Infrequent musings of a meandering mind

The sleepy town of Port Elizabeth, South Africa, is in mourning today. One of our former Miss PE winners passed on after battling injuries suffered during a head-on collision on Tuesday, 11 November 2014. Bianca wasn't just another beauty queen spewing clichés about world peace and ending poverty, she was a remarkable young woman. To use a cliché of my own, she had beauty and brains. But despite her obvious talents and intelligence, she was also humble, kind and motivated. Bianca and I both studied at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, I graduated in 2009 and she in 2010. As a student, I only knew some of the students in other years of the programme and didn't really develop a friendship with Bianca until later on. But she did make an impression on me when she was in her B. Pharm. final year. I was studying towards my M. Pharm. and was working part time for the pharmacy department, with my involvement being in their fourth year hospital programme. I acted as a coordi

I salute retail pharmacists and pharmacist assistants. Full time pharmers. The ones who know how to bite their tongues, keep their hands occupied and suppress the urge to roll their eyes all the while moulding their facial features to an acceptable expression for the ever changing situations they deal with on a daily basis. My colleagues and friends who, as they read the following dramatization, will respond with a knowing smile, which is likely to be followed by a grimace when the realisation hits them that they’ll be due for a visit from their own “Mrs Williams” and “Mr Morris” in the next few days … A snap shot into the life of a retail pharmacist You call a medical aid for chronic medication authorisation only to be put on hold for twenty minutes. Upon finally hearing the voice of a living, breathing person after the seemingly endless replay of pre-recorded messages ( Please stay on the line, your call is important to us ) or tacky phone music, you feel indescribable relief…

I am a control freak, I am a perfectionist and I have very strong opinions and feelings. This can make me a very difficult person to co-exist with as I’m very often quick to make judgements and can be extremely stubborn when my opinions are challenged. However, to contrast those aspects of myself, I am also very empathic, caring and often have internal struggles between the logical processes at work in my left brain and the strongly emotional responses in my right brain. As a result, although my logic would dictate that I should view something in a certain way, my empathy forces me to try to assume a different perspective so as to better reconcile the situation and create closure for all involved parties. A lack of closure disturbs me. Deeply. I recently learned that a lot of my eccentricities are due to my having the rarest personality type on the Myers Briggs Personality test (MBPI), that being the INFJ (introverted, intuitive, feeling, judging) personality. But this posting isn’t ab

Most people would like to be able to brag about their job title. Given that many of us spend more of our waking hours slogging away at some or other form of work (in order to create revenue) than with our loved ones, it’s generally quite important to like that work. When you can’t say that you like your work, it’s at least pleasing to be able to throw a fancy sounding job title around when people enquire as to what you do, you know – to make you feel slightly less like a gear that helps to turn the wheel and more like the actual wheel. So a pizza delivery driver could say that he’s a “transportation specialist for edible resources of Italian origin”. I think that the latter sounds a bit more impressive. These extravagantly concocted titles make just about any normal job description sound, well, normal . Being a member of recognised profession is no longer sufficient for one to sound professional. In my case, I’m qualified as a pharmacist and when people ask me about my job, I say that

Once a beacon of truth and marveled for its accurate representation of reality, it would seem that the camera has become yet another tool through which our perception of what is real is distorted. Although, to the camera’s credit, it is not a direct tool, it simply forms part of a process which mimics reality so closely that discernment between truth and fiction becomes challenging. “Photography” literally means “to write with light”. Let the inherent imagery (and poetry) of that definition develop in your mind for a moment. Then consider that photography is an art form, it reproduces reality to allow us to marvel in the simple perfection that is the world, the simple perfection that is life. Art, however, exists to create beauty. Beauty is subject to interpretation. Thus, when one uses a camera to create art through a photograph, is the camera not being used to capture someone’s interpretation of beauty? The essence of this statement is captured perfectly by Susan Sontag in “The

This is a rather old piece from 2011. Since I decided to start a blog (again), I figured that I'd post some of my older Facebook notes here to start. I read a column by Hagen Engler in which he described "micro-racism" among Caucasians; specifically making mention of the "anti-ginger" movement. In it, he wrote about the unfair treatment of people with red hair, citing the demeaning insults and ostracisation which they are now subject to. He went on to say that he wouldn't want to get on the wrong side of red heads, given their notoriously fiery tempers. Now, I won't deny that I've made the ginger jokes. Done in jest and in no way meant to be hurtful, let alone taken seriously. People that know me well enough are aware that I generally don't try to inflict emotional pain on anyone and that most of the seemingly random things I say are usually said "tongue in cheek". I wouldn't walk up to some random red-haired person on the street an

If you're abreast (pardon the pun) with feminist agenda, I'm sure you would've have encountered the rather controversial subject of "rape culture". Under the guise of liberalism, feminists would have you believe that all acts of violence perpetrated by a man against a woman are as a result of a persisting patriarchal need to exert dominance over women. Rape culture is present in the simple appreciation of the feminine physique right through to actual forced sexual misconduct. I’m not about to pretend that there isn’t a degree of truth to the presence of this mind set which many would project onto all men, but I feel that the assumption that all men fundamentally are a part of rape culture is very short sighted and, quite frankly, illogical. This piece is written in response to an article I read wherein the author, a man, essentially stated that every man in the world is a part of rape culture and how good, well intentioned men should behave so as not make the wom

I am pro equality. The views that I have regarding feminism are based on the writings that are being published by self proclaimed feminists. I am aware that this description is not accurate for all branches of feminism, this description is targeted at the extremist branch: the Feminazis. The modern feminist is a bold, proud and fearless creature, but she will reveal the occasional personal hardship to remind you that she has a vagina and that that makes her a victim in a world run by misogynists. She does things "like a girl", meaning she puts all of her effort into achieving her goals. However, if for some reason she doesn't achieve said goals, it was probably a man's fault. She doesn't hate men, in fact, she could quite easily want to get married and have children. She will expect her husband to be tolerant of her extreme opinions, to support her in her desire to find anything a man says that could be considered as being critical of a woman or expressing appreci