Monday 14 January 2013

Lessons from 2012,part two


So last week I shared with you why 2012 remains my most practical unit of the fifteen units I registered for in the last academic year. You might not understand what a major fete that was beating serious units like Maternal Health that contains intellectual topics like how to breastfeed, when to initiate coitus after delivery, or how lactational amenorrhea affects copulation and by extension family planning. The unit CORDed LIFE 2012, I maintain was more practical than how depo causes long term fertility concerns or the epidemiology of Nyeri’s current population state and the underlying factors for the male battering in the county we learnt in population health in development by Dr. Dr. Dr. Onsongo, the guy from Yunaired States (Ugenya, Siaya, and Alego).

If you don’t fathom any of the above terminologies don’t beat yourself, it took me three months of pilgrimage to The Kenyatta university postmodern library to acquaint myself with some of this basic terms. Biko Zulu once said that the tragedy of bloggers is that they think people get time to just  sit, relax and read page after page of hard prose. With this in mind, I cut short my story last time, to live to write another day-today.

Sometimes when they say it’s the small things in life that matter, relationship experts and some arm chair analysts have always confused us. To them the small things in life that matter are like opening doors, paying compliments, acknowledging new hairstyles among other such chores. What the founder of the phrase meant, in my esteemed opinion, is that petite objects such as SIM cards, USB cables, flash disks, IDS and such tiny stuff that have a high propensity to get lost should be handled with care.2012 taught me just why it’s of crucial importance to remember where you left your keys, all keys including Omsakhulu’s bike with a mounted one band radio which ‘catches’ only Mulembe FM radio and has got huge speakers made of clay. This year I have heavily invested in a trench coat with pockets the size of my sufuria where I will be keeping such stuff to avoid the mental anguish of turning my room (ok Byudeh, I know it’s your room too) upside down in search of small voiceless objects. Just hope it rains heavily so that you get to see my orange trench coat. 

Listening is a skill that can never be taken for granted, it’s a must have for anybody who wants a fulfilling relationship. Women, I realized are just like radios, one doesn’t know what to expect. Some Bonokode and Mbuside may strike a conversation in the middle of a beautiful song. Those Celine Dion songs that you just listen to and slip into another world. You not sure what the next caller to Maina and Kingang’i is going to say. Whether it’s ‘all men are the same’ or ‘aki I don’t know wat’s wrong with him’ or ‘I used all my money in December’. You not sure whether Alejandro wa Githu is going to be busted by one Wamaitha. And though they share that uncanny ability to speak all day just as the radio, they are even better in that they can’t be switched off. I had figured the best way to have my cake and eat it was to feign interest, pretend to be listening, nod your head sometimes and an occasional mmmh to spur her to go on. I was always careful to remember to laugh when she smiled or show the face of Aladeen when required. After all you don’t want to be smiling while she’s telling you how her friend sat on her baby Sue. Sue in this story is a teddy bear. To cut a long story short you’ll get caught, guaranteed. This year I choose to listen, or to skim through. Surely a nigga can multitask, just so how you know how not to reply to texts like;

“Babe uko wapi?”
“Tufanyaje sasa ile story?”

Even for those of us who went to a school with the motto perseverance shall win through and saw the truth of this statement in our high school lives, sometimes it gets so tough that you just wana quit. When we left the Maseno School Bakora Hockey Team we thought we knew all hockey. Alongside Odhys and Byudeh, then called Dunda we used to be the perfect midfield. So getting to Vultures Hockey and finding a pool of over 70 players, we weren’t afraid of the competition for the 16 man match squad. However, that wasn’t meant to be. This team had people who could hit the ball from one province to the other, people like Gilly who could score from any angle. Sometimes we used to appear on match day in suits with our hockey regalia lurking in the background. If you dint get to have a jersey well and good, you could always claim to your super fans that you got an injury. If you did get an appearance, mostly five minutes, you could still use the same line,

 ‘the injury I was telling you is why I dint play much’.

 But we dint give up, we trained, I perfected my curve, he perfected his sembe. The situation may have drastically changed with the retirement of senior players and the rise to captaincy of one Juma Juma but it was surely a reward for our perseverance .Even though today he might not be as popular as Messi, but any sports journalist in East Africa worth his salt surely knows who Byudeh is. They would tell you something like;

‘Ah, you mean that guy who plays to the left of the Varaq?”
match day,


 sorry i coudnt get you a photo of omsa's bike,alikuwa anataka kuku mingi,he still does barter trade pekee

2012 also taught me that contrary to what our primary school teachers said, women are beautiful people. They are our sisters, our mothers, our significant others and our daughters for the early birds who caught the early fertile worms. They are great company, they can sustain an intellectual conversation, one can lay bare their genuine fears and get reprieve. There’s of course the probability that your insecurities will spread across the campus with some new details inserted to make the story juicier. Conversation between Wekemeu, Gythy, Mcwho, Sad News is usually about who the stronger man is, who Manpower and Adam would be most proud of. Sorry guys, am not ratting you out, am still a loyal member of your little sect. 2012 made me realize that there are two types of ladies to be afraid of; the one with more ambition than you do and the damsels in distress. The former because she’ll drop you like an empty bottle of liquor when somebody with more balls passes by. I don’t understand why my basic anatomy classes taught me that all male Homo sapiens sapiensa have the same number of balls. As for the damsel in distress you can figure out why, that aint rocket science.

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