Items by Mugendi

mugendi.wordpress.com

• slowly comes the light

  Posted: March 23, 2012, 4:41 pm by Mugendi

  (or what to do with a quarter century’s worth of knowledge) So another year has passed, and this one has not been uneventful. As has become routine, I’ll say a couple of things, sound smart, and then walk away. Life is like a hill… The beginning is hard, where every day you see is a [...]

• restarting…

  Posted: March 16, 2012, 6:39 am by Mugendi

  I admit it, I have been neglecting my blog, and watching a lot more movies-based-on books, and reading the books that the movies are based on… It’s a self-propagating process. But somehow I managed to write a poem that I was meant to perform, but didn’t. I write a lot less than I used to, [...]

• food for thought

  Posted: February 10, 2012, 5:22 pm by Mugendi

  Something I found and wanted to share… [E]very day, we run around, ticking boxes off, making phone calls, completing errands, piling on more work on top of an already heavy load. We run around stressed, depressed, angry, impatient and unloving. We run until we can run no more, and then, we die. In between the [...]

• webcomics: like actual regular comics, only smart…

  Posted: January 27, 2012, 6:40 pm by Mugendi

  I’m not writing as much as I used to… I’m rehashing old stuff. I know, sad. Originally did this for @bazanye‘s blog. And being as I am going through the worst writer’s block ever, I shall post it again… Somewhere along the general evolution of mankind (or briefly after the creation of man, if you [...]

• Pancakes, ready to eat…

  Posted: January 20, 2012, 6:34 pm by Mugendi

  Pancakes, ready to eat…

• Pancakes, ready to eat…

  Posted: January 20, 2012, 3:34 pm by Mugendi

  Pancakes, ready to eat…

• 2011: The Year That Was

  Posted: January 5, 2012, 7:48 pm by Mugendi

  The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog. Here’s an excerpt: A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 3,600 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 60 trips to carry that many people. Click here to see the [...]

• Merry Christmas

  Posted: December 24, 2011, 8:00 am by Mugendi

  Nobody does Christmas quite like Kenyans. The festivities are quite an occasion. For the two odd weeks during which the ‘festive season proper’ occurs (keeping in mind that the carols and “Christmas sales” have been going on since November), life changes for a lot of people. For some, it means that the shops have odd, [...]

• so now

  Posted: December 22, 2011, 7:10 pm by Mugendi

  The thing with being human, having a heart, is that you end up gathering a lot of baggage on the way, trying to get over the past without making a mess of the future. I want to change the past. To go back to the forks in the road where I took the road not [...]

• snakeskin

  Posted: December 14, 2011, 8:48 am by Mugendi

  The snake is a fascinating creature… Every so often it sheds its skin and gets a chance to grow. Moulting, they call it. And it’s a confusing time for the snake. Pretty much everything it knows ceases to exist. Its eyes get clouded over and it can’t see, it has to lie still for extended [...]

• Milos, by Anis Mojgani

  Posted: November 29, 2011, 4:53 pm by Mugendi

  Let us take a sack of spray paint and spray paint over the paintings. Let’s dance through Paris; kiss in the shadow of the Louvre, crawl inside its windows, scroll manifesto’s over its canvas, write Morse code on the sculptors, roll a sleeping bag on the floors to sleep inside of, tell one another a [...]

• I remain skeptical

  Posted: October 12, 2011, 6:30 pm by Mugendi

  These are troubled times, if the news is to be believed. Traditional, safe systems are giving way to rapid, hard-core change. The things that were true for Generation X are not necessarily true for Generation Y. No longer will we look to the things that are and see a future beyond the next couple of [...]

• the great social (book) experiment

  Posted: September 21, 2011, 6:20 pm by Mugendi

  Books are amazing. They have the ability to bring people together in very interesting ways. I attended the 2011 StoryMoja Hay festival, where I met the people behind ‘Pods Must be Crazy‘, a social experiment/book club that collects books and encourages people to leave them in public places for others to find and read. Pmbc [...]

