Bob Dylan or Dylan Thomas?

As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death

I take a look at my life and realize there's nothin' left

Something, hum, hum, something…

Been spending most their lives, living in the gangsta's paradise

Something, something, something, hum…

Tell me why are we so blind to see

That the ones we hurt are you and me

That’s me trying to sing along to Gangsta’s Paradise the other day while I was watching Dangerous Minds. I couldn’t really remember much of the song – or the movie for that matter. I vaguely remembered it as the story of a tiny little white teacher having to teach a class of streetwise kids from the ‘hood.

What I didn’t remember, was the coolest part of the whole movie – the way she gets the children to be interested in poetry, by using music. I loved the idea of the Dylan/Dylan contest!

So this got me thinking – there are so many songs out there that, if you strip them of the instrumentals they would still totally stand up as poetry.

Let me just clarify – I’m not saying all lyrics can be likened to poetry. Despite how well I like big butts rolls off of the tongue, it’s hardly poetry (even though it actually rhymes!) But there are some really great songs out there that could be considered as serious poetry. In fact, I think there are many songs out there far more beautiful than any poems I’ve ever read.

Here’s one of the favourite bits I came across the other day:

I saw a beggar leaning on his wooden crutch,

He said to me, "You must not ask for so much."

And a pretty woman leaning in her darkened door,

She cried to me, "Hey, why not ask for more?"

~ Leonard Cohen, Bird on a Wire

But my latest thing hasn’t been so much looking at song lyrics as poetry, but rather plucking one line from songs – one line packed full of meaning that you can take so much from. I’ve found a few good ones, and I’ve decided that I’ll line a wall in my house one day with framed lines from songs.

Like my all time favourites from the Beatles:

All you need is love

Let it be

Take a sad song and make it better

I am the Walrus, goo goo g’joob (Just Kidding)

So far I’ve got:

We’re just two lost souls swimming in a fishbowl

Don’t worry be happy

Don’t stop believing

Everybody hurts sometimes

It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine

Nothing Else Matters

Excuse me while I kiss the sky

Hey Joe, what you doing with that gun in your hand

There must be some way out of here

Hello darkness, my old friend

There’s a lot to be said for nowhere

I even found a great one by 2 Pac – Even the genius asks questions.

It will probably look a little something like this

Or this... take a moment to figure it out.

And so I’m just going to keep collecting cool lines from songs to add to my wall one day. Let me know if you think of any.

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Don't give so many damns

The less you give a damn, the happier you’ll be.

I came across this saying while randomly trawling the Internet the other day for funny pictures of cats and other entertaining things, and it really struck a chord with me.

But surprisingly, not all that many people agreed with me. So I had to take a second to think about it, and I realised that there could be a lot of different interpretations to this one seemingly simple and innocent phrase. 

“Oh, so if you just go through life not caring about anyone else and doing whatever you want you’ll be happier? Sure, maybe if you’re an insensitive asshole with no conscience.”

Woah there! Just because I liked the saying doesn’t automatically mean I want to hand in my nice card and become a complete douchebag. 

 “Well if you don’t give a damn about anything, that means you have no ambition to become anything better."

And it also doesn’t mean that I want to quit my job and move into my mother’s basement for the rest of my worthless life, simply spending my days walking around being an asshole to people all the time. 

“So does that mean you want to grow old and die alone? Because if you don’t give a damn about anything – how can you ever love someone and be in a successful relationship?”

I definitely don’t want to live in my mother’s basement all alone, except for my 39 cats – who I’m a total asshole to all the time.

So, now that that’s all cleared up. I don’t think that you shouldn’t give a damn about anything. You shouldn’t suddenly stop caring about other people and how your actions affect them. You shouldn’t completely give up on anything you care about.

It just means that you shouldn’t give so many damns all the time.

There is a balance – there are things you should care about, and some things that just aren’t worth caring about so much. So to me, the phrase 'The less you give a damn, the happier you'll be' doesn't necessitate the extreme that not caring about anything at all is the ultimate level of happiness. To me it simply means that if you cut back on your cares a bit, you might be a lot happier. Make sense? It’s kind of like ‘don’t sweat the small stuff’.

Sometimes we just need to have the guts (or maybe the anger) to not care too much – so that we can have the freedom to live life on our own terms.

We just need to know when not to give a damn.

