Everybody is Talking. Nobody is Listening

Somehow this keeps coming up. It creeps out of under some rock- one that can walk, breathe and talk, apart from bat an eyelid perhaps- and crawls right into my head. And right now, truthfully, I am about over it.

My head is spinning like I never thought it possible. And my prayer, for years now, still holds; “please, let all this hypocrisy stop.”

There has been so much pretence and hypocrisy going on; both rolled in with double-dealing, backstabbing, lies and self-righteousness. It’s sickening.

I don’t mean to point fingers, and I wouldn’t.  It’s actually impossible considering that I wouldn’t have any left to point at myself. But to put it plainly; all this gay bashing has got to stop.

Let’s just calm down and listen to someone else other than ourselves for once. And maybe, just maybe, have more developmental and helpful views than simply become ignorant rants (no offence).

Where is all this anger and hate coming from? I mean the anger that you are welling up right now, only because I mentioned gay people without name-calling.

It is weird that sex, the one subject that affects us most, is public taboo.  Why should we rather not talk about some things? Why is it okay for your daughter to have numerous sexual partners so long as she puts up the “Holy Molly” image? Why do we insist to not talk about contraceptives and condoms with our children, but hope and pray that they ‘play it safe’, that they never contract diseases or die during an abortion? Who is that ultimate power in which we have this much faith?  The power that should clear or re-direct our mess? 

Like some before me, I have more questions than solutions and that may be because unlike in most other cases, here, there is one answer: let’s grow up and live in the real world. It’s about time. 

Plain and simple: we all want things the way they were meant to be, even when we are not sure which way that is exactly, or by whom the standards were set.  We just want to live the ideal life. But now is the time to snap out of this fantasy and get with the program. Just because ideally a man is supposed to have sexual relations with a woman (and vice versa) does not mean that when this is not always the order, we should throw tantrums and order those people to hell (because the Holy Bible says so) or worse, stage  public protests cursing the people who talk or write about these situations in the media.

Some people will blatantly argue that this country is conservative and to let people express their sexuality in national newspapers “which even our children read” is unacceptable. They will chant about “our morals” that are being threatened by this explicit gay debate. 

Okay, let’s listen to ourselves here. What is so conservative about this country exactly? And which morals are being threatened, for example? 

 It is not rational that we should consider tolerating more immoral or criminal behaviour that homosexuality is considered to be (in Uganda).  All am saying is;  cut the pretence. Why are you pulling out the Bibles now?  Why all these lies about our “unchanging morals” that will make space for women and men in power to cheat from the people they lead? Our values where adultery is understandable, bribery and corruption, necessary … I could go on.

 The reality we have to face is that homosexuals, bisexuals or whichever other sexuals there are, do not spring out of those articles published in newspapers. They are here already (more in the closet than those brave enough to come out- even if when masked) and they need you and me to read their stories, to hear them out.  

Let’s face it, with or without the media, these people are here with us; working with us in the same company, sleeping in our house, laughing at our jokes, playing a game of chess or darts in your favourite hang out, your best friend or relative.

Gay people are here, they’re real and they’re human.  And pretending that they aren’t, or ordering everyone around us to shut up about the issue will not make them, or this issue, to disappear. 

So let us live in the real world, see it for what it is and deal with it.  

(this couldnt make it to the paper, i hope it survives here)

Goodreads Poem of the Month

by Gabe from Colorado

                                       Damn all the good books

 

                Damn all the good books, 

               They call out my name, 

               I reach out to read them all, 

               Falling flat on my face with shame, 

               The timeless classics Don Quixote would say, 

               The newfound glories, Clancy and James Frey, 

               The poets like Poe 

               and Dickinson 

               Ms. Emily I feel your pain 

               But I haven't the time 

               To read every non-rhyme 

               and clear the shelves of Humor, 

               Mystery, History, Architecture 

               and all the good books call out 

               my name "Bend my sheath." "Break my spine." "Get familiar with me." 

               I haven't the time. 

               Damn all the good books!

Iam back

 I feel nauseated, my neck hurts, am not sure if my mind will still be working with me in the next hour…

I miss my sleep, i miss my church, I miss my sick grandmother who, even when visiting her (and grandad) will only cost me shs.500 taxi fare, I haven’t visited for two weeks.

