Posted on by crystal · 14 Comments

I need a pause button

I was a huge fan of Ally Mcbeal in the first two or three seasons. I sort of saw myself through her. Well, so did every girl in my high school, but of course I thought she was just so me!

We had endless arguments of ‘I am the real Ally Mcbeal’. That’s what you get when you take 300 bright chicks, lock them up with 50-something nuns, and tell them that boys are devil spawn.

Especially when said boys like to jog past your dorm windows at 5.00 a.m. singing rugby songs and calling particular girls by name. For some strange reason the girl[s] in question would then face the wrath of the nuns and their minions. Like it was somehow her fault that 50 devil spawned rugby players know her middle name…

[Note, that wasn’t me **grin**]

But I digress. My point was I have a lot of Mcbealesque … traits. And a few wannabe traits too. For example, how I wish I could wear her hankie skirts. But alas, le sigh, no guts, no heels [knock knees], no glory.

My first Ex used to say I remind him of Ally. I’m not sure it was a compliment, but hey, I can be naively positive when it suits me, and right now, it suits me. So I say muchos gracias.

[Eeeeeeew, Six pence none the richer’s ‘Kiss me’ in what sounds like Japanese!! Creepy!!]

One of my Mcbealesque-isms is to wish my life had a soundtrack, just like hers. My theme song would be … never mind that. I do sometimes hear songs in my head and dance to them, and I often lol to jokes no one else can hear. Probably a little-known effect of living in headphones, yes?

But more than a soundtrack, what my life really needs is a pause button. You know, some switch-controlled mechanism to freeze me before I do something stupidly CB. Because, clearly, not everything can be explained away by being INFJ. Sometimes, my blonde moments are just down to me being me.

[PS: Simple Plan singing a Beatles song inside my headphones is really very disturbing. **puzzled frown**]

Okay. So, let’s put this in a way I can comprehend. As an INFJ, my least developed function is Se. Extroverted sensing. That’s the spontaneity gene, the one that does stuff that feels good, just because. This is the function that rules impulse. It is also the one that strikes me least often, since I’m pretty solid and structured, and plan my actions months, sometimes years in advance.

But once in a while, I get the impulse to do something that would otherwise be considered stupid. Like call a boy four times. Yeah, I know.

See, I am not wooing this boy. I don’t do that anymore. No wait, I need to explain this in a little more detail. There are actually several boys involved. None of whom I am wooing. Some are new friends. Some are old friends. Some are almost friends. One is a boss. But they are all boys, and girls are generally not supposed to call boys. It makes them look, you know, stupid. Because boys are used to making the first move. They are used to calling girls, for whatever reason. So when a girl calls them up, 2 times out of 3, it is a booty call.

Enter me, who routinely calls boys because, well, it seemed like a good idea at the time. I have endless reasons for calling boys. I called one boy because I wanted to hear his voice, and because we have the same tariff and I had two hours of tariff-specific free talktime. I don’t know anyone else on that tariff … and we sorta-kinda had a thing … and I had to use the free minutes, they’d expire in seven days!

I called another boy because he called me then mysteriously got disconnected. Maybe he ran out of credit. Or network. What, don’t look at me like that. He had something I wanted. Head out of gutter please, it wasn’t like that.

Then I called the boss boy because he said I could call him anytime, and I needed his email, you know, to avoid giving off the wrong impression with endless cell calls.

I called a third [um.. fourth?] boy because he’s one of my best friends and we hadn’t talked in ages, and I wanted to bully him into doing something for me. Mweheheh. He never commented on the **ahem *ahem *several* cough ** missed calls. I called yet another boy because I needed advice, and it wasn’t the kind of thing you can ask on text.

So yeah, I routinely call boys. No, it’s not that I have a lot of credit, it’s just that sometimes I need to use my cellphone. Mind you I rarely get called myself. I never actually know where my phone is because if I’m not dialling, then it’s not active. That’s why I get so jazzed when a boy actually spends talktime on me.

