“I work hard to put bread on the table.”

Cliche.

But what really constitutes working hard? Usually the guys who said stuff like that in movies were dockworkers, factory men, construction people, or hustlers who constantly, literally, move around cracking deals and making money. Men from ‘that age’ where going to work meant you actually had to sweat and use your hands, and I don’t mean tapping a keyboard or feeling the heat of life in a coastal town.

For some strange reason, that phrase makes me think of some sweaty guy with rippling muscles ramming a sledgehammer onto an anvil…or was that an eighties music video for CMC music factory? Anyway, my point is, what exactly does it mean when you say you’re working hard?

I suppose in the US where ‘living the American dream’ translates into either [over]working overtime in an Ivy League job, or working three, four, even five hourly-wage gigs just to survive. That’s working hard.

But what about the regular person in the regular country? Tuseme Kenya. You leave home at 6 to beat the jam, and work past 8 – again, to beat the jam. Or you pull the regular 9 to five but it’s more like 8 to 9 coz you spend five hours in traffic. So by the time you get home, you’re exhausted from the commute.

You go to work every day even though your job is probably as dull as the ‘before’ clothes in an Omo ad. You drudge through the day without really thinking about what you’re doing and why. The only thought in your mind is that you’d rather be somehwere else, anywhere else. Then you go home. Are you working hard?

I always tell myself I’m working hard. But am I really? Surviving office politics is definitely hard work, extremely hard work, in any office. But that’s not what you’re paid for. What I am paid for, the stuff that’s on my job description, that comes pretty easily to me. On a good day, I don’t need to put much effort to get my job done.

Of course there are those days when your boss makes no sense and you don’t have the energy to dot that i or do that ridiculously pointless project. Or when your brilliant idea gets shot down because the boss doesn’t like it. Or those meaningless tasks that you do on autopilot to simply get the job done without thinking or feeling anything, pushed purely by the paycheck.

Or those days when you have a mad deadline and you actually do feel exhausted after beating it, when you get home feeling that you have actually worked. Or those days when you have to work extra hours, weekends and holidays because the boss, client or project demands it; when you’re too tired to eat and too spent to sleep, so you just vegetate in some pseudo-zombie-med-school-intern state.

And my personal favourite, the moments when your superior is being blonde and mean and you want to blindfold them and shoot them with blanks till they drop dead from fear. But instead, you have to smile at them and be nice, because after all, this is real life, not Wanted [where Wesley put my current thoughts into words quite succintly]. I think that’s hard work – making yourself do something you detest because you need the money.

But that’s on a bad day. Most days, the reason I get home exhausted isn’t because of the job, it’s coz of the accessories to the job, the clashes with coworkers, the office bureacracy, the little and not-so-little annoyances. So then, on a day like that, am I really working hard?

I think I’m working hard to blog right now, coz I’m doing it consciously, carefully. Before I’d just open the window and type whatever came to mind. I wrote instinctively. But now I filter each post before I type it. I channel it through my senses, especially the common one. I sift it in my mind to see if it will hurt anyone, or if it will upset me to read it in a few months tme, or if I will one day get a mwaura-spired urge to delete it.

I feel like I’m cheating when I do that, like I’m not being true to the writer in me, like I’m compromising the quality of my writing, like i’m quenching what i love most about my art – it’s authenticity. I feel like I’m wearing a mask in the one place where I need to be myself. I feel like I’m diluting the beauty of CB.

But then, in life we have to hide sometimes. And a good friend taught me that the best place to hide is in the open. I have finally acquired privacy, I have outlined my inner self, and more to the point, I’ve discovered the need to hide her.

I have this romanticized idea of love, the kind of give-all love between Celine and Michael in Underworld, or Neo and Trinity in Matrix, or Aragorn and Arwen in LOTR. [i watched them all in one sitting – long story, longer night, fun!! – and who names a gun-toting (shiny?) leather-wearing vampire Celine?! They couldn’t give her a cool name like Shivara or Latrava or… anything but Celine. I mean Celine?! Really!! ]

I long for that somebody who will know everything about me and love me anyway. But that can’t happen if everybody knows everything about me. So for the sake of my soulmate, I shall keep a bit of me secret, and leave it just for him. Maybe one day he’ll come along and unlock it for me. Maybe. I am the queen of excuses, no?

Besides, since I don’t work very hard at work, I might as well do it at play, yes?

