Wednesday, March 31, 2021

That too is love


Are there many ways to love?  

Thank you, 
to all who draw near.  

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When they ask "what do you do?" and it really bothers you

I am finding it helpful to use this framework: BE.  KNOW.  DO.  Some people and cultures have more interest in one of these than the others, and so you end up in the room of "do-ers" in which "what do you do" "what do you do" is practically a greeting, while to you it's practically hell.  You hate the question.  Ahhh.  

Anyway, I am learning that I am not all do, or not even mostly do, or maybe I do nothing, and that is a strength.  


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Thursday, March 18, 2021

NFT.me






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Thursday, February 25, 2021

Living it up!

Haha, if you know anything about me, you know I've not been quite living it up.  Now, who was it that said ( a Naija man-in-the-street interviewed on TV): you can not be working like an elephant and eating like, like, a tambolo.  

So...yeah.  Maybe I will try to get hip, get large and complex and ... modern.  For example, banish old clothes, find shiny ones.  I think that's what people do?  Banish old, get change-crazy.  Banish slow, get frenzied.  Cocaine and caffeine and rage and money, money, money.  

Or yawn. 
Or go halfway - get exercise, up the energy, pretend a little more excitement!  At life!  Live it up!  Now!  While you have, I don't know, health, breath, joints?  
  
Now, the pandemic - did you notice that although the USA, the UK, and many other countries suffered a lot from the virus (and since we get their news, we get their 'feelings' too), many countries did not suffer very much as they took adequate public health measures to reject the epidemic; they did lock-downs that worked.  The USA, the UK, did more, in the manner that a dancer or an acrobat does more maybe?  I mean, more things happened - including more deaths - when compared to the China, New Zealand axis of covid-freedom.  

If I had more energy, I would write more about this (such as how: what makes the bias between the doing of more and the doing of less to accomplish the same result is how much ENERGY there is in the system, sometimes youthfulness, simple exuberance, lack of knowledge, or lack of experience, but usually just the energy, the excess of it, and that extra must go somewhere...)  
   
If the US had "less energy" one possibility would have been to shut down the pandemic early, by judging it unaffordable.  Instead, it did all the madness of expressing every view and trying every style, especially ignoring its expertise, and all that chaos has now contributed to vaccine science and all that health and science stuff, which you can say is positive?   I mean, a lot of diseases are going to be impacted, to be honest.  Potentially.  Potentially.  

Writing this is making me see that  I do have more energy, because I feel that understanding the word 'potentially' could be a fun pursuit, and I feel like discovering what is known - and what is becoming known - that relates to energy, and I feel like testing the truth of the things I have written in these paragraphs, and I feel how I would find joy in the language and the journeys that have revealed these interrelationships between concepts.  In essence, I feel again that there might be more maths and physics in my future.  And literature, and library time (reading time, internet time.)   

This does not paint a picture of "living it up" because that usually alludes to gregarious interpersonal exploits, and also consumption - maybe careless, conspicuous, fashion-forward.  Spending and socializing?  But "living it up" as a reader doesn't quite have the same flash to it.  Living it up as an unknown person.  Living it up with no money.  Living it up while being boring. 

You probably have more energy too.  In what areas?  Maybe it's physical, but maybe it's not, and you feel "called", "restless" in a different dimension - emotional, mental, social, other?  

Do you remember this saying (actually from a Bible verse): an idle mind is the devil's workshop?  
 
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Sunday, January 31, 2021

It can't really be that I have nothing to say...

Say, or write.  
I do have things to say.  

People are dying.  There is a pandemic on, you know this.  
Vaccines are now available and already many, many thousands of people have been vaccinated in many, many countries.  

There is a lot of focus on death these days, now, let's add some perspective: the "excess deaths" in 2020, can you guess the percentages?  

...although millions of people have died in the pandemic and many more have been ill and otherwise harmed, the overall excess deaths, (the increase in death over the deaths of a non-pandemic year, like 2016, 2017, ...) were not close to 100% (that would be twice as many people dying than in a typical year), the increased death toll was far lower than that.  

