FATE, OH SWEET FATE

Fate! Fate is when everything torpedoes. Fate is when hitherto smooth-sailing endeavours crumble into a heap. It is fate when you cannot contain things when they head nadir. That is fate.

It’s fate when your beloved baby dies. Sadder fate it is when she departs at so tender an age. Isn’t fateful when no medic can save her life? God! Oh God! She wasn’t ill. But that is fate, darling.

It’s hard fate when your girlfriend elopes with another man. It’s fate ‘cause the other is richer, handsomer, more romantic. Never mind you were bill and coo in love with each other. Her heart turns colder toward you. Man, colder than the wild of Siberia in winter, blame fate. Fate!

Call it fate when your bae loves a less prettier, rogue and undeserving damsel. You are a thousand times more chic, loving, everything! It’s fate that a heart finds home even on rocks, thorns. You weep, you beg, till you run hoarse…and wait…you  LOSE. For it is fate in charge.

Fate! Is when in college, a good guy as you are, you share a room with rugged guys. Hell! They have mannerisms of invalids. They smoke, they drink, they speak crudely, and even shag. In your glaring presence. This is so unfair! You are right, sweetheart, but easy. You gotta gird your loins. It’s fate!

Fate, oh fate! Is when your beloved, lovely wife dies in labour. You loved her! You can’t lose her, hell no! You can’t take in this much anguish, yet she’s is gone, gone with the kid, FOREVER! Your man spirit is crushed; this is fate!

Fateful is when you read, research, commit. You bomb in that exam, none the less. Why? The research was legitimate! The work was authentic! Weren’t they?  Yet cheaters excel, the tardy sail through, but you. That’s fate’s justice.

Your business collapses, a lifetime’s undertaking. It goes down the drain, worse in one throw. The manager suggests your entry into the stock market, lucrative, no? The plan backfires, horrendously. And you lose it all. Your claim is valid: you didn’t propose this, the manager did. Castigate him not too much. It’s the course of fate.

Your friend, relation or acquaintance perishes in an accident. Or someone close to you gets crippled for life. They had NOTHING to do with the disaster! It was someone else’s mishap, but suffering you have to. Human error, they say. No! It is pain, so much pain, and fate!

Your bank gets liquidated; closure is imminent. Managers embezzled every last penny with reckless abandon. Your lifetime savings stuck in the accounts. There’s no warning for you: it was a cancer they never wished to expose, till now. You sink as they sink, or float. And sink you must, for fate is fate.

Fate! We cannot contain, deter, escape it. It is ruthless, indiscriminate. Fate is the cruel crucible, the crucible in which we all get roasted. Fate is a path which we passionately abhor, yet which we MUST take.

Fate! Oh, sweet fate!

(Written under duress and dejection of losing a loved one. To fate.)

HELL THAT IS LIFE AS AN INTERN

On that July morning, the weather was sullen, and so were the office colleagues. Few people engaged, for most seemed sizably gripped in the pile of work on their desks. The atmosphere was thus still, except for an occasional ring of phone at the supervisor’s work-station, which would break the menacing quietness.

Today, my third day here, I had reported to work with confidence full tank.  After having had a relatively peaceable one the day earlier, I had bet every bean on this to be a success.

I was wrong.

“There are some characters who still don’t know why they are here.” Betty’s voice rented the air.

She was our beat supervisor. Ruthless, authoritative but pretty. I wondered how so beautiful a body could house so bitter, so stony, so cold a heart.

Who that spiteful and double-barreled remark targeted, I wasn’t sure, yet somehow, I knew I was subject to it.

I did not wait long to know. I did not have to.

“James!” yelled she, her eyes darting around the room, searching.

‘What have I done?’ I wondered silently.

Everyone’s chair creaked, and all faces were planted on my empty sitting position. I had left for a momentary gossip with a colleague at her desk.

Lorna was a fellow intern, though she had been here for a month.  She had known everyone around by now, and somehow got along pretty well with the staff. She was comely, and with a good heart to match.

