I remember when I first cried while listening to a song.

It wasn't the first time I had heard it, and I have listened to it many times since then without a tear coming to my eye. But, for some reason, on that day the words of “Iris” by the Goo Goo Dolls really spoke to me.

I remember connecting it to Terrence Pearson. He was my “boyfriend” at the time (though I doubt that he considered me his girlfriend - probably just saw me as a fling). Listening to the lyrics made my heart ache, and I immediately thought of him.

I had heard love songs before, but none of them spoke to me like this one did. It was romantic and heart-wrenching simultaneously, and I still cannot hear it without thinking to myself: “Now that's love for you!” But I am not so sure that the song linked well with Terrence.

I didn't love him. My feelings for him didn't even come close to love. But for that moment, while listening to that song – focussing on the cello-and-violin instrumental and the simple, yet slightly unconventional lyrics – I felt that I should feel that way. It didn't need to be for Terrence, and it didn't need to be right then, but I knew that this was love.

It was then that I found myself sifting through my sister's CD rack, trying to find Dizzy Up The Girl. I knew that, somewhere in between Madonna, Matchbox 20 and Rodriguez, I had seen the Goo Goo Dolls. I took it on myself to sift through my sister's collection on a regular basis, and though I had seen the album before, it had never appealed to me, bringing up as it did images of drugs and raves. But, now that I had found a song on the CD that I enjoyed, I felt that it was time to give it a try.

I played the first song, “Dizzy”, and almost gave up on my efforts. It was angry and loud and not at all what I wanted to hear. I turned to the next song, and found myself listening to “Slide”, and my mood cheered slightly. I went through the entire album, one song at a time, and each one brought out a different emotion. As I listened, I went from feeling angry, to lonely, to sad, to happy. I had never listened to music that made me feel so many emotions in such a short period of time.

My sister was far away at Rhodes, so I took the CD from her collection and began keeping it in my room. When I started University, I brought it with me to Grahamstown along with my own personal CD collection. I didn't segregate them. It had become my own, regardless of what my sister said when she found out that I had taken it.

Over the years, I found more music that spoke to me, and the Goo Goo Dolls began to fade into the background. I no longer listen to Dizzy Up The Girl as much as I used to. But it sits amongst my collection, and whenever I begin to feel lonely or sad, and occasionally when I begin to feel happy, I bring it out and play a song or two. And each time I hear “Iris”, I am reminded of the first time I cried when listening to a song.

The Years of Rice and Salt. The sound of it conjures up images of cheap Chinese restaurants – restaurants that try to be authentic, but are filled with red paper lanterns hanging from the roofs, young women speaking in Chinese accents before running off to talk to their Afrikaans boyfriends and food dripping with oil.

I have never been to Asia, so my introduction to eastern culture was through Chinese, Indian and Thai restaurants that horde all the kitsch faux-authentic items onto every surface. Even though I knew that this was not the real Asia, the bold colours and the fragrant spices still enticed me. I wanted to know more! And so I started reading.

I know little about reincarnation, and little about religion. The novels that I have read over the years have provided me with a sense of Asian culture, but not with the details. Kim Stanley Robinson provides that same sense of culture, but mixes it with a web of knowledge. The Years of Rice and Salt is a melting pot of knowledge about eastern religions.

The first book of the novel begins in about 1405 A.D. after most of Europe has been wiped out by the Black Plague. The reader is introduced to six characters, most of Asian decent, and the nine books that follow tell the tales of their reincarnation into different religions and different parts of the world. The reader first meets Kyu, for example, as an African slave aboard a Chinese ship and follows his story as he is reincarnated as Kya, a tiger who decides to help a lost man or Katima, a Sultana who attempts to change the Islamic religion to be more accepting of women.

I found myself relating to the characters in a number of ways because of this constant changing. With each philosophical question that was asked, I found myself questioning my culture and my history. Each time that details of religion were mentioned, I found myself looking at my own religion, and comparing it to that of the characters.

I would often get so involved in the book, that I would forget where I was until some sound or movement brought me out of the fantasy world and back to reality. I could imagine that I lived through those different times in history, that I had those experiences, that perhaps I, myself, was a reincarnated spirit. Maybe that is why, when I go to Chinese, Indian and Thai restaurants, I scorn the decorations that adorn the walls, ceilings and tables. Perhaps it is because I have known the real Asia, far back in my history, and appreciate its true beauty rather than the falsity that these restaurants provide.