Again, I digress. My point here is about flawed logic. See, I’m a handbag person. And a shoe person, as I recently realised. Which means I can’t resist a pretty bag or a neat pair of [mostly flat] shoes. My handbags are extreme. They’re either really tiny or really huge. And they are always always full of junk. Finding something in my handbag is like hunting for easter eggs.

As a result, the few times I get a phonecall, I have to scavenge my bag for ages before I give up and empty all the contents in search of my phone. Then I have to figure out which of the two identical phones [Nokia 1210 I think, the black one with the torch?] is ringing. So I usually pick my phone on the twelfth ring. Or I find the caller has given up so I call back.

Hence, I am very patient when I call people. If you don’t pick, I will assume you are rummaging in your bag, so I will call again. Then I will assume you have left your phone somewhere, so I will text. Then I will assume you forgot to respond, so an hour later, I will call again.

Then at some point it will eventually hit me that when someone, especially a boy, comes in from wherever, and sees four missed calls and two texts, they are probably thinking stalker alert!!

Eventually the person will text to explain why they didn’t take the call and what do I do? I immediately call again. And they don’t answer. It is at that point that I realise that perhaps calling is not such a good idea, yeah? Yet a few minutes later my itchy fingers will be dialling some other person’s number. This has happened four times in the last 24 hours … with four different people! Tsk tsk. This is not a good day for phonecalls, clearly.

Oh well, at least I am earning bonga points, yeah?

In related news, somebody needs to invent some kind of frequent flyer scheme for Safaricom and Zantel. Seriously. And I don’t mean postpaid…

PS: The police in Dar have issued a memo to international companies, banks et al warning about a gang of violent robbers. There have been three armed robberies in my hood in the last three months, and that’s a lot for Dar, where we mostly get petty thefts, and where any unusual crime is blamed on Kenyans. This time, the cops have stated clearly that the said gang includes Kenyans, and have issued hotlines for info leading to their arrest. For someone living and working in Dar, it just got that much harder to be Kenyan.

For more information on 3CB, click here.

Posted on by crystal · 19 Comments

Anotherpiphany

I was snooping around here, and … well … I guess I’m a little befuddled right now. So pardon incoherence, this is one of my self-seeking-clarity posts, it is allowed to not make any sense. It’s a**move along, nothing to see here** kinda thing.

When I first read those posts, I was really irritated. I thought ‘not another one, though at least this one is funny’. But I have to admit, there’s something wrong with me thinking all of ‘them’ are not normal. See, when you walk into a room of fifty people, and 49 of them are insane, it’s time to consider whether perhaps it’s you that isn’t ‘normal’.

It is very easy for me to dismiss people that don’t see things the way I do. But that writes off the human race, since very few people think like me. It’s down to basic projection. I value honesty, openess and trust, self disclosure and cuddles. So I give what I would like to receive. And since few people function like I do, they can’t handle it. They enjoy it at first, because it is novel, it’s something they haven’t encountered before. But after a while, they feel imposed upon and smothered. They just can’t handle it.

I”ve been accused of putting people into little boxes and making assumptions about them. I never mean it as an offense, I believe everyone has their own social fingerprint. It’s just that my mind operates by breaking things down into workable bits before I analyse them in depth.

So my generalisations are only ever a starting point. They are never an end in itself. I will class you into male or female, introvert or extrovert, SJ or NT, geek or bully, then I will look at you as you, see how similar or different you are from others in the box, what makes you tick. The world is my lab, and you are all guinea pigs. But you know what, I like guinea pigs. They’re cute, and I like cute.

I’m very stubborn about being myself and speaking my mind, even when no one wants to listen. Sometimes, especially when no one wants to listen. I tell myself that I am unique and special to be this way, and that anyone that doesn’t agree can go … yes, that one.

But I have this … pattern. When I make new friends, especially guys [coz girls are really complex, they scare me!!], they find me interesting for a while, then they tune me out. Yes EB, I know what you said about generalising, but I can only base my assumptions on what I have experienced. I will agree, grudgingly, to be proved wrong.

