The Inbetweeners

Dear Kenyans, I understand that we are tired; I am tired too. I am tired of wearing my mask. Tired of staying away from my friends and family because I don’t know if I could infect them. Tired of being resilient, of being hopeful and of being cautious.  But above all, I am tired of seeing the increasing number of dead and infected pass by. Knowing that each of those numbers represents promises unkept. Knowing that each of those numbers represents communities in mourning. Fearing that one of those numbers could be me.  So, I will not remind you of those numbers. Because, for better or worse, many of us remain unaffected by the virus. And it is this distance, that allows us to look past the coronavirus. This distance permits my selfishness as I bemoan the containment measures. As I join others in calling for a return to normal.  But this is normal . If normalcy is conforming to a standard and the realisation of expectations; we now live in a world where we expect to stay ho...

I tend to write the posts while I am at Church. Partly because it keeps me awake and alert, subsequently sparing my family the embarrassment and God the dishonour of my falling asleep at my post. But mostly because, at its core, church is a time for introspection and reflection in a community of like-minded people who can hold you accountable. Now, while I may not share their beliefs, I do benefit from the introspective and reflective culture that has been cultivated. So, today I write this in Church and I find myself writing to prevent the former, rather than engage with the latter. I have nothing to say about my week. Was I anxious? Yup, but how is that new? It continues to manifest in the same ways and impact my life in the same ways. What lessons did I learn? Perhaps those who proclaim their power the loudest, often have the least amount of power. To quote Tywin Lannister, "Any man who says 'I am King' is no true king at all." True power, desires to perpetuate its...

The working title for this post is "Falalalala Lala La La." For no other reason than, that this phrase represents a sort of release of musical tension. Without needing to write the preceding words, the song, if you are familiar with it, started playing in your head; almost subconsciously. Not only does this demonstrate hermeticism in action, as I have changed your reality, albeit minutely, but it provides a lovely framing device for what I want to talk about today. It has been a tense week. I started a new job and had to check imposter syndrome rearing its ugly head as I tried to learn from a place of neutrality, not defensiveness (because imposter syndrome makes me feel like I don't belong or I am undeserving, I get defensive). In so doing, I learned something about myself and the way I operate in the world; ideas and their abstract applications fascinate me. It is far more interesting to discuss how Schrodinger's cat is both dead and alive, and the philosophical ...

  To be honest, this week has been a bit of a blur and of perfectly warranted anxieties. To extract what I have learned would be like wiping crude oil off a bird's wings. But I will try? Delivery matters. I listened to two people delivering the exact same speech and was reminded of the difference between communicating a speech and merely saying it. The former conveys the implicit meaning the words attempt to capture, while the latter expected the words to stand on their own merit. I know this to be true, for music because it is something I struggle with. Due to my perfectionism, I want the presentation to be technically perfect, forgetting that the purpose of music is to express the spirit, not just communicate the text. This is a lesson I keep forgetting, so it was nice to be reminded. I am not where I want to be. Not who I want to be. But equally, not so far removed from that ideal that I feel pressured to change substantively. The dissonance between my ideal and reality is, rat...

I have been thinking about this particular subject for a while. In a move ridiculously characteristic of me, I was reluctant to start because of the implications of whatever conclusions I drew would say about me. But as there is no wifi, and this is on my to-do list, let’s begin, shall we? There’s an episode of the TV show, Girlfriends, in which one of the titular girlfriends, Toni, rejects a man with darker skin. This man was her type to a T - sinfully wealthy, but she rejected him. When asked why, she said that she didn’t want to have kids darker than her, because they would have it worse than her. Implicit in her argument was that the best thing she could do for her future children, the best thing she could pass on was lighter skin. This got me thinking; is that truly the best thing she could have passed on to her children to ensure their success? While the answer is no, it’s more complicated than that. It’s no secret that people of colour with lighter skin  have it easier. Pas...

