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.

of sundays, voices and utilitarianism

 Disclaimer: A random post if ever there existed one! I'd read on anyway... :))))))))

I haven’t written in a very long time. Not for other eyes anyway. I think part of it may be attributed to the fact that I decided a long time ago that my blog was not going to be a whine page. It was, naturally, soon after I had turned it into a whine page. So the last few weeks have gone by in a blur. Some have been happy, some not so much; most of them have been busy though. And all I need is one week away from writing and pretty soon I’m all about the keeping quiet.

It’s Sunday night. It will be Monday morning very soon. It was a good Sunday, a really good Sunday. Certainly the best Sunday since before that Sunday I was back in Busia with the main man of the hour (that would be the guy leading Sunday service with the mic right outside my ears (not really, but it certainly felt close enough to them)) woke me up with a series of choruses he would sing for exactly one minute at a time. He wouldn’t even allow the congregation to be done with the response, before he juxtaposed (see how I put that there oh-so-naturally) the next ‘number’. He continued to do this for close to an hour. Even mum, who had been trying to sing along as she went about her tasks, got frustrated.

I know I should have been attending service rather than asleep, but I had just travelled 600km roughly, jolted awake every hour or so during the trip by some mishap on the road that forced our driver to employ all his magical emergency braking skills. I was tired. So naturally all sounds that were not of soothing music lulling me sleep-ward were scowled upon. Nonetheless I woke up to contribute to my share of the things that needed doing, after I figured there would be no more sleeping that morning. Mum would prefer if I said it was because I hadn’t after all travelled 600km and survived biting cold for an hour in a cold dark room with strange men to come and sleep. Nary, I had not. Yes, I know that wasn’t a nary situation.

That turned out to be an okay Sunday, despite how it began. But everything about this Sunday was perfect. Mostly though this Unchained Voices double album launch thing I went to at Alliance Francaise. Teardrops and Mufasa, launching their album, Sarabi, H_art the Band, Stacy (whose voice is so gloriously sophisticated, and whose style reminds me of something between Adele and India Arie). Sarabi’s rendition of Amandla was way cooler than what they have on their album. Somehow now I can’t imagine what it would be like if they performed Msalimie live, I think I might swoon. That’s a distinct possibility. I looooooooove Msalimie.

And there was the MC. His name is Elsaphah Njora. Also known as Benjamin from Village Christmas 2010. Youch! He was hilarious. And deep. And hilarious. I’m still smiling. For real he should be the next Groove Awards host. I certainly know if I’m ever placed in charge of planning any event I will be frantically looking for him. Oh, he was amazing.

So back to why I haven’t written in a while. To illustrate my point, I’m going to share a paragraph I got from my research of the first article I ever wrote for Martin: "How to write a good article". By the way, #someoneTellMartin to change that topic, yaaaye. Anywho, paragraph, if I can find it:

I was the language crank, the one who swooned over sentences. I could forgive much in a book if it was written with force and beauty, if its story was told in a voice unlike anything I’d heard before, if the writer was finding new and mesmerizing ways to employ the same words that have been available to all American writers for hundreds of years. I tended to balk if a book contained some good lines but also some indifferent ones. I insisted that every line should be a good one. I was—and am—a bit fanatical on the subject.       ~Michael Cunningham~

Yaaaaay, found it! You can read the full article , and if you hope to ever be any good at writing, I’d strongly suggest that you do. Not that I have done much of what the good people say, but it’s got some valid points one ought to go back to from time to time (added to list of pinned tabs). 

When my mother was in college she wrote an essay on Shakespeare once in her English class. She scored 18 out of a possible 20. The lecturer was known to be quite stingy with marks (I know what you’re thinking; parents say things like that all the time). Well, dad corroborates the story, and thinking that they sat down thirty years ago and plotted to mislead us with such tales seems to be too much trouble. Ergo, I believe them. Also I saw the essay. Yes, she kept it. Not just for the marks, but because after giving her that mark the lecturer went ahead to write “I am tempted to give you a much higher mark blah blah”. 

The point was not that my mother was a brilliant writer, even though she is. The point is that those are the people who raised me. When you get used to a certain standard of grammar, finesse and quality in writing, you cannot help but become an editor. So I am one. Unfortunately it’s the reason I’m also afraid of writing. I have written a few okay pieces in my day. I consider this one to be one such, flowing with the ease of a river moving downstream. 

But more often than not, I feel ill equipped to maintain the standard I have set for my writing. I know that if I open my mouth, I may score a few great sentences, but most of them will be “bland, slack utilitarian” sentences that “serve no other purpose than to transport the reader from point A to point B”. Michael again.  Therefore I keep quiet. Until the urge hits again like a bathroom break, and I cannot sleep for all the itching in my fingers. And I go at it on a Sunday-almost-Monday night-stroke-morning. 

And all of a sudden, the universe in no longer so skewed upon its axis. The reason I wanted to write this piece in the first place was to talk about things you cannot change. I won’t be doing that. Because these are 1000+ words. It is sufficient. But now you have a reason to return next time. I’ll go read that editorial so my sentences can remain as intriguing. Hopefully.