Anisha

When you're half way through the draft and realize that you wrote in the wrong genre for themes you wish to explore.
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‎NEW RULES FOR FIFA WORLD CUP 2026
‎‎Football/soccer fans, are you aware that the International Football Association Board (IFAB) has approved changes to the rules which will take effect at the 2026 FIFA World Cup? Come with me:
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‎1. RED CARD FOR COVERING YOUR MOUTH
‎‎Players who cover their mouths with their hands, arms, or shirts in confrontational situations will receive a red card. This rule does not apply to friendly conversations. A player whispering tactics to a club teammate on the opposing side, for instance, will not be punished. The rule was triggered by the Vinicius Jr/Prestianni incident in the UEFA Champions League when Benfica's Prestianni covered his mouth while saying something to Vinicius Jr. which Prestianni later alleged was not a racist slur but an anti-gay slur. 🙄
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‎2. FIVE-SECOND COUNTDOWN ON THROW-INS AND GOAL KICKS
‎‎Referees will raise their hand to signal a five-second countdown for all throw-ins and goal kicks. For throw-ins, if the ball is not in play after five seconds, possession is awarded to the opposing team. For goal kicks, if the kick is not taken within five seconds, the opposing team is awarded a corner kick. This is targeted at the glacial time-wasting that has plagued tournament football for years.
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‎3. TEN-SECOND SUBSTITUTION RULE
‎‎Players being substituted have just 10 seconds to leave the field once the fourth official has raised the substitution board. If they fail to comply, their replacement must wait at least one minute before entering, and only at the next stoppage in play. As has been the case, players must exit via the closest point to the sideline. This rule was already trialled in a Japan vs Iceland fixture, where Iceland conceded a late goal directly as a result of their substituted player failing to exit the field in time.
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‎4. GOALKEEPER TACTICAL TIMEOUT BANNED
‎‎The so-called "tactical timeout" where a goalkeeper strategically goes to ground for treatment while outfield teammates rush to the touchline to receive instructions from the coach, before the keeper simply gets up and plays on has now been banned. If a goalkeeper is injured, players of both teams must stay where they are or gather in the centre circle. They are not permitted to approach the bench. One of the most high-profile recent examples of the practice came when Leeds boss Daniel Farke accused Manchester City goalkeeper Donnarumma of feigning injury to break up play in a Premier League fixture. There are no yellow cards or disciplinary sanctions attached to violations. Referees will simply be proactive in preventing players from approaching the benches.
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‎5. INJURED OUTFIELD PLAYERS MUST WAIT BEFORE RETURNING
Any player who receives off-field medical treatment must exit the game and wait one minute after play restarts before returning to the pitch. This is to kill off the feigned injury as a time-wasting tool.
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‎6. EXPANDED VAR POWERS
VAR's scope has been significantly broadened in three key areas: 1) VAR can now be used to check and overturn clearly incorrect second yellow cards, and to correct cases of mistaken identity where a card has been shown to the wrong player. 2) incorrectly awarded corner kicks can now be subject to VAR intervention, provided the correction can be made immediately without delaying the restart. 3) VAR can now intervene if a foul is spotted before a corner or free kick is taken. For instance, if an attacker is seen blocking a defender before the ball is in play from a set piece. Arsenal inspired this one. Come and beat me, I'm at home. 😂

‎7. RED CARD FOR LEAVING THE FIELD IN PROTEST
‎I knew this one woild be here after that Senegal "kafwafwa". Players who leave the field of play in protest against a referee's decision will be shown a red card. The rule applies equally to any team official who incites players to leave the field. Teams that cause a match to be abandoned will forfeit it.

‎8. MANDATORY HYDRATION BREAKS
Each half at the World Cup will feature a three-minute hydration break, the timing of which is at the referee's discretion.

NB: This is an AI generated image. It may contain errors. Fortunately, they're not medical errors so we can all relax. 😀

When I read the trending post by the gentleman who wrote about hospitals killing people, I immediately agreed with him. 😂 Unfortunately, I have this thing where, if I find myself aligning with something too quickly, I give it time to marinate before I act on it. So I silently followed the discourse and awaited the backlash I knew was coming. And finally, here I am.