I’ learning to be brief 🙂

10 facts about mels

1. Mels are deep, and good with words. They think in symbols and images, and can find meaning in anything from electronics instructions to cotton wool. Only a mel can write a convincingly passionate love poem [or song, or make an epic drawing or picture] about a plastic cup. They can expand a speck of dust into an essay (or lecture) on the philosophy of existentialism. Ergo, mels make the world’s best dottists.

2. Mels have a dark, sarcastic sense of humour. A mel classmate of mine, in response to our complaints about overchlorinated drinking water, explained that it was medicinal – the excess chlorine would bleach our red blood cells…

3. Because of their love of detail, organized minds, preference for running things from the background and sense of perfectionism, mel females make great PAs and housewives.

4. Being extremely sensitive, analytical, brilliant communicators observant and emotionally aware, mels have superior skills in all arts, especially the art.

5. Since most mels are brilliant with words – they’d be killer dartists if they weren’t so insecure and shy. It’s why they’re so charming on chat. Offline, they stick to creating lines for others in books, songs, movies, and love triangles.

6. The average mel [including me] smiles without showing their teeth, giggles quietly when amused, and covers their face when they laugh because they don’t like to be noticed. Or maybe we all have bad teeth…

7. Mels never believe compliments that they receive. They are likely to end up being mad at the complimenter for ‘mocking’. Other people think this is fake modesty and resent the mel for it.

8. Mels are prone to genius…and to self harm; they don’t like themselves very much.

9. The average mel is a true romantic and longs to find their ideal soulmate.

10. They like to think – about everything, including jokes. A typical mel thoguht pattern starts with the mel looking at a peas, then wondering where the phrase easy peazy came from, then recalling a song by black eyed peas, then wondering irritably what ‘they’ were thinking when they made london bridge a hit, then asking themselves what the original [duchess] fergie is up to these days… and on and on and on! Here’s a little mel-dentity test – it’s the mel equivalent of ‘two men walk into a bar’ : Why is abbreviation such a short word?

10 facts about cholerics

1. Cholerics are playground bullies, and the whole world is their playground.

2. They are workaholics who ‘have no time to get sick’.

3. Cholerics have immense stamina…and are deliciously flexible. Think 12-inch pipes and gravity boots.

4. To the choleric, everything is a competition, and they only play to win.

5. The choleric is always right. And they always get what they want, whether everyone else likes it or not.

6. Cholerics are adrenalin junkies.

7. Road rage is a choleric.

8. The average choleric spends the bulk of their income on footwear.

9. Cholerics don’t make friends, they acquire contacts, and they don’t socialize, they network.

10. Cholerics invented jobs. Without them we’d all be broke and in bed. 😉

10 facts about sanguines

1. The best way to stress [or punish] a sanguine is to tell them to sit still and shut up. They won’t last five minutes!

2. AD(H)D is sanguine.

3. If a sanguine isn’t allowed to flirt, s/he will shrivel up and die. If their mel partner catches them flirting, the mel will give them the look, which will make them shrivel up and die.

4. Sanguines like to use pet names for people they know – to flirt, and to cover up for forgetting your name. They are forgetful enough to forgive slights after 5 seconds, and to forget where they parked their car.

5. Sanguines are terribly expressive, like the little girl with the little curl. When they are up, their smile can light a room. When they are not, their expressions make you want to look in the mirror to see if you there’s an axe sticking out of your head. The sanguine sneer is pure evil with a nose.

6. The average sanguine has about 15 ‘blonde moments’ a day, where even the smartest of them goes totally clueless and behaves like a five-year-old. And they don’t do it on purpose. But it makes mels [and some cholerics] think they’re fake.

7. Sanguines are attention junkies. They’ll do just about anything to get noticed. They can die from isolation.

8. Sanguines have an infectious smile, and are constantly bubbly. They also have a thinly veiled mean streak, but they get away with it because they’re so cute.

9. The sanguine’s most effective weapon is the tantrum.

10. The average sanguine can’t speak to you without touch. They’ll pat your knee, rub your back, hold your arm or muss your hair within five minutes of meeting you.

10 facts about phlegs

1. Phlegs are almost as insecure as mels. The main reason they never give their opinion is because their thinking is so radical, and they are so poor at expressing it, that they are sure we’ll laugh at them. They hide their fear with a calm unaffected attitude and an easy smile. And the main reason for their ‘low sex drive’ is that they’re scared they won’t do it right.

2. The phleg’s greatest fear is being discovered for who they really are. But it’s their greatest desire to love someone that does.

