on the last day of a generally eventful trip round the sun

One of the things my experience with life does is it makes me afraid of the future. Obsessing over what might be, what might happen. Most of the time I end up picking on the negative and magnifying it so that in the end my future looks like doomsday. Instead of being content with whatever I have, I obsess about what I don’t have, what I could have gotten and in the end I feel like a loser. So in the end I have all this fear of the future, like there’s nothing I can do to change it. That is, simply put, fear of novelty, fear of newness, fear of the future. For most people, the future is something to look forward to. Something to be all excited and happy about. At least they have something to look forward to. I’m not one of those people. I shrink at the hint of me tomorrow. I see failure, and in this I’m afraid to do anything that would improve my future. I go, “after all, it’s not like I have something to look forward to”. Obsession is unhealthy. Something that’s completely destructive. Damaging both to the body and the mind. But it happens so often and so regularly that it’s considered normal. With time, it becomes normal, it even becomes the thing that we do. Obsess. Over trivial things. Like clothes, looks, the opinions of others… Things that we otherwise wouldn’t care about given a choice. Like I don’t care what clothes I’m wearing or what the make of my phone is until I see something I perceive as better. That’s when the mind goes into overdrive and questions like why I’m not like that person, why I don’t have what he has and what I should do to become like that person become the focus of your thoughts, your actions. TV The lack of an opposing force makes it worse. It’s a career for some, advertising and induced peer pressure. To be perfectly honest, it involves thoughts of death and destruction of the person that is me, the individual, for the will of the world to be done. I wanted to be like other people. I hated me. I didn’t want to be me. I hated me. I’d imagine the world just moving on over my dead body, like the cog in the wheel, whose presence isn’t as important, because what’s one cog in an engine with six billion gears? I felt inconsequential. And this would get me angry and depressed. Hating the world and blaming it for what I thought it had made me. Turns out that that was one of the many things I had become obsessed with. Making the world “feel” me and who I was. But one thing I realized was that that was what I wanted me to believe. That the world was so bad that the only escape was to build an internal world. A place where I would be safe from other people. I wished I had an alternate that I could become whenever I wanted. Switching when the circumstances changed. In effect I became a me person. With the burden of all this I slowly cracked and obsessed about a future after a complete meltdown. With the world having deserted me, all that was left was for me to desert myself and whatever I decided would be the eventual outcome of my life. But I didn’t. I left the world to its devices and set to fixing myself. Becoming a person. Becoming real. All this time I was just toying with myself, moaning at failures, not realizing that eventually I had to come out of all that nonsense and define who I would be. So I set out to become who I wanted to be. No illusions, no ideas, no voices. Just me. And I set out to make my life something I would be proud of, not regret. I cut out all that thinking and set to getting things to do. That’s why I listen to so much music nowadays. And good music. And reading. I do read a lot now. Gives me things to think about.
I turn 24 tomorrow.
The world is still the same place, I have to grow within it.
It will change for me, not the other way round.
I will prevail.

temporary insanity, or what hangs out in the dark side of my brain

A second-hand life, living within the lines that have been drawn already, because anything outside the lines is wrong…
The inevitable truth is that we are not the people we want to be, that we have ideals we want to aspire, but with time the ideals are diluted until they are hardly recognizable. Individualism is shunned, because it is in direct conflict with society. It is no longer a society if people do whatever they want, because societies are there for people to belong to, to feel safe in, right?
Wrong.
Individualism is alright as long as it doesn’t show up too prominently. That is how it is sold and packaged, like you can show how much of an individual you are by wearing different colour shoes from everyone else, but that’s about it. When you start thinking different, that is dangerous. You start contributing to the decline of social order. Everyone doing what they want is chaos, it can only lead to trouble, it has to be stopped. The individual cannot think for himself, the individual is there to be thought for, to be used to contribute to the benefit of the group.
That is where conventional wisdom went wrong. Due to its nature, conventional wisdom can often be mistaken for foolishness. Because we all agree to agree does not make something right. The Earth being flat and at the centre of the universe was conventional wisdom for quite a while, it had supporters, people were killed for claiming otherwise, because it was limited to what people could see and hear.
Life as we know it is a series of events designed to destroy the individual and make him dependent on others. That is the essence of society, a sense of belonging. And the sense of belonging is heightened through pointing out and persecuting those that do not belong…
The thing with life is that it always seems original, that at some level we are the first people to do the things we are doing, but usually, unknown to us, someone else has done the exact same thing. Like it or not, we are all living second-hand lives. To make it worse, the things that make us original and unique are suppressed until they are lost, discarded like milk teeth that have to give way to the permanent set. And like molars that show up and hurt like hell, growing up means having to adopt things. Fine, it is alright to be inquisitive as a child, it is part of the learning process, but at some point, the need to know is killed through the idea that all the answers are in education, that knowing what you are supposed to know is secondary to knowing what is true.
Being intelligent is good, as long as that intelligence translates to measurable gain. Having a massive IQ, for instance, and not being able to apply that intelligence in the real world is a drag, conventional wisdom argues, because everything is supposed to benefit the human race. The real world is often designed to melt everyone down to their basic form and cast them in a mould so they can fit in. It’s like having a jigsaw puzzle. The way things should be is that everyone is a unique piece that has points where others attach, while the way things are is that everyone is a complete, one-piece puzzle, or a Rubik’s Cube that’s glued together so the colours don’t mix.
That is why there are no more renaissance men. In the Renaissance, individuals sought to learn more about their world than what was presented to them, that is how there were such interesting combinations as painter/sculptor/lawyer/doctor. The joy of knowing more about the world was more important than what had already been established. But with time came specialization, because individuals would be better suited for a society if they had a purpose. The Renaissance man was abandoned, the specialist became the ideal. Knowing everything about everything became secondary to being the best you can be…
The question remains, are we still individuals or has our fundamental wiring been changed so that we can only survive within a society?