They say we see the world as we are, not as it is. To a large extent, I believe that. My post-graduate marketing dissertation investigated how certain brands use a specific tactic to secure their market, a tactic called Emotional Targeting. In simple terms, it is the deliberate use of emotion to influence how an audience thinks, feels, and behaves. In media terms, it means giving your audience a feeling first, and letting that feeling do the interpretive work. Fear. Outrage. Hope. Belonging. Nostalgia. You name it. The emotion is the entry point, and everything else, including the facts is merely furniture arranged around it. I read that post through that lens. And I could not unsee what I saw.

HOSPITALS ARE KILLING YOU. GOING TO ONE MIGHT BE THE WORST DECISION OF YOUR LIFE.
That is a very sensational headline, and it does exactly what it was intended to do: evoke fear and outrage. Fear is the highest-engagement emotion in content marketing. It bypasses deliberate thinking by creating urgency and making people share before they reflect. I'm in the business of strategic communications, so I know this because I use it a lot. There was a time they said headlines are a summary of a story, but not in the modern age of social media and algorithms. And the headline, "HOSPITALS ARE KILLING YOU" was not a summary of the content. It was the content itself. For the majority of people who never read past line one, that headline IS "the" argument.

The body of the post cited real research, and what better than a Johns Hopkins study! Most importantly, I could relate to the narrative because after certain experiences, I no longer believe fhat the primary concern of most hospitals is healthcare. They may simply be in the "business of healthcare." The distinction is important, but that's not my concern here, and that's definitely an uneducated opinion. There is a well-documented psychological mechanism where the presence of credible data creates a halo that extends to everything around it. And I may be using this theory in real time as I write this. Watch out. 😀 The audience stops auditing individual claims. They see "Johns Hopkins" and their critical faculty relaxes. What they don't see is that the 250,000 figure is US-specific, methodologically contested, and extended to Zambia with zero Zambian data. The real evidence was load-bearing scaffolding for conclusions it doesn't actually support. I thought thay was brilliant marketing. 😁 Selective, fear-anchored, emotionally engineered marketing.

And then the backlash came. And the second campaign launched. The gentleman said, "I WILL NOT BE SILENCED." I thought, uko, we have ourselces a martyr on our hands. 😂 The threats he received, if real, were wrong and indefensible, but I saw them coming from a mile away. We do not get to choose our tools and disclaim our outcomes. Own the outcomes, and then establish the parameters of communication.

My point here is: the underlying patient safety issues he raised are real and documented. That conversation needed to happen, but it deserved better than the framing he gave it. The framing was anchored in fear and engineered to alarm. And my position is that it was reckless because packaging a legitimate message that way puts real people at risk of making real decisions based on an incomplete picture. His weapon of choice was fear. HOSPITALS ARE KILLING YOU. If advocacy and genuine information sharing were the primary goals, that framing worked against him. It invited exactly the kind of reactive, entrenched response that shuts down the conversations patient safety actually needs. Which leads to a discussion of solutions. But, if attention (trending) was the goal, he did a phenomenal job!

To the men who proposition me because they assume I'm easy simply because I speak openly about s*x online, to you i say: muza luma njanji. You'll be talking to yourselves in the inbox. I made a promise to myself years ago to be a voice for women on topics society has deemed taboo for us. If you go through my feed, you'll notice that my niche areas of discourse aren't spaces where you'll find many women. That is by design.

I grew up in a home with an overprotective father who would threaten to have my mother conduct virginity tests on us girls. We were very young when the first threat was made, too young to even understand what was being searched for. No such threat was ever made to my brothers. I was a little girl when i was told I needed to pull my l***a so my future husband could enjoy me more. But no one explained to me what that could mean for my own enjoyment. And so I had a mountain of questions about s*x, about my body, about the strange and unfamiliar things I was beginning to feel as I grew up. And there was no one to ask. I would read Harlequin novels under the desk at school and wonder about the wetness in my pants. I couldn't ask my parents or my peers. I was afraid of being shouted at at home and judged among friends. For a woman, ignorance was apparently virtue.

