Thursday, April 30, 2009
Postless and Papers
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Mother's Day Madness
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Nature vs Nurture
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Fully Booked
A Creative Couple
Friday, April 17, 2009
Abortion: Yes or No?
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Gift For A Good Report
Coffee: Tick or Flick?
Coffee has gained the image that it is bad for you and you shouldn’t drink it. But is that really the case? Now I’m not one to diminish coffee, in fact it’s possibly my second oxygen however; the rich taste comes at a price of many factors.
Firstly, buying brand name coffee from places including but not limited to Dome and Gloria Jeans and Starbucks in the US can cost over $3.50 for a small coffee. Thus totaling to over $1000 per year if one coffee is bought Monday through to Friday. For home brewed coffee such as Nescafe, a year’s worth (of black coffee) would only total to over one-tenth of the price. However, keep in mind the extra costs such as electricity, water, sugar, cups, spoons etc.
The second and most debated factor is health consequences. Not only does coffee have a negative effect on your digestive system, particularly your stomach but it also causes heartburn. The acidity in coffee is a cause of stomach ulcers, which in tern can cause death. An early symptom of ulcers is coughing up blood, which in its self is horrible. Regardless of whether you drink regular or decaf, coffee can lead to liver disorders which is linked to premature death.
Large amounts of coffee can cause a fast heart rate, excessive urination, nausea, vomiting, restlessness, anxiety, depression, tremors, and difficulty sleeping, resulting in fatigue. However, a large amount isn’t three cups, in fact this is considered a standard daily intake. Drinking two or three pots by yourself is definitely a large amount.
Although it is a misleading notion that decaf is better, regular coffee is actually addictive. It’s no mistake that there are quitting programs for coffee consumption. Also, the above effects of a large consumption are more common in regular coffee drinkers to compared to decaf.
However, regardless of this information, I am still asking to make my… fourth coffee for the day.
Miami Bay Election: Speech
Thank you for that enthusiastic welcome. It shows just how much you care about the future leadership of Miami Bay.
I stand before you today, not to persuade you or promise you unachievable goals but to tell you the truth. And the truth is that you, the people of Miami Bay deserve better. You deserve security, luxury and affordability. But most of all, you deserve certainty. Certainty of your jobs. Certainty that your children will be educated. Certainty of your safety. And certainty of your future.
My purpose today is this. I will not stand here and promise you millions of dollars or free taxes. But I will deliver my precise plans for the future of Miami Bay.
At present, our government is providing a satisfactory living environment for the residents on Miami Bay. But you deserve better. You deserve more educational opportunities. You are deprived of healthcare facilities. You are lacking security and safety.
The current government has heartlessly given up on areas such as Miami Bay but we, The Nationals have the ambition, the ideas and the energy for change.
Educational systems and facilities in Miami Bay are falling below standards. The rapidly increasing teacher shortage is depriving Miami Bay from basic education. The Nationals believe that every child is entitled to a qualified education. However, the current government believes there is nothing that can be done. We are willing to rise both primary and secondary teachers’ wages to increase education in Miami Bay. We will also provide government funding to increase the standards of local schools and provide better educational facilities such as learning resource centers and computers. We will also establish another local university to increase the constantly dropping number of students entering tertiary education.
However, education is sadly only one of the areas that the current government has neglected. Miami Bay is currently deprived of healthcare facilities. Time after time, politicians promise to repair the healthcare system, yet nothing is being done. Aged care facilities are unable to be accessed without extensive delays so elderly residents are stuck in hospital beds. This is not the place for them.
They should be transferred to a comfortable facility that is fully equip to their needs. Not only is this unfair for them, it’s unfair for those who desperately need hospital beds but are now forced onto long waiting lists.
My plan is to extract the money given to private healthcare in the community from the budget. As they are already well facilitated, we believe that the money should be put into healthcare that is more generally available. A portion of the funds previously given to private healthcare will provide funding to facilitate public aged care facilities.
We will further equip these facilities with the latest technology to accommodate the needs of every single elderly resident requiring the assistance of this facility. To ensure you are given an adequate amount of staff, we will provide financial incentives for doctors and nurses to work at your local aged care facility. However, we have more plans for healthcare in Miami Bay.
We believe that working families with young children deserve a place of medical reassurance. We intend to use another portion of our funds to establish a new public maternity and children’s hospital. Plans have been discussed to waive as many financial medical charges as possible. In term, this means only minimal payments are required for the use of this medical facility. The remaining money will be cut from the budget to decrease taxes.
Miami Bay can no longer be a good suburb. You can no longer settle for what you’ve been given. You can choose new leadership with fresh ideas and innovative plans. You can give everyone a fair go. You can vote for me, because together we will transform this community. Thank you.