So, maybe overall, in the whole world, human death in the 2020 pandemic year was 5% or 10% greater than it would have been without the whole covid/coronavirus thing, like, maybe just over 90 million people would have died in the year (including childhood deaths to old-age deaths, disease, accident, and so on) and instead nearly 100million did, something like that.  (Is this estimate reasonable?)  

We should all be doing the "public health" things that inhibit transmission, and we should be working on science and other developments to make life better, and ... we should get vaccinated as well, as soon as possible.  
The thing is seasonal, the thing is tricky, the weeks that are bad (in the epidemic) are really bad and can feel terrible.  
Hugs to everyone who is still here.  :(  


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Thursday, December 31, 2020

List - My best music+videos of 2020

1. 
SAME SO, by Protoje 


2. 
BLACK IS KING, by Beyoncé 
(Visual album, over one hour long, but not free online)


3. 
RODEO (remix), by Lil Nas X (featuring Nas)


My previous Year-End Lists: 


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Sunday, December 06, 2020

happy as a clam at high water

because I am (in my nature, in my heart, not in actual employment) a librarian, who now has the internet.  
It's an all-you-can-read buffet!  
I am (right this instant) listening to music and downloading a few movies to watch in future.  
The joy of having all of this abundance of media, for me, it never gets old.  

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Wednesday, December 02, 2020

Dedicated to...the gist of this morning as e dey hot


It's Girl-Boy Drama.  Same thing I am passing through so of course I'm with HER. 
 What else?


Ok, to be honest I only watched part of part 1 and all of part 10.  Maybe later I'll finish it.  All I have to say is, she's alright.  She'll be alright.  It's nice to love and all that fun stuff.  
Ok, better option: read the story with pictures, here.  

Music: 
Ocean Drive, by Lighthouse Family 
System Fail, by Show Dem Camp 





In summary, today is  
A good day to #SoroSoke 
and also 
A good day to #ReceiveSense 
For instance, this Nonso Amadi, is he single?  Joy Pearl.  Come and see something.  There are many fishes in the sea abeg.  fish in the sea.  

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Tuesday, November 24, 2020

Korean Drama series

Do you have a favourite k-drama?  

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Sunday, October 18, 2020

#JeSuisProf

1. A September 2020 essay in Al-Jazeera online: Reprinting the Charlie Hebdo cartoons is not about free speech...but about using speech to reaffirm domination.

2. A 2015 feature in BI: 16 Bold Covers From Charlie Hebdo, The Magazine That Was Attacked In France. 


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Tuesday, October 13, 2020

My latest tweets on @tosinbird



My main twitter account is @tosinbird, but I delete all the tweets every month or so, mostly out of habit, and because I don't feel the need to save what are essentially bursts of re-tweeting activity, that although time-focused (I mean if you consider them in the short time that they were made, you can find a theme and/or understand the tweets), are certainly from haphazard and diverse topics and styles over the long term. 
 But also, maybe it's to hide, for example when one has said something political for which one could be witch-hunted someday? (Because human beings are crazy.) 

 But mostly because I deleted all before and got in the habit of doing it. I mean, because my tweets, being worthless when they've passed their use-date, deserve to be deleted. And perhaps by twitter's nature many old tweets are worthless too. Although collectively, this is not true, and it is a good thing that the twitter archive exists, a gargantuan library of gibberish and some gold.  

Anyway, I have this secondary twitter account @REALbubbler where tweets are more permanent; I have never deleted all here. So, to make this blog post, I let @realbubbler echo my latest tweets on @tosinbird so I could embed the more permanent objects. I hope you enjoy the mini-project.








This is my "pinned tweet" at @REALbubbler. The one that I've kept at the top of my page/feed for some years to give it more prominence and help people notice my product - the poetry book.



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I just created even more tweets (re-tweets): about protests to End SARS, and other matters.  Please click and see the array.  


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Saturday, September 12, 2020

I feel lousy. I think post-period dehydration is one way to describe this?