And for me, that’s when something is negatively affecting my life. I’ve decided to not allow negative things in my life to get me down. So instead of obsessing about all the little things in my life that I’m not happy about – I simply let them go. Anything negative is put out of my mind. And it’s true – I do think I’ve been a lot happier because of it. 

Sometimes it’s okay to not give a damn.

Hakuna Matata!

It's a problem free philosophy!

  

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Good old New Year's Resolutions

 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

So another year ended - and everyone grabbed it as their chance to make a(nother) fresh start and to be a better person (again). We’ve all seen the gym packed to capacity for the first few months (whether we’re the exasperated regulars getting annoyed that our usual routine is getting interrupted, or the noobs trying to become regulars and giving up after a month).

It’s all about New Year’s resolutions right. Because it's the beginning of a new year we feel motivated and inspired, but secretly we all know from the start that they don’t usually make it past March, maybe June if you’re lucky. 

I read a cute anonymous quote about them the other day that I thought was pretty much 100% spot on: “New Year’s resolutions are a bit like babies – they’re fun to make, but extremely difficult to maintain.”

And yet, everyone runs around making commitments to themselves along the lines of:

·               Eating healthier, exercising and losing weight

·               Drink less alcohol, quit smoking or get rid of any other bad habits

·               Save money, get out of debt or invest

·               Get a better job, improve education or read more books

·               Pray more, be closer to God or be more spiritual

Sound familiar?

Thought so.

What got me thinking about this so much is the amount of people who have been asking me what my resolutions are. 

I’ve never really bothered to make any before – but I thought that that was a pretty boring answer, and decided I should try and get myself some.

Since I had never done it before though, I didn’t really know where to start so I went on a search to find some inspiration. I quite liked this one: 

Then I found this little website – a really cool New Year’s Resolution Generator.

And this is what it gave me –

This year I will (apparently):

Make a short film (Oh sure, I’ll just whip one up on my cellphone quickly.)

Participate (Uhm… in what exactly? I’m fairly adventurous, but we all have our limits…)

Throw a party (Who needs a resolution to do this one?)

Be serious (Okay… *sniggers* wait, wait. Give me a second *sniggers* to pull a straight face)

Say hi to a stranger (I’ve already done that to all the ‘strangers’ that showed up on my usual jogging route)

Improve (What’s with all these weird, vague resolutions? Oh wait, I get it. The more vague it is, the easier it is to stick to!)

Get married (Woah there Mr Generator man. I’m not ready for any kind of shotgun wedding!)

Take a nap (This one should be *yawns*easy enou... Zzzzzzz)

Learn to say hello in 5 languages (Ooh! I like this one. *Googles* 1. Turkish – merhaba 2. Swedish – Hallå (Holla? Swedish people are gangster) 3. Swahili – hujambo 4. Polish – cześć 5. Irish – dia duit)

Be me. (Ooooh. I can do this one!)

That last one is where I decided to stop – and that was the one that I chose as my official New Year’s resolution – because it’s nice and vague, so it’ll be easier to convince myself that I stuck to it – I just tweaked it a little. Instead, I made it – be more of the person that I want to be. (That’s even more vague) Yay!

 

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If life was like Facebook

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I’ve come to the conclusion that Facebook enjoys testing people’s comfort zones. Every time you get used to some new change they’ve introduced, they go and spring another one on you. And you can expect everyone to be complaining about it and threatening to leave Facebook. 

Of course they never actually do. You see, another thing I’ve realised is that resistance is futile - and that we get over the new changes so quickly, that it’s really not that big a deal.

So, when the latest drastic layout change started, I still tried to avoid it for as long as I possibly could. No matter how pretty my friends’ profiles looked with their pretty little cover photos, I was determined to ‘protest’ and stick with the old layout. 

 That is until the change was forced upon me. Which meant that either I had to accept it and move on, or leave Facebook.

 

So, of course – I got over it. Quickly. Timeline turned out to be kind of awesome. I ended up spending at least half an hour going back on my timeline and enjoying a trip down memory lane – all the way back to 2007 when I first joined Facebook and still updated my status in the third person like a noob!

