CHEATER!

I’m not sure if it applies to everyone but as far as I am concerned I can cheat the world but I can’t cheat myself. I used to be my own worst critic but that didn’t prove healthy so I gradually evolved into my own biggest challenger. Not quite a different thing but much more fun for me, if I overcome the challenges that is. I’m going to attempt to elaborate.

I’ll begin with FIFA, my all time favourite computer game. This should be on Ripley’s because believe it or not that game has the fundamentals of living a fulfilling life embedded in it! Playing the manager mode, FIFA teaches you to bank on the future, stick with old players and it won’t be long before you are left with either no players or a bankrupt club. Similarly, (and now I’m about to reveal the superficial me), whenever I see a woman, the pretty one mostly (‘pretty’ here refers to the whole package as far as physical eyes can see), my brain, upon my request generates probable images of how she would look like after her first child and again after her second… and perhaps another for after her third child if the images are still bearable to envision. This helps me to estimate the ‘use before’ date of a woman’s prettiness given the circumstance of pregnancy or pregnancies. Don’t you dare sneer because I’m serious. It’s all about peeping into the future. There are many other FIFA principles that can be applied in real life, but that is another post. All this, although irrelevant in the context of this post is quite significant to mention. What is relevant though is that playing as Arsenal on FIFA 2010 (never have I played as any other team), I have never won the Champion’s League. It sickens me! And you know how it takes days before you complete a season. I won once but I had to retake the semi-final match and that doesn’t count to me. I didn’t feel anything because I cheated the software, but not me.

I’m always challenging myself, sometimes, as I have come to realize, unnecessarily. For instance, I visited chiira’s blog and he makes description of places in Nairobi on this post. To date, it bugs me that I can’t figure out a single location but I wouldn’t ask or let anyone tell me because yes, it would equate to cheating! You know that game Spider Solitaire? It does have the option of checking for possible moves you could make, guess who doesn’t use that? You got it- ME! And sometimes I set a time limit for myself within which I should complete the game. If the time limit ends before I finish, I start afresh. Did I mention that I only play the difficult level?

This, my blog friends, may seem a harmless habit but not when applied in life and death situations, because that is what I unknowingly did over time until God showed it to me. It came to me in a flash, it couldn’t be any more vivid. This happened moments ago from when I’m writing this. Brethren, like everyone else I have my own demons to fight, I have my own flaws, I have my own weaknesses. When it came to matters of sin, it was etched in my subconscious mind that to truly surmount sin you should face it. That if you are struggling with adultery, bring home a whore and dare not to touch her. If you have trouble with porn, buy tons of it yet don’t use it! To me that would have been true victory over sin as opposed to running away from it by eliminating it from your life and pretending it didn’t exist! I was wrong, or maybe I was not but it’s putting excessive load on yourself. It’s unnecessary, but if you can do that then you are better off. I’ve been playing with fire, sin is nothing to challenge yourself with. I can’t remember praying to God to let Him help me with my battle against sin. My attitude was “it’s okay, God, I’ll do this!” because in my mind if God helped it would have been cheating! As much as I wanted to please God and say “look, no hands!”, I have learned today that it’s okay to let Him hold me to prevent me from falling.

So dear God I have a sin problem I can’t overcome on my own, please help me. If I should cheat sin or whatever then so be it. No more self-induced challenges.

TRUE STORY

I'm breaking records in my life, let's begin with the rather conceivable ones. Today, okay it's past midnight so I really mean to say yesterday, was the day that went down in history as the day I spotted the highest number of expectant women around town! Wasn't an unusual thing in the college I went to... hell, half the people we shared a room with became accidental dads (2/4), but for some reason the same scenario on the streets of Nairobi alarms me. From the looks of it, the state of the economy done not depress any progress in that department :)

Nowadays I can smell an expectant woman from twenty miles away and I can pinpoint just exactly when this ability began to develop inside me. I was eighteen years old (them good ol' days) and very naïve, or maybe not... depending on how you look at it, sometimes emotions can cloud your judgment. Then there lived a beautiful female that I got so strongly attracted to, let's give her an innocent name as Mary. We were in the same class for a short course in a certain institution, she was my neighbor too so we walked home together everyday, making my moves on her slowly but surely. In my head I remember saying, "She's okay except for that potbelly, but that we can fix"

So one morning when the boys in class gather up during recess to talk, Mary's name pops up. Nobody knew my intentions with her, about how I fantasized about her every night. It is my principle to not reveal the prey to friends until the prey becomes a victim. Them boys hated on her, and to pretend I was on their side I innocently added, "And I don't think she's even serious with life, seen how she keeps leaving the classroom all the time?" Then one of them blatantly tells me "That's because she's pregnant!" I still stared at the young man with a blank face waiting for further explanation for I still couldn't see the connection- morning sickness! Long story short, I now can identify a two day pregnant woman if I hang around her long enough. True story! And to the curious lot, no I did not proceed with my quest.