One In A Billion: Speech
My mum. Just the sound of my topic might bore you to death but honestly, her life isn’t simple nor easy.
When I was only five, mum began to feel weak and unwell and it wasn’t just every once and a while. Everyday, as she describes it, mum felt as if she had run a marathon but she kept performing her home duties as well as working full time, hoping the pain would disappear. As you might have guessed it didn’t and after a doctor’s appointment, the doctor suggested she had chronic fatigue, a disease which makes you weak and tired. He perked her up with iron and vitamin B injections but after a only three weeks, the vitamins wore off and she was back to feeling bad.
In March 2001, mum was forced to quit work as the doctors diagnosed her with a rare disease called myositis. The disease, as it usually does, ate away at the muscles in mum’s limbs, making it hard to pick up things and walk. In the colder months of winter, mum found it hard to get out of bed and a lot of the time, she didn’t have the strength or energy to.
When 2002 came mum began to have difficulty breathing. Even walking made mum short of breath and soon she felt very limited in what she could do. The doctors knew something wasn’t right when mum’s face broke out in a butterfly rash. They ran some tests which proved she had DermatoMyositis, a disease which not only affects the limbs but her skin as well. She was put on heavy doses of steroids to help the disease but that also ended up affecting her. Mum’s right eye began to turn in each time she woke up or became tired and she gained around 20kg. Then the worst part came.
On the 21st of September 2003, mum was rushed to hospital not being able to breathe. In the early hours of the next morning, mum was pronounced clinically dead when her organs shut down. She said she saw herself inside a coffin with her children and husband standing over her. She saw the coffin closing but begged God not to let her go, that she was too young and that she would give up smoking if he let her live. Many doctors gave up but two young doctors wouldn’t let her go and thank god to them because mum pulled through. For three days, mum was unconscious but when she finally awoke, she stayed true to her promise and to this day hasn’t had another cigarette.
Later that year, mum’s GP was concerned at the fact that she was continually short of breath and having heart burn as well as high blood pressure. He referred her to a heart specialist at Sir Charles Gardner Hospital and in 2004 she was told she had heart failure. They kept monitoring her but finally decided to put a device in her which would monitor her heart. Bad results were found from this and at end of April 2005, mum was notified that her heart had deteriorated and she had Cardiomyopothy would require a heart transplant. Cardiomyopothy is when the heart enlarges itself to try and cope with the body’s workload. They implanted a deliberator which is a device that jump starts your heart. Over the course of six months, mum’s deliberator went off thirteen times, all for false reasons such as electric blankets or hot showers.
Around 11:30pm on Tuesday the 6th of December 2005, mum’s pager started to beep. The message lit up, “please ring the hospital” we knew this was the call we’d all been waiting for. Mum immediately got dressed and packed her bags before rushing to my grandma’s to tell me the good news. Half asleep I smiled “That’s great news” and soon mum was at the hospital. There was still four hours of tests to insure the donor’s heart was completely compatible. Fortunately it was and on Wednesday the 7th, mum was having the biggest operation of her life. However, during surgery, a large amount of air accidently entered mum’s body, causing her to fall into a coma.
She was immediately put into the Intensive Care Unit under 24 hour watch and two days later I was able to see her. Seeing her in that bed was one of the hardest moments of my life but the doctors were worried she wouldn’t make it through and wanted her closest friend to be with her. She had a large tube down her throat breathing for her, a nasal tube taking bile out of her stomach and her face was puffy and a weird colour. They tried three times to remove the breathing tube but every time she had a seizure. They finally got it out and on Saturday I came again to visit her. The doctors tried to wake her from her coma but they were unsuccessful. I sat on the edge of her bed and stroked her hand. I talked to her and asked her to wake up. I almost cried when I saw her eyes slowly open. It was a miracle.
Things weren’t all better though. Within the first three months, mum was in hospital on four different occasions, three times with an infection and once because there was water surrounding the heart. Over the next two years mum was in and out of hospital and in April 2007 mum’s new heart went into complete heart block and she was required to have a pace maker implanted. It helped immensely as it started getting her back on track but then something else went wrong. She was diagnosed with chronic kidney disease and had stents implanted in her arteries. These began to improve the function of her kidneys and the blood flow to the heart. So things still aren’t exactly perfect now, they’re testing to see if something is wrong with her oesophagus, she’s still taking 20 tablets daily and her myositis will never be cured. So with the myositis and the way her condition has deteriorated, doctors have stated that she is really, one in a billion.
It's Time For A Change: Speech
Do I look fat in this? Why can’t I look like the girls in magazines? How come people stare at me? These are the questions that many teenage girls ask themselves. I can probably guess how many people in this room put themselves down. Close your eyes, and raise your hand if you have ever told yourself that you are not beautiful, that you could lose weight or someone looks better than you. Open your eyes and look around, this number makes me feel terrible because it’s not only us in this room that put ourselves down, it’s many girls locally, nationally and globally.