Straight-backed, I sit in silence
but for the R3.30 in five cent pieces
rattling in my ashtray
and the wind whistling through the crack in my window.
My hands taut on the steering wheel
as I swerve from pothole, sheep, pothole, warthog, pedestrian, pothole.

I keep my eyes fixed on the road
but my mind drifts to prayers said untruthfully,
lies told unwillingly,
duties shirked unashamedly,
in between snippets of songs playing in my head
that I refrain from singing for her sake.

Occasionally I look at her –
eyes closed and peaceful –
and wonder what is happening in her head.
But then I hit a pothole
and am jerked from my reverie
to concentrate again on pothole, goat, pothole, pedestrian, pothole.

What could we learn from these four walls
If we just listened to what they know?


Would they tell of the horrors that they had witnessed –
the anger, the sorrow, the pain?
Would they shudder to recall the hatred,
the violence and the murder
that caused their essence to be tainted?
Would they weep as they spoke of stains and peeling paint
or of petty arguments over electricity?
Arguments that tore relationships apart.


Or would they smile to remember
the secrets, gossip and games of Never Have I Ever shared over dinner parties;
the posters that clothed them and filled them with beauty and colour;
the loud laughter and music
reverberating through the plaster and cement
to become a part of them?


The walls are a part of every family that resides within them -
the black sheep; the forgotten daughter
who sees all but is never acknowledged.
They willingly open themselves to pain and heartbreak, joy and friendship.
They alone have seen how the world has truly changed,
without ever going anywhere.

The phone rings at the other end of the house and I run to pick it up, just in time to see my

mother answer it. Even though I wasn't able to get there first, I sit around in the kitchen, waiting for her to finish so that I can ask her what it was about. It's not that I want to know. It's that I need to. I

need to know everything – I am four and a half, after all. I should know everything already!

“She won't be able to come,” Mom says, watching me out of the corner of her eye. “Lara's sick.” Now I know that the call is about me, and I become more desperate. Who is it? Where are they going? Why can

't I come? I run up to Mom and start tugging on her sleeve, wanting to know what I am missing out on. She hangs up the phone, and starts walking away.

“Who was it?” I ask, almost in hysterics. She is doing it to me on purpose, keeping me in suspense.

“That was Jeffrey's mom. You remember Jeffrey, don't you?”

I've been following Mom around the kitchen, but I freeze in my tracks when I hear the name. I haven't heard it in a long time.

Jeffrey and I used used to go to playschool together. We even used to live up the road from each other. We would play all the time and, besides Judy, he was my best friend. He was two years older than me and had started primary school the year before. My family had moved at the same time, so I never saw him any more. I missed him. I still wore the bracelet that he gave me, even though it didn't go with any of my clothes. It was bright blue plastic, and was made up of little hearts. Every time I looked at it, I remembered the day he gave it to me. We were at his house, and h

is brother walked in on us, and started mocking us, saying that we should kiss. We both looked away shyly, embarrassed at the thought.

“Please Mom! Please!” Not only would I get to see Jeffrey again, but we would be going up Table Mountain. I ha

ven't been before. It's his birthday party, and he's taking some friends up in the cable car for a picnic.

“I'm not sick,” I choke out, trying to hold back a sneeze. “I'm all better, I promise!” I can't hold the sneeze back any longer. I let it out, and it ruins everything.

“You're not goin

g,” Mom says, “and that's final.”

I try everything to get Mom to let me go. I try throwing tantrums, hoping that she will just want to get me out of the house. I try begging, hoping that she will give in to my puppy-dog eyes. But to no avail. Th

e day of the party arrives, and I am still not allowed to go. Up until this point, I have been hoping that Mom will change her mind and let me go. When it doesn't happen, I resolve that I will hate her forever. By dinnertime, I have discovered that hating takes a lot of energy, and I give up.

It snowed on Table Mountain that year. Though there have been a couple of occasions since then where the mountain has been dusted with snow, it has never been as glorious as it was that year. My family

m

oved again

a couple of months later. We didn't move far, but it was still further away from where Jeffrey was

. I never saw him again, and a couple of years later Mom heard that his family had left Cape Town and moved to the Transvaal.

At the back of my bathroom cupboard in my parents' house, I keep a little box. It is filled with odds and ends

from my childhood. Right on top of everything else lies a bracelet. It is bright blue plastic and is made up of little hearts.

