Differences Between Men And Women

Now, I have a 20 year experience at being a  boy child. I have lived among women  since I was very young. First my mother and  my sister in the house,then, my female friends, classmates and relatives. So I have observed them quite a while to vouch that in many complex ways women are different from us men (or that we are different from them)-not better or worse just different. And science has helped to undergird this (we will delve into this later).
There is just about only  one thing that men and women have in common, and that is we belong to the same species, that we are both human. We both have a soul, a mind and a spirit. We both feel pain, love,happiness and rejection. We both have have a brain (its nothing short of prosaic) but the way we percieve the world is a tad dismillar: the subjects we talk about, the way we express our  emotions,  how we operate and even the way we love is essentially different.
We've grown up knowing that the only contrast between boys and girls is in their gonads, their reproductive organs. But it is more complex than that.  Female persons can multitask, males can't. Girls love people,boys love things. Women never stop talking, men dont want to be nagged. Ladies want an emotional love, men a physical one. And much more to mention.
What we are taking for granted however is the fact that these differences can take a toll on relationships between the sexes. Women criticize men for being insensitive, uncaring wanting to do sex instead of making love and not listening. Men critize women for talking a little too much and not wanting sex. (But hey the sex part is for married couples).
We all have heard some frustrated people whining that they have had enough with not just a particular individual but with the entire opposite sex. Sometimes it is not even because of unfaithfulness in the relationships. Very often, I just think,  it is because of not understanding what men or women want, how they communicate and how they want to be loved. This is a typical example of how we end up in clashes because of our distinct gender variance.
In this series of articles I will be discussing these differences. And it the end I hope it helps us understand each other and relate better because they stick with us.

Now we begin.


In part 1 I gave you a peek into this subject of the difference between the sexes. And right away I will plunge headlong into the contents in this rubric. So I welcome you to read on:
1.Talking And Language.
Women are great talkers and talking  to them is quite something. You know when she can't talk to you, you are in trouble. It is an imperative tool they use to foster friendship and cope with stress. Female friends bond by talking, the more close they are, the more they each other in a nuanced kind of way: They are acquainted with each other's little secrets, insecurities etc. But for dudes the tack is different. They way of becoming best of friends for them is accomplishing things together. Of course men talk to each other about lots of subjects but it's barely personal stuff.
And they (women) speak way more than men do in words and cues:
We also know the flip side of this tack: gossip.
Contrast a woman's daily 'chatter' to that of a man. He utters just 2, 000 - 4, 000 words and 1, 000 - 2, 000 vocal sounds, and makes a mere 2, 000 - 3, 000 body language signals. His daily average adds up to around 7, 000 communication 'words' - just over a third the output of most women (which is 20,000 communication 'words').
This speech difference becomes 


Fiona: ‘Hi Darling… it’s good to see you back home. How was your day?’

Mike: ‘Good. ‘

Fiona: ‘Brian told me that you were going to finalise that big deal with Peter Thomson today. How did it go?’

Mike: ‘Fine. ‘

Fiona: ‘That’s good. He can be a really tough customer. Do you think he’ll take your advice?’

Mike: ‘Yeah. ‘

… and so on.

Mike feels as though he’s being interrogated and becomes annoyed. He just wants ‘peace and quiet’.






Women can speak and listen simultane￾ously, while at the same time accusing
men of being able to do neither.

Renascence

"Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good. His love endures forever." Psalms 136:1

Firstly, I will say I'm deeply introverted. I don't like stuff about my life flying about  and people making a fuse outta it. People can be horrible, you know. But this tale is a tad different in the sense that it  is a testimony and testimonies are not meant  to be kept. They are meant to be told.

Mark 5:19 - "Howbeit Jesus suffered him not, but saith unto him, Go home to thy friends, and tell them how great things the Lord hath done for thee, and hath had compassion on thee."

Now, It has been known in a relatively big circle that I have had 'problems with my eyes'. My glasses are a testament to that. But my close friends know it's not just 'problems with my eyes'. They have known that my eyes ache badly- and deplorably, problematically, notoriously badly so.

But it's been more complex than that. I have experienced for 5 fraught years multiple  inexplicable symptoms: itching skin upon exposure to the sun, photophobia, allergic conjunctivitis, fatigue, eye pain, neck pain, back ache, loss of appetite, poor vision, fever, tooth ache, facial pain, falling hair and even occular hypertension (abnormal eye pressure)- almost all of them simultaneously.

All this time I have been trying to treat these symptoms to no avail. The number of times I have gone to hospitals is ridiculously huge. I remember at one time a box of batches of tablets that was prescribed to me, a box the size of the box of bata shoes. Damn!!
And lately I went for a CT scan, exposed my self to noucous radiation, to find if there is a problem in my head. 
Awful, right?