She was my instant crush.

Inside, I was petrified, yet I was not ready for a dish of scorn and contempt for dessert that Betty would sure serve me for leaving my station so early, for a female’s desk, which was abhorrent a misdemea nour  under her roof.

I kept still in my corner of misery and horror. I knew it was bold a move, and careless too.

Seeing no one that would probably drain her strong feelings, she sat with an air of disgruntled vehemence, and twitching her bottom against the chair in that manner of hers that marked ire.

Still unsatisfied, and banging her table: “Where is this harum scarum?”

Sir! I had not before heard that phrase, or known what it meant. But whatever on earth it was, I had a strong hunch that it was not among the pleasant kind.

Defying Lorna’s attempt to stop me, I rose and advertised my presence. 

Everyone swallowed hard.

The supervisor’s gaze soon caught me. From the way she eyed me, I expected her to spew me with endless insults. I was mystified plumb, and just sighed waiting for my dramatic dressing-down. Interestingly, everyone watched with stupendous anxiety. It is such drama that ignited the office to life.

“Come get me some doughnuts,” she finally said, where I exhaled with massive relief.

As though this were an anticlimax to an eagerly awaited concert, chairs and faces resumed their positions, with an apparent air of deflation.

I rose, slightly ashamed but feigning composure, the latter that was on agonizing trial, and walked to where she was.

Giving me a look for which motive I failed to divine, except for a stoical face, she handed me the cash, saying nothing, but signaling two.

I stepped out.

#####

Ironically, I didn’t have the scantiest idea on where to start. Nairobi’s Upperhill area is an office, courts, insurance and other high-profile business section. It is not the place where you easily get to spot a food vendor. Hawkers do not touch the locality with a barge pole, for Nairobi County officials are ever on the scruff of their necks.

I had only one option: walking to town…

THE GOOD, THE BAD AND CRUCIAL LESSONS: FAST FOODS

Do you like a sandwich? No? Wait, but you must fancy French fries, well dried and in huge proportions, right? We’re on the same camp on that, for I like French fries too, and milkshakes. Chocolate flavour especially. It leaves me on cloud nine!

An average human being today is faced with threats of all kinds. From all sides. Terrorism. Global warming. Strange illnesses. And fast foods! Scary, right? But it’s the bare truth.

So, kindly, sit easy and be my obedient audience, for we shall together explore the pros and cons of fast foods. Nice.

The popularity of fast foods is evermore on the rise in most countries of the world. It’s a thriving venture, and a godsend for most youth. There’s a KFC in nearly every major city in the world. Most delectables enthusiasts are painfully eager to see when a McDonald’s will open their doors in Nairobi. Our very own Java House is spreading like bush fire. I wonder when they will dock at Eldoret.

For a regular collegian, hardly ever a day passes by without gobbling down some form of fast food, or popping into a joint that makes the same, albeit for just the aroma.

Sandwiches, smokies, kebabs potato chips, and pizzas are the main culprits. Burgers, milkshakes and muturas. Whoa! The list is nearly infinite. For health’s sake, even soft drinks! Drop that soda bottle! Drop it! Good.

According to Wonderslist, an online platform that promotes healthy eating and active lifestyle, fast foods is any type of food that can be prepared and served quickly. In most cases, these foods contribute little or no nutrient value to the diet, and instead contain excessive calories, fat and sugar.

Hey, have you ever wondered why fast food joints dot the streets in every town? Why meat vendors do their stuff outside? It’s easy. Fast foods are irresistible! What drive us in our choice of them is merely colour, odour and taste!

Sometimes you don’t intend to eat out, but the aroma of fries and the succulent chicken seen through the glass invite you into the food court –whether your checks and balances allow it or otherwise.

But fast foods are not entirely hell on earth, are they? There are several advantages associated with them.