pie in the sky

One of my favourite episodes of the [sadly short-lived] Evil Con Carne, spinoff from Grim and Evil, is ‘The Pie Who Loved Me’, where blueberry pie made by Doctor Ghastly (whose favourite element is Boron, plus she’s got some rocking red knee-high boots on…) that works for Hector Con Carne, that ends up wrecking the world.
Everyone holds hands in the end and talks about how the all-conquering pie has broken their spirits, and the mystery ingredient that’s got the whole world subdued (after having too much pie nonetheless) is love…
Apparently pie in the sky, outside the cartoon context) is an allusion to heaven, like we all want a piece of the pie in the sky. he promise of something greater, like the assurance that all that life is is not going to end here…
So in the end it’s an attempt to get a piece of the pie, like one piece is not enough. And like everything else, there’s a teeny bit of envy that works itself in, like I’m happy to get my bit of pie, knowing someone somewhere will get a smaller piece. that way I can feel better about mine.
There’s no point in me saying I have eternal life (or whatever alternative there is in all the other religions) when there’s someone somewhere that’s going without. It would be a major fail on my part as a member of the human race. My brother’s keeper.
So I shouldn’t just focus on getting as much pie as I can, I should make sure that in getting my pie, nobody will get any less of theirs… Being considerate is hard…
And the pie? Well, the pie is love. Isn’t that what we’re all looking for?

Post-holiday Clarity

I had been on holiday for about 5 days somewhere between end of November and beginning of December, and during that time I had loads of time to think. Beach-walking, introspective thinking, that stuff.
So here’s what I have drawn from that.
My life is a massive spiderweb. In it are tangled very many individuals and things that either have an impact on me or that I have an impact on…
And usually what happens is these webs is that the impact of such people is soon forgotten, until, say, major crisis happens and there is a recollection. Or the disappeared person reappears and there is a recollection. Like a primary school buddy suddenly happens to be in the same school as me, and all the recollection about how we were the fiercest of rivals comes up… then I realize I kinda took my foot off the gas after that pressure was eased…
In my life I’ve had various pressures to succeed, some of which persist, others which wear off. With time I get used to the persistent pressures and just tune them out… But then they kick it up a notch and I end up beating myself up for generally sucking at something i should be good at.

I thought I had myself figured out at 19… The world was there for me to take over and completely pwn, but with time I realized there was way more than I could manage by myself. I’d always been the independent rebel-sans-cause type, the world couldgo hang for all I cared, but that came to change as well, having to factor in other people into my life and live with them and for them as it were… Not exactly the idal situatiom, but that’s how we’re programmed, to be social and everything…
So here we are, having barely lived our lives. What’s it to be? For one, I need to learn to stop taking things so seriously. It’s only life. And much as I have come to learn to live from regret to regret, there’s also the happy bits in between…I need to take those and learn from them. I also need to start working out how to move on to level 2. And to make use of what I have. And before that, to appreciate what I have.

Above all, I need to learn how to speak my truth.