Looking over the last few years of my life on Facebook and seeing how much I’ve grown up and changed – through my fat days and my fit days, my longer hair and my shorter, all my old favourite outfits that I miss – and I started wondering what it would be like to have a place where I could see a real timeline of my entire life. Imagine if you could go back and look at all the significant moments in your life, all the most important things you’ve said and done. There might be a few that make you cringe, a few that make you cry, but I think it would be pretty awesome.

I remember reading a quote once about how Facebook is like a jail – you sit around and waste time, write on walls and get poked by people you don’t know. Not the most tasteful quote ever, but take a second to think about it.

Of course, everyone would be in perfect relationships and their lives would be absolutely amazing.

And everyone would look drop-dead-gorgeous all the time. 

 

Although, once people get annoyed or upset about things – instead of writing about it in a diary or discussing it with close friends – they would just walk around screaming all their frustrations at everyone around them! Some people would constantly be letting you know what they're doing or thinking.

And on the same note, new parents would walk up to you in the street all the time and shove their babies in your face. We’d also have a lot more manic street preachers standing up on their soapboxes telling the world about all their crazy opinions and grievances.

Yes, all these little things that annoy most people on Facebook would be a whole lot more annoying in real life. But there are also a few cool things. You can just simply ‘unfriend’ someone at the click of a button and remove that person from your life. You can ‘hide’ some people on your newsfeed – kind of liking muting the voice of anyone that you’re tired of hearing from.

But if I could choose just one aspect of Facebook to have in real life – I would want my very own Timeline – a permanent record of my entire life that I could access at any time.

So, now that I’ve admitted my feelings for Timeline to the interwebs, how long do you think it will be before Facebook decides to make another radical format change?

                                                                JO WATSON PRODUCTIONS

Life is a soap opera – full of bubbles!

Every once in a while, when a little bit of drama manages to creep into my life without me noticing – it feels like my entire life has been dumped into the middle of a soap opera. 

It’s like I just wake up one morning – and I’ve been cast as the new neighbour in Days of our Lives. Or better yet, I’ve been cast as the poor little stranger, innocently wandering through town – and then I get adopted by the Brady family and thrown right into the middle of the latest Salem drama.I just hope I don't turn out like Sammy Brady!

Like sands through the hourglass...

So I walk out of my front door and feel like I need to be constantly looking over my shoulder – just waiting for the moment that my evil twin is going to jump out of nowhere and announce her existence – along with the fact that she’s the one who’s been wreaking so much havoc in my life.

It’s not long before I start wishing I could rather have been cast as the character that wakes up in the hospital with an unexplained case of amnesia. That way I wouldn’t have to remember or deal with any kind of drama.

Okay fine, so I’m totally exaggerating. But you understand what I’m getting at, right?  Sometimes there’s just so much drama in your life that you begin to feel like it’s not really your life anymore. Here’s what I do when that happens.

I watch an episode of Days, and when I realise that my life is actually pretty boring and ordinary – I feel a lot better. My life doesn’t have any crazy plots involving blackmail, amnesia, comas, impostors or people coming back from the dead – again and again – or any crazy, desperate baby-swapping women. Yet.

So, I might have a few soapsuds here and there – all lives do – but I won’t let my life be turned into a meaningless soap opera where the drama continues for months on end and takes up all my energy. I decide to avoid drama – it makes for a much happier and more peaceful life. Try it out. 

This is what a REAL soap opera looks like...

The one thing I regret about not turning my life into a real daytime soap? The fact that none of those people ever age – ever!

 

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Common Decency – are you still out there?

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Although I don’t like the idea of anything being common (especially as we say in Afrikaans – Kommen, met ‘n ‘k’) there are three things that should be – common sense, common honesty and common decency.

Of all three, common decency is the one that I feel every human being should just inherently have – except of course sociopaths, they may be excused from this tirade. I would never expect everyone to have common sense – some people really can’t help that one. And I understand that honesty isn’t always that simple. Common decency is the one that just really gets to me. 

I drive a lot of people in my life crazy every time I lament the loss of common decency, but I can’t help myself. When I see a shopping trolley abandoned in a parking spot – keeping someone from being able to park there – I can’t help but ask, “Would it really have been SO difficult just to return the trolley to the bay?” That was made even worse when we once got back to our car to see a trolley abandoned between two parking spots – and leaning against our car! And it LEFT A SCRATCH! Really?

‘Common decency’ seems to have become a kind of oxymoron, since it isn’t all that common anymore.