So today, after reading that post and hearing from someone whose opinion I trust that it is all true, I got upset. Because I have done every one of the forbidden items on that list, and I still don’t see why I should stop doing it. To me, that equates pretending, playing a role, not being myself. Why should I be like everyone else?

In my little mind, people who think like that writer are a little … loopy, and I will find that special boy who is not. After all, I’m INFJ, we are apparently [and i have no proof of this] very rare, so naturally, the superbeing that can love a nut like us is equally rare, yes? Maybe so, but if I want to function in this here world, I need to pluck my head out of my … that one, and get with the programme. Either that or I need to stop being so shattered every time my beloved ones do ‘normal’ things.

When I like someone, I feel free around them. I speak uncensored. I say whatever comes into my head in the very moment that it does. People seem to like that at first, but then it gets pretty old pretty fast and they begin to ignore me. I find that I’m talking at them instead of talking to them. I don’t think it’s that they value me any less, they just get, you know, tired. Too much of anything is wearying. Plus, I’m giving them what I need, not what they need, so they’re getting nothing out of it and they start to stay away.

Thing is, if I could get a nice solid reason to stop saying all that idiot stuff I say, then I would. Seriously. I like things to make sense. My world does not compute otherwise. For example, I learnt from one of my angels that people simply do not like hearing the truth. The average person will tell you ‘be honest’ and then they will hate you for it. Hence ‘do i look fat?’

People will say ‘just be yourself’, until they see you actually being yourself. Hence the demise of marriage. Spouses let their guard down and ‘be themselves’ and the spousees simply can’t handle it, so they cheat or leave. My solution to that has been to expose my warts from day one so that if people are going to be scared away, it happens early.

That rarely works, because people are used to faking and putting up fronts, so they assume I’m doing it too. Meanwhile, I am thinking that I am being accepted for me, and getting more and more comfy, so that when it hits the person that I’m for real and they take off screaming, I get shellshocked.

To successfully interact with people, you have to give them what they want. I don’t mean giving in to peer pressure, I mean that if you want someone to talk to you, you have to talk about stuff they like. Sometimes that means pretending. Sometimes it means compartmentalizing, only showing them what is acceptable, what they can handle. I think that’s really really sad.

I’ve never interacted with people before, because I didn’t want to get hurt. I am a proverbial easy bruiser, and I have a phobia for pain that not even childbirth has cured.  Lately I’ve been doing more of that, meeting people and talking with them getting to know them. Strictly online of course, because I live in Dar and few people here make sense.

In a few weeks I’m going home, and I hope to meet some of my online friends for real. I’m pretty excited about it, because I really have not mingled before, and surprisingly, I didn’t feel particularly nervous. Until I read those posts. I know it’s a riddiculously whole lot to draw from something so little, but that’s how my mind works. Everything is linked. So if one brick gets dislodged, my whole system comes tumbling down.

Suubsequently, the more I mingle, the more I want to crawl back into my hermit cave. People are just too complicated. Dealing with them is way too much work. And it doesn’t even burn any calories. Ai !! The whole process of finding out what different people are interested in and engaging them takes a lot of effort, and sometimes it’s just plain boring. It is so much better to say I will stick to people who see things like I do, share my interests, my passions, my desires, but again, that pretty much writes off humanity.

I’d like to think there are people out there who can consistently enjoy the person that I am. So far, I have found two, and how I adore them. Thing is, they are both very … how you say … closed. They keep things in. So I don’t know how much I mean to them, or if I mean anything at all, and I’m the kind of person that needs to know that.

But I suppose the fact that they alone, of all my intimates, bear with me constantly, means they do care. Or maybe they just haven’t tired yet. Maybe they just hide their unease and wearidom better than everyone else. I hope they won’t tire of me soon. And I pray that I’m as big a support to them as they are to me, because each day I see my group of intimates shrink as more and more of my angels lose their will to fly. I guess I’ll never really know, because they can’t express themselves in a way that I can understand. I need to somehow learn their language.

