Masonge Blog
Parentals In The Mother City: Part I
I wasn’t surprised they were late, taking me back to my boarding school days at the end of the term, when I would be so eager to get out of the hostel and home to some DSTV I would be ready with my bags in the parking lot straight after school, only to sit there for hours watching the other kids spirited away by their progenitors, only for my parentals to rock up with a car full of Fruit & Veg groceries. At least I know where I get my resplendent punctuality from (where’s that sarcasm font when you need it?!).
My dad had organised tickets to the President’s suite for the 1-Day Cup Final between Cobras and Warriors on Friday, a game that was scheduled to start at 3pm. I eventually hooked up with them at 4pm at Newlands, after a long and uncomfortable wait at the Vineyard Hotel reception. I had forgotten my dad’s “celebrity” status amongst the cricketing fraternity, and it took us 20 minutes to get to our seats.
The Warriors innings seemed to fly by fairly quickly, most probably because we missed the first 25 overs of it. The Barcadi and coke also helped, which of course, like my ciggy breaks, had to be masked by breath mints. Good job those were provided at the bar.
Motherhood was in great spirits, at her sarcastic best. At one stage, she had the whole suite in stitches when a Makhaya Ntini obviously dipping into the KFC during breaks while filming the ad for the fast food chain came out to bat, looking rather burly and a couple of sizes too big for his Warriors outfit. My mother spared no punches, although she said whenever he came out to bat, he was guaranteed his one boundary before perishing. And so it proved true when he swatted an attempted bouncer straight over the bowlers head. The box was jubilant, and the round of applause went to my mother instead of Ntini!
The Cobras innings was something of a bore, and my dad took the opportunity to regale us with tales of his Fort Hare days and Xhosa poetry. Luckily I have long learnt the art of pretending to listen while my mind is elsewhere, and bless motherhood’s occasional interruptions.
After the game, I badly needed to enjoy a proper drink and fag without looking over my shoulder, so I stopped over at Stones after parting ways with the parentals at the Vineyard. I made my way to Enerchi Emporium after my drink, to Whitney’s birthday/wedding party I was supposed to be at had it not been for the cricket. By the time I got there, I was tired and Jace was desperately trying to revive the party, which was pretty much akin to flogging a dead horse.
Inexplicably, I had to accompany my dad to the airport, in a separate car, on Saturday morning. Had I been feeling better, no doubt I would have been all for it, but the red wine at Enerchi was causing all sorts of havoc in my head. I managed to maintain a sunny disposition nonetheless, especially considering the impromptu request by motherhood to visit Access Park after we had dropped off fatherhood. She clearly does not know what the place is like on a Saturday, or my loathing of shopping malls or any place with close grouping of stores. I spent the rest of the afternoon in and out of consciousness, save for the two hours we spent at Spur, which I spent watching (read blankly staring at) the 7s game between Canada and USA while motherhood and her sisters caught up.
Yesterday could not have been a more chilled day. I spent the morning at the airport with my mother at Mugg & Bean, where she was awfully chatty. I spent the rest of the afternoon in holiday mode as Conrid, his sister and brother-in-law and I braai’d. It was the relaxed end I needed to the weekend, and we ended it watching The Tourist.
There’s plenty happening this week. Our End-of-Year lunch on Wednesday, which won’t be much to write home about apart from half a day out of the office, and a long weekend. We have plans to hit La Med on Saturday, but I plan to spend Friday in fully-relaxed mode. Perhaps do some reflection and jot down some plans for next year.
That said, I expect none of that to happen and spend the weekend going from one hangover to the next!
Here We Go Again! Let's Dance!
At the forefront of all that, on a personal level, has been the "Let's Dance!" Competition we're dancing at. We won't be competing, but doing a piece inbetween the competing dances. We were supposed to do 3 dances, but after the original novelty had worn off and reality put a firm boot in, it was decided to cut it down to one. The one we know the least. Typical.
