Social Networking Withdrawal

A little over a week ago I made a deal with my younger brother lets call him young one. The deal was basically a challenge that I could not survive without my phone for a week, never mind the fact that I knew he was just saying that to get my phone knowing fully well that I resented backing off a challenge. So with a painful heart, I watched young one take apart my precious BB Curve swapping SIM cards, memory cards, ring tones and I cringed to the possible lack of push emails for a week. I thought to myself, snap out of it, you are not attached to a simple piece of technology snap out of it!.

So with that motivation from my inner self i summoned up some will power and let the phone go, out of my room and I found myself saying " you better take care of her or I will kill you in your sleep". The expression i saw on young one's face and I knew, I knew I had climbed to the very top of our weirdness scale of one to ten. I was TEN, TEN!, did I just refer to a phone as a person, did I just threaten to kill young one in his sleep?? Ofcourse I was joking, chuckling uncomfortably as young one left my room with my little friend and I almost waved it goodbye. At least there were no tears welling up in my eye or I might have just broken the weirdness scale and crossed over to the other side.

Day 1

This was not a fun day for me, I got lost on my way to work and if I had my phone google map was just one click away and here in lies my excuses why I needed my phone but my main was the lack of facebook, twitter, yahoo messenger, msn and instant access to all my five email addresses. I felt like i had been detached from the rest of the world and placed on a deserted island but i braved the day and survived it!

The remaining days were surprisingly uneventful and as i was almost congratulating myself for a job well done, i get a call on the makeshift brick that was my phone for the week and it my friends saying "why weren't you in class??, the exam resource was handed out" my jaw dropped and i almost screamed the house down. Apparently an email had been sent two days prior to change the day for the class and as I had become so attached to my phone actually going on the pc to check my email was no longer an impulse.

Now the world is back to normal and I have my phone but as much as i thought that my daily existence isn't being governed by the fast pacing world of internet, phone and computer but then i have become dependent on it and I have chosen to be actively aware of my actions so that I do not become completely inefficient without these gadgets. This journey will be tough but it needs to be done

The demythification of Magun

"An evil man makes his race bad even when that race is filled with angels; but a race is a race and a man a man."

This is a quote I got from Thunderbolt (Magun), A Mainframe Yoruba movie on the subject of magun, the superstitious ideology that curbs unfaithfulness. As much as I would like to be discussing why a man's action has effect on his race or whatever group he identifies with like how a catholic girl getting pregnant having an abortion and them marrying a divorcee might make people think catholic girls don't hold true to their Christian beliefs. That said, what I intend to rant about is how adultery is handled in the society and how this is another level in which women and men are differentially treated.

PLOT: A young married woman decides to go back and finish her uncompleted NYSC programme a compulsory year of service to to the country after one finishes from the university but gets deployed to a rural city far from her husband and child. The husband feels insecure as he believes his wife is very beautiful and would command many male attention and in his sour of jealousy he laced her with Magun after he believed rumours of her continuous affairs with co workers and a particular doctor. The film actually addresses the concept of a spiritual aspect to our existence that is slowly been eradicated by our lust after western civilisation i.e are Yoruba mythology and superstitions actually true?

MAGUN: A sort of voodoo charm (for lack of a better word) to prove/punish adultery and in the many superstitions surrounding it, if a woman 'infected' with magun becomes intimate with any man either the man or herself and the man crosses to the life beyond or remain alive and be worth no more than vegetables. The situation can only be remedied if the aggrieved husband was ready to forgive the cheating or in the case of the movie the not cheating wife.

Now magun from what I know about it can only be placed on women albeit there are love potions that a woman can use to enslave her husband. The fact that this potentially deadly mythology is only in place for unfaithful women causes me to think about the time it might have been invented and what the plight of women might have been then when it comes to adultery but the consolation to that is times have changed but looking at the modern and globalised society we live in today I still see discrepancies as to if a woman cheated to if a man cheated.

There is shame for a woman if she is found to have multiple affairs but a man is a conqueror if he can juggle a wife and three mistresses. But I am not trying to remove shame from a woman who cheats because that would be accepting something of which I am very much against but to put into our society shame for men who are unfaithful. Equality isn't about being able to do the same thing but about being able to take same amount of responsibility for the same action.

The Diary of the Sick and Tired

Being rejected is something we all resent, it stops us from taking risks and challenges because of the very fear that we might be shot down and stopped in our tracks. Rejection can come to us in every area of life, but often people talk about being rejected by love I say love (the feeling) as opposed to being rejected by a loved one (the person) because the feeling is what prompts us to take the step forward and it is this lack of feeling that causes the other person to retreat thereby hurting us, therefore it is love that betrays and rejects us over and over again.

It is the strong of us that rise above the storms of rejection and those that come short of strength may sink to a downward spiral that many of us cannot imagine, however,failure isn't about falling down, its about not rising up again and it is important to be conscious of our state of mind because we often run the risk of thinking that our shortcomings in life are our fault.

But I am not talking about love here as the boy/girl thing we see thrown in our face in the media. I'm talking about the love one could have say for a vocation or calling and then deciding that all our strength and devotion would be to achieving whatever that dream is but often, these things are not in our control; if its a job, somebody does the selecting and they can decide that we are not good enough and this can happen even when we think we are the best there could be.

There is need for rock solid strenght and determination to rise above this, it is the strong of us that can keep pressing on, pushing on until we reach our mark. So today friend, if you have been rejected and you know you are made for whatever it is you been deprived, don't give up just yet push on just a little more, reflect and find what might be holding you back and when you find it, fix it and try again and don't forget, all we need is one foot in the threshold of the door and our dreams would be on the palm of our hands.