I have often wondered why certain people are afraid of me, guys specifically, and why they keep running away once they get to know me. It occured to me very clearly today. It’s because I am a child. When people look at me, they see an alpha female, and that’s a pull factor. But once I speak, and they see my soft, unfiltered, unadulterated heart, speaking without thinking, flirting without knowing, teasing without meaning, they realise that I’m just a kid.

I suppose I’ve known that all along, but it’s never been this lucid in my mind. I am me. I can pretend to be all grown up, or I can wallow in my childhood and find someone fun to play with, it’s entirely up to me. But when it comes to my dear ones, if I want to be with them at all, I have to learn to reach them at their levels. That means I need to learn smalltalk and boytalk and girltalk, because in this world of grown ups, very few people want to play.

For more information on 3CB, click here.

Posted on by crystal · 19 Comments

Bow down!!

This is an ode to my frenemy. [I sure hope she doesn’t read this … but just in case she does, no hard feelings hun. I got madd respect for you. Madddd!] Also, kahenya, my inspiration, [and JustDes, his inspiration] for teaching me to curse politely. Muchos gracias.

So today I [re?]discovered that I’m not really an editor. It’s a [re]discovery that I make often. Usually when I have spent hours poring over a manuscript and handed it in to the boss, only for him to spot a missing full stop on page one.

Or when I have scanned a 250 page novel cover to cover, looking for a particular paragraph, then some genius comes and finds it right at the beginning of the book. Yeah, it happens.

[I should spend more time looking at my page one, yeah?]

Or even when my boss is explaining the difference between ‘en and em dashes’ and I’m thinking about some VOK advert that had kids in knitted cotton pulling KICC bougainvillea poses and screaming Dash!! Then, subsequently, my mind drifts to my favourite song by those Msenangu people, ‘Can you be my dash-dash!!’ What was that band called again?

Boss says I have a problem with consistency. No, that doesn’t mean I’m unreliable, it means I sometimes spell organize with an ‘s’ and sometimes I spell it with a ‘z’… in the same sentence. I don’t give a first-syllable-in-the-Coffee-shop-slash-sports-bar-opposite-Jubilee-Insurance about stuff like that, but editors are supposed to care, and my boss blows a gasket over colonary content like that. Yeah, that was a bit much. I like the sound of it though.

I watched a previous boss go on and on about a book called ‘Eats shoots and leaves’ that dissects punctuation. What the coitus? [I can say WTC instead, yeah?] Anyway, things like that don’t move me. When you’re an editor, they should move you from skirting board to ceiling.

So yeah, in moments like that, I expect to see a bulb light up over ze bosi’s head and scream male bovine excretory product, coz that’s largely my editorial career staple.

Oddly enough, I didn’t really like being called an editor till I saw the reaction it draws from peers. I studied Music and Literature in campus, and often got asked by the med and law students ‘Kwani you want to be a teacher?’ No offense to the teachren btw. So, when said lawyers and med-people now hear I am an editor and go all jaw-drop on me, well, it feels kinda nice. So yeah, I do generally put a little stress on the I’m an Editor, see me type. Rather sad to [re]discover that I’m really not.

Oh, and some pretty boy walked into the office juzi when I was bopping my head and banging my keyboard [no gutter implied] and said that I type like a journalist. Hehehe.

There are moments when I scream to leave my job coz I just don’t fit. But there are other moments when I’m so in the zone that I wonder why I‘m fighting my genes for jeans. I have just realized that it always [or is it only?] happens when I’m construing, when I’m cooking up stuff, when I’m pulling Master of Equestrian Rear Fallout. My job highs are never about editing, they’re all about creative.

First, let me explain editing. It’s not just about fixing typos and finding full stops. It’s about quality control. You make sure the sentences are the right length, the nuances have the right tone, the registers are at the right level, the market trends are included, the censors are inoffended [what. I like the way it sounds, so there].

When you are interviewed for an editorial job, you’ll be given a 6 year’s old story about a cow and asked to turn into legal jargon. Then you will be given a work contract with a million different fine prints and asked to translate it from lawyernese into kinderspeak.

