelevant that annoys the rest of the country.

Listen to Highveld…well just don’t do that.

Not to downplay the problems this country has, because boy do we have so mother flipping problems; but stop all the complaining and do something. Now for the poor girl who had to stand in the line for too long and only caught the tail end of the Britney Spears power half hour, there isn’t much I can do to help you, besides perhaps advising you to take a cyanide capsule or getting better at giving large Nigerian bouncers blowjobs.

A few years ago a little thing called the French Revolution took place.  For those of you who have been living in a cave …or Rivonia where history is laughing about ‘that one time at Manhattans when you totally kissed that like totally cute guy then totally did lines in the toilet’ the French Revolution ‘totally’ ROCKED!

So there were some people who were really rich…they looked kinda like this:

No one should have hair that 'big'

That were real douche bags and kept spending the rest of the countries money.Everyone else kinda looked like this:

Sucks to be you

The 99.9% of the population got fed up with the 0.1% of pale faced idiots who were having wild parties while they starved so they decided to do this:

Never mess with a lady wearing a red hat carrying a sword

They literally ripped a building apart! Talk about power of the masses. Imagine what South Africa…which is a smidgeon bigger than pre Revolutionary France could do. Something that is evident in the partnering of COSATU and the DA against the tolling system our somewhat dim-witted government wants to enforce. If an entire country won’t pay there is nothing that can be done to enforce it.

So we have some people that look like this:

Let them eat cake...I sure do

And they are real douchebags and keep spending our money on things like this:

Okay not really, but you catch my drift?

While the majority of the country looks like this:

Please sir may I have some more...electricity, running water and other services?

I say if you complain you should be willing to storm the Bastille …or at least attempt to.Liberté, égalité, fraternité!