Last week, a rather uncanny series of events occurred in my life. Never happened before in the history of my life. I hop into a bus and sit next to this good-looking chic on my way home. Describing her as just good-looking seems a description so inadequate but I'm going to fight the urge of wanting to describe her any further than that to protect her privacy... or whatever. Yes, so I thought she was cute, she alighted at her stop, that's right before mine and I alighted at mine and went home. Following day, around the same time, I arrive at the bus stop, I get into a bus to go home, I look for an empty spot near the window which leads me all the way to the very back seat. Ten seconds later, I see the same chic coming and sitting next to me! I don't know about you out there but I have never sat next to the same stranger in a bus in two consecutive days, in this case nights. As soon as she sat down these are the exact words that I said to her "What are the odds? We were together yesterday!" She smiled and pretended to recall, then she said yes. And the rest is history. Lets just say that that was not the last time we saw each other.

In other news, from my impossible thoughts; as I was conversing with myself today yesterday walking home from the bus stop, I was struck by a thought I have never thought up before. I can't remember what I was talking about but it all started when I told myself that I'm only but human, insinuating that I am not perfect. Then I thought, if indeed it is in the nature of man to be imperfect then why does God expect perfection from us, we all fall short but that's what He would want from us. God's initial intention was for man to be perfect and sinless but man chose a different path. Again Jesus was human in nature when He was on earth, he experienced everything we do as human beings; pain, emotions, hunger and so on, yet He was perfect. Conclusion: we are not imperfect because we are human, its because we allow ourselves to slip. We are not weak, we are powerful! And it's the misuse of this power that proves detrimental to ourselves. Believe it, true story!

Bonus: Again last week, I listened to an English stammerer being interviewed on BBC radio. Never had I heard anyone stammer in English before. It was kind of hilarious!!! TRUE STORY.

NB: For those who thought I forgot, I did not. Part 2 of Strange Strangers is coming soon. Seems I have my mojo back, so I'm holding it back a little :)

GOD IS GOD AND MAN IS MAN

‘Thou shall love your neighbour as you love yourself’ is, perhaps understandably, not the easiest commandment to keep especially if your neighbour is a pain in the… neck. So is it too much to ask of a person- to love unconditionally?

Before I can go any further I feel the need to clarify one thing which forms the basis of most of my arguments anywhere anytime, something which you may or may not agree with but hopefully it would make me better understood, but to not necessarily make you agree with me. As much as the world that we are living in is imperfect in every way, I still believe in perfectness (for lack of a better word) and the reality of it being achievable. Pure and perfect world peace, for example, is proclaimed impossible. I understand, but pure goodness does exist even if we have never ever experienced it or even heard of it. I believe in the absolute impossible in our world as we know it, which I refer to as perfect goodness.
That having been said- a truth that I’m not willing to give up, let us together explore the truth about love- pure, unconditional love. In this case for our neighbours, yes it has never been seen among men perhaps but it is there somewhere and the least we can do is try to find it and own it within ourselves and not allow anything or anyone to tamper with it. By keeping love in our hearts it will help keep us within the boundaries of the wider law which is responsible for our existence.

For example when the Muslims took to the streets and caused chaos that led to huge losses in the city of Nairobi not so long ago, Kenyans were peeved by the incident, and rightfully so. Anger is allowed, but to whom or what is the anger channeled? To the Muslims, those ungrateful Somali scumbags whom we allowed to live in our country and forgot, now they think they are equal citizens, them? How do you love such people? The only thing that is deservedly left for them is nothing less than hate, not just for those who participated in the riot but the whole bunch of them! Hate all of them, how can we tell the difference anyway? They are all Somali Muslims! Is that it? Anger is rapidly transformed to hate and before you know it the whole thing becomes personalized and people become profiled and a ‘wanted’ tag is hang on their neck. It’s so easy to become inebriated with these strong and turbulent emotions that subsequently lead us to holler abusive statements. At this point the initial wrong deed is forgotten and a specific group of people becomes a target as soon as they are labeled as the bad guys. This is by no means trying to redeem those Muslims or to imply that what they did was right or to accumulate sympathy for them. It’s to merely suggest that emotions should not be misunderstood or be exaggerated into something else, and especially not hate.

If anyone knows the slightest thing about perfectness and the whole story of purity, then he knows God and is very close to Him. And God himself gets annoyed with us sometimes if not all the time (because we sin all the time), does that make Him look at the individual wrongdoer differently? Does it make Him hate that person? I think not. So why not hate the evil deed and love the wrongdoer, is that reasonable? Just so we can be like God? When Jesus was in that church whipping the fear out of a crowd that had turned his Father’s house into a market place, kicking all their goods around, He did not at anytime think- I hate these people! But I know the response that this argument may fetch, let God be God and man be man, its hard enough being human as it is. There is no time to worry about such stuff, life is too short. We will all die and find out all the secrets of life after all.

