scheming in my pretty little notebook

There have been occasions wherein I have wondered about a variety of things as with all human beings, and I get struck by the urge to write them down. Usually, actually almost always, I score these deep thoughts in the middle of a road (literally) I’m crossing, or anywhere really, provided there is nowhere for me to write. So they end up floating around like cosmic rays in the universe, because as soon as I sit to write, they’ve got someplace else to be.

Today I’m lucky, I’m in the right place, so at least I get another post. I didn’t get to reading that editorial on making every sentence “at least good”, but I’ve read through the first paragraph, and I think none of those ones can be described as “bland, slack, utilitarian sentences”. Particularly if you think in images, like Dinah (it occurs to me from the number of times she gets mentioned on my posts that I need more friends). Anywhoo, I mentioned last time that I was supposed to be writing about things you cannot change, and now seems as good a time as any to get started down that crazy path. 

In other news, being an editor is fun, last time I made it sound like a really lousy job, but really, being an editor is a lot of fun. In fact, if I could be an editor for the rest of my life I would die a happy human. Like, don’t even pay me, just lemme go at people’s words with a thousand question marks and that forbidding red coloured font. Or let me be a teacher, so I can write things like these on the scripts of unsuspecting youngsters:

I had a teacher in primary school, or was it high school… I want to go with high school because chances of scoring zeroes on a test were higher in high school, but then I also want to go with primary school because I have just the teacher to fit that profile: one Mr. Wamae of Kiswahili. Anywho, whenever someone got a zero on the test, he went ahead to draw it as a crying face and happily announce it to the class when the scripts came back.

I found the concept so hilarious, so it was no surprise that when I got to high school and some nice boy from some school wrote me letters massacring, butchering, annihilating and decimating (thank you Thesaurus) the English language I was in heaven. We (in the interest of privacy I won’t mention your name) took red pens and went to town on letters we received, translating their words to hilarious pictures and laughing some more. It wasn't very nice, but I was 15 in Form 2 and I had no sense of tact whatsoever. 

As a side note, I’m beginning to zero in on the reasons I’m still single. And as a second side note, someone should have seen that and told me I was born to be an editor. Life might have been very different. So back to the things I cannot change, (this was supposed to be a serious post). 

I have and not once in the throes of anguish wondered (TMI ALERT!!) why endometrial linings have to exist. Why doesn’t the body have a mechanism to build one only after fertilization has occurred? Or why, like cows and other normal mammals, didn’t we just land an oestrus cycle, where the thing gets magically reabsorbed if fertilization doesn’t happen? You probably already know when exactly these thoughts plague me. 

Job is one of those deep thinking, philosophical people who quotes Leo Tolstoy and Bob Marley in the same conversation as you casually walk around in Kahawa Sukari. It’s interesting because he’s been dating this girl Naomi since we were in first year, and she has the memory and concentration span of a goldfish. A very beautiful, sweet, mandazi-brown Taita goldfish who I’m supposed to be having icecream with tomorrow. 

Anyway, Job told me once that life and relationships are about whose crap you’re willing to take. He said Bob Marley said that, and I have yet to confirm it for myself. I have a feeling he said it because he’d kept me waiting for an hour, but I have been thinking about it from time to time. And too about Danielle's statements. The spirit of them anyway, rather than the stark reality, hers is too, too something, severe maybe .. or too harsh, I think:

You can plan and scheme and write in a neat little notebook. You can create numerous lists that await the swift line of completion, but it won’t matter. Nothing will end up the way you thought it would. Things will happen that you couldn’t have possibly foreseen. Life doesn’t care about the plan. The scheme. Your neat notebook. Or your fifty lists.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m going to have kids, and what they’ll be like. I stopped taking that as a right, owing to a series of shifts within my circle of friends, and Nancy Leigh DeMoss. Sometimes I wonder what marriage will be like, and I get scared. Maybe it’s because I’ve seen a little bit of desolation and crap, haven’t we all. Maybe it’s because on occasion I have the disposition of a conservative educator in the 1960s, with thick glasses and a tight severe bun at the back of the head, telling children to get their minds off the clouds. Like Marilla Cuthbert in “Anne of Green Gables” which I’m now reading. 

You know, it’s an honorable thing to be a parent, it’s the greatest responsibility on earth, and apparently the hardest. You can do everything right, and they still might not turn out how you'd hoped. But heaven knows you won’t. You’ll second guess every decision you ever made, you’ll make so many mistakes, and you’ll try formulae until it hits you that no two kids are remotely similar. And then you’ll eventually have to let them go and make their own mistakes. 

The reason I wanted to write about this on Sunday was because one of the poets mentioned something about why poor people have the most children. It reminded me of a book I read and this mother who could hardly feed herself had 12 kids, and when she had another someone asked her why. She said that the moment when brought another life into the world, that single moment before all the thinking about how they’ll eat and all the problems, she felt like she did something good for the world. And that maybe she wasn’t a complete waste of clay. So she did it again and again.

Life hardly ever turns out the way we think. I didn’t think I would be here now I know, not in a cocky I’m-better-than-this kinda way, but I just imagined my life would follow a decent path of events, like other normal human beings. But I get what that lady said, and why Rebecca Bloomwood loved shopping so much. I’ve shared this before. 

I think the best way to think about life is to take it like one of your kids. You do what you can to raise them right, you teach them God and ethics and discipline; you prepare them for the future and everything no one prepared you for. But then you’ve got to let go and realize that things won’t always go the way you’d thought. And it doesn’t mean that someone did something wrong, we only do the best we can with the information we have at the time. That’s what life is all about. Now all that’s left is for me to believe that.

In the interest of my 7 desiderata posts, let’s consider this the next installment, even though I’ve had to skip a few lines in between. The rest will come, they will come….

Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself.

You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars;
You have a right to be here,
And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.