In fact around 80% of teenage girls have body image issues. This means that day in and day out girls tell themselves that they are not beautiful, that there is someone better than them and that they aren’t special, but why you ask? I’ll tell you why, all adolescents are susceptible to the psychological phenomenon known as 'the imaginary audience'. What this means is that many teenagers are extremely concerned with what other people think and see of them because they believe everyone is constantly watching them, analysing them and making judgements about them.
A stain on their shirt, a pimple on their forehead; these are common examples of issues that most people would never notice about another, sometimes even themselves, but teenagers feel like it’s the only thing others notice. Teenagers feel the strong desire to fit in and be ‘like everyone else’ or do something like go on a diet because ‘everyone else does it’. If their peers are striving to look like supermodels then they will feel the need to do the same. For most teenagers trying to achieve an unrealistically thin body can lead to endless dieting, constant vigorous exercise, depression and the sometimes fatal eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia.
Add this obnoxious imaginary audience with a civilization obsessed with being sickly skinny, wearing expensive clothes and meeting the requirements of a certain trend and you can start to understand the day to day issues that each and every teenager has to contend with. However, these are not the only things you need to contemplate, what most people don’t realise is that you’re not always guaranteed to grow out of this phase. Studies have shown that many women over 40 are still dissatisfied with their appearance. This can mean that women of all ages, shelter themselves inside their homes, hiding their image from the world, it’s like a caterpillar living in a cocoon and never showing itself as the beautiful butterfly it is.
The best way to ease the stress from teenager dealing with body issues is to let them know that they are unique and should express themselves in their own way. They should also be informed that everyone has imperfections and issues such as acne are a part of life, but be careful not to say 'no one cares'. Telling a teenager no one cares is like telling them that no one will notice them. It’s an odd situation because while the teen fears everyone is watching them at the same time they don't want to feel like no one is noticing them. A common example is when a girl goes to get her hair done but when her boyfriend sees it, he says nothing. Wouldn’t you feel bad if that happened to you?
Being a teenager, I understand that teenagers will still do and believe in what they please, the best one can do is show teenagers that the Hollywood image is not the perfect image or the only image. It can be tough being a teenager with all the mixed signals one receives from society, the media, their parents, peers and friends. The pressure to have the ‘perfect’ body image in the 21st century is immense, especially with all the photo editing products used these days. Photoshop, Printshop and Paintshop are only a few of the photo editing programmes available nowadays but who would want to spend hundreds of dollars buying products to lower your self esteem, I’d suggest you all go and spend the money on a photo shoot instead of turning yourself into a stereotypical image
Stereotypical figures like the manikins in the shopping centres portray the wrong image. The size six plastic dolls help to ruin our self esteem. Am I right by saying that the clothes always look great on them but somehow not so great on us? These dolls are coat hangers for our clothes just as fashion designers are trying to make us. But who wants to say, isn’t she a lovely coat hanger or when I grow up I want to be a coat hanger. Designers are only interested in selling their clothes, no matter who gets hurt. It’s disgusting to see models that are size 4 and 6; they can barely work down a runway. They show these skeletal girls in magazines standing like racks with clothes on them. It’s a shame that healthy, normal sized women cannot be shown off to the world.
Magazines send the wrong impression to not only teenagers but older women as well. We look at these photos and see beautiful faces and stunning figures, but really what we’re looking at is 2D objects. These people don’t exist; you can’t even say they are plastic. They were once beautiful women but they entered the world of computer screens letting men and women edit their figures and touch-up their faces. They became pieces of papers, lies hidden under a computer screen. We look up to these people and think “why can’t I look like them” but really what we’re saying is why can’t I look like that piece of paper.
You may laugh but it’s true. Raise your hand if you have ever read a magazine and thought, I wish I was that pretty. I thought so. Everyone repeat after me. I don’t want to look like a piece of paper, I am me and I am beautiful. So, next time you read a magazine I don’t want you to say, I wish I was that pretty but say, I don’t want to look like a piece of paper, I am me and I am beautiful. So, it’s time for a change but not to change our bodies, it’s not time to change our lifestyle, our eating habits, our clothing, it’s time to change the rules.
Everlasting Battle: Poem
From evening to dawn they quarrel, in front of her teary eyes,
When morning comes he does not recall, the things that he has said,
He does not bear in mind, that those bruises on her arm,
In the best interest of their happiness they have now parted, and gone their separate ways,
But what about that little girl, who’s had to pick a side,
That little girl I’m sad to say, is closer than can be,
But don’t feel sorry for me or that little girl, because it was my mum that had the battle to fight.