Saturday, January 21, 2006

Let it out and move on...

I went for another international students birthday bash yesterday.And yes I enjoyed the alcohol but and this is a big but I didnt get drunk.I instead did things the way I like to, drink lots of beer slow but sure and take breaks to talk,dance and flirt.When I do this I don't get drunk.I just get buzzed and go to sleep buzzed and it is 11 am I am going to the gym and I am still buzzed but no hangover at all (and that is how it is meant to be).
I was talking to some white girls yesterday and I told them about how my pal had been shot.I also told them that I miss him and that I was not going to cry so they said that they would cry for me.Not true, I and most African men cry; we just don't do it in the open and we don't admit to it.In my case I put my grief at arms length, I fight it and then I choose a night to be alone and to wallow in it.I listen to my melancholic music,I drink at times,I remember,I weep my tears then I let my grief fade away like the ghost of one loved who has found peace.I stop loving what is gone, I believe in carrying on even if I miss what is gone and embracing what I still have.Because as one of my melancholy songs says;
life carries on in the people we meet,
through all the faces we see on the street.
In the dogs and cats,in the flies and rats.
In the homes we reside in,
Life carries on and on and on.....

So if you ever get to know me personally and something goes wrong and you don't see my cry.It's not because I let my grief grow like a tumour in my heart to the level that it sears away my humanity.No my grief is mine and mine alone.For everyone I will be strong then I will find a place and time for myself to be human and to be weak.I grieve but you will never know, that is who I am.....

Friday, January 20, 2006

The good die young....

Yesterday was a sad day for me.My small sister called me and told me that one of my oldest friends was dead.No he had not borne an illness bravely nor was he in a road accident,He was shot during what was a botched carjacking or assasination.I remember meeting Justin when he joined my school in standard 3.We were such good friends then that people thought we were brothers, it didn't help that we both started wearing spectacles at the same time.We had a grand time driving teachers mad in primary school and even though we went to different classes in secondary school and were not as close as we were, we still hung out once in a while and shared laughs and an occasional underage beer at Jkay's in it's hey day.
After high school we parted ways.He went to work for his father who was wealthy and had several business interests and I went to university.Fate would bring us back together when he began dating my small sister's friend who eventually became his fiance.He had since stopped working for his father and had instead gotten some capital and a partner to start up an ISP that was doing pretty well and incidentally was the provider for the company I was working for at the time.Anyway he was great company,always had a smile on his face,a great idea brewing in his mind, a dirty joke for the guys and a good word for the ladies.When I last spent time with him and we went out for some beers at Tamasha he was telling me aboout how he was planning on settling down and how he had gotten some potential business partners in Canada who he went to see as I was leaving to come here.We never did keep in touch when I left but his fiance was a good pal of mine so I used to talk to her and send greetings.
This is a new thing for me because most of the close people to me who ever passed away were old or sick but never young.For me youth was second to immortality.It may sound foolhardy but I always thought that God would let the young live longer as he had more plans for them and because tears and funerals should not be wasted on the young.But that's just me, a dreamer.
I want to rant about how such things don't have to happen but this isnt the time.
To my friend Justin your star may have shined briefly but it shined brightly, you will be missed.

Thursday, January 19, 2006

The Chaste Life.....