Pros              

The main advantage of this type of foods is their undeniable convenience. The modern man is ever in a hurry. You either need to get to class on time, or to return to work after the often short lunch break. The first thing that comes into your mind is chips!

Fast foods are cheap. To prepare a one-person meal for supper is costlier than buying a burger and a soup. And sleep till morning you will. Contrary to popular belief, fast food is the choice for lower class folks in the society. Ahem!

Customers have the freedom to choose from the many varieties offered. The menu is abundant. You may have grilled chicken, a fat-dripping one, or just salads. At home, you settle for what is set on the table.

With an increasingly health-conscious population, the majority of joints are offering healthier foods these days. In the US for example, some hotels have moved on from their traditional fatty and unhealthy foods to more risk-free, less-sugar choices that take care of their clients’ health.

Some meals are just agonizingly tedious to prepare in a home setting. Have you ever tried to make a sandwich, or a burger? Fries? What were the results? Laughable, I bet. Rather than tire yourself vainly trying to make one, cut your cheddar on one, and you will get the best quality from your neighbourhood café. Easy.

Accessibility of fast food joints is a big plus. They are everywhere. From your hostel room or house, it’s at most a five-minute walk to one. While travelling, you only need to pull up at the roadside joint and grab a bite. So starving becomes simply inconceivable.

Picture this scenario. Your bae drops by without notice, at night. They’re hungry, but you’ve eaten all there was, and so, there is practically nothing ready to eat. Would you for instance embark on preparing pilau for them? I guess not. A dash to the food kiosk to grab samosas and/or a sausage would be the most welcome choice.

Granted, some people will wholly rely on fast foods for their survival.

Nonetheless, there is usually a heavy price to pay. And pay you must!

The disadvantages of fast foods range from mild disturbances like occasional loss of appetite to treatable conditions like ulcers, to more chronic, life-threatening diseases like heart malfunctions.

Cons

Obesity is a phenomenon that each one of us is well acquainted with. Worryingly, it’s on an unprecedented increase in our society. There is an obese in our life; a parent, sibling, friend, classmate or neighbour. Scarcely none at all. Most fast foods are normally too fatty, and a perpetual feeder on chips and fried chicken risks becoming a victim, if they don’t exercise properly.

Type 2 Diabetes is caused by excessive sugar consumption. Soft drinks and cakes are the criminals here. These contain so much sugar, more than the body requires. And tragic is when you contract this disease. Your feeding habits change forever. The physician will bar you from taking virtually everything that was hitherto your Holy Grail! As you wait for your inevitable death!

Heart diseases like the cardiovascular will creep out anyone. Blame it on the consumption of fatty foods. The arteries get blocked with layers of fat, making it difficult for the heart to pump blood effectively. It gets strained, and fails eventually. Death.

Hypertension is an unspeakable horror. Fast foods sometimes contain so much salt and other additives and preservatives. It is what makes them more scrumptious. Like sodium. Continued usage of the salts increases the level of salt in the blood, thereby high blood pressure. The dramatic ultimate of it all is demise. 

However much tasty they are, fast foods lead to a loss of appetite. Sometimes one develops nausea, their stomach can’t take anything, and experience abdominal discomforts.

When one is too used to fried foods, they tend to dislike boiled ones or those cooked by other methods. Try asking your friend or spouse this evening to choose between a sandwich and a boiled maize cob.

Ulcers are hell. The sore can’t let you sit, stand or sleep. But the waitress will usually hasten to push the kachumbari bowl and chili sauce to your table after delivering the fries. The roadside maize roaster has his half lemon ready for you. If that nyama choma joint does not provide pepper and other accompanying spices, customers will often make an exodus, and go to the rival who offers the same. How we run to our death!

The preparation of foods in hotels will usually nauseate you. Theirs is a mass production of food, and sometimes, understandably, it’s difficult to observe every last of cleanliness procedures. What they end up making is low quality and unhygienic meals. You’ve not tried eating someone else’s leftovers, have you? I wish to spare you.