Then, years later, as a married woman, I sat in a room with other married women at an intimate gathering. What I heard disturbed me deeply. Close to 80% of the women in that room had something in common. Many rarely orgasmed in their marriages. Others were too afraid to be expressive in bed, terrified of being judged by their own spouses. Others said that when they tried something new, their husbands became suspicious and accused them of infidelity, as though desire itself was evidence of betrayal. And others couldn't be honest about feeling short-changed in the bedroom because their husbands responded by calling them names that implied they were too "loose," or that they had "played too much" before marriage to find them satisfying now. These were married women. In the privacy of their own bedrooms. Silenced.

That room is why I do this.

I want women to own their bodies. To own their s*xuality without shame, without the constant threat of being misread, mischaracterised, or reduced. I want to dismantle the idea that a woman speaking openly about s*x is morally bankrupt, that her frankness is an invitation, a confession, or a character flaw. Now, I anticipate the objections. 🙄 To the "but s*x is sacred" brigade, yes, I agree, but sacredness and silence are not the same thing. The silence we impose on women around s*xuality is mostly about control. Sacred things deserve honest, informed, and dignified engagement. What we've been doing instead is leaving women ignorant, ashamed, and unable to advocate for themselves even within the most intimate spaces of their own lives.

To the "there's a time and place" brigade, also true, but "time and place" has historically been used to mean "never and nowhere" when the speaker is a woman. I am not live-streaming my bedroom. I am having conversations about s*xuality as a dimension of human experience. The same conversations that health professionals, therapists, researchers, and writers have been having for decades. The objection only arises because a woman is the one having them publicly. Eh "you're attracting the wrong attention." And so what? Why should I self-censor to manage male behaviour? Am I your mother or spouse? The men who proposition me are not doing so because I failed to be careful enough. They're doing so because they've been conditioned to read a woman's openness as availability, and it is that same conditioning I'm pushing back against. I discuss politics, economics, philosophy, theology, etc, on here and yes, I get propositioned on those too. The rate simply multiplies when the topic is s*x, which tells you everything you need to know.

My primary objective has never been to attract a following, manage a brand, or perform liberation for applause. If I wanted those things, I would be posting naked pictures of myself or writing sob stories because the world enjoys other people's pain. I want to give women the courage and space to be seen and heard. To be fully-fledged human beings who are not reduced to a single thing. A place where a woman does not have to pretend she is not a s*xual being in order to be taken seriously in every other area of her life. The world adjusted to seeing pregnant women in public, knowing full well what put them in that condition. That same world will adjust to this too. A woman can be articulate, ambitious, politically engaged, spiritually grounded, and also unashamed about her body and her pleasure. These things can be true at once. The discomfort you feel about that coexistence is yours to examine, not mine to manage. Munza luma njanji.

‎I just saw a post somewhere... where the ex to one of these popular boys was talking about how he is so cheap, how he bought her a fake designer bag and took her to some cheap salon in town. I died laughing. 😂 The thing that stood out for me in the comments is how almost everyone, especially men where laughing at her and calling her entitled. And unfortunately, I agreed with them...but not for the reasons you may think. She should be charging him for something, but certainly not her nails or hair.
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‎There is this expectation most women have that when they have a boyfriend (we're not talking marriage here, this distinction is important), then they have gained a financial fairy to make all their bills disappear. Men know this, and that's why when pursuing you, they'll present themselves as capable of making that fantasy come true. Until you both realize you're mad.

‎But that's not the conversation I want to have right now. There is a cost that women incur everytime they lay with a man, and it is a cost that's rarely discussed in the open. I'm not talking about STIs, that's a conversation that goes without saying. When a man and woman have unprotected s*x, his body introduces semen into hers. Now, semen is alkaline (pH 7.2 to 8.0). The healthy va**nal environment is acidic (pH 3.8 to 4.5). This acidity is her body's frontline defence. It keeps her microbiome balanced and protects her from infections. It is, quite literally, her internal security system.