I don't know what kind of sickness this is. It's not Malaria, it's not typhoid, it's not Ebola. It's not a definitive kind of disease.

What has been prominent though is the eye pain , clinically known as chronic eye pain. I have always thought  the other symptoms were its appendages , that the neck and back pain extended from it. I don't know whether I'm right here or not.

I have suffered an egregious pain.I m not putting a stretch to it. I have suffered for real. I could cry sometimes. This mysterious disease has taken its toll me on me. Life has dealt me it's bad hand; excoriated, reduced me piece by piece in a way somebody who's not me can not fully comprehend.

image

Firstly, my academic life.
I was born a precocious kid. And for most of my life I have been ranked in top positions in class. But when all this started the  graph on my transcript started to dip and I could not do anything about it.
The pain I experienced was damaging and almost crippling. Reading become utterly strenuous (until lately) and sometimes even impossible.

In my form 4, I read virtually nothing the year long. I slept or flipped through magazines ,or just pretended to read and shouted 'shut up '-being the class prefect -during morning and evening preps. Sometimes I sneaked to go and sleep. (  I was never caught. I just don't get how ).And during classes I would not concentrate.

Long way after the syllabus was done I was still grappling with the first topics and actually I never did the whole syllabus but I sat for KCSE which I flopped (but not the way you can think) yet I'm no dimwit.
I barely read the set books...
Secondly, my social and spiritual life.
This nagging, hardworking pain changed my social life also. I become unusually silent and withdrawn. I become loggy and grouchy. I also become a blithering idiot.
My spiritual life also went faltering.

BUT THINGS HAVE CHANGED JUST AS MYSTERIOUSLY.

I'm overexcited or perhaps rhapsodical about my renascence. I mean I have never felt this way for such along time.

It's my fifth day feeling whole again, after what seemed like a lifetime of dreariness, pain and torment.
It's hard to be believe I can wake up without squinted eyes, without duels with light that made me feel like 'passing out', without notorious back , eye, tooth and facial pain.
And also this is the fifth day I have had real sleep.

Right now I'm on medication of a godsend wonder drug.

Let me explain.
In our church-I'm a Seventh Day Adventist-we believe in medical missionary work ,that is, using naturopathic means to heal maladies: use of simples juices and vegetables, hot water baths etc

Now last week after church I bought a strange reddish brown powder from a medical missionary. He is a professional doctor but he deals in this sort of unlikely medicine, now which is the ideal medicine.

To him I explained my symptoms: the eye pain, the back, neck, tooth pain. He just told me those are allergies, allergies simple as that! And then he prescribed the wonder drug; 'One tea spoon in a glass of very hot water, cover for 20 minutes ×2 daily, morning and evening.'

You know I have gone to hospitals, many of them, but no doctor really diagnosed my problem. In fact they told me I'm not allergic.

I'm recuperating.
And this healing can not be called anything else. It's a miracle.

Thank you God for this miracle.
You had a reason for my pain and you know why it had to be me. It is your handiwork. I will never forget!!

Not Old Enough

I have just ‘finished’ writing my new book dubbed, Thrills and Chills. And I’m 20. It has been painstaking, tedious and daunting. It has been hard work but now I’m done with it. One of my regrettable failures is that I took so long to reach the back cover. I should have completed penning this lilting muse a year earlier but regardless, it is something I’m infinitely proud of-as a young person. My next move definitely, ultimately would be looking for a publisher.

And this reminds me of Gideon a medical student who doubles up as my friend and a fellow writer. He related to me an odd experience of a very disheartening rejection he once went through after he had prepared his manuscript, just as I have. He was turned down by a number of publishers, not so much because his work had failed- because it hadn’t-but because of his tender age. They told him he was a first-timer and that he was not old enough. They then ‘encouraged’ him to continue writing.

NOT OLD ENOUGH

Of course being turned down is something that’s relatively commonplace particularly when it comes to beginners and it cuts across all the ages. John Creasy, a criminal novelist, for example was rejected 753 times and it had nothing to do with his age. In the context of Gid’s story, however, age was a predominant factor in determining his plight. He was just not old enough.
This story bespeaks in a succinct manner of the horrible sidelining that young people face for being young here in Kenya and Africa as a whole. It is an insidious adultism-repugnant and unprepossessing. 'Adultism is prejudice and accompanying systematic discrimination against young people'-Wikipedia.It goes together with agism and it is almost as deplorable as sexism, tribalism, ostracism and other isms but people don’t talk very much about it.