A light wind blows and the scent of jasmine wafts into my room. I close my eyes and breathe it in, and for a moment I am transported away from my computer screen, away from Grahamstown, to the other side of the world.

I am in a secret garden, surrounded by the white blossoms. They sit like diamonds on branches of jade and emerald, yet smell like the most exquisite perfume. The scent is calming and I walk amongst the shrubs, brushing them with my fingertips and taking in the scent as though it is oxygen.

I gently pluck one strand of flowers and place it carefully behind one ear so as not to compress the delicate blossoms with the weight of my hair. I look down and find myself in a beautiful white silk dress. I twirl around in it, feeling glorious and beautiful and freed by the scent of the flowers. I cannot contain the laughter that bubbles up through my body. It flows out from me, into the garden, joining in with the sound of a river trickling past, almost unnoticed.

I am one with nature, unburdened by the problems of the real world. This, I think to myself, is my reality. The work that I have left behind in my room, the problems and the worries, are all in my mind. They are unnecessary nightmares, and they fade away one at a time with each breath that I take.

I lie down in the grass that is at my feet and close my eyes, breathing deeply and enjoying the textures around me. I softly run my hand through the soft grass and allow my fingers to lightly touch the silk of my dress. Each touch feels wonderfully fresh and new. I close my eyes and allow my senses to take over. The textures, the sounds and the scents are so calming that I begin to fall into a light sleep.

There is a knock on the front door, and I open my eyes. The scent has faded and I find myself back at my computer. I try to shut it all out again and force myself back into the garden, but the image is gone. I go to answer the door, but the person has left. I sit back at my desk for a while, mesmerised by the daydream. Eventually I get up and walk into the courtyard.

I find the jasmine shrub and sit on the ground beside it, hoping that being close to it might bring the image back. I breathe in the scent, and close my eyes, waiting to be taken away. It doesn't work. The pure scent is mingled with those of clay and wet paint. I try to breathe in deeper, and choke on the dusty air. I run my hand across the ground before me, and my finger is cut by a stray piece of broken glass.

I give up, opening my eyes again and finding myself sitting on dirty bricks with my neighbours watching me strangely. I get up awkwardly and wave at them, giving an embarrassed smile. When they have retreated into their houses, I pick a strand of the flowers and bring it back into the house with me.

I sit back down at my desk, with the flowers in a vase beside me. I resign myself to the nightmare of day-to-day life. Yet, though I know that I was never standing in a garden in a beautiful dress, surrounded by jasmine and water, I still feel as though a weight has been lifted from my shoulders. I feel calmer and more ready for the day.

I glance once more at the jasmine, and begin to write.

So I have always really struggled with writing things for this blog. I can never come up with topics to write about that interest me, never mind anyone else. I doubt that anyone has actually ever read anything on here, besides myself. So, I have decided to take charge of my blog and use it for something that I decided to do a long time ago - tell the stories of my ever-so-slightly not-normal family.

I have been lucky enough to do quite a bit of travelling in my short lifetime. Though not much of this travelling took place in South Africa, this made my travels even more exciting. But each trip has stories attached to it. A couple of years ago, I made a promise to myself. I was going to write down the stories from my travels with my family, so that I wouldn't forget them. Then, over the next couple of years, I would revisit all of those places, possibly even stay in the same hotels and self-catering inns, and see how different my experience of those places was. Of course, this would require a great deal of time, a great deal of money, and a great deal of independence - none of which I have. But I suppose this could always take place over the course of my lifetime. I like to think that my exploits would make quite an entertaining book. At least, I hope they would. But, as I have yet to write down the humorous tales of my travels with my family, I have decided that I will use my blog for this purpose. It may happen that no one is particularly interested, but on the other hand, why should I care what people think? So here begins my first travel experience diary entry.

I have been to Zimbabwe twice in my life. The first time I went, I was three years old. All I can remember from the trip is looking up and grabbing hold of something brown hanging from the ceiling. I have been told that three year olds cannot have memories, but I am determined that I have this one. It is very clear in my mind, and it all clicked into place when I told my parents about it and they suggested that it might have been the piece of leather that people had to hang onto when the plane into Zimbabwe is landing. This memory is of my first plane ride. I think that is quite appropriate, since my memories of travelling are some of the best that I have.