The great thing is I just ate.  (I have made a habit of never taking food for granted, or the small privileges like time-freedom.)  The other great thing is that I did not eat all of the food - the half that was signalling to me that it would make me feel terrible.  Another great thing is that I'm free to drink water, rest, or do whatever I want.  The half of the food that is good is the boiled yam.  The half of the food that is poison is egg-sauce.  I just ate the yam, and the salt on it felt great on my tongue, and the starch in it is familiar and soothes whatever emotional problems I may have.  The egg though, even before it was made, the kitchen smells were annoying me.  And you know I love food and would often just eat the food with joy, but today I had some sense and threw the egg thing away without even tasting it.  I could see ginger fibers in it, and the crazy kitchen smells had included onions, and I'm not talking about moderate quantities here.  And the physiological state I'm in now is probably low blood or something, yesterday was the last day of a mildly lively menstrual "period"/flow, not far out of ordinary, just that it felt like it had started a full day before it started enough that I assumed it was and used a tampon that I didn't need - I usually do that "after" the flow has started, yes?, and then I had PMS during the first day of bleeding instead of the day before the first day - by PMS I don't mean there is pain and cramping, just that I might act bitchy - in a text message perhaps, with a boy perhaps - and not know why until the day after when I say hahaha I did that yesterday and it was definitely pms.  Anyway, the other reason I would call this period a little lively is that say the usual flow is sorta normal or heavy in the first 24 hours, on day two it may be normal then it fades away like it's giving up, then it sorta comes back for a semi-normal but usually light fadeout on day three, I think?  But this time, it may have been that day two was a full day like day one, I think.  Either way, the thing I do not want now is onions and garlic and ginger or such nonsense while I rebalance.  When there was (very present) coronavirus, yes, definitely onions, and I have treated myself to another onionsvaganza extravaganza even recently who knows maybe I was getting a cold - these things happen almost by instinct.  And maybe by instinct my mother is needing to infuse her life with these aromas and foods right now whereas I already have a headache and (right on cue, right now I notice my leg and foot tingling painfully, which relates to hampered blood flow) well the headache for me is a very rare - very rare - occurrence and I noticed it one or two hours ago but it's half-gone now, and what I'm saying is low blood, hence no need for the blood-drain foods right now, and - smart girl me - I resisted the urge to eat anyway.  

And I was also wondering why I do not speak up.  But after writing this I see that I do not speak up because it is not clearcut and easy.  These items are not unmitigated poisons, they are medicines actually, for the right person at the right time.  I am not one hundred percent against them, in fact I recommend them to myself when an antiviral need arises.  I am not forever and always responding negatively to these things, and my response to them is not clearly negative like, I don't drop dead or anything.  Who knows, maybe if I spoke up, it would turn out that the food feels bad for somebody else and the overall effect would be to solve a shared problem, although I suspect that the food is very good for my mother and possibly good for somebody else, and maybe in some different pathways it is very good for me as well.  Also, I suspect that (I should be looking to try asking, not suspecting - eyeroll) the somebody else's don't care about how their function might be changing in such seemingly minor ways in response to food.  It must be something going on with my mum, I mean in her body; we had been out of this for a while now and eating well, but now we're back.  (Edited one hour later: Now I remember, yes, she went to the dentist five days ago, she had a procedure - had a whole tooth removed, and has been taking medicine since and also likely managing pain, without showing signs outwardly.  And a piece of the mystery is solved!)

Now I feel well, no headache.  I'll eat a little more yam, drink a bit more water.  One of these days I'll buy myself some of the foods I need.  Actually, I already have stuff around the house that I like.  I made a spice paste weeks ago - contains Indian-style dried beans and spices aka masala powder - that I haven't been using.  Actually, the first thing I thought this morning had been to warm a can of cream of chicken soup for myself.  I'm no longer in the mood for that now, but you can see the direction my appetite is leaning - chunky foods, fats, skins - chicken skin, fish skin, creamy, normal, a little salt and sugar not excess - up from my usually close to zero salt and sugar lol, hmmm, it just occurred to me now that the medicine I need is a bottle of tomato juice, that would rehydrate me right back to life...although it's easier to not go shopping now, since rest is medicine too, another thing I would want is like a cup-a-noodle thing - you know, with rice or noodles and spices and you do hot water with it to make a broth yummm the salty spices at the end make you feel your joy restored, ... and maybe cheetos.    