‎His semen disrupts it. Every single time.
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‎Her body works to restore that balance, typically within six to eight hours. But if this is happening regularly, if the exposure is frequent, if her microbiome is already under any kind of stress, that restoration becomes harder. The disruption compounds. And what follows is real, recurring, and costly.
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‎It may come in the form of Bacterial Vaginosis. You (woman) also becomes more susceptible to UTIs and other infections. The need for pH-balanced intimate care products, specific probiotic supplements, more frequent gynaecological visits, and sometimes prescription treatment. All of these things cost money. Him? He came and went, literally and figuratively. You? Oh no. One wrong move and he'll be the first one to laugh at you for smelling like a fish!

‎Apart from the risk of carrying STIs, men pay nothing else biologically after s*x. His body introduced the disruption and walked away completely intact. You the woman is left managing the aftermath of something you both participated in and both enjoyed. And knowing the quality of some of these men nowadays, you probably never even came, but he did. And even worse, you may even become pregnant but ninshi sunafike nofika iwe. Chenve chinafika, Noyenda! Iwe trapped for the next nine months and from then on, you'll have another human or humans glued to your side everywhere you go wanting to be fed, protected, and educated. For 18+ years!
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‎And yet somehow, someone decided that men financing women's aesthetics is the thing we must pursue as an entitlement. What about your va**na, Mary? How about men financing the direct health consequences of their own s*xual choices? That conversation does not exist. We have never even thought to have it. I'm not saying a man should pay for a woman's existence.

What I'm saying is, ‎if your choices, specifically, your insistence on unprotected s*x are creating recurring costs in my life, costs tied directly to your biology interacting with mine, then you do not get to be a silent beneficiary of that arrangement. Shared pleasure cannot come with unshared consequences. This isn't a feminist rant. Ask any doctor. See if they'll disagree. So no, she probably shouldn't be asking him to pay for her hair or nails. But someone should absolutely be asking why nobody is telling her to hand him the receipt for her probiotics. Because that's something she's very much entitled to.

‎In another episode of I'm Definitely Going to Die Single:
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‎XY Specie: I love my meals fresh off the stove. Can't stand reheated food. And I hate eating the same meal more than once a day. So I expect my woman to do her thing, you know. 😁
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‎XX Fairy: I like to take trips abroad at least once every three months. I'm focusing on the Nordic countries now. I've done Denmark and Norway. Up next is Sweden and Finland. I expect my man to do his thing, you know. 😁
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‎XY: 😂 Can you afford to take yourself on those trips?
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‎XX: With the money you'll be paying me for being your personal chef, I'm sure I can afford it. I don't come cheap you know. 😁
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‎XY: Who says anything about paying you? 🙄
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‎XX: Can you cook? 🙃
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‎XY: I'm a man. 😎
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‎XX: And I'm a woman. 🤷🏾‍♀️ We both clearly love to live beyond our means so we're a perfect match! 😁
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‎This conversation never happened. But it could. 😂 Do with this information as you wish. 🤔