  I'm starting to realise the form these weekly posts are taking. Originally, I had envisioned them as weekly reflections, but now they read more like short posts that I couldn't turn into my usual posts. I will be more intentional about extracting the lessons I learned and sharing those with you. Let's begin: Health insurance is arbitrary as all hell. I 've been shopping around for private health insurance, and I've been trying to find one that meets my needs at my current stage. However, many exclude family planning but will offer to cover whatever children I may have and that annoys me. From an economic perspective, you would rather pay the hundreds of thousands to cover my future children, than the thousands to cover my contraceptives? I have yet to find anyone that can explain to me why this is, so I've been left to figure it out for myself. In my mind, there are two reasons; (1) financial and; (2) moral. Regarding the former, perhaps the insurance compani...

2 weeks ago, I was looking for a new show to watch and I stumbled upon Hulu's "The Great". A, sometimes true, history-inspired tale of Catherine the Great; Tsarina of Russia. The Tsarina is, an awe-inspiring figure who should be remembered for her penmanship of the  Velikiy Nakaz - one of the most remarkable political treatises published that enshrined enlightenment principles like the rule of law into Russian Law - but is instead remembered for her sexual exploits, including an alleged tryst with a horse (a rumour addressed in the eponymous TV show and a recurring joke in which Catherine believes no-one will remember it).  What can I say, except that history does not treat its' women kindly? But then again, it has been said that rarely do well-behaved women make history, and Catherine the Great was not " well-behaved", for the standards of the time. But I digress. As I was watching the show, I was struck by how much the writers got right, and how much th...

 Here's what I learned this week; Intelligence is a muscle that needs to be trained, exercised and challenged. Unfortunately, I have not been directly doing so. Yes, when I watch the, more than, occasional commentary video I am training my intelligence, much like the walk to work can, technically, be counted as exercise. But the primary purpose of that consumption is entertainment, not education. So, I need to be more intentional in training my intelligence. From next week, I'll end these posts with a commentary on what I learned from a paper I read, a documentary I watched or podcast I listened to. I hate, absolutely fucking hate, the idea that African nations were given democracy. We were not given democracy, we fought for it. We bled for it. We die for it. It was not a gift from the colonisers, who set up their colonies for their political and capital interests, not for democracy. No one has ever been given democracy. Even the Americans, the self-proclaimed bastions of democ...

 In an attempt to build habits this year, I'm going to start the month of with a weekly reflection on the lessons I learned. These lessons may not be profound, much to the chagrin of my sidditiness, but there is a certain charm in simplicity. Hopefully, in doing this, I can get into the practice of writing again. For nothing else, than simple enjoyment. Lesson 1: Anxiety is a bitch. An old lesson but a true one. It is truly exhausting to be worried all the time. Worried that, in a nutshell, I am not enough with "ample" evidence that my broken, serotonin-lacking, brain misconstrues to prove my point. Worried that due to this inadequacy, I will fail. But I did learn that an "attitude of grattitude" helps. On the days I forced myself to think of 3 things I am grateful for, I felt a real calm in my mind. If only I could remember to do it more often. Lesson 2: I want to be an expert. At this point, I'm not entirely sure if it's for the recognition or for its ...

Happy New Year! Let's talk about some lessons, shall we? I often find myself wishing for a reset button. Or the ability to make multiple clones of myself so that they could live out every option, take every path I was availed. Or the knowledge of all Aileen's in all the universes. I figure, it's the only way to make sure I don't make a mistake. To guarantee that I have "NO RAGRETS" by the end of my life. But this often means when I reflect on my life and the choices I have made, I focus on what could have been and yearn to return to the moment I made the choice to choose differently. Which means, I don't know how to live with, and move on from, my mistakes. I dwell on how I should have never made them in the first place. For example, when I make a mistake in an essay, I start again. I don't salvage, I burn and begin anew. But that doesn't work with life. I wish it did.

NB: this was written as a stream of consciousness, so I apologise if some bits are repetitive or slightly incoherent. I didn't edit it too much because I wanted the aforementioned structure to shine through.