Ira

“While a man was polishing his new car, his 6 years old son picked up a stone and scratched lines on the side of the car. In anger, the man took the child’s hand and hit it many times; not realizing he was using a wrench. At the hospital, the child lost all his fingers due to multiple fractures. When the child saw his father with painful eyes he asked, ‘Dad when will my fingers grow back?’ The man was so hurt and speechless; he went back to his car and kicked it a lot of times. Devastated by his own actions sitting in front of that car he looked at the scratches; the child had written ‘LOVE YOU DAD’.The next day that man committed suicide.”

Like most stories you find on Facebook these days, the first time I read this story, I found that it was beautiful and bullshit. Then a friend sent it to me on Whatsapp as part of those “Send to 10 other people you love” messages, then I thought maybe it wasn’t so bullshit. But for the sole reason that I found it first on Facebook, I scientifically concluded that it was still bullshit. The point however, is that it makes an apt illustration of how each one of us can be when we lose it. Its name is wrath ladies and gentlemen and it’s another one of the seven deadly sins. [If you haven’t read Invidia yet, you can read it right here.]

Control, is one of those feelings we are genetically programmed to jealously guard like a kid guards his golden sand castle. Everyone wants to be in control of their situations. Control what they say, control what they do, control what they think, control what they eat (and weigh). But like all things shiny and oily, you lose that control once in a while. You crash into a mushroom farm miles off the calm highway. And when you lose the brakes on your anger, you have wrath. Red hot blinding rage.

"You lost my cat? Aaaaaahhhh..."

I believe we’ve all been in one of those situations in our lives. Even the most tolerant that walks amongst us has lost it at some point. All of the anger builds up, there’s no extra space for dinner. And the only outcome is letting it all go. All of the anger, all of the malice, all of the hatred. We lose control of it all and let fly. At something, at someone. And then when it’s all over and we’re back to calm-ville, we feel better. But we also regret it. Most times.

After regret comes justification. We want to believe our moment of rage was justified. That it was the best way to deal with the situation, but it never really assuages our sense of regret. If anything, it only drives home the point: you shouldn’t have.

Being wrathful gives you a sense of control, which is ironic, because you’re actually out of it. You might think hitting the wall with your bare knuckles is understandable because your internet connection is bad, but all you’re gonna be left with when you calm down would be limp bloody knuckles, and a very bad internet connection. Or you might think burning down a building because you can’t find your phone is what rational people do, until you realise you almost killed people too. Which is what a woman totally did.

When I was in high school, I hit my friend. We were at a new year’s party and the microphone was lying idle for a while. He grabbed it and within earshot of everyone that wasn’t deaf at the party, declared I was dating a girl in my class. A girl I didn’t exactly even like. It was a joke, but not to me. I got the most readily available wood log and hit him in the knee. We squared at each other but got separated. We didn’t say ‘Hello’ for two years. I wouldn’t say sorry because that would mean I’m admitting I was a jerkhole with zero sense of humour, and he wouldn’t say sorry because, well, maybe because I was a jerkhole with zero sense of humour that hit him with a log in the knee. We eventually skipped the sorry part and are friends again (for those of you that care), but we’re never getting those two years back. I was a dick then, I’m a dick now. We’re all dicks because we all lose it. At some point, we all do.

Not Pictured: My friend's knee.

Now I’m not about to sell you a manual on how best to take control of your issues. If I had to teach you about control, that would make you freaky mutants, and I’ll be Professor X (without the degree, and baldness). And you’re never gonna believe me anyway if I told you the ancient method of control is licking your nostrils with your tongue (you can go ahead and try it anyway). What I’ll however do, is state the obvious and prescribe more doses of control for you. Control your anger as best as you can or channel it into something else. Anything but wrath. Control, and more control.

Benjamin Franklin said, “Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame.” If you’re able to look past Lee Iacoca’s teeth-grinding name, you’ll probably see sense in him saying, “In times of great stress or adversity, it