Who You Give it To
I heard it many times, that as a woman, you end up dating/marrying your father. I’ve always had an opinion about such myths but I held back my sentiments on this one. It was a weird thing to think about-dating my dad ( (shudder) ) and so I thought it was complete rubbish; ‘Cosmo propaganda’ is what I called it.
I was having a deep conversation with a friend about this the other day and she mentioned that some girls, especially those who never grew up with a dad look for men who can completely provide for them in addition to being their lovers. Provide here meaning pay for all their living expenses. ALL. I looked back at the girls who I knew hadn’t grown up with fathers and realised that while this was not entirely true for all their romantic relationships, it was true for all the girls I knew who had such relationships with their men.
As I was walking out of my hotel room that weekend, my attention was grabbed by a guy on his balcony. He was shirtless, smoking a cigarette and having what I guessed to be coffee as he almost insolently signalled with a wave of his hand at the room service to come back later. “That’s definitely the kind of guys I’m attracted to” I thought to myself more or less shamefully. Strong, self absorbed, confident, emotionally unavailable kind of men. “But my father doesn’t smoke off balconies shirtless” I thought remembering the conversation I had had with my friend, “so how is it that I date my ‘father’, please?” My father is a tall, calm, well cultured respectable man. All male, all present in all my life’s achievements, all knowing, all other ways available however…emotionally unavailable!
“Holy Sh*” I had just had a eureka moment.
That was the insight, the deep penetrating truth to the men I picked to be my partners. I was so overwhelmed with this discovery that I stopped dead in my tracks to recollect. I could not believe it.
My father is a great dad. Always has been. Took me to the dentist, replaced all the retainer braces I lost, bought me the coolest roller blades, never missed any big event in my life… However, he’s not the kind of dad who has ever known how to bond with me, if you know what I mean; something I had wanted so much of especially round my teenage years. As a matter of fact, it is so for many of my friends; male or female. Many African fathers from the Michel Jackson, Al Green, and Marvin Gaye era backwards don’t really have a clue how to connect emotionally with their kids.
Now joining the dots I could see exactly what that ‘factor X’ was that I used to tell my friends over and over a guy had to have no matter how attractive, for me to be attracted to him. He could be an introvert or an extrovert, but just the mere fact that he distanced himself emotionally captivated me. That X-factor that I had never labelled had always been “emotionally unavailable.”
Now of course my first question here would be that, does it mean that all sisters in the same family fall for the same kind of guy? No. You seek out from a relationship those things that are important to YOU as an individual for emotional equilibrium and those which you lacked in your father figure. In other words, instead of looking for the emotionally available guy because your father figure was emotionally unavailable, you look for the exact same thing your father was and try to make what he denied you, Present.
As a huge sceptic of this myth, I am now a full convert. Girls do fall for their fathers; or variants of them.
So, should you now, if you are a girl like me, accept an emotionally available guy and evade all the crap that comes along with the emotionally Unavailable? Or maybe make your father emotionally available instead to change your taste in men?
Figure out your poison.
Yeah, I said it!
Peace and love
Julia Love
(Sequel to ‘Who you give it to’ out next week, ‘Cold Turkey Exit’)
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#WriteThinking: Our Kids Might Never Know Their Own Handwriting
By Jacque Ndinda
One of the things that would make me happy right now is receiving a decorated declaration of love in form of a handwritten letter. I have not received a handwritten letter since high school. There is an intimacy in the handwritten words. An unaltered correlation between the words and the person that wrote.
I am worried that the greatest disease of language is not the XaxaXema conundrum. It is yet to come. And it will be the inability for our kids to learn their own handwriting. In this age of the cell phone, text messaging and printed assignments, who will ever find a need for the pen in coming years? What, with machines that can listen to your voice and type for you without you lifting a finger? Why struggle curving letter B with kids while you can just teach them where to find it on the keyboard?
When we all went to kindergarten, the first thing they taught us was how to write the alphabet. Then came combining these letters to write your own name. There was nothing sweeter than learning how to curve out your name on a piece of paper. I might not have felt it back then but looking at it now, it must have felt really good-a product of my first creativity. Curving a J next to A and not Q! It was personal. After day one, I forgot. I wrote the Q as O. I forgot again. And again until I got it right. Sometimes I would mix the upper case with the lower case, even after being taught for a week. But the struggle was worthwhile. It etched in me something that a computer would never have done.
In class four, we went through it again in Dictation class. I learnt to spell without using the dictionary. I learnt how to make neat notes with my hand. The kid with the best handwriting was given the privileges of writing on the blackboard on behalf of the teacher for others to copy.
Writing by your own hand is more than just curving alphabetical letters on a piece of paper to communicate. It is about the pleasure of putting a signature of you in the words you write, not just by the way you arrange your train of thought but by the way you express them physically on paper. A sense of ownership. A result of your own craftsmanship.