We've been at panic stations the whole week, and the shit will literally hit the fan at 6pm when we arrive at the venue. Literally. The nerves really activate the bowels to uncontrollable levels for some, and the amount of liquids lost due to the constant need to urinate must creep close to body weight (at least my measly body weight).
You would think the more we dance the better we would be at handling these nerves, especially considering we did City of Dance, as close to a professional show as I have ever come. The truth is, we have gotten better at dealing with those demons. No longer do we worry about fucking up because of nerves. We put it aside and perform, and we enjoy our performance. From that enjoyment, comes the character that has always been missing and is so essential on stage.
But it is before we hit the stage that nerves become a problem. Luckily, we are something of a tight-knit group, so we always make sure the nerves do not become debilitating for any of the dancers. We all deal with our nerves in pretty much the same way. It comes in stages. There's the original nervous energy, calmed down with a cigarette (a surprising amount of dancers smoke), accompanied with continuous chatter and nervous laughter. Then comes the make-up, and reality hits that this is about to happen, and the chatter dies down, and we start to wonder if we can do this. We start going through the dances in our heads, a big mistake, and panic ensues should a step be forgotten. Then comes the silence, when we are properly kakking ourselves, sitting in corners and wondering what the fuck we were thinking. Then 10 minutes or so before the dance begins, come the bathroom trips, which can be difficult according to how elaborate the costume is, accompanied by farts on the way.
The worst is standing in the wings, grief stricken with fear, sweating profusely from balls to armpits, and all you want to do is run away and abandon ship. But then you pull your shit together, and its showtime. And everything beforehand is all forgotten, and the focus is wherever you choose your focal point to be.
Afterwards, you're so gripped by excitement, you want to do it all again! Forgetting how excruciating it all was before. During City of Dance, it was four nights of going through all that, 9 dances each night, in front of 60+ people. Another night, and I would have died of some cardiac malfunction it was so stressful. I certainly lost a number of years of my life, bringing down my life expectancy from the expected and intended 60.
Tonight, it's just one dance, but an expected crowd of 300! It certainly doesn't make it any less stressful. In the case of City of Dance, apart from the Intro, we had rehearsed everything to death (not that it made us feel any more prepared). This time around, we've had to whip a dance together in 3 weeks, had an awful practice run at a social, and a handful of rehearsals. Masochists, we are.
Hopefully this time tomorrow, I'll be crowing about how great it was. Otherwise, I will have sufficiently drowned my sorrows.
A Hilarious Account of a Colonoscopy
ABOUT THE WRITER: Dave Barry is a Pulitzer Prize-winning humor columnist for the Miami Herald.
Colonoscopy Journal:
I called my friend Andy Sable, a gastroenterologist, to make an appointment for a colonoscopy.
A few days later, in his office, Andy showed me a color diagram of the colon, a lengthy organ that appears to go all over the place, at one point passing briefly through Minneapolis.
Then Andy explained the colonoscopy procedure to me in a thorough, reassuring and patient manner.
I nodded thoughtfully, but I didn't really hear anything he said, because my brain was shrieking, 'HE'S GOING TO STICK A TUBE 17,000 FEET UP YOUR BEHIND!'
I left Andy's office with some written instructions, and a prescription for a product called 'MoviPrep,' which comes in a box large enough to hold a microwave oven. I will discuss MoviPrep in detail later; for now suffice it to say that we must never allow it to fall into the hands of America 's enemies...
I spent the next several days productively sitting around being nervous.
Then, on the day before my colonoscopy, I began my preparation. In accordance with my instructions, I didn't eat any solid food that day; all I had was chicken broth, which is basically water, only with less flavor.
Then, in the evening, I took the MoviPrep. You mix two packets of powder together in a one-liter plastic jug, then you fill it with lukewarm water. (For those unfamiliar with the metric system, a liter is about 32 gallons). Then you have to drink the whole jug. This takes about an hour, because MoviPrep tastes - and here I am being kind - like a mixture of goat spit and urinal cleanser, with just a hint of lemon.