When I was given that test, I threw around words like bovine, cow, gestation, maziwa lala and yoghurt in appropriate places. Nice, yes? When she was given the test, she drew a stick figure of a cow and coloured it. Yes, she got more brownie points.

We have worked together, lived together, and have had the same taste in men. Bad. I admire her, respect her and detest her in equal volumes. And today, she literally saved my life.

Here’s what happened. I got my first PJ. Yay! They paid in advance. Double yay!! I promised to deliver. Because I could. Except that contents of sewer happened, and I was too overwhelmed by mania, exhaustion, and deadlines at the day job. So I didn’t deliver.

I tried to find some intimates to bail me out. One did, voluntarily. EB, you rock!! A couple of my other darlings had prior engagements. My baby brothers commiserated … but they have the combined attention span of a feather, so with all the love they have for me, they couldn’t help.

Enter she. I called her on a whim, cursing and grumbling while I did. It’s pride really. I’ve always known she’s better than me, I just didn’t particularly want to buy her a badge to prove it.

One [of the many] thing[s] I give this girl, she’s gracious. There was not a touch of arrogance or superiority or anything at all. She just said ‘Cool, swing it my way, I’ll work on it.’ She did. And how.

I am looking at her work now. Awe does not even begin to describe it. My work is good, but hers is brilliant!! It’s like comparing a roman column to a toothpick. Well, maybe not, but the metaphor sounded really nice in my head.

Anyway, point is she’s good. She makes this excrement look easy. And she’s so copulating nice! Coitus! I’m looking at a chapter she’s done vs a chapter I’ve done. I know you’re not meant to compare yourself to anyone yada yada yada, but copulate it, she’s good! Cowdung!!

It comes down to style really. I’ve got ideas, but she’s got technique. I dazzle my boss with whiffs of brilliance when I come up with some unexpected concept that looks good in print. She fixes the text and makes it look all neat and sensible. I do the quirk, she does the polish. Which is all well and good, except that we’re editors, so we’re supposed to do less quirk and more polish. Hence, she is way better at th’ish than I am.

I am not complaining though [uh-huh, eyes on the nose now…]. She works somewhere else now, so the rivalry is all in my head. And she has done this beautiful job for my client. She gets the cash even though I get the glory, I am forwarding every cent to her. I don’t need bad kharma stalking me around.

Is there a point to this rant. Er…yeah. Editorial side-hustle = fail. I will stick to writing and blogging. I toyed with the idea of copy-writing a while back, I might look into that. But I shall leave the editing to the editors. Woman, bow dooooown! I salute you.

Oh, PS: she’s the tiny petite damselesque boys-fall-all-over-themselves-to-save-her type. Short and sweet and pretty little figure. And she’s got glasses and a Sophie Ikenye bob. Sigh. Some girls have all the luck. Back to my corner. **grin**

PPS: I’m considering telling my boss that I can’t do the 6-months-shrunk-into-one project. What are the odds he’ll fire me? I’m thinking he will bribe me instead, to try and make me bite the proverbial bullet. Hmm. This might be the week I discover what my price is. Interesting.

PS 3: I was supposed to go for a wedding tonight. [Yes, the four separate TZ wedding ceremonies generally happen at night]. I had my pretty little dress and my pretty little shoes, but the hair was a mess!!It hasn’t seen Rashidi in months because I’m always at work. The horror!! I tried to sneak an appointment today, but he was all ‘I’m too tired, call me tomorrow’. Sigh. Anyway, I put on the pretty dress and the pretty shoes and pranced around to the sound of my little girl’s camera click.

Then I put princess and nanny in a cab and sent them on their way … without me. Yep, I’m chicken. Cluck cluck. So now I’m sitting with my top in my lap and my pretty little dress grazing my kness while I work. Later I shall hear tales of the bride and the groom and a small piece of cake, but for now, I happy in my little girly dress, even though no one but me can see it 🙂

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