Young people in this country face adultism and similar challenges in different guises. They are incessantly being told they are not old enough. Here when you are told you are young, ‘Wewe ni kijana tu!’ it is not meant to be a compliment. And even in the way it is said, it is supposed to be condescending. I think this is terrible. There is a certain prejudice, a certain distaste that is unstinted in measure that you are subjected to when you are young.
To many grown-ups the word youth is a euphemism for pretty ugly traits, for vice, for lost direction, for despair. To them we are young and fledgling, young and spoiled, young and good for nothing. I’m willing to contend that we the youth are a hard demographic, that we are vulnerable to a lot of things so I won’t blame them for their disposition very much. We have our own frailties and too often these ugly traits are part of what we are. We do a lot of shady things-generally speaking. We make wrong decisions. We are attracted to false scents and we don’t listen. But we can’t allow ourselves to be defined by this singular descriptor.
I once listed to a ted talk by an acclaimed author and one of the leading voices of Africa, Adichie Ngozi Chimamanda. She spoke about the danger of a single story: how we end up sizing people up from the very few things we know about them. The single story  is damaging not just because it is incomplete but also because it makes one story to become the only story. The single story that is told about young people in many places is that we are fledgling, unfit and not good enough. And it's almost become a stereotype.
But we know of course young people are incredibly smart. They exude stupendous mental and physical strength. Just this week my country,Kenya has launched a large scale offensive to tackle down al-shabaab in Somalia, in something like a revenge mission after its camp got attacked. It is quite fascinating that the troops in the battle field are largely composed of young people, young people who are fighting for sanity and peace. I could wish, also, to talk about Malala Yousafzai, a Nobel Peace prize laureate at only 17. She is an intrepid young woman who is fighting for rights of women and girls. And also of Mark Elliot Zuckerberg who is the CEO of facebook and he is only 30. I think it will be stunning to say that he launched this widely used social site at 20 from the dormitories of Harvard University.
There are countless other exceptional stories of young people who are rooting for change in their communities, youth who have notched uncommon success and older people can not help but drool with envy.
So I think its of great import we listen to these bright narratives as well because they add up to what it means to be young.
Young people grapple with drug and sex addiction, they are slugabeds, they binge-watch but they are also fly, determined and very talented.
We should help them overcome their frailities and leverage their unique skills and talents. We should encourage young ambition not cast it away or mark time expecting it will grow by it self.
I have taken a personal initiative to mentor and goad young efforts. I have a Facebook page known as YOUNGlegacy-Africa mean't for that. Please you can like it.

Is Raving Wrong

Is raving wrong?
Dear Mr and Miss  the short answer is YES.
By now you should have heard of some madling, vicious sex and booze party  that was slated to happen, dubbed project x that sparked public outrage and unsinted derision. Some of it's beckoning lines were: "One night to lose your mind"." No one goes back home a virgin."
I have always known that there alot of things around partying that are flagrant but I didn't quite expect it to escalate to this: blatant, planned-for fornication. No one goes home a virgin.
Oh foolish 'Galatians' who has bewiched you?
It shows just how much  young people and  the society as a whole has sunken down to the abyss of self-degradation and shame and unconsciousness. People these days don't get inside of their brains very much. They are bold in sin. Their sensibilities have become course. And it is fascinating that  they will  have a problem with you if you don't drink, if you don't sleep with women just like they do.
It is quite alarming young people nowadays are obstinate. They don't listen. They 'don't care.' They 'don't give a damn.'
Now talking about parting we will have to contend that partying  has become synonymous with one night stands, drinking, bedlam of loud music, smoking and worse. Even seemingly blameless feasts  like birth day parties are abound with risque activity and intoxication. It happens very often that  a party without alcohol (they call it 'Mzinga') and members of the opposite sex is not a real party.
Now,I'm no stranger to a hyped  class of young people(friends, friends of friends and classmates) who have deluded themselves to think that hard revelling, drinking and smoking shisha is fun. This class thinks of itself as 'cool' but ideally it's the most sorely damaged, desperate and debased  class of all. Just how could someone level all these  manner of unconscionable deeds with fun and glamour? Actually there is an English word for that and that word is foolishness.
One preacher showed a very consistent pattern of what happens in revellings and banquetings. He gave several examples from the Bible and I was stunned. There is music, then liquor, then idolatry or sex/nudity somewhat in that order.
Music, drinking and dancing effectively create an enabling environment for loosing one's control and consequently leading to indulging in perverted practices.
And those who come to parties to drink soda and 'just watch' are just as guilty because it gives them pleasure to watch animal passions manifest.
The dangers of revelling are well documented. It takes a toll on morality, on health and on society.That's why Christianity and Islam don't allow it. This is somewhat a morbid thought but it is true. This every-weekend-at-the-club lifestyle sets a bad prognosis of disease,unwanted pregnancies, troubled marriage,addiction, prodigal spending, aging and a early grave. That's why I feel strongly that raving is something that we young people need to avoid.