I am not sure of all the places that we visited in Zimbabwe that first time, but I do know that we went to the Victoria Falls. I know this because of the photo that I have of my sister and I standing beside a man in a bright red tailcoat. This was later compared to a picture that was taken on my second visit to Zim, of my sister and I (slightly older) with the same man (who hadn't seemed to have aged a day.)

Zimbabwe is the only place outside of South Africa that I have visited twice, although my parents have been to the States and to the UK a couple of times without me, and my sister has lived in both of those parts of the world. I do remember the second time I went to Zim, however, and seeing as how I don't remember the first, it feels like I have only been there once. The second time we went, we did not go by plane. Instead, we drove through South Africa - from Cape Town, up to Bloemfontein where we spent a night, and then up to the Zimbabwean border. Flying would probably have been a better idea. My sister and I were not the most fantastic of passengers, and both started getting carsick shortly into the journey. Our parents tried to curb this problem by giving us tablets. This is also when I found out that I am not very good at taking tablets. They didn't stay down very long at all.

It was on this trip that I met Sophie Tomaszczyk and her family. Sophie was just slightly younger than I am, and we became fast friends. We have not seen each other since, but for fifteen years we have kept in contact through letters and postcards. We kept each other up to date with the little things that happened in our lives, as we are now even friends on facebook (amazing how some thing work out, isn't it.)

I think that Zimbabwe was probably one of the best trips for my parents. For them it was more a homecoming than anything else. Having left Zim thirteen years before, they were able to go to all the places that they remembered and see how they had changed. I hope that someday I will be able to go back and do the same, but I am not sure that will be possible. At the moment, I cannot imagine visiting Zimbabwe because the place has fallen into such ruin. The trips that we took there were before some of the bigger troubles started - before the land started being taken back from the white farmers and before there were billion dollar notes. Perhaps some time in the future I will be able to return to the land of my forefathers and -mothers (as my parents and even my grandparents on my father's side were born there). All I can do for now is hope.

This is one of the slightly less humorous adventures with my family, mostly because I was too young to remember very much of what happened. I do remember small details - like walking in the grass holding my skirt and having a giant locust jump into it, or driving past a baby elephant close enough to touch on a short safari that I went on. But these memories are foggy, and disconnected like pearls on a rope that are so close, but aren't quite making contact.

So, I have never been a good cook. I am the kind of person who has to take precise measurements, and stand beside the food, watching it simmering, instead of going off to do something else.

But recently I have made a deal with my boyfriend, that each of us will cook twice a week and his housemate will cook once a week. So I have had to find recipes on my own to try and cook. And some of them have turned out really nicely.

I intend to list the recipes here, in part for my own sake, because I tend to forget them, and in case someone comes along who, like me, is just looking for a quick and easy recipe that they just cannot screw up.

The last one I tried, which ended up pretty well was a Portabello Mushroom Steak recipe, which I made with carrots and mashed potatoes. The recipe follows:

2 tenderized steaks
1 cup dry red wine
2 teaspoons flour
1 cup beef stock
1 teaspoon each of worchestershire, tomato and bbq sauces
1 teaspoon ground mustard
120g mushrooms

Though the original recipes had alternative ingredients in some of the cases, I adjusted them to suit my meagre budget, and though it might not have tasted quite as lovely as I am sure that original would have tasted, it was delicious none the less.

Brown the steaks on both sides over medium-high heat. Remove and keep warm.
Reduce the heat to medium. Add wine to the pan, stirring to loosen the browned bits. Cook for 2-3 minutes or until liquid is reduced by half. Combine the flour and the stock and mix until smooth in water, then whisk into pan juices. Add worchestershire, tomato and bbq sauces and the mustard. Bring to the boil.
Return steaks to the skillet and add mushrooms. Cook in the sauce for about 2 minutes on each side or until meat reaches desired doneness.

I personally found the steaks to be fairly salty due in large part to the worchestershire and bbq sauces, and did not feel the need to add any salt. However, the recipe suggests adding salt and pepper as desired.

The mashed potatoes had my own slight twist, which I am sure that many people do. But my friend was fairly surprised to see me adding cream cheese to the mash. I find that it gives it a nice added flavour, particularly when it is flavoured cream cheese, such as chives, as it was in this case.