This is what you get for not counting me…

So the National Population and Housing census is well underway, started on Monday night and we even got a public holiday out of it. We, here refers to everyone else, I had an exam to do. But it got me thinking, what is the relevance of all this? There’s controversy over the tribe question being as we’re only just starting to recover from the trauma of post-election violence. We being the folks in Nairobi… There’s places outside the city where the violence is still all too real… Every 10 years, money goes into counting people. Money that could be used in other ways, like for example, to make the said people’s lives better… Like this guy, a pensioner and retired teacher that doesn’t see the value in him getting counted.
Ok, while I se the value, being as I have done a bit of population dynamics and planning for populations (both first-year environmental planning units), it could have been planned better, even with a diary.
For one, the exercise should have been put on a Friday, so that the weekend can eb used to ensure that people are at home, rather than putting it on Monday then forcing a public holiday… And it’s been done before, that’s how they did it in ’99…
There’s the contentious question of tribe. I for one, do not want to be identified by my tribe. As a result of circumstance, I have no father. I don’t speak my mother’s language. I was born in MP Shah Hospital and have lived in Nairobi all my life. As such, for me, the idea that my tribe defines who I am is a fallacy. I have been identified alternately as Generation X, the dot com generation, the 90′s generation, the future and many other random things… But ultimately I am part of an increasingly frustrated generation, with potential denied and such. I’m the one they’re planning for. The next census expects to find me settled, employed and with my own household to do a survey on. The future is no longer as safe a haven as it once was. The way markets are collapsing and such, investments lost, it will be increasingly liquid. And jobs will be hard to come by as well… Now I want the planning minister to tell me what he’s going to do with that info.
And I still haven’t been counted…

Flux

One thing that life assures is the on-off nature of most things, what is regular and standard now can turn and flee the next moment… The constant change, welcome or otherwise.
One of the things I have had as a constant is family. Like every day I wake up and they’re there, all up in my space, taking over stuff, but they’re mine… But now, seeing as I belong to a superficially gregarious family (meaning we just get together for show, otherwise it’s just hi and bye, not even ‘a plane crashed into your hood, hope your ok’), we’re getting together to celebrate our familiarity. And to catch up on things. And to smile and laugh with new additions (there’s two, a cousin and a nephew). And to catch up with long-lost relatives. And to remark at how tall/large/thin/lost/found/arbitrary adjective/educated you have become…
Now I’m all for family and relations and such, but I want to branch off and go on my own. That’s one of the consequences of having a small family, greater individual independence, once one has established that when they go off on their own, they will not starve, they’re good.
While my mother had several siblings to feed and clothe and educate after her mother passed, I have one brother, that’s it. I’ve become an individual, and as such I have formed my own private thoughts, feelings, understandings, opinions, attitudes, language and such. Which means I can survive for a while outside the family.
But she, on the other hand, is social, by choice as well as circumstance. Like she has to consider them when she’s deciding things, meaning she gets frustrated a lot, they’re not exactly a walk in the park to deal with, then there’s the fact that they, as well as her, have lives to live…
The things people do for family.
Does being my own person mean I have to cut off anyone that could stop me from being such? I don’t think so. While no man is an island, I would consider myself a tombolo (thank you, high school geography), an island connected to the mainland by an ever-so-slight sliver of rock and earth. I’m still connected, but come a storm strong enough and I break free…

unnamed, for some reason or the other…

I’m blogging at work.  Not good. I could justify myself by saying I’m working on my blog, but still, that’s not good enough. here’s the long and short of it. i blog because i can’t Facebook. I twitter because I can’t randomly surf. Randomly surf means I can’t get on sites like  Cracked, the site with the arbitrary lists of very funny things and such… *sigh*

I’m getting soft.

No, really, I’m getting soft, a little extra padding, a little more of me to love… The euphemisms are endless, I have realized. Living at home means I can’t go hungry. That used to be my answer to exercise, not eating. Now I eat. And the most exercise I get is a brisk walk through Nairobi on my way home. Which should be good enough, but for some reason it’s not…  It’s likie that wake-up call, I need to get me some of that exercising…

Somewhere along the line, I realized I’m not the man I thought I was. I’m a lot more worldly, a lot less religious, and my philosophy had dulled with time. Now I’m more of an economist. Everyone is, really. Like with the tide of collapsing equity, the resulting flood of CNN coverage and the spectrum of experts that went ignored in a previous lifetime, conventional wisdom suddenly centers around the fact that material prosperity isn’t all that… Like there’s more to it than the mansion in the ‘burbs, the postergirl wife (or posterboy husband) and the two-and-a-half children… There has to be more.

More please… It’s the puppyness that get to you… And it’s a puppy…

It’s one of life’s classic gambits, where does it end?