So anyhow; my Friday is coming to an end today! I think immediately after i finish this post, shut down my pc and hop onto a boda-B home. Just typing that brings me joy.

I guess I need help from the pros; how do you guys do it? How does one have a fabulous life- you know- date, hung out with friends, do crazy nights out and then be able to go to work everyday of the week (and the weekend) go to church and be a part of your family?

I will shamelessly say that i have failed, ’cause I feel like a mess right now.  My head is spinning from all the dancing and wines and lack of sleep and…

So on Friday, I played the priorities game and opted out of both dates – without saying no or because or maybe next time. Without saying a thing actually. I chose work and I chose my (sometimes) favourite person’s birthday party.  I was there just before he did the cake cutting (that’s like saying vows in birthday party world) and i stayed… we all stayed even he wasn’t there (he had to work). 

I don’t know what was with me but the minute I entered club Rouge (that’s where the party was), I just had this crazy energy and I totally let loose and had a crazy blast.  My energy was infectious… We left Rouge at 4 in the morning.

During that crazy fun having time, I totally forgot about Saturday. I forgot that I had stuff to submit before the end of Saturday. I forgot that I was scheduled to attend a (work) training session from 8:30 until whenever. I forgot that Josh, my very good friend, whose wedding meetings and Kasiki I didn’t attend had asked me to miss the wedding only if I intend for us to never be friends again (he didn’t say it like that though).

I must have had one hour of sleep, ’cause at 6am my phone was alerting me that i had more important stuff to do than roll my tired body into a ball in bed. I worked abit, I did the training: it was really fun, i had no idea how much I have missed the classroom environment (school was my best part of growing up).

Thankfully the training ended early (1:30).  And i was through with  work at 5. I did manage to secure my friendship with Josh. I was at their wedding reception at 8pm. just the right time to consume more wine on an empty stomach.

Now, am not big on weddings, I have actually said that they depress me, but I really enjoyed this one. it was like the most beautiful and very cozy wedding I have attended.  When i commented that those two; Josh and bride, looked totally in love with each other from their body language and the general reception setting, the guys I was sited with all turned to me, as if on queue and went ” no man would get married in his twenties unless he was totally in love”.

In his short speech, Josh told us that he is smitten (not was).

Anyhow, it was done by midnight and after the small buddies get together thing that i missed out in the bachelor party I left at one.

And am now  leaving to go meet my bed, I have a debt to pay. Good thing my bed and I get a long very well… So long Little Jars.    

Can I?

This is not a good friday for me, especially because of how its supposed to end. if it does end at all.

One of my favourite people ( I hate him most of the time) is celebrating his birthday today.  He’s ‘mega b.d bash’ begins at 7 and ends at 11pm. And I must be there, i want to be there.

But thing is, i have a date that should go from 3 to 6pm, we planned to do a movie or something.  

And I have another one (another date); we are supposed to go for some house party…. a friend of his, who’s also a friend of mine, is throwing a house party tonite- I love house parties. 

Now, I can opt out of either one of these dates but i dont want to. I am not the kind who promises someone (or some ones) my most incredible company, and turn around to tell them am choosing not to.

So what’s my dilemma? I have work. I have an assignment that covers most of my tonight; from 7pm to midnight perhaps. which means i will miss out on my house party date, and the house party, my favourite person’s mega birthday bash and am starting to think that i dont want to do that movie date anymore, I will be cheating everyone else[involved].

oh, and i have work right now; alot of work, but none of what is on my computer sounds intelligent enough to pass. So i have to go over it again.

even this here is not what i intended to post. i just wanted to vent, and i havent…. I will be back. 

Common Place Books

“Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.”
–Oscar Wilde

When I was little, I kept a notebook, notebooks actually and journals.  I would write almost everything- everything in my line of interest.

 

I noted birth dates, anniversary dates, dates that were of significant meaning to me. I noted in  words whose meanings/definition I had no idea (so I could later look them up). I did most of my random writing there. I noted quotes, extracted paragraphs and statements from novels and books I would be reading.

 

They were my best friends these books; they were the only ones with whom I could freely express my self  and say what exactly was on my mind.I still have most these scrapbooks; I lost my favourite one however, a pocket notebook, which included some of my best quotes.

Anyhow, what is this all about again?

Today I was going through wordpress good reads and stuff, and I stumbled upon a link  where people post their quotable quotes.   

