Give me loadshedding over bladder botox anyday

While South Africans are worrying about where their next inverter is coming from, well-heeled Americans are considering the benefits of bladder botox. I kid you not. It’s a real thing.

In a recent article in the New York Post, close to 1 000 words were devoted to extolling the merits of this procedure, the primary one being that it limits the need for bathroom breaks on the drive from Manhattan to a holiday home in the Hamptons.

Give me loadshedding over bladder botox any day, thank you very much.

The aim of this procedure isn’t to have a younger looking bladder but to re-engineer the piping so as to be a little bit less human. An aspiration first identified by a pharoah of Egypt, who tried to be appear above this sort of thing.

In the misery of last week’s loadshedding disaster, a friend asked to meet for coffee. He was late because of the power-outage traffic and wasn’t in a great space when he arrived. If I couldn’t read that off him, his first question on sitting down was a giveaway. “Why are you still here?”

It was a pleasant day, which is why we chose to sit outside in the warm Johannesburg winter sun. While that sounds ideal it wasn’t, as instead of a South American-inspired CD in the background serenading us, we were afflicted by the sound of a nearby generator.

I wanted to answer, “Because I can’t imagine living in a place that’s so perfect, I would consider bladder botox.”  But I didn’t. Even though I should have.

Instead, what popped to mind was the memory of standing on a platform in Zurich some years ago when there was an announcement that the train would be two minutes late. Although no one said anything too overt, more than a handful of people next to me shook their heads in a “what will be next?” gesture. And I imagined that this would provide them with a story to tell their spouses at dinner. “You won’t believe what happened to me,” they would say as they shared the horror of a train running late. In Zurich.

Why am I here? Because each day is a new day to make a difference. Not because I’m so righteous, but because contributing makes me feel good and valued. Because the vacuum created by the reality of the country means that my day can be valued.

And because in spite of the ridiculousness of the situation, we still live in a wonderful community that gives and gives and gives. And because perfection is so far away that people haven’t lost sight of what’s important. And because no one’s bladder looks wrinkled when the power is out.

Perfection is like sugar. It tastes so good when we eat it. But too much of it isn’t good for us. Perfection is what leads people to shake their heads when trains are two minutes late, and to think that a bathroom break on the way to the Hamptons is a problem in need of a solution.