‎For those of us following the Senegal political drama that reads like a political thriller, we have an update. 😁
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‎Senegal's President Bassirou Diomaye Faye has unveiled a new government, and PASTEF, the party that put him in office, will not be part of it. Sonko announced it himself after a meeting with Faye on Monday produced what he described as "points of disagreement" about the future role of the party in the executive. Recall, PASTEF holds a parliamentary majority. Its founder is Speaker of the National Assembly. And it will not be represented by a single minister in the government of the country it governs.
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‎The context of this development is that PASTEF didn't simply refuse to participate. Before that refusal, the party's Executive Committee had published a formal document laying out seven conditions for participation: faithfulness to the 2024 electoral programme, clarity on debt management, a block on cost-of-living increases, and continuation of strategic contract renegotiations. Faye met none of them. Instead, he went around the party entirely, recruited individual PASTEF members directly for the cabinet, and appointed a technocratic economist as Prime Minister with a specific mandate to re-engage the IMF. Conclusion? PASTEF put terms on the table. The terms were rejected. The party walked.
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‎What this means in practice is that Faye has now answered, definitively, the question every political marriage of this kind must eventually answer: when two people share power, who is actually in charge?
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‎Faye says: the president is.
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‎Sonko says: the movement is.
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‎And thing is, ironically, both of them are right. Faye controls the executive. Sonko controls everything else. The party, the legislature, the activist base, the ideological soul of a movement that millions of young Senegalese built their political identity around. And in four days, Sonko convenes PASTEF's first-ever party congress where the agenda includes, in his own words, clarifying "the relationship between the party and the state." At a congress he controls. With a party that just voted 132 to 1 to make him Speaker.
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‎Meanwhile Senegal has until June 30 to reach key agreement points with the IMF on a frozen $1.8 billion programme, against a debt burden sitting at 132% of GDP. The man Faye appointed to handle that crisis leads a cabinet that the parliamentary majority has just formally rejected. Every piece of legislation that crisis response requires has to pass through a legislature controlled by the man Faye fired. This is either a very bold presidential assertion of independence or the most expensive political miscalculation in Senegal's post-independence history. I genuinely don't know which one yet. But I am watching and enjoying these developments way more than I should. It's like a live action seminar on political rivalry. Riveting! 😁

‎I was having a conversation with someone recently that left me with a pounding headache. 😀 Have you ever spoken to a closed-minded person? Someone who is very rigid in thought. They only know their way of life and beliefs and anything outside of it is either wrong or abnormal. To attempt to shift or widen their perspective is an exercise in futility. It's exhausting. I wanted to hate this person. I really did. But then I looked at them...seriously considered them and realized something.
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‎"Do you read fiction?" I asked.
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‎They were visibly taken aback by my line of questioning. "No," they answered, defensively, as if I had just accused them of a heinous crime. 😂
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‎"What do you read?" I asked, trying my best not to punch their matobo that's safekeeping all that hate and judgement.
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‎"I haven't read anything in a while since my Masters, but I read books related to my work once in a while." I rounded that off to the nearest bongo-bongo and it translated to - I read lots of documents at work. 😀
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‎"Have you ever travelled outside the place you were born or abroad?"
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‎"Yes, for my Masters, Namibia." They quickly added that they didn't explore much of Namibia because they used every break they had to come home to their young family and attend to their church duties because they hold a leadership position in their church.
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‎There's a reason I asked if they read fiction or if they travelled. The travelling one is obvious (I hope, 😀), so I'll talk about the power of reading fiction and how that can train you to inhabit other consciousnesses, which in turn will allow you to have higher levels of empathy. And the bonus is, when you chat with people, they'll assume you're highly intelligent in numerous subjects when all you've ever done is vicariously live the lives of millions of imagined characters experiencing life-like events. 😁
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‎People who have not developed rich conceptual frameworks for understanding human interiority will genuinely struggle to empathize, not because they are cruel or indifferent, but because they simply lack the cognitive vocabulary for it. They can't map what they're seeing in another person onto any internal model because no such model has been built. They simply do not have the conceptual range and narrative exposure. Their world is narrow, and so is their perspective. It's a question about how much you've been required by life or by literature or just by genuine encounter to model a consciousness that does not resemble your own.
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‎So, what am I trying to say? Read more fiction, especially literary fiction. Travel. It's cute that you still live in the same compound or village or town you were born, but please dearie, leave that place once in a while. See what the other side is like. 😁 And while you're at it, I would recommend reading Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life," the novella that's the source material for the Oscar-winning movie "Arrival."
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‎Both works centre on Dr. Louise Banks, a linguist recruited by the military after twelve alien spacecraft position themselves at various points across the globe. The movie explores themes of language and reality (that different languages represent different systems of thought, and that understanding different languages is a key component of empathy). Other themes include time and free will, otherness and institutional failure (how we respond to people/thing that are unfamiliar or different from us), parenthood and grief, etc. The novella is quieter, more internal, and more philosophically rigorous, which is more my kind of thing. You won't come out on the other side the same way you went in. Both pieces of work are mind-transforming.