 

 Kay asks if people have any quotes from commonplace books.

People ask what a commonplace book is.

Kay posts a definition from Wikipedia.

 

“Commonplace books (or commonplaces) emerged in the 15th century with the availability of cheap paper for writing, mainly in England. They were a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They were essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: medical recipes, quotes, letters, and poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas.

Readers, writers, students, and humanists used commonplaces as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts they had learned. Each commonplace book was unique to its creator’s particular interests.
 

… Both Emerson and Thoreau were taught to keep commonplace books at Harvard (their commonplace books survive in published form). Commonplacing was particularly attractive to authors. Some, such as Coleridge and Mark Twain, kept messy reading notes that were intermixed with other quite various material; others, such as Thomas Hardy, followed a more formal reading-notes method that mirrored the original Renaissance practice more closely. The older, “clearinghouse” function of the commonplace book, to condense and centralize useful and even “model” ideas and expressions became less popular over time.

Critically, many of these works are not seen to have literary value to modern editors. However, the value of such collections is the insights they offer into the tastes, interests, personalities and concerns of their individual compilers. From the standpoint of the psychology of authorship, it is noteworthy that keeping notebooks is in itself a kind of tradition among litterateurs. A commonplace book of literary memoranda may serve as a symbol to the keeper, therefore, of the person’s literary identity (or something psychologically not far-removed), quite apart from its obvious value as a written record.

That commonplace books (and other personal note-books) can enjoy this special status is supported by the fact that authors frequently treat their notebooks as quasi-works, giving them elaborate titles, compiling them neatly from rough notes, recompiling still neater revisions of them later, and preserving them with a special devotion and care that seems out of proportion to their apparent function as working materials.” 

Just thought its great to have this on my blog; especially because I had no idea that my numerous little notebooks had a name- Commonplace Books.

Black Sorrow

Her entire life, until now, had been padded and sheltered a lot more than even she was aware of.

She had it all going for her, yet only the people far, far away could see that.  She never knew what she was risking, she never noticed who she was losing. No one warned her, she now tells, no one tried to wake her out of the trance. Not even her closest friend, he who knew all her secrets, he who had the ability to see through her and bore the gift to change about her what no one else could, never, not even, once mentioned to her that the light she was walking towards, that light at the end of the tunnel in which she was caught, was only an approaching train.

And now here she lies all bruised and broken, crashed and left for the worms that feed on the helpless.

Why can’t some one get her out of here, why can’t any one save her from this earthen confinement? And what is this little thing in which she lies, she wonders in panic. It looks nothing like her bed, no. The big beautiful wooden bed where she spent so many teary eyed nights, hugging onto her soft pillow, pulling onto her covers. The bed in which she would run to seek solace and safety from the people and the world she believed despised her.

“Why would one push away the people that care so much about her? How, oh how, can we not see the love we receive, the affection we are bestowed upon by the people in and out of our lives,” her speechless voice wonders. 

 Instead we cry and complain. We blame them for what they do not give. We demand of them what they cannot offer. We want more, we want nothing at all. We seek for the impossible, we reach out to those things that can only hurt us- because that’s what we lack-being hurt, true pain. In the end we are, like in a JK Rowling story, chasing after wizards and witches that live only in our self tortured minds. And finally we learn the truth; that we are all by ourselves. Not even stray cats would want to  live with us, because we do not live are any more. We  have no home.

Only the red earth can shelter us. Only a wooden box can hold our fragile bodies together, and that’s only for a moment.   

Let’s Play

There’s something going on in the Big Brother house; I am not sure if its just I or Big Brother is intentionally trying to rob the entire public of what should be theirs-explicit entertainment.

I should have guessed from the very first night; just in an hour of these guys meeting, they engrossed in a macho argument. Justice and Kwaku (should be Kwaku) and Richard, and more, sprang into action arguing about the power of the white race versus the black race. an issue not only too sensitive to be discussed on South African based TV but also, just plain boring.  Right there was (not-so-little) miss Namibia asking for some one, any one, to touch her breasts and affirm (to her, most likely) that they were not fake. and Lerato just wanted to let the point sink in that since she’s the girl from the ‘host country’, she would be the queen of the pack. and what a shame that all the guys could come up with as their ‘bonding’ story was, why white people make more money, and are more successful than black people. Does any one ever think of Orientals, the Hispanics… I was almost picking my phone to call Timothy Kalyegira. I actually did pick it up, then i remembered, I had never imagined that i would ever need his phone number this bad. 