3. The core of the phleg is to be different from everyone else. They hate being classed or generalized.

4. Phlegs are the most independent of all temperaments. The rest of the world thinks we control them because they are so adaptable to our moods and whims, and because they bend so far to adjust to us. We think they are blank pages that we write on to suit or desires. We call them doormats. But phlegs never do anything they don’t want to. They are gifted at watching people, and we trust them and confide in them. They only hang around people that they are in tune with, so we assume that they do everything we want. But the truth is if they didn’t want to do what you were doing, they’d be someplace else.

5. Phlegs like to take photographs because they live in the moment, and so they like to capture the moment.

6. Phlegs are genius when it comes to wit. Like that line in 27 dresses – ‘I feel like i just found out my favourite love song was written about a sandwich.’ Or something I once had Iman say ‘I feel like a green plate‘. Green plates – in high school, we had our meals on tables of eight girls each. Each table had one green plastic plate. We used them at mealtimes to throw peels, bones, weevils and leftovers.

7. Phlegs are the only truly unique ones among us, because each of them has their own drive. Mels have the generic drive of making things right, all cholerics want ‘to win’, all sanguines want to be adored. But the generic phleg goal is to be different. So each of them is a constantly shifting being, a career chameleon, with an individual core specific to them. In a group, mels will have a common goal, cholerics will have a common goal and sanguines will have a common goal. They will all be looking at the phlegs, liking them, ‘winning them over’ to their team. But every phleg will stand out in their affable unobtrusive way, smiling a quiet smile, and knowing that thay are different. And studying the others to see who best aligns with their goal and drawing that target.

8. It is impossible to dislike a phleg. They can be frustrating, stubborn, even annoying in their refusal to react. But it’s impossible to dislike them. And the true reason for that unreadable smile is that phlegs really don’t know how to react. Their responses to life are unusual and confusing – like the giggleloop. So they never know how to express them, and are afraid to offend anyone by doing it wrong or being inappropriate, so they just hide behind the easy smile.

9. Phlegs are gifted at picking up slang, languages, accents and dialects. It’s part of their camouflage.

10. The real reason phlegs ‘give in’ to everyone is because it’s the best way to get what they want. Since the world thinks they are pushovers, they are not a threat. We underestimate them. So they are left in peace to do exactly what they really want. And that makes them happy.

When a girl gets married, she loses a name. Or changes a name. Or gains a name. Depending on how you look at it. Some girls like to hyphenate, to have a foot in both worlds. Me, I’m old-fashioned. I believe in new beginnings, new initials. Besides, I’m still my father’s daughter, no matter what I’m called, right?

You might [or might not] have noticed a slight change in…tone in the past few days. A lot of stuff has gone down, stuff that has changed me profoundly. No, I didn’t go to South America and change my name to Diego or anything, but I did have a slight…operation.

See, differences in…gender…arise from the differing levels in testosterone. Guys generally have more than girls, and it’s generally stored in the…fruit basket. So if someone was to, say, lose their harvest, then they’d clearly be a little less…bass.

That’s what happened.

I went a little trigger happy with the clippers and lost my cashews. The essence of the cahsews is still there of course, it’s just a lot less…visible. Hence the voice alterations and stuff like that.

When I first found CB, she sounded a lot different than she does now. She didn’t like mirrors much – she was more of a window person, looking out at the world and offering some lemonade.

But lately she got into vanity cases and things, and it went to her head. Fortunately or unfortunately, the mirror broke, and I’ve had to take a step back, look at her, look at me, and figure out who’s who.

C is a watcher, an observer, a commentator, a writer. CB is a talker, and she doesn’t always know when to shut up. We tried a marriage of convenience, but you know how I feel about birds, bees, fleas [and girl on girl action]. I’m keeping the name though.

So chances are you’ll be seeing a lot less of B and a lot more of C. Except maybe when Mwaura visits, then all bets are off. But either way, hopefully, me – we – can still make you smile sometimes. 🙂

Is it lunch time yet?

PS : Does anyone remember in which year Relic Hunter aired on KBC? It was some Indiana Jones type show with a hot gypsy-looking chic called Sydney Fox and a cutish little Briton called Nigel Bailey. The chic was an archaeology professor and they used to go round the world hunting artefacts and things. I’m pretty sure it used to come at 6pm on Sundays, but I can’t remember the year. Google says the show ran from 1999 to 2002 but I’m sure KBC had it way before that…if that’s possible…help?