• do you remember the time?

  Posted: September 17, 2011, 7:45 pm by Mugendi

  This comes a while after a post about some of the things I did and believed in when I was a child. Would you want to be a child again? The problem with life is we all start young. So much for intelligent design. Like we work our way through it, getting more and more [...]

• Storymoja Hay Festival 2011

  Posted: September 5, 2011, 7:20 pm by Mugendi

  The 2011 Storymoja Hay Festival will feature, among others, award-winning Nigerian author Ben Okri, New York Times best-selling author Beth Lisick and British Book Award winner Hari Kunzru. The festival runs from 15th -18th September 2011 at the Railways Sports Ground. For more info, visit the Storymoja site

• [nt]

  Posted: September 5, 2011, 3:29 pm by Mugendi

• diary of a wimpy kid

  Posted: August 30, 2011, 9:34 pm by Mugendi

  I was a child once. In many ways I still am. My endless fascination at the fact that my face can grow a beard has many concerned. But my childhood was less than conventional. Granted, the fact that I had just a mother, and the said mother was pretty involved in my life, successfully masking

• maybe, or the recovery position

  Posted: August 1, 2011, 6:12 pm by Mugendi

  Maybe the last choice you made ruined everything that you could possibly have achieved had you made a different turn. Maybe you have an idea that you will not follow up on because it is either too massive for you to process, or too different for the world to accept. Maybe you have nobody to

• compromise

  Posted: July 4, 2011, 9:05 pm by Mugendi

  Sometimes you have to settle for less. It’s not a plan. You don’t wake up saying, ‘Today I shall accept whatever comes my way, regardless of whatever other options I may have’. It just happens. An unconscious process, where you lose your line of thought, you are no longer making the rules. Rather, you are

• this is why I read

  Posted: June 6, 2011, 8:25 pm by Mugendi

  There is not a question in the world that does not have an answer in one book or another. I have always been, for as long as I can remember, a keen reader. I don’t know why exactly. Could be the feel of paper on the fingers, the pictures in my head as I fly

• my next challenge

  Posted: May 18, 2011, 4:54 pm by Mugendi

  I tend to think of myself as being rather good at writing. Now I would like to challenge myself. The Drucker Challenge, named for Peter Drucker, a writer, management consultant, and self-described “social ecologist”, has a writing challenge where the grand prize is a trip to Vienna and an invitation to participate at the Global

• xkcd: Marie Curie

  Posted: May 10, 2011, 10:14 am by Mugendi

  via xkcd.com Women scientists ftw

• life lessons from Super Mario

  Posted: May 9, 2011, 11:09 am by Mugendi

  Thanks to Naija twitter person and all round awesome guy @maurice_nn and the perpetually lovely (and yours truly’s girlfriend) @notmutant for the general inspiration for this line of thinking… Having been an 80s to early 90s child, there are quite a number of things I quite enjoy till now. There’s the cartoons that made sense,

• why i write

  Posted: April 24, 2011, 6:17 pm by Mugendi

  After attending the [first ever] Poets and Writers Online Meetup at the iHub, and reading (and re-reading) George Orwell’s ‘Why I Write‘, I have been looking back at my reasons for starting a blog in the first place, why I write and where I want this to go. It’s physically exhausting, sitting and channeling the

• information is power

  Posted: April 21, 2011, 8:19 pm by Mugendi

  I recently stumbled upon a twitter account operated by the Government of Kenya, specifically the Ministry of Finance. Okay, maybe it’s not the Government itself that tweets, but it’s a really interesting account, called the Kenya Economic Stimulus Programme. Basically it’s a bailout by the Government of Kenya, trying to get money to the people [...]

• date a girl who writes

  Posted: April 11, 2011, 11:07 am by Mugendi

  This is not an original post, it is a composite of various posts I found on the internet, titled ‘Date a Girl Who Writes’. Date a girl who writes. She’ll grab her pen from time to time and write about her man. She’ll work on prose and poetry that will and won’t rhyme. She’ll feed [...]

• when the sky turns orange

  Posted: April 8, 2011, 9:12 am by Mugendi

  He clutched the bag in his hand. The cold nipped at his face. The nights had acquired a life of their own, with the streets, usually crowded during the day all empty, doors locked. He liked it this way, when the world was devoid of life, when there was nobody else, save for the watchmen [...]

• wisdom is for sharing

  Posted: March 31, 2011, 12:04 am by Mugendi

  It’s the end of the month, about that time when people with jobs get paid. No, I did not get myself a job. At least not yet. I have taken the time to pay a couple of things forward, like the distilled wisdom of a wannabe wise man who’s becoming more man (and not less [...]

• jigsaw puzzle pieces on marriage

  Posted: March 26, 2011, 5:22 pm by Mugendi

  jigsaw puzzle pieces on marriage

• on the last day of a generally eventful trip round the sun

  Posted: March 22, 2011, 8:39 pm by Mugendi

  One of the things my experience with life does is it makes me afraid of the future. Obsessing over what might be, what might happen. Most of the time I end up picking on the negative and magnifying it so that in the end my future looks like doomsday. Instead of being content with whatever [...]

• Date A Girl Who Reads; or what an odd thing to find when you’re on a break…

  Posted: March 7, 2011, 11:03 pm by Mugendi

  Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes. She has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve. Find a girl [...]

• irrelevance

  Posted: March 6, 2011, 4:56 pm by Mugendi

  Irrelevance: When before the world felt like it spun at your command, that events were in themselves geared towards making you feel needed and necessary, replaced with a foreboding, a feeling that the world has moved on, leaving you behind… The feeling is cold and dark and all-encompassing, and it has ways of spreading and [...]

• si you’re my fans?: how to be a kenyan ‘artist’

  Posted: February 27, 2011, 5:32 pm by Mugendi

  Thanks to Montana, with whom this topic was discussed at length, with lots of ranting, but mostly laughs in the end. There are quite a number of entertainers in Kenya. I use the term ‘entertainers’ carefully here, because some of them do nothing more than repeating themselves over and over, thinking that the screams from [...]

• what is love?

  Posted: February 14, 2011, 9:56 pm by Mugendi

  Pray tell What is this love That is dreaded and longed for in equal measure That both puts the heart at ease and raises the pressure That hurts and heals That builds and destroys That fills and makes hungry That quenches thirst and dries the throat That fills one with words And takes the same [...]

• opinion, or what you want me to think…

  Posted: January 19, 2011, 7:26 pm by Mugendi

  “The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.” Bertrand Russel Opinion polls are interesting. They take a random sampling of the population [...]

• Photos of Nairobi by The Shaboozle

  Posted: January 19, 2011, 5:23 pm by Mugendi

  [[posterous-content:pid___0]][[posterous-content:pid___1]]

• for such a time as this

  Posted: January 14, 2011, 8:40 am by Mugendi

  In the beginning of the year, it is almost customary to come up with rules and resolutions to live by. Granted, some of those rules will be broken as soon as they are laid out, but still they serve their purpose, to give some sort of direction in an otherwise confused world… I have been [...]

• walk the line III: guilty

  Posted: January 11, 2011, 1:47 am by Mugendi

  Atsango had a troubled past. He could tell by her curt answers to any questions he asked about her. More effective than a ‘Keep Out’ sign, he thought. ‘So, you live with your parents?’ ‘No, I live with my mother’, she replied, catching him by surprise. He could tell she was on edge. Her body [...]

• all you have to do is win

  Posted: December 28, 2010, 8:17 pm by Mugendi

  Life is an interesting means of keeping itself going… Small victories. Like waking up in the morning and getting out of bed rather than digging deeper into the covers and sleeping some more. Small victories, like going out and doing what you want and achieving the results that you were hoping for as opposed to [...]

• Dance or Die – Janelle Monae ft Saul Williams

  Posted: December 26, 2010, 12:09 am by Mugendi

  Cyborg, android, d-boy, decoy, water, wisdom, tightrope, vision, insight, stronghold, heartless, ice cold, mystery, mastery, solar, battery Some will pull the gun because they want to be stars Snatching up your life into the blink of an eye And if you see your cloning on a street walking by Keep a running for your life [...]

• walk the line II: the white dress

  Posted: December 12, 2010, 12:20 pm by Mugendi

  ‘You will meet many men, and they will promise you many things’, Atsango recalled, as she finished her business with the mama mboga. Her mother put a special emphasis on this. ‘I don’t want you to turn out like me’… ‘W-w-would you like a cup of… Tea?’, he offered, as he saw a small, austere [...]

• walk the line

  Posted: December 6, 2010, 9:25 pm by Mugendi

  Maybe it was the taste of yesterday’s party lingering on his tongue, maybe it was the smell on the clothes he still had on, but something was pushing him to take a long walk. Not just any walk, the kind that leads to no good. he smiled inwardly, not sure why, but it just felt [...]

• when we stop

  Posted: December 5, 2010, 3:25 pm by Mugendi

  When we stop fighting, have we the peace That we were promised? Or are we bored, Looking for other things To engage us for the time That we are here Devoid of purpose Staring into space Following the lights That shine in the night And disappear in the day Leaving us to daydream, Wishing we [...]

• Cyanide and Happiness on Agnosticism…

  Posted: November 26, 2010, 2:19 am by Mugendi

  Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

• and they say that a hero will save us

  Posted: October 24, 2010, 3:00 pm by Mugendi

  Heroes are a rare breed… They appear every so often and save the day and astound the people around them, but they also have a tendency to leave people dependent on them… Somewhere along the way, they merge with the problems they solve… Forgive the generalizations. People latch onto things very easily. It’s how the [...]

• interlude post: All Things Will Die – Alfred Lord Tennyson

  Posted: October 23, 2010, 2:14 pm by Mugendi

  Clearly the blue river chimes in its flowing Under my eye; Warmly and broadly the south winds are blowing Over the sky. One after another the white clouds are fleeting; Every heart this May morning in joyance is beating Full merrily; Yet all things must die. The stream will cease to flow; The wind will [...]

• farewell old man, or the rememberance of a life

  Posted: October 2, 2010, 10:21 pm by Mugendi

  25th September My grandfather died earlier this week, following a period of illness. That’s me being as safe as possible, being as i don’t exactly know the details of his passing. He was 80, and he was in home care suffering from prostate cancer… I don’t know why exactly, but his death really hurt. Probably [...]

• freaks, or the social construct

  Posted: September 13, 2010, 1:45 am by Mugendi

  Everybody’s a freak to someone. Take a newborn baby for instance. To it’s mother it may be a freak (based on the circumstances of conception) but to everyone else it may be the cutest thing on earth. Life’s a constant battle. You have to pick who to listen to and who to completely ignore. And […]

• it’s not plagiarism, or the post i stole from myself

  Posted: September 12, 2010, 4:45 pm by Mugendi

  This was way back in 2007. I was going through something. Strange, quite a lot of it is still true now… Growing up was hard. Having no father and all. No man figure to look up to. And becoming a man-figure for my family. That was hard. But still it says quite a lot for […]

• bad service, or the illumination of thieves

  Posted: September 8, 2010, 2:40 am by Mugendi

  I have been contemplating this post for a while, but it’s official. I am tired of all the crap service I have been getting where there should ideally be actual service. There is a way that I am expected to behave as a customer, which includes accepting End User agreements and generally bending over… For

• rain

  Posted: September 2, 2010, 2:39 pm by Mugendi

  I dream of rain I dream of freedom I close my eyes Take it all in The world is my playground I want nothing, I have it all I know all, I am all The luxury of time and space The glory of the human race The world is moving at my pace My fears

• shared umbrella, or unsolicited advice

  Posted: August 24, 2010, 9:08 pm by Mugendi

  Once upon a time, I was 16. Yes, those were heady times, I was all young and restless and unsure of my place in the world. So it happened to be raining one day, and I was in need of a haircut. Off to the barber’s with a large Pilsner umbrella. No idea why the

• cursive, or children with pens

  Posted: August 15, 2010, 2:27 pm by Mugendi

  I am currently rediscovering my love of the fountain pen, using it to jot down stuff and to make entries in the diary that has kept me organized for the most part this year. It’s a Parker, actually, branded with Myongji University, a Korean university I almost went to when I was still undecided about

• bucketful of laughs, courtesy of uganda

  Posted: August 6, 2010, 5:10 pm by Mugendi

  Who Killed Captain Alex? I want to see this movie, why lie…

• demands, or the shareholder effect

  Posted: August 4, 2010, 12:47 am by Mugendi

  Ok, so the votes from the referendum are still being counted, but it is possibly the first time that I feel like a real shareholder in my country… I voted in 2007, that was my first general election, and that didn’t turn out very well (epic understatement)… the main result was that my country was [...]

• are we going up, or just going down?

  Posted: July 28, 2010, 8:15 pm by Mugendi

  The thing about progress is it is usually the thing that keeps us alive. It is the advancement that got us cooking so our brains grew bigger, that took our ability to count things and gave us computers and also took our weirdness and kept us alive long enough to see how we could use [...]

• now that it’s winter

  Posted: July 21, 2010, 7:23 pm by Mugendi

  Overhanging clouds outside. Lack of inspiration, and my brain is on leave thanks to the cold. So here’s an ‘until the muse sings again’ post in the meantime… The cold is making me do a number of things, among them: Wear a sweater – Yes, I finally have a number of uses for all the [...]

• temporary insanity, or what hangs out in the dark side of my brain

  Posted: July 7, 2010, 7:05 pm by Mugendi

  A second-hand life, living within the lines that have been drawn already, because anything outside the lines is wrong… The inevitable truth is that we are not the people we want to be, that we have ideals we want to aspire, but with time the ideals are diluted until they are hardly recognizable. Individualism is [...]

• uganda, week 2: haute cuisine

  Posted: June 28, 2010, 10:00 pm by Mugendi

  Ugandans have mastered the art of eating. The Ugandan concept of ‘food’ is everything, literally. I laughed whe I saw signs saying ‘Food + meat’ and so forth, so I actually ordered it, and it came. Pumpkin, matoke, cassava, ugali and rice, and meat in a plate on the side. Massive chunks of meat. Teeth [...]

• uganda, week 1

  Posted: June 18, 2010, 3:37 pm by Mugendi

  I arrived in Uganda on Monday, to little ceremony. Not that I expected anything, but I was surprised all the same. First, Kampala is massive. I had expected a small city, easy to get around, not that much going on. By Nairobi standards, it may seem small, but it’s on several rather steep hills. Getting [...]

• choices

  Posted: June 9, 2010, 2:01 pm by Mugendi

  I had to make a decision, go with an entry-level job with relatively modest pay or go abroad for an unpaid but rewarding opportunity… Background info: I had a job once, when I was 19 and life was good… So I got a job and I did quite well at it, but i had to [...]

• beauty, or the late night/early morning post

  Posted: May 21, 2010, 3:07 am by Mugendi

  I started writing this as a status update on facebook, bit it just went on and on and on… Inspiration comes in many bizarre ways it seems… With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy. I get it now, the sham and drudgery [...]

• Poem: Struggle

  Posted: May 5, 2010, 5:16 pm by Mugendi

  Struggle Wake me up, before I die. Staring, awkwardly to the sky, lying there, hold me close. As I stare; comatose. Sleep so long. It feels so wrong. My soul’s undone, I cry for fun. Red drops of liquid eternity, life force flowing. My life force, going. My life force, slowing. Dead eyes staring at [...]

• two wheels are better than none…

  Posted: April 14, 2010, 1:55 am by Mugendi

  I must have made someone (or something) quite angry somewhere in the course of this week… Had a bad day of Lemony Snicket proportions. It didn’t look particularly bad from the start, just average. Like another day of waking up and lounging, something I have become rather good at… So today I happened to be [...]

• Reflection – maybe…

  Posted: April 7, 2010, 4:31 pm by Mugendi

  Maybe… © By Emily Genatowski maybe If I go away I can figure out what my life’s supposed to be and what it’s all about maybe if I go away I can finally tell what it is that I can’t do and what I can do well maybe if I go away I can break [...]

• one percent

  Posted: March 16, 2010, 7:10 pm by Mugendi

  Think about it… Giving one percent of what you have. Your time, your energy, your resources, to a worthwhile cause… A week has 168 hours. That’s one hour a week. There’s a lot you can do in an hour. There’s a lot of time I waste, I realize, doing things that are otherwise trivial and [...]

• regurgitations #3, or the innocence of youth

  Posted: March 4, 2010, 2:41 pm by Mugendi

  This is the last in our series, “regurgitations, the re-blogs from when I was on MySpace.” Enjoy. Happy Birthday to me Current mood: accomplished Being 20 feels just like being 19, only this time I feel guilty when I’m watching TV instead of going out and finding focus in my life. Thanks for all the [...]

• regurgitations #2, or my first job

  Posted: February 5, 2010, 9:27 am by Mugendi

  Sunday, February 04, 2007 So this is how I spend my time Current mood: sleepy Category: Life I’m really sleepy. Seriously. I’m zoning in and out right now. Got a new job the other day, selling ISP service over the phone. So people call up and what I do is basically tell them about our [...]

• regurgitations

  Posted: February 3, 2010, 3:15 pm by Mugendi

  The following is a post I put on MySpace way back in 2006. Yes, that was when it was simple and clean, devoid of the many weird things that have come to make it, simply put, bizarre. I have since killed the account, after a year-and-a-half of inactivity, but the blog posts shall take up [...]

• here be dragons

  Posted: February 2, 2010, 3:07 pm by Mugendi

  Life has a lot of grey areas, areas that lie uncharted that in maps of old would be marked as ‘Here be Dragons’… There’s a tendency for such places to be the source of a rather bizarre fear, effectively a fear of the unknown. Instead of going there and finding out what exactly is over [...]

• pie in the sky

  Posted: January 2, 2010, 10:25 pm by Mugendi

  Pie in the sky, makes me want to love you

• Deux Milles Neuf

  Posted: December 31, 2009, 7:28 pm by Mugendi

  The end of a year, and the (supposed) end of a decade… It has had its fair share of ups and downs, this year. And thankfully it’s been more up than down. It has been the year of responsibilities stumbled upon, relationships consolidated, the blog, the internship (with the awesome sandwiches), the ulcer, the failure, [...]

• a letter to the other side

  Posted: December 26, 2009, 7:15 pm by Mugendi

  So I decided to write a letter to myself in 2010, seeing as that’s in a couple of days… Eric, First of all, happy new year, and congratulations, you made it this far. It’s a brand new year, a blank canvas you can do pretty much anything with… Choose wisely what you want to do [...]

• Post-holiday Clarity

  Posted: December 12, 2009, 11:18 am by Mugendi

  I had been on holiday for about 5 days somewhere between end of November and beginning of December, and during that time I had loads of time to think. Beach-walking, introspective thinking, that stuff. So here’s what I have drawn from that. My life is a massive spiderweb. In it are tangled very many individuals and things [...]

• Proximity vs Distance

  Posted: October 29, 2009, 11:26 pm by Mugendi

  So my roommate and his girlfriend have been going through some rather interesting phases of late, like they’ve broken up and made up several times. Yesterday was the calling-and-no-answering stage, and before that was the disowning of everything. Now my room is rather small, so I have become an unfortunate participant in these sharings, including [...]

Blah blah blah

Fish cakes

Alas a fish cake.

Yet more fish cakes

Guess what ... yeah ... fish cakes.

The end of the fish cakes