I am afraid that our kids will be handed things so easily that we will deny them a chance for cognitive growth that comes with the handwriting. I have a feeling it will be handing then a gun to their minds, or turning their minds into vestigial organs, unknowingly. Writing is a way of thinking.
The word document is an easy path. I am not saying that we ought to make life difficult for our kids, but would you rather your kid becomes dependant on autocorrect and his ideas are easily arranged, not by his thinking but by a simple right-click? It is too factory-made. Thdey will never learn their flaws. They will have something perfect, but plasticised like a nose job. Eventually what you have are prisoners of autocorrect who do not know how to spell without a machine outside their own brain.
We have all used computers and we know how absentmindedly this happens. First of all, typing is so noisy! In is too interruptive. It denies us a chance to think about what we are writing. There is this disconnect between your thoughts and the things you are writing. Normally, a synchrony between the mind and what you are writing is achieved after a struggle.
But writing by the hand at such an age will hone their minds. When teachers asked us for handwritten apology letters, they did not do it because they like to see us decorate papers with our sorry. It was about thinking about what you were writing. When employers prefer handwritten application letters, it is because that handwriting says a lot about you!
I want my kids to learn their handwriting. It is a part of who they are, and it would be really sad if technology denied them that opportunity.
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Q&A Monday : @Raaheli
Rachel Gichinga has, for the last five years, been working on ways to employ the use of creative approaches in advocacy, civic engagement and development initiatives.
@Raheeli
In 2009 she co-founded Kuweni Serious, an initiative which is focused on getting young, educated Kenyans involved in socio-political initiatives and translating online engagement into offline action.
She is also part of the 2012 class of Acumen Fund East Africa Fellows.
Rachael confesses that she occasionally may be found on the iHub balcony staring into the sunset instead of doing real work.
She lives on coffee, hates cats and she is a proud aunt to Mwendi and godmother to Maya.
We had a few questions for her and this is what she had to say :-
1. What was your first phone?
Wow. It was an Ericsson T10. I thought I was sooooo cool with the mouthpiece flap thing. I also had one of those atrocious Motorolas that had the red light and the oval screen that made them look like they were from outer space. It was good to upgrade to a Nokia 3310.
2. What do you prefer? Facebook or Twitter? Why?
As is the case with most people, it took me a while to get Twitter. Now, though, I completely love it. I find the most interesting information and people there, and it’s truly exciting to see how people are able to engage with the people to whom they’d never otherwise have access. That’s infinitely cool, and it creates all kinds of possibilities. It’s a great way to gauge public sentiment on issues. I’d say the downside of Twitter is that it can dehumanise people – it’s disheartening to see people falling over themselves to come off as witty in the event of death, for example, or just being merciless about subjects no one needs to be merciless about.
Facebook largely exhausts me. It has definite value, but I find the relentless stripping away of privacy a bit much. It’s a stalker’s paradise. Maybe we all just need a third social network: Twitter is for cool people you don’t know in person, Facebook is for acquaintances, and we can join a third network that’s for close friends, one of those networks that doesn’t let you add more than 50-100 people and you can say whatever you want to say and post whatever photos you want to post without first spending an hour tweaking your privacy settings.
3. Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
That’s a good question. Still trying to answer it myself. Hopefully alive – I’m incredibly clumsy and absent-minded…I really hope I haven’t fallen off a building by then.
4. Any question for us?
Why this push to get people to pay to attention to art and books and culture?
5. What would you do if you were president for a day?
The exact opposite of every single thing Kenyan presidents currently do,
I would do my job.
6. Whats your favourite book & movie?
Can I say my least favourite book? Anything and everything by Paulo Coelho.
Can I say that? I know I just lost a bunch of actual and potential friends there. 
It’s hard to pick an all-time favourite, though Arundhati Roy’s “The God of Small Things” is always heartwrenching.
Anything by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Alain de Botton’s “Essays in Love.” A book I recently read that was phenomenal was Teju Cole’s “Open City“. Also loved “The Fire Next Time” by James Baldwin.
Movies: again, difficult to pick a favourite. Anything by the Coen brothers (with Burn After Reading and The Big Lebowski topping that list). Before Sunset, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Revolutionary Road, Chicago.
I miss the 90s teen flicks (Clueless, Save the Last Dance, She’s All That)…that was a winning genre. Viva Riva and From a Whisper were also brilliant African movies, and the Matrix Reloaded was a heartbreaking work of staggering genius.