Martin Luther King was a very extraordinary man, I think he believed in that state of pure goodness to be the ardent preacher of peace and pacifism that he was. He preached love and was himself confused I think, when he asked himself how anyone could find it in his human heart to love the white racist oppressors of their time. Many people found his call for love and peace as a counter for hatred directed to black people in America by racists as impractical and unreasonable. That ‘stupid’ belief that everything will fix itself one day by the power of that unconditional love, is what I’m talking about. That belief in that pure love and pure goodness has power over evil of any magnitude, that belief that would make people look at you and wished you came back to reality for your own good. But even in this belief one has to acknowledge that this world is imperfect and will never be perfect and neither will any of us, at least not in this life but it is not at all hopeless or naïve to believe that goodness will prevail over evil, this goodness powered by that pure love, that pure unconditional love. The idea behind it all is to mimic God, because He is pure and good.

So it is upon us all to practice that love and protect it from being distorted by our own judgment and
reasoning and emotions such as anger and pain. Injustices are going to be committed against us and we are not constrained into not seeking justice. Justice is good so it shall be granted to us and it shall prevail. There is nothing evil that shall ever conceive any lasting good. And in the final hour, it is goodness that shall emerge triumphant over evil. That’s just what love does, it brings forth goodness.

YAWN

I should stop doing this, I’ve been holding this fake smile for so long I can feel my facial muscles aching. I must look ridiculous right now, like a stupid clown who’s accidentally stepped on a live wire with the expression on his face looking like he just died! Okay, I’m relaxed now, this thing is like reflex I can’t remember how I came to having that static smile on my otherwise handsome face. From now on I’m going to be real enough, at least to my self, to not fake anything. If it’s not funny then its not funny. Life couldn’t be any more unfairer, how is it that there only two groups of people who have the most nothings to talk about- boring people and people with bad breath. Now I’m stuck here watching him go on and on but little does he know…

Which brings me to my other point, how doesn’t he know? I’m yawning after every two seconds yet I’m neither hungry nor sleepy, it’s my only display of body language that is authentic which naturally means it’s easy to see that it’s overwhelming me. I’m even trying to suppress it because I’m afraid having my mouth that wide and that frequently may lead to un-wanted foreign objects down my throat! I am not paying attention, can’t you see? How mild can I put this, if boredom were music, you’d be the best artist of all time, right there at the top. Can’t even make out what all the fidgeting I have been doing denotes, how the hell does this guy interact with them females?! Everyone knows them ladies don’t speak any other language better than they do body language. The clown must be single.
If he goes ahead to narrate another one of those movies or TV shows I am going to hold my breath until I drop dead. He’s not running his mouth now. He’s stopped. There it is, that awkward silence before another story sets in. The trick is to not say a word to avoid giving him a reason to keep going.

“And have you watched 2012?”

Should I answer this? Perhaps he’ll let it go if I just look at him and play deaf.

“Have you?”

Oookay, he won’t let it go. I guess that won’t work.

“Yes.”

“Yeah, at the beginning it starts when this guy takes his kids camping…

I thought I just said I’ve watched that movie? I should just brace myself because that movie was looong, and seeing that he’s got a passion for detail it seems like I’m in for a very long ride. I could just stand up and walk away right now but we’re in my room. And what type of uncle would I be if I gave in to the urge of screaming the words “Get the hell outta my face!” to him, look at him. I’m just thankful he’s not my conscience, so I can still have real conversations with myself… in my head, like now. Yawn alert, suppress! Suppress! Oh, how else will he get the hint just let it. Oh, my. Where were we? Wait, where’s my phone I should check my Facebook inbox.

What is he laughing? Okay, I’ll let out a chuckle. Where is that damn phone, I need to keep my hands busy. I know Talliah has sent me something in my inbox anyway, I love that chic. Yawn, cover mouth! I must look like an Orang’-utan as I’m yawning. I’m getting tired, he’s sucking the energy out of me! Found you baby phone, come here.

Before I log in to Facebook and subsequently Twitter, lets fake a face that suggests attentiveness. Wow, he likes that yet what I’m wondering is how did he get that pimple on his cheek to become that big and red? He’s giving me a smile I think he’s going to tell a joke, giggle. Damn, by the look in his face I must have laughed a little too soon. And there goes the first truly funny thing, ha-ha. Look at his face now, he makes me laugh some more… Sis to my rescue, she delivers a message that mom wants nephew for something. Phew, now onto Facebook. This young man, but he’s okay he’s family.