But wait!

Before I scare you off – don’t stop reading yet. Now that I’ve gotten my little rant out of the way, I’m not going to moan and groan and act all high and mighty about how there are no decent people left in the world. What would that accomplish? Instead I just want to take an objective perspective of what common decency actually is.

To me – it means doing what’s expected of any normal human being.

But that’s probably too broad a definition, since some people might still qualify as ‘normal’ human beings but don’t always act that way. So we should probably add in an element of consideration for other people – that’s probably the main thing.

Common decency isn’t simply about social conventions like covering your mouth when you sneeze – it’s about giving the people around you some thought. It’s about being considerate of other people, their possible situations, feelings and what they’re doing. It’s like the very worn-out saying that you should treat others the way you want to be treated (unless of course you’re a sado-masochist or something less-ordinary like that). Basically, common decency means having empathy.

I think the nicest way to explain it is this – it all comes down to looking at the world through different lenses and trying to see and understand perspectives other than our own. All it takes it putting yourself in someone else’s position and trying to understand them – and to care about how anything you do might affect them. That’s it.

There are very few things that can brighten up my day more than having other people treat me with common decency. Doesn’t it make your day a little bit brighter when a car gives you a gap on the highway? Or someone sees you coming down the aisle with your shopping trolley and they move out of the way for you?

George Orwell, who’s often referred to as the saint of common decency, figures common decency as a humanising force – I like that idea. So if we treated each other with more decency – would the world be a more decent place?

I guess we’ll never know – and for that, I shall lament.

Bottom line - just try a little bit harder not to be a selfish douche. I'll try too. 

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Housewives' guilty pleasures

Romance novels.

You know, those books you once saw hidden in your mom’s cupboard. With the cover featuring a muscular, longhaired Fabio-type with a redheaded Southern belle draped across his torso (or something like that) – And with titles like Forbidden Love or Secret Desires. 

Look at that six-pack!!

I think his hair is prettier than hers...

I recently decided to try and write one. It’s a sort of fun little project I’ve embarked on (And I hear they don’t pay too badly if your book gets published!) And luckily for me I have quite a strong background to rely on while I’m writing. I’ve read a great multitude of romance novels – in many different varieties. From strictly PG13 to steamy scenes, to historical Afrikaans romance novels: I’ve seen them all. And they all have the same formula. Although I have never ever pictured my hero looking anything like Fabio!

No Thanks!

Should I be ashamed of having read so many? I don’t know? There are many people who would say yes. Romance novels have been around for more than 100 years, and in that time a lot more than 100’s of people have denied reading them – including well-educated people and among them, even men! So I’d like to investigate the whole genre a bit deeper.

What does it take to be a romance novel? To be classified as a romance novel, a book’s plot has to revolve entirely around the development of a relationship between two people – and filled with the budding romantic love that they experience in the process, however explicit the writer chooses to make it. Oh – and they absolutely cannot, under any circumstances, have a sad ending. The end has to be optimistic and emotionally satisfying. Basically – they are set in a world of love, lust and romance to tell the reader that couples who fight for their love will be awarded with unconditional love and a happy ending.

But why the stigma?

Well, critics have claimed that romance novels are boring because they’re so predictable – everyone knows that the hero and the damsel will eventually resolve their issues and live happily ever after. And many people think that the quality of the writing is lower than in other genres. That’s why apparently only lonely housewives who have nothing better to do will sit around at home and read romance novels.

So why do people read them?

The answer is simple – escape and fantasy. Sometimes it’s nice to get away from the real world – where falling in love isn’t necessarily on the cards and happy endings aren’t guaranteed. So reading a book where two lovers fight the odds and survive all the struggles because they have love on their side is a great escape. Especially when you’re stressed out – escaping into a world of love and romance is a great comfort. Not to mention that the steamy scenes are fun to read!

Maybe romance novels are mindless and trashy. But sometimes it’s fun to just sit back and read a book that doesn’t take a lot of energy – laugh at how silly the characters are being and enjoying the happy ending.

It’s not about the hot and steamy sex (Well... maybe a little) – it’s about vicariously enjoying the thrill of falling in love. And you get to fall in love over and over again with every new book. 

Who doesn't love falling in love? And all that awkward sexual tension between the two lead characters that just makes you want to bash their heads together!