Fast foods are a waste colossal of money. Their irresistibility pushes our budget to the limit, and beyond. We can’t help them, can we? And often, we don’t budget for these foods, yet they consume an enormous proportion of our monies.

These foods are cheaper for a single person. And slightly, a couple. For a larger family, the equation does not balance. It thus becomes much easier to prepare food at home.

Dreadful, right? There are remedies, nevertheless.

Useful advice

Instead of buying meals, it’s advisable to make it a practice to prepare them at home. You only need to learn a few culinary tricks, and there you will have it. Clean food, well-cooked and devoid of toxins.

‘I can’t survive without chips!’ Some will yell. Fine. Stick to your serving of fries, but always eat them along with salads. It tempers the effects, and helps, a lot.

If you cannot resist the temptation of fried chicken every weekend, or muturas every evening, then your battle is tighter. It is said that a single meal of fried meat adds to the tune of 1500 k/joules of calories to your body. A normal jog will help break about 300 k/joules of those calories.

It’s almost a losing battle, but keep jogging. This will help break the calories, and keep you fit, somehow.

Consume boiled and stewed meals in larger proportions, fried and roast meals in even smaller quantities. It’s life at stake here!

Water should be a permanent component of your meal, every time. Drink lots of it. It’s healthy.

Of critical importance, you should go for a checkup every so often. Have your blood sugar level tested. And pressure too. Let the doctor examine your heart. This could mean a life for you.

Let me hurry and grab myself a burger as I await my apocalypse. We will all eventually die anyway, won’t we?

But let’s die more honourable deaths: of natural causes, and not lifestyle diseases. It’s a shame for mankind to succumb to things we can control.

Have you exercised today? Have you had a fruit? Drank water? Good health is not magic. It’s an effort we must make. It starts with you and me.

It’s possible! Let’s do it!

MURKY WATERS IN PARADISE: COLLEGE RELATIONSHIPS

They are the grandest, brightest, loveliest idea of relationships! What hath ye to say if thou have not tasted love in college?

In truth, a love relationship between regular collegians is usually anchored on the strong pillars of deceptive chivalry by the man, and simulated innocence by the lady. You reckon innocence in the 21st century is such a rare thing, huh.

So the parties will often exhibit personality far removed from their real self. It’s the way to go.

Every average student has been involved in a relationship at some point during their time in college. Prove me wrong. By show of hands. See? No one. Whether it materialised or otherwise notwithstanding. 

In fact, a good number of souls have their maiden love stories penned when their feet first touch college.

With tonnes of curiosity muffled in pitiful naivety, they plunge headlong into the dangerous ditch we like to call love. Few fancy recollecting their first relationship experiences, for they are absolute hell.

I won’t mind being branded Sir Chauvinist, but, mostly damsels will approach the normally slippery and cobblestone-lined path of love with the innocence and humility of a nun shot with a crossbow from the heart of a convent.

More heartrending is if the poor girl hails from a family of the strictly devout religious stock. Poor thing will love with all the power of loving, for it is the first time she’s breaking free from the chains of parental monitoring.

If a typhoon sweeps by, the heartbreak often exceeds anything in all the quantitative parameters. 

What pity!

Most of these do not last half a semester. Then, the lifelong curiosity has been cruelly terminated, and innocence stolen. Call it the university. It is the place where one gets weaned on all a fronts. You cut teeth for the package of all the intricacies that life presents.

Nonetheless, some are rosy to recall, depending on the variables.

If a campus relationship manages to weather the test of time, boredom, the incredible tempest of financial constraints, the temptation of infidelity –which, in college, is more overwhelming than that of opening the Pandora’s Box – it can survive anywhere.

For the parties involved, embarking on planning for their nuptials already won’t be too ambitious an enterprise, dare I declare.