The instructions for MoviPrep, clearly written by somebody with a great sense of humor, state that after you drink it, 'a loose, watery bowel movement may result.'
This is kind of like saying that after you jump off your roof, you may experience contact with the ground.
MoviPrep is a nuclear laxative. I don't want to be too graphic, here, but, have you ever seen a space-shuttle launch? This is pretty much the MoviPrep experience, with you as the shuttle. There are times when you wish the commode had a seat belt. You spend several hours pretty much confined to the bathroom, spurting violently. You eliminate everything. And then, when you figure you must be totally empty, you have to drink another liter of MoviPrep, at which point, as far as I can tell, your bowels travel into the future and start eliminating food that you have not even eaten yet.
After an action-packed evening, I finally got to sleep.
The next morning my wife drove me to the clinic. I was very nervous. Not only was I worried about the procedure, but I had been experiencing occasional return bouts of MoviPrep spurts. I was thinking, 'What if I spurt on Andy?' How do you apologize to a friend for something like that? Flowers would not be enough.
At the clinic I had to sign many forms acknowledging that I understood and totally agreed with whatever the heck the forms said. Then they led me to a room full of other colonoscopy people, where I went inside a little curtained space and took off my clothes and put on one of those hospital garments designed by sadist perverts, the kind that, when you put it on, makes you feel even more naked than when you are actually naked..
Then a nurse named Eddie put a little needle in a vein in my left hand. Ordinarily I would have fainted, but Eddie was very good, and I was already lying down. Eddie also told me that some people put vodka in their MoviPrep.
At first I was ticked off that I hadn't thought of this, but then I pondered what would happen if you got yourself too tipsy to make it to the bathroom, so you were staggering around in full Fire Hose Mode. You would have no choice but to burn your house.
When everything was ready, Eddie wheeled me into the procedure room, where Andy was waiting with a nurse and an anesthesiologist. I did not see the 17,000-foot tube, but I knew Andy had it hidden around there somewhere. I was seriously nervous at this point.
Andy had me roll over on my left side, and the anesthesiologist began hooking something up to the needle in my hand.
There was music playing in the room, and I realized that the song was 'Dancing Queen' by ABBA. I remarked to Andy that, of all the songs that could be playing during this particular procedure, 'Dancing Queen' had to be the least appropriate.
'You want me to turn it up?' said Andy, from somewhere behind me.
'Ha ha,' I said. And then it was time, the moment I had been dreading for more than a decade. If you are squeamish, prepare yourself, because I am going to tell you, in explicit detail, exactly what it was like.
I have no idea. Really. I slept through it. One moment, ABBA was yelling 'Dancing Queen, feel the beat of the tambourine,' and the next moment, I was back in the other room, waking up in a very mellow mood.
Andy was looking down at me and asking me how I felt. I felt excellent. I felt even more excellent when Andy told me that It was all over, and that my colon had passed with flying colors. I have never been prouder of an internal organ.
On the subject of Colonoscopies...
Colonoscopies are no joke, but these comments during the exam were quite humorous... A physician claimed that the following are actual comments made by his patients (predominately male) while he was performing their colonoscopies:
1. 'Take it easy Doc. You’re boldly going where no man has gone before.'
2. 'Find Amelia Earhart yet?'
3. 'Can you hear me NOW?'
4. 'Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?'
5. 'You know, in Arkansas , we're now legally married.'
6. 'Any sign of the trapped miners, Chief?'
7. 'You put your left hand in, you take your left hand out...'
8. 'Hey! Now I know how a Muppet feels!'
9. 'If your hand doesn't fit, you must quit!'
10. 'Hey Doc, let me know if you find my dignity.'
11. 'You used to be an executive at Enron, didn't you?'
12. 'God, now I know why I am not gay.'
And the best one of all:
13. 'Could you write a note for my wife saying that my head is not up there?'