I have discovered that journalism and exhaustion go hand in hand. I cannot remember the last time I have been so tired, or the last time I went so many consecutive days with this little sleep, and yet, here I am at 10:48PM, when I could justifiably be sleeping, preparing to launch into a tirade about journalism and why I feel that even though journalism and exhaustion go hand in hand, I have still discovered this week that there is nothing else in the world that I would rather be doing. Perhaps I would get more sleep at other jobs, but I do not believe that they would be nearly as rewarding. I cannot see myself sitting behind a desk for hours at a time without moving. I would far rather be running around trying to get quotes from people, even when those people really don't want to give you quotes. I have discovered a tactic to use when getting quotes from people, however, and thus far it has worked well.

My method, you see, is to act perfectly innocent and shy. For example, today I was attempting to get quotes from business owners. So I would walk into a shop and stand around for a short while, looking as though I didn't know what I was doing. Then, I would find someone who did not seem too busy and ask shyly if there was a manager that I could talk to about an article that I was doing. This is when the majority of people clam up and don't want to talk to me anymore, but that is also when I put on the sugary sweet voice, explaining that I mean no harm and pretending that journalists are not the heartless creatures that we all really know they are. However, when I get down to asking the questions, away goes the shyness and out comes the need to know answers. I feel that guilting someone into answering what they think is going to be a really innocent couple of questions, then posing ones that they do not expect gets more honesty, as they cannot prepare answers beforehand. Then, once the interview is over, I return to my shy and innocent ways and pretend as though nothing ever happened and that it was all in their imagination. I feel that this method works.

So far, I have only had one article printed this week, and it was a joint article with a fellow classmate of mine. Hopefully on Tuesday I will feel even more positive about my life choice. But if I don't, this level of satisfaction will do me just fine... for now. Soon I will need to move on to more challenging tasks... but that is a future that lies ahead far in the distance.

Everytime that I go to watch a movie that has been based on a book, I hear hordes of people mumbling about how rubbish they expect the movie is going to be in comparisson. I know that I have heard probably a thousand times that any movie based on a book is going to be absolutely terrible!

Now I admit that Hollywood needs to come up with some more original ideas for movies. And, fair enough, a vast majority of the movies that are based on books don't capture the books the way that we imagined them. But that isn't really the director's fault. He portrayed the book as he saw it, and sometimes that works out amazingly well, while other times it ends up being terrible. For an example of a movie that turned out really badly I just need to look at The Golden Compass.

First off, I really have a problem with the name. I grew up reading the His Dark Materials trilogy, and I always knew the first book as The Northern Lights. I knew that in America, the name of the book had been changed to The Golden Compass, but I expected that the movie would be named according to what the rest of the world know the book by. What annoys me even more is that I saw the book in the bookshop the other day with the new fancy movie cover. In tiny letters at the top of the cover was printed "The Northern Lights", and at the bottom in huge letters it read "RELEASED AS THE GOLDEN COMPASS". It really upset me. Especially since they changed the name to reflect the movie and the movie was truly awful. I loved the books... I couldn't stand to watch the movie again. And it ruined my memory of the book. I haven't read it in years and years, and yet I had such fond memories of it. And now all of those memories have been erased to be replaced by the worst performance I have ever seen Nicole Kidman give and an average performance by Daniel Craig.

On the other hand of the spectrum, however, I recently read Stardust by Neil Gaiman. I watched the movie first and I absolutely adored the movie. I have watched it so many times that I have the scenes saved in my head and when I was reading the book, I could pick out which quotes had been used and which had been altered ever so slightly. I was given the book for Christmas and it has taken me a long while to gather the energy to read it. And it's quite a good thing that I did wait, because I read it in 2 days flat. If I had started reading it before the vacation, I would never have done any of the assignments that I had due for the last couple of days of term.

I was really disappointed with the book though. I found some parts of it really funny, parts that the movie had left out, and I was so sad to find parts of the movie that I had really enjoyed that were left out. I was really disappointed at the fact that Captain Shakespeare wasn't in it. His original character, Captain Alberic, was not nearly as entertaining. Robert De Niro really made that role for me and I think that the movie wouldn't have been the same without him. I was also so disappointed by the ending. It is completely different. In the movie the ending is filled with action and suspense. It almost felt as though Gaiman was rushing to finish the story with the book, and after watching the movie and seeing so much action and drama, I was expecting the same of the book and it let me down slightly.