Some really pretty and worthy ladies and gentlemen –I have the discretion to call them thus, albeit this once – have a hankering after invalids of the opposite members for lovers. You cannot talk them out of this. It’s a concept most intriguing, and which has always spectacularly eluded the grasp of my intellect. Am not alone in this, I bet?

Favours

Every so often, one needs a favour of some sort; a novel, the laptop to type an assignment (read to watch movies) financial, with the term paper. Just anything. A favour is not a bad idea. Even two. Once in a while. People in a relationship are responsible for each other, aren’t they? But too many requests for favours all the times is exploitation.

Dating friends

This is a territory no person worth their dignity should venture into. You hear me? Good. 

If you are a man and you have your eyes on girls who are buddies, brother, you are on a losing wicket. You don’t need to date both of them. Nuh. But it’s equally perilous to court either with the other’s knowledge.

There will usually be one of this three agendas:

First, the other girl doesn’t care a rapt into which goddamned lake the relationship will drain. She is after your money. Yes, money. She will ‘eat’ along for as long as you provide for the other girl.

Secondly, she plainly hates you, and will strive to do anything to catalyse the apocalypse of your love thing. Pure malice.

Thirdly, she also loves you, somewhat. She intends to have you in secret. Together, you will steal the first lady’s love. Soon, your girl will learn of it. Them of the female kind are keener than the gods, beware. That’s where the rubber meets the road. You bust, what else?

Shockingly, the two will engage in a squabble, but will be friends again before the dust has completely settled. They will laugh you off, and life will have to continue. Tragic. Who’s the loser?

Materialism and college love

Meet the college materialists. These, naturally, are members of the sisterhood. They are the true disciples of the Marxist theory. For this breed, they make it clear right from the onset: 

"If you cannot support my lifestyle, stop trying, honey." It’s that simple.

Like in tendering, their love is for the highest bidder.

Ideally, in most campus relationships, the hassle is normally on the male divide. The university is another wilderness where muscle, dexterity and agility rule. They are the precepts.

This is how:

To gamble for the sunniest chic campus has to offer, the dude must have bottomless pockets. Imperative. And be of stunning looks. Oh, yes, really stunning. And of huge biceps! Members of the female kind like to be protected. Literally. And only alpha men are capable of protecting themselves, and others.

For those of us who are skinny and with wobbly balances and checks, although not so homely, throwing the hat into the ring in such a highpower contest is a futile endeavour. We stand no snowball’s chance in hell.

There are those who feed in this man’s house, and proceed to another man’s hostel room. I once had a friend who would invite for supper and prepare the nicest delectables –the budget of a collegian can permit –for his love interest. 

Once she was full, she would excuse herself to go to her room, only to sneak into another dude’s room. For the whole night! Mercy!

I overheard another lady openly dismiss a guy who had tried to hit on her:

“A campus bed is too small for me, sir. I sleep in mammoth beds.” 

If you’re still grappling with the semantics of that cavalier statement, it bore all the connotations of insatiable materialism.

Surprisingly, love does not have to be an element in the relationship equation. It’s penny and pleasure, as they put it. Without the former, the latter is a flight of fancy.

Cheaters

Infidels exist everywhere. But no breed of cheaters can hold a candle to the college crop of cheaters. These usually have mastered the abominable art in a gut-wringing scale.

Like in the jungle, all animals here drink from the same pool. Some rough beasts will drink from inside the pool, while others are without a hint of manners that they soil the water after they have drunken. Guess you are racking your brain to break that down. Sorry.

It is possible to have several lovers across campus, without the slightest detection on the part of their lovers. For such folk, men and women alike, they roam through the university with gay abandon.

Woe unto those who commit upon them their full emotions and trust! Free counsel for them: heartbreaks are real in this world. It happens that the moment a lover has turned away from you, however slightly, repeat, however slightly, it is the sad end of the romp.

If your love is seeing someone else behind your back, or openly, that marks the watershed of your relationship’s waterloo. The die is cast, and, often, there will be nothing you can do to salvage the relationship.

Such is college and relationships.