Remember one of my New Year's resolutions was to go undergo a period of chastity?Well I have been doing it for some time but I decided that I would not blog about it till I got to the double figure digit in days passed.My vow also included no downshifting,polishing the rocket,spanking the monkey; you know what I'm saying.The interesting thing is that when I put my mind to stop doing something most of the time I can.So that was no big deal.But this vow has led me to notice some interesting things.
Firstly I started getting up at 6a.m every morning.This did come in handy so I could do yoga with the folks on Oxygen every morning but what wasn't nice is when I used to being nodding off at noon.Thank God for last week's hangover that rebooted my biological clock so now I am back to getting up at 7a.m.
My dream life has never been so vivid!And no there are no sex dreams!My journies in the idyllic realm range from childhood memories,the future,people who I had forgotten about and of course the flying dreams (sometimes with wings and sometimes under my own power-I fly in style!)
Then strangely enough I am getting along great with women now.I spent most of Sunday hanging out at some gal's apartment and she even invited me to go on a trip with her and her pals.There is this other gal who works in one of the offices who has taken a liking to me and also that lecturer from last sem whom I had taken a liking to asked me out for lunch this week (no hanky panky here coz when I went to see here last and she was talking to her hubby she told him that I had popped in).So is there something ethereal about chastity that makes a man more appealing?Not that I have told any of them that.
Oh I now go to the gym 4 times a week.I have a metabolism that if I could sell to ladies I would make a million bucks.First of all I had to eat American food to put on weight and a diet with lots of junk and sweets only gave me an extra 10 pounds.I have always had problems gaining weight.When I do gain weight it is then shed like water off a duck's back when I start going to a gym or some martial art.I recall a pair of shorts becoming baggy 2 weeks into muay thai classes.The only problem with not being able to gain and keep weight without being an eating machine is that after 2 weeks in teh gym I start looking like this (still working on getting the abs!)



So Ms K and Guess since you are gathering psyke to go to the gym why don't we all go together and then after that you can take me to the local take out joint so I can go replenish the calories that I have burnt?Who said not having sex couldn't be fun (Mutumia stop slinking in your seat I can see you!)

Wednesday, January 18, 2006

Don't Fall For This.....

The best captions go up manyana but as for now enjoy this as you wait!

Tuesday, January 17, 2006

Gender Diversity

Guest poster Instigatorxxl

I was reading some other KBW blog where the suffering many African women have undergone under men was brought up and someone commented that what they would do to make up for this was to always employ an equally qualified woman over a man.A very noble it seems, why don't we see how this pans out.
Let's call the company Femnet which is set up by a business loan from the government so as to uplift women or by a huge grant from some ngo eager to uplift women from the morass they are entrenched in.
To make the work environment more feminine oriented Femnet then goes ahead to grant their employees the following benefits so that the work environment is more woman friendly.
1. Twelve-months maternity leave on full pay
2. Paid leave when children are ill
3. Working hours 9AM - 3PM so that the mothers can pick their kids before traffic
sets in
4. Free (i.e. paid by the company) supervised creche for any kids employees want to
bring to work
5. No penalties (like loss of promotion chances) for those taking massively long
career breaks
6. No overtime after dark to avoid employees having to drive long distances in our
unsafe city at night, and no overtime at weekends so no-one is kept away from
their families

Perhaps there can be a few other informal rules, such as promotions not going to those who are most productive but to those who are most liked and get along with most of the employees, if you have ever worked in a predominantly female company you will note that women feel that they have to be friends so as to work together.So you need someone who is almost everyone's friend so that a good work environment minus bitching and petty squabbles is the order of the day, we can work on productivity later.

Obviously, to make it fair, this company shall not receive any government funding because these are Empowered Women who are more hardworking and smarter then lazy African men who have ridden them for way too long.Also they will most probably get a large endowment to get started so as to save them from the grip of evil patriachal African men and the retrogressive African society that works to their benefit.

Of course, Femnet would go bust in a few months.

Facetiousness aside, if a large company was full of just women and gave them all the rights they have - let alone those they demand - it would go bankrupt. Clients do not want to find that the individual they normally deal with is simply not there and that no-one else can help, or that their service/product is unavailable because key people are on career breaks or their kid is ill so they've taken the day off too. Plus providing all these subsidised rights in this hypothetical feminist utopia of a company would mean they would either have to raise their prices far above the competition, or accept a loss. Either way, it's bankruptcy within a month.

This is why as feminists push for more women in the workplace, they panic when men drop out of it. They will need men there to subsidise all these benefits for women as they are slowly legislated in African countries as they already exist in Western countries. When a woman is not at work because of maternity leave she is paid for work that she doesn't do and that has to be done by other workers or by a temp who has to be paid. Same thing happens when you have family friendly hours because some clients will still need your services at the time when those with children have gone to pick them up at school friendly hours. This has to be covered by someone; men and the few women who choose not to pursue motherhood and concentrate on career.Which will lead to resentment as the women who do not have families will feel that they are carrying more then their fair share of the load and like I said once women dont like each other in a workplace it messes up the team dynamic and productivity.

