Thinking out loud

I laughed reading a news article about the dilemma that men in Taiwan find themselves in. To sit or not to sit. While having a wee. I could not believe it. According to a Taiwanese minister, sitting on the toilet like women do, creates a cleaner environment. Seriously! Local governments are actually going to put up notices in public places suggesting that men to sit down. Turns out 30% of men in Japan sit down and there’s a serious political style campaign in Sweden to advocate for sitting down. Why sit down? No pee puddles = a cleaner and fresher smelling toilet! While I am all for toilets that smell of roses, this whole thing just made me realise that being in a developed country means that people have the luxury to worry and spend time and money on things that, in the greater scheme of things, don’t actually matter! In Taiwan, gents care to take a (toilet) seat? In the rest of the world approximately 2.6 billion people have nowhere to go to the toilet. That’s not ‘Oh crumbs! They d...

I love reading books. There is nothing I enjoy more than immersing myself in a narrative and finding myself emotionally invested and thinking of the characters’ lives long after I have put the book away. I enjoy the process of discovery and I take pleasure in how much I learn about myself during the process. I am obsessive about most things I do. And reading is no different. I will not read just anything. I have a long list of books that I must read and I read and re-read book reviews before I give a book a chance. It’s probably why I am petrified of writing a book of my own (who will want t read it?). But there have been books that I have just bumped into and I have loved. Jeffery Nyarota’s , Against the Grain was one such book and it was after reading it that I set myself the task of reading as many Zimbabwean books as possible, particularly books with some of some sort of political commentary. Since setting myself that task, other books have got in the way. Women in Love, The Help,...

One of the things I love the most about the internet is its ability to connect you to like minded people. Having the internet means I can reach out to people who are as weird as I am wherever they might be in the world! Granted it’s given the crazies a platform to join together in the most disheartening and shocking ways, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I am thinking more of the times where you have a question that no one else can answer. For instance I have a health concern and I wonder if I’m normal or dying from the world’s rarest condition. Or those times I’m playing the name game with the family and my brother in law insists that Bujumburistan is a country and the rest of us just can’t be sure! Or you hear a snippet of a song on an advert and you really want to buy it on iTunes and no one seems to know it. The internet gives me the assurance that someone out there in the world has had the same thoughts and I sigh knowing that I am not alone. It is the greatest human conditi...