7. Who/What inspired you to do what you do now?
It’s been a continuous path of discovery, and at every point I get to work with super cool people who inform and inspire my thinking. From my first real job with Eric Wainaina and Sheba Hirst, who taught me that you could take dense, boring ideas and make them beautiful and compelling; to meeting Ory Okolloh, who’s umpteen types of cool and brings in a fascinating way to think about politics and activism; to the Ushahidi/iHub team who’ve redefined “be all you can be” in a Kenyan setting; to the Acumen Fund team and fellow Fellows, who blow my mind with the super smart way they’re rethinking development and social sector work; to the ridiculously silly and hilarious Kuweni Serious family (Mbithi Masya, Jim Chuchu, Njoki Ngumi, and by extension Blinky Bill and Daniel Muli), who defy all forms of convention and have no idea a box even exists, let alone thinking outside of it. I feel incredibly blessed to constantly be inspired and challenged by these wonderful people and more.
8. If you were to change jobs, what profession would you get into? Why?
I wish I could actually create something. Or invent something. Or find something important. Whatever would allow me to do that.
9. If you had a superpower, what would it be?
I’d be Jean Grey from X-Men for sure. Telepathy/telekinesis. I’d also like to have the power to heal sick people. I’d be a cancer-zapper.
10. If you were deserted on an abandoned island what 5 things would you want to have?
- My Kindle (and a direct connection to Amazon + a credit card with no limit)
- Solar chargers
- Not my current laptop, as it is driving me crazy…I’d like a new laptop
- A magical internet connection (unlimited, uninterrupted)
- Cheese
11. If you were a car, what car would you like to be? Why?
A Landrover Defender. Isn’t it just the coolest car in the world?
12. If you could be in any band in the world, which one would you like to be in? Why?
Hmm…I don’t know. I’ve watched Hugh Masekela perform twice now and I’m convinced his band must have some fascinating stories because he seems like a such a fascinating person. Bjork’s band, too, because she’s so clever about making music and experimenting with ideas.
13. Anything interesting you would like to share with our readers?
I don’t walk/sit under ceiling fans because I’m afraid they might decapitate me.
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Sunday Reading
Creative Writing – A short story by Etgar Keret
Lord My Woman Is Talking - A Poem By Olouch Madiang
Weekend Plot – by Amare Poeta
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – A short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Fire and Ice – A Poem by Robert Frost
I wanna Text you up – By Our Kid
London Bridges – A poem By Tolu Ogunlesi
Word On The Street – A Poem by Michael Onsando
Confessions of a masturbating twelfth Man – A short story By Linda Musita
#TwitterAfterDark: Her Story – By Wiselar
Of Underwear & men – By Neemo
The Joy Of Books [Video] … Continue Reading
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My Key That is Optimism
By false reflection, the eyes flicker,
Still as the day ends, my hopes ticker,
By bestial acts, jibes, scoffs and taunts,
With new charisma my ardour flaunts.
I own my world, I am my own master! … Continue Reading
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TABLE FOR ONE
TABLE FOR ONE
I read somewhere that 25 is the ‘Quarter Life Crisis’ age. I was surprised that this was a shared belief since I recall last year telling my older friends that I felt like I was going through some sorta ‘quarter life crisis or something’; after which we laughed it over of course. But once I saw my ‘doesn’t drink’, ‘never smokes’ guy friend order a cold Tusker halfway through a maturely smoked cigarette, I realized that this really is the most conflicted time of anyone’s life-working your ass off for your big break, trying to move out of home and what not… During what I think was and could still be my quarter life crisis, I was going through some serious motions of ‘Am I on the right path with my job?’ ‘Shouldn’t I be saving my money?’ ‘How long am I going to sit in this drastic relationship-no wait… fling’ ‘Will I regret that decision, or this decision?’ ‘Is this the sole purpose of my existence?’ ‘Will I ever be happy?’ ‘Am I making a mistake by doing this?’ … 2011 really was the most emotionally trying year of my life and I haven’t even hit quarter life yet!
Translate this to relationships and it only gets worse. You see at quarter life as girls we are pretty much done with the trashy relationships of our recent over active late teenage years and we are looking for something with more substance and a longer shelf life. This is the age when we realize that 26 years sounds ‘Old’ and ask whether we have made anything of ourselves as we rapidly approach 30.It’s when suddenly you realize that every year you say “This year has flown by so fast!”. We also start to wonder if we should start to worry about worrying about our biological clocks ticking. Well thank goodness I still think babies will break and die if I hold them and that they smell like regurgitated breast milk. No pun, please. I like babies. Clean, quiet, sleeping ones.
Sitting at a restaurant I overheard 4 girls at the table in front of me talk about how much their love lives had changed (in their mid twenties). One of them, who I thought to be the most intelligent, said that she had never been so lonely in her life. That she could remember a time when her phone was blowing up cuz of all the calls she got from male pursuants. But the moment she decided to have standards and cherry pick the men she chose to date, suddenly, there was no one. Another girl said that she was not going to leave her boyfriend despite the fact that she was bored out of her wits with the guy because she didn’t want to be lonely again. “At least he is a good guy! Remember how Kevo was an asshole. Don’t even think of leaving him,” another girl warned her.
