Extreme workouts for your eyeballs
SOMEWHERE on Twitter there is a tweet with an incredibly funny and accurate description of an extreme eye-roll.
It was along the lines of an eye-roll going so far that he or she was checking the back of his or her brain. I wish I could remember it because it really did make me laugh out loud (Lol).
The eye-roll is a magnificent gesture.
Children develop the roll early, instinctively. Teenagers have it down to a fine art. Parents may only see said child/teen retreating, but you can feel it and hear it. You know how rolly it is. Mainly because it was one of your own silent youthful protests.
“Don’t you roll your eyes at me,” you shout as they walk away.
The first time there may be a bit of surprise that you knew they were doing it. Kind of reinforced the “mom (or dad) knows everything)” line. But it doesn’t stop the roll, and since they know you know, it’s not such a big step to do it before turning away.
And we don’t grow out of it. Silent communication with a person near you while one of you is on a phone call with someone who has obviously lost the plot. Same with a fellow roller when you’re in the company of the idiot family member/friend going on an old, tired rant or making a new foolish observation.
It is clearly a thing: I was delighted when my boss sent me an eye-roll emoji which I didn’t know existed and is now my favourite.
Politicians and public personae are mammoth eye-roll instigators – they actually want us to believe what they’re telling us, when we have banked knowledge about spin and downright lies?
Eye-rolls get me through a day’s emails, and boy, do we get some doozies.
There are so many that tell you to Hurry! Hurry! There is only one day to get this incredible deal on something you don’t need at this amazing price!
Or the ones that suggest your life can’t be complete and you will never have joy or happiness if you don’t sign up/become a member/join the gang/ buy that thing.
Some of the items being sold in these special deals are so eye-roll inducing you also have to shake your head at the same time.
Similar, it seems, to Sir Paul Mccartney’s eye yoga.
The 78-year-old Beatles singer learnt from a yoga instructor in India to give his eyes a workout and has been regularly doing so, something which he thinks has aided his vision.
“He explained that your eyes are muscles,” said Mccartney. “Your ears aren’t, so you can’t exercise your ears.
“But your eyes, you can. So head still. And then you look up as far as you can, one, two, three, go back to the middle, then down, back to the middle. You do three lots of that then go to the left and the right. Now you’ve got a cross, up and down, and sideways, now you do the diagonals.”
With all the eye yoga I do I should have 20:20 vision, but I sure don’t, so I reckon that ruins that theory.
But I wish I could give all my other muscles the workout I give my eyes. Then we’d really be on a roll.
THE DA prides itself in being South Africa’s official opposition party hellbent on exposing corruption and presenting a transformed, unified front.
Yet the cracks appear to be widening, showing signs of a party in disarray.
This week, DA MP Phumzile van Damme resigned from Parliament and as national spokesperson for the party.
“My resignation as an MP is not because the DA is a so-called ‘racist party’ but because of a clique of individuals – and in order not to make the good women and men still in the DA suffer, I will not delve further into this,” she said in her resignation.
A few hours later, Van Damme performed a U-turn on her party resignation.
This begs the question why she would deem it necessary to make this
THE ground underneath their feet is pulsating.
Palestinian people are palpitating. Projectiles propelled to their placement. Bomb shelters as basements.
But even from there you can hear spirits separate from flesh.
The wailing, the wrecking, the levelling, the tearing down of their lineage.
Demolition, destruction, explosions and death, yet hoping for the best.
The raging storm of Israeli missiles has no eye.
Fires there are too stubborn to be ceased.
There is no calm in the Middle East.
Days may as well be dark there. There is nothing like clefts of flash grenades to snap you back to reality.
Death toll rises. High-rises bow to airstrikes out there.
When fighter jets levitate, no matter the spewn body parts predicted beyond descension, still they rise. Oh the cacophony, the crescendo when they fall.
And the people who scatter. And their limbs.
The melody of murder in sync with the rumbling of their world.
How it echoes. Bats can hear it.
How it quakes the ground. Sizeable reservoirs of newly discovered oil and natural gas wealth, that the occupied Palestinian territory lies above, can hear it.
The rest of the world can see the buildings; how they are becoming roads of rubble. And the people, and their pain.
Palestine is swinging to the breeze of a spell they know as their nakba, or “catastrophe”. What an enchantment! Everything is shaking out there.
All day fighter jets roar overhead with aerial bombardments.
People are shaking too. They are afraid. So is the land. You can see in how it quivers when skyscrapers crumble to the ground. It’s too loud out there.
When will violence sleep in the Middle East?
Palestine has caught the stubborn flames.
It isn’t every day that you sit in front of a grocery store and suddenly there’s a missile.
At any moment, your home might become your grave.
It is all in how, when launched, rockets behave.
Their flight-to-light demeanour is synonymous with a moth to a light, to a flame.
Palestinians ought to be stopping, dropping and rolling.
A family was laughing, filling sacks of straw and suddenly, a rocket seeked a needle in a haystack. Their bodies were a haystack, set alight and torn to pieces.
The needle is their nakba. The needle is the land they were forced to flee in the 1948 Palestinian exodus. Everything around them caught fire. Like how black bodies catch police bullets, rubber or lead, knees to the head. Like how women’s bodies clench flames at the hands of their lovers, of strange men. How they are found hung on trees. Queer bodies disregarded all the same.
The world is eating at itself.
The more things change in the Middle East, the bloodier they get.
Blood of the departed washes against the sun, eastward to the Dead Sea.
Perhaps violence will sleep when Palestine snuggles at the seabed of the northern half of the western shore of the Dead Sea.