That isn't to say that the book Stardust isn't absolutely amazing. It is so beautifully written and I suggest that anyone who enjoyed the movie read it. But I think what it comes down to is that movies that are based on books should be looked at as separate entities, separate stories that have very little to do with the book themselves. If everyone went to a movie and viewed it without having the book that it was based on in mind, then they would probably find that the movies were good in their own right. Not as a representation of a book, but as a movie on its own. Books and movies should just stay separate. If you need to go and see a movie that has been based on your favourite book, you should expect that it will not come out the way that you imagined it. But if you go with an open mind, you might find that you enjoy both the movie and the book even though they are completely different.

I have never written a serious blog before, but I feel that since I am studying journalism and journalism is moving further and further away from print and towards the web, I should really be involved in this phenomenon. It's not that I have never written a blog. I was one of those people who had the blog that told everyone how my day, month, week, year was going without actually saying anything of any significance.

When trying to decide what to write about, the first thing that came to mind is an article that I am thinking about writing for the local student newspaper. I suppose that it is in some ways ironic that I am still thinking along the lines of what I would write for a newspaper when thinking about what I would write for blogs. The two mediums are supposed to be so entirely different, but everything that affects me personally lately also makes me think whether I could make that into an article. I suppose that is what studying journalism does to a person.

The subject of my first ever serious blog (as you may have noticed from the heading) is abortion. The reason for this is a story that I very recently heard that truly disturbed me and made me slightly sick to the stomach. I don't know the full story, and in fact only had it related to me from a friend (let's call him John) who knew one of the people this girl was living with (let's call her Sarah). But even only knowing part of the story disturbs me enough to know that I don't want to know the rest of the gory details.

What I do know is that this girl (let's call her Anne) was pregnant and beyond the point of no return, when abortion is illegal. Anne didn't have a place to live and was going from friend to friend, sleeping on couches. Eventually she ended up sleeping on Sarah's couch. One day Sarah came home from work to find the bathroom splattered with blood. She went to each of her housemates and they eventually worked out that the blood was Anne's. So they approached Anne and asked her about it. She told them that it was only bloody diarrhea. They decided that there had to be something seriously wrong with her if there was that much blood, so they took her to the hospital. There they were told that Anne had induced an abortion on herself.
Now as disturbing as I find the idea of inducing one's own abortion, what I find more disturbing is the part that follows...
Sarah went home with the housemates, leaving Anne at the hospital for the night. They went to clean up the bathroom and in the process of cleaning they found the foetus in the toilet.

Now, as far as I understand the story, Anne was underage, because according to the law, as a minor she had more rights than the foetus did. Even though it was illegal to perform an abortion on herself, her rights prevent her from being arrested or made an example of. I am not sure of the whole story behind that part, but it disturbs me that a person could even do such a thing to themselves.

Don't get me wrong. I am all for abortion. I think it is a fantastic thing that women should be able to choose for themselves whether to have children or not. You can be as careful as you like, but short of abstinence or immaculate conception, accidents can happen. People fall pregnant while on the pill and while using condoms. Nothing is 100% fail safe other than abstinence. And considering that some women are raped without condoms or any protection being used to prevent them from becoming pregnant, I believe women should have the right to say no to having a child depending on their situation. I also believe that in cases like that of women with HIV, it would be absolutely irresponsible to bring a baby into the world knowing that you are putting it at risk of contracting HIV. In cases such as these, abortion is fabulous.

But past the point where abortion is legal I believe that people who try to do it themselves are stupid and dangerous individuals. I believe that they are stupid for two reasons. First of all, shouldn't they have done it before the pregnancy got they got to the point where abortion was illegal. Fair enough, it is sometimes the case that they do not realise that they are pregnant until it is too late, but that is in a minority of cases as far as I can tell. Second of all, the limit is there for a reason. After 20 weeks, to have an abortion is a dangerous procedure for women and there can often be serious complications that can lead to death. So anyone who would try to induce an abortion on themselves when a doctor won't do it for them is endangering their own lives which is a stupid thing to do. They evidently don't want to die themselves, otherwise they wouldn't object to staying pregnant. If they didn't want to baby and they didn't want to live, then they wouldn't have bothered with the abortion. They could have just killed themselves and the baby would have died at the same time. They obviously want to live, but they are putting themselves at risk by inducing pregnancy. Their stupidity is what I believe makes them dangerous individuals.

Anyway, I don't know how much longer I can talk about this without it becoming a rant. It might have gone beyond that point already, in which case I feel sorry for anyone who might happen across this blog and read it. I will stop now though, however, and end the pain.