A week later with my friends at a bar, I brought up the topic. The discussion was pretty much similar to that one of the girls’ at the restaurant; we all now know what we want in a man, nobody wants to settle, but given the insufficiency of the ‘one tree hill’ happy endings we yearn for, settling starts to look okay and even more realistic. It is now that we have a picture of what we can and cannot tolerate in a relationship and we recite the pillars of “he’s just not that into you” like it is scripture from the goddess of love herself. This is not by any means a negative thing but it just so happens that once you have standards in the men you pick, scarcity of love is sure to follow.
When you want that pair of heels so badly, you will save for them and you will buy them. We have been taught to GO FOR WHAT WE WANT. When you want love so badly, it’s never there.
In my learning, love was designed NOT to be sought.
Not that my learning was a dignified knowledgeable and intelligent one. Far from it; very far. In fact it was the exact opposite.
But I can tell you this, you are never going to find love if you obsess over it. Never. So don’t, or do, if you can’t help it…in fact if you can’t help it, do it till you can’t stand it. Go through the motion, date the loser again despite having learnt from your past 100 relationships that you shouldn’t, but then stop and seat at your table for one unembarrassed, go for the wedding without a date, buy a you know what and an extra pair of batteries incase it dies on you at 2.ooam, seriously explore the things you are passionate about, think about everything that beautiful sunrises and cozy downpours have to offer you, think about it all and don’t think about Love.
Because here’s the thing about being happy with that person, you have to be happy alone FIRST. In my opinion, that’s the order.
Yeah, I said it!
Peace & Love
Julia Love
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Through The Eyes of A Little Boy
Looking at the world through the eyes of a little boy,
I walk through twisted paths of imagination;
Switch power on and walk to Farm Town
With 20 coins; I plowed by field yesterday
With 500 coins; I planted eight fields of potatoes … Continue Reading
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WriteThinking: Is My Intelligence Showing?
By Jacque Ndinda
“Yes, I am categorically certain that it is unequivocally incontrovertible that I recurrently employ gargantuan and multifarious terminology throughout the progression of otherwise ingenuous assertions with the intention of facilitating the manifestation of the opinion that I am of extraordinary and superior astuteness.”
Is my intelligence showing?
I like to use the above sentence I came across while reading about reading. Does it make you want to pull your hair out? I know I am not the only one that has fallen prey to the ploy of big words. There is a way certain people say things, leaving us thinking of how much of intellectuals they must be! He is so smart. Have you seen the way he tweets? Have you read his blog? Do you see the words he uses in there? Such big words! Such a smart person!
I do know that there is a very high relationship between language and intelligence. I however do not know which way to look at it: You are intelligent because you have an excellent command of language or you have an excellent command of language because you are intelligent. The chicken or the egg?
I cannot also be the only one that sees the pressure on the twitter timeline or facebook updates, or even blogs – an attempt by the social media masses to put up a smart act via language use. Here, domicile becomes home and ‘lascivious’ is highly preferred. It is all about making the people reading feel like they are titrating language in a science laboratory. But you know what they say? You can fake an orgasm, but you cannot fake smart. Smart does not come out in a calculated whimper.
Let us make this clear first. The reason why we say things is because we want to communicate. We don’t do it because we want to sound or seem smart. For there to be communication, the message should be coded in a way that even the communicator understands what exactly they are saying and the target audience as well. So what need is there if we have to use Thesaurus while writing or tweeting? What communication is there if we are pushing the reader further away from the message?
I understand that sometimes, there is the element of aesthetics in language. Even our faces do love some make-up sometimes. You want your sentences and your tweets to appear beautiful. But there is this other desire, this desire to use a word where an easy one would have been just okay. Sometimes, especially when Thesaurus is in use, a synonym leaves a sentence meaningless. Some of these words are so awkwardly placed that the sentence itself screams Awkwaaaarrd! A careful reader or listener will also read in between the lines, and in between these lines is a cry for help, a cry of a person who is trying so hard to overcompensate for lack of vocabulary by using big words.
Sometimes, in your pursuit of these big words, you end up sounding like a schooled idiot. A difficult word, even when well fitted in the sentence, will also make you sound pernickety. See what I mean?
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Q&A Monday: Dan ‘Chizi’ Aceda (@DanChiziAceda)
Dan ‘chizi’ Aceda is a Kenyan Singer Songwriter. He has recorded two studio albums Benganology(2010) and Suluwe (2005) and has written songs for many different artists including Kanji Mbugua, Joseph Hellon, Atemi Oyungu amongst others. He has also won two Kisima Awards and been nominated for two others. In 2011, Dan became the first Kenyan musician to perform at the Lake of Stars Festival in Malawi.
Dan Chizi Aceda © Paul Kariuki Munene
You can sample his music here.
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