Feminists say they don't need men, but in fact they do, to subsidise all their socialist dreams of privilege in every part of society. As marriage is shunned and companies choose to grant hiring priviledge to women, feminists are going to find that the bottomless well of labour and money men provide is going to dry up. They'll be on their own, something that - although they will never admit it because it runs against their protestations of independence - they cannot stand because they know they will be ruined.

I will admit that this scenario is quite some way off from happening in the African society the fact is that women need men as much as men need women in life and that the preferential treatment of one over the other may seem as the best path of righting the wrongs of the past is not the best way to go.African men should see women as their equals and embrace the what makes us different so as to work towards a stronger society.But that is just a pipe dream few a ready to accept that approach and would rather wage a war of attrition.

Disclaimer: The contents of this post are not endorsed by The Acolyte,management of this blog and by blogspot.com.No animals were hurt during the composition of this post

Sunday, January 15, 2006

I.C.U.

I left the I.C.U. one hour ago.No I was not in an accident or been stricken by some deadly illness.I have finally passed the plateau of my hangover.I rarely have hangovers but when I do they are of I.C.U magnitudes.Yesterday one of the international students was having a bash and I decided to attend to represent good old K.E.N.Y.A, it was pretty good and all continents were represented, for a change I actually met an American who knew where Kenya was and even about Nairobi; I had gotten so tired of the blank stares,moronic statements and the impromptou geography lessons that I have to give that I usually tell people I am from East Africa.Moving on, one of my other new year's resolutions is no more drinking and it is one that I had been faithful to until last night.As I came in I noticed that there were no soft drinks so I decided to have a bottle of brown water aka Lite Beer.After having one I noticed that the supply of drinks was running low and I decided to grab what I could.So what had remained was vodka, so I went ahead and poured myself a half a cup and added some ice and lime juice.In my rush for the free vodka I had forgotten why prior to that night I had not drunk vodka in 4 years.First of all there the burnng sensation as it goes down your throat,then the unexpected inebriation that strikes you when you least expect it (I have had a friend who shifted from political discourse to cursing and jibberish in 2 seconds), the memory loss (I have a night that I have 3 different acccounts of, I know in my head I stopped those 2 from fighting; but I was told that I did an impressive job of kicking both of their asses- but that is a post for another day), then last but not least there is the hangover and dehydration if you didnt drink at least 500ml before you went to bed.
Anyway I got up feeling like someone had taken a sledgehammer to my head then ran over it with a semi truck and at the same time feeling like there was a dance troupe tap dancing in my skull.My mouth tasted like something had died in it and my tongue felt like sandpaper.I was felt totally drained so getting up was a herculean task, I could hardly stand sound so I watched the tv on mute ( thank God for closed captioning! ).To add insult to my injuries I had gone to the gym yesterday so in addition to my head, my chest was aching, biceps were spasming and my abs felt like I had gone 15 rounds with Oscar de la Hoya and Bruce Lee had used it as a kicking board afterwards.The headache meds I took seemed to have no effect so I could only drink water and fizzy drinks till my appetite returns ( vodka hangovers kill my appetite ).
But the appetite did return and I did manage to have breakfast at noon and luch at 4 p.m.I am now at 80% capacity, I have spent most of the day replacing the brain cells that I lost during last night's bender by reading a book for one of my classes that is so interesting that I intend to post on it soon.
Lesson of the day: Vodka is the tool of the devil!
Lesson 2: There is nothing as dangerous as free alcohol
Lesson 3: Don't forget the lessons of the past
Lesson 4: Always go to a bash with some of your own liqour/soft drinks
Lesson 5. Even under the influence some women still remain sexually unappealling
Lesson 6: Please learn from my mistakes and do not imitate me!