So back to the house mates and big brother’s not-secret-any more- mission; If there is any one hoping that some action, sexually speaking, is going to take place in that house, just switch to the premiership already. The only people having sex or sexual thoughts with any big brother housemates are the guys in Namanve; whoever it is that does the show’s commentary for the Red Pepper. end of story.

Thing is, Biggie (that’s every one in that control room/sponsors of the show), like every other enterprising individual, knows that you can always win with the sex card; push the ratings, get people talking and others addicted, because, lets face it, there is a voyeur in each one of us. But he also knows the power of giving the client what they least expected-a great alternative!

So now instead of having sex, (and by sex i mean everything sexual) they are talking about it, at very great length.

That should be fun, right. its what little high school kids spend their break time dreaming of -the sheer freedom of expressing themselves sexually, just in speech.   and when they grow up to get jobs and homes, they take time off to talk about sex. the ladies meet in coffee shops or bridal and baby showers,  the men meet in pubs or the office cafeteria, and live it up. you have no idea , well may be you do,  how just a chest, that plain old chest of yours, can be a result of the most ellicit talk any man/woman has ever had.

And now biggie has put it right there, in our living rooms. That indeed should be a very good thing. Only it isnt. 

These housemates are talking about the gross kind of sex; they are going on about sex in terms of  diseases, violence, abuse and death.

So it shouldnt surprise any one that even when not-so-little Miss Namibia is stuck in the Jacuzzi, physically begging for some guy to touch her;  sitting up, sitting down, turning this way and moving her legs that way. no one is going to.

Not because they dont want to. who wouldn’t want to. but because the self given sensitization talks are working. No one will conclude a speach of ’sex kills’ and ‘Let’s choose Life’. And then, with the same people and the same audience, dive right into it. 

 Poor not-so-little-Miss 21.  

Wow

i gues am am now going to stick to this ‘presentation’.  It is more like me and workable.

Ping Pong

I am either, at the very last, becoming all soapy and emotional about stuff that never used to concern me not so long ago, or the girl that my grandmother raised, along time ago, is finally coming to the surface, slow paced, but she still is.

Suddenly, the sun happens to have come out and my garden flowers are in bloom. Everything has some bright colour to it; the boys are cuter and all the girls have bigger hips than I (yes. it’s a very good thing). My boring life seems so filled up with activity and my normally slow mind can do with a break, every once in while now. Without exaggerating this feeling that’s started to overwhelm me, I feel more real, more in touch with my surroundings and myself. I have started to notice the little things in life, to appreciate the people behind a great movie or stage performance, I am now aware of how much I have taken for granted the people who love me. I have started to realise that the idea of growing up, of having fun is not racing through your young life, sampling on this, shoplifting that and spending the following day, going on to whoever cares about how ‘badass’ you were.

Probably, this is what growing up is like. Maybe when people start on their journey into maturity their focus, subconsciously, switches to the things that matter most, the aspects of life that are actually essential to their lives. I have, on a number of occasions now, caught myself with a lump in my throat or teary eyed at a well documented horrific story broadcast on Al Jazzera or actually touched by that poor old woman whose only idea of ‘a better place’ is 6ft. lower into the red earth. It should be little wonder that last Friday I caught myself starting to put my hands together in applause for that story in Monitor that Moses Serugo had written about saxophonist Isaiah Katumwa. And yesterday, I had a lump in my throat while reading a piece of Glenna Gordon’s titled ‘Why I write.’ With these two pieces I certainly realized why I want to write, why I have always wanted to write. It is really magical how so connected to a person – a stranger- you feel, when you read their stories. It is in their choice of words, the voice that runs through, the emphasis on some statements and down play on others; some times you can swear you know these people. And most times you do know them a point more than the people who have lived with them, the people who should know them.

It almost feels wonderful that am getting over my obsession with Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, the entire Hollywood brat pack and can instead focus on how much I miss Whitney Houston. The beautiful, talented, ready-to-fill-up-my soul Whitney Houston.

Help

Okay, am almost sure am not going to get the works of this any time soon. Maybe am just too…

I cant upload pictures. plus, why does my second posting look the way it does. Can some one provide me with hints, anyone?!