Even before the period though, and don't read this if you don't like "too-much information" about bodily functions, I'd noticed 1. pooparella, as in I don't normally shit/poopoo/"use the toilet" often, I poopoo infrequently in normal life, but I noticed I poo-poo'd a few times, maybe once daily a few days in a row, not that I was ill or that it was diarrhoeal or anything, I attributed it to my having eaten a lot of granola (raw grain, oats stuff) and I'm sure there was another reason.  And it occurred to me that I should eat more things like granola, and that such things make me happy, and that although I love milk and milk products, my body was probably not liking it.  Guess what, thanks to the yam, and the water, I'm due to poopoo again now.  Nice.  I hope I don't become an average poopoo-er, I was proud of my identity as a no-poop soldier.  Hahaha.     2. The other thing I noticed was a ginger chunk, in my food some days ago but I just ate the food anyway but I wasn't happy about it but maybe forgot about that.  3. Also I'd been feeling dehydrated for many days, like for instance, I'd been cracking my joints/bones - how do you say it - not only in my feet, ankles and so on, but also now in strange places back, shoulers, neck, hips, if I'm remembering this correctly.  Terror: does that mean I'll have bad posture when I'm old?  
After this post, I'll be more aware and rehydrate. The things I'm writing about may be relatively minor shifts in a body's program.  Also, I assume that they are shifts for the better, even though in reality they may be neutral.  
The weather is back to normal, yippee.  We have rain, we have sun, and the incredible cold of the past months seems to be over - it was maybe 2*Centigrade below normal daily range of 27 degrees +/- 4, but for a sensitive babe like me, that is cold at night.  (Editing one hour later: it is still cold.)  Soon I'll start to feel uncomfortable with the heat.  Hmmm, should I remove these curtains?  They were nice when it was cold, but now I want nature and ventilation, and maybe that is what my body is trying to tell me...I need fresh air?  YES.  and more light.  Adjust to the changing weather and throw the curtains open?  yes to that too.  Because they are linked, how you're breathing (and I think I don't breathe very well because my body is protesting the nonsense air quality essentially of the world so it just tries to operate without air) and your metabolism, your blood activeness and your general hydration levels.   And digestion and mental function.  I'm stopping now.  One Love.  
 
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Friday, September 04, 2020

Baby-name consultation

The boy-twin names you should totally use now: Kendrick and Chadwick.  
The girl-twins, obvvviously, should be Venus and Serena.  

In Yoruba culture, twins automatically get the names Taiwo and Kehinde.  
The child born after them is named Idowu, which also works for the third-born of triplets.    

Well, if you need a baby name, anywhere in the world, I guess I can help you?  CONTACT. 

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Monday, August 31, 2020

Caine Prize, Booker, Commonwealth, NLNG Nigeria Prize...

When am I going to read all these books (or short stories)  
and not just the final winners but also the finalists/shortlisted like I once used to do.  

and the PDF books on my laptop, and the ones I'm halfway through right now... 
and the small piles of books on the arm of this chair 
and the books that I have not bought or the ones I bought and lost? 
and the re-reads!  

Mmmm, I look forward to a beautiful life.  

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Monday, August 24, 2020

Meaningfulness, senselessness, and dance.

Three years in, 
it turns out that:  
OMMMMM
and 
 
Let's Face The Music, And Dance.  🎵🎶🎶
Year One and Two here: It was always dance.  

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Sunday, August 16, 2020

Words, like idiocracy

Sturm und Drang - as we now live in a world of children.    
Doom and Gloom - a different kind of vibe.  

I'm looking forward to watching this famously idiotic movie.  

It better not disappoint.  

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Friday, July 24, 2020

Dark humour

I've watched this so many times, and shared it a few times...
It's about how different personality types (the 4-letter /16 personalities /Myers-Briggs) handle the pandemic-apocalypse.  
Tell me.  
Is it funny?  True?  A little weird?  

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Tuesday, July 14, 2020

Not saying I'm going to post daily - I'm NOT - but here's another quick one

I claim to hate cellphones but my phone finally gave up the ghost this morning and by early afternoon I had gone off to try to get it repaired.  In between I had an online event/meeting/session about education in Lagos.  If my sister hadn't gone and got separate internet at home I would have been unable to join in the call since my smartphone was dead.  So I joined the call on my laptop then went for a walk and my repair guy said what was wrong and that he couldn't fix it but told me what to do and so on.  I normally would not do a post like this one that says (almost says, I'll skip that part) where I will be tomorrow because I'm not comfortable with the security risks.  That said, haha.  
Meanwhile I saw another sister that was on a videocall with my sister-at-home and that was nice, and she told me that she felt connected (I think was the word she used) to me because she had read my last post.  Yes, I have sisterzzz, plural. 

People who write minutiae, how do they do it?  Yes, I know how they do it, I did it in a novella and so on, with close-ups on people's lives, but I don't do it in my life - sweet God, just sit here and tell you rubbish about: what I ate and who has corona and how I liked the meeting and who gave me some money to try and repair the phone and details about how I asked the phone guy what his specialty was, and he said iPhones and Samsung phones to which I replied that I had honestly forgotten that I didn't possess a high-end phone, it's true.  Oh my, oh me.  Carrying my cheap ass phone around trying to get it repaired, and also my cheap ass second laptop which has a motherboard issue.  
What I do know about my phone is that there are even way cheaper smartphones than mine, swear to God, like they have some things like internet browsers and downloads and music players but they're ... ok I don't actually know sha.  But I know that the security guys, people working low income (aboki is not the perfect word to use here, political correctness, even though it's not a mean word) they all have phones, some of them large-ish phones, but they don't have the range of normal apps available to them.  I should check and learn more about that.  
Now to talk about my second laptop, I'm sad to see it go, but it always did have heat-management problems and considering that I bought it for very little way back when, and got to use it quite a bit esp when I had jobs in recent years that needed you to bring a laptop to work, so of course I lazily kept my little cheap laptop on-site and didn't have to carry heavy load about.  Like, the work is not even that serious.  The most serious part of some of those jobs was the acting serious.  LOL.  Or maybe I missed the point of the job(s).  Also used it when this laptop I'm using right now was down, for example earlier this year.  Also in the past I sometimes used it when I felt like taking a laptop to my food place to chill, sometimes I took both and now I can't remember why; (UPDATED one day later: I remember now - to charge all my devices when there was a prolonged power outage) and also sometimes when I had the back-in-the-day teaching job (which I somehow consider more serious) and did not want the weight of my main laptop and felt sure that I only needed to show something minor that baby-laptop could handle.   And sometimes when I needed two laptops, especially I think before I had all the smart-phone stuff going; say main laptop had crashed and I needed to study online how to restore it to life.  

O, Baby-laptop, I will try to save your ass.  You have value to me. 
I paid less than 20k (when the exchange rate was about 160 naira) 
 
And it occurred to me as I walked back home today that I was anxious about the future because I had one laptop and no second laptop, and what would happen if...if, I mean, main laptop is ten years old now, and, I don't know?  And I tried to tell myself something from the Bible, that I should "be anxious for nothing."  The likely thing I will do with Baby-Laptop is dispose of it - the repair guys buy it, I understand, for close to zero, while I ask them to remove the hard drive first, or somehow remove the browsers and whatever few personal files I may have saved on it - or risk having the next user just open it and have access to my email and all that.  You would think I actually had stuff to protect, the way I care about security lapses.  Hahaha.    


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Raw-blogging

It's time for me to exceed my former standards in honesty.  It's time to try blogging that strains toward a deeper honesty, or to try rawer posts for a while.  

Raw things on my mind: 
One of my blogs won't post to facebook anymore.  It is very annoying.  At first it was maybe all of my blogs, then I complained and then it was just one.  That one - NewsBuka - has been banned for several months now and I must have complained a dozen times.  

I'll return with more, uh, info.  It will be boring stuff like how I once again did the Values Exercise, and how today I got the name for my next poetry collection, and how...that's all for now.


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Thursday, June 11, 2020

Speaking of skin-colour, let's ask horse-lovers.

Common Horse Coat Colors from TheHorse.com :  "Horses come in a variety of vivid coat colors, ranging from solid and static to multifaceted and ever-changing. These coat colors are controlled by complex genetics."  They are described as bay, chestnut, black, dun, gray, roan, ...pinto, appaloosa, palomino, buckskin, seal-brown, ...  More from equine-world.co.uk and Even More from wikipedia/equine_coat_color

What are some of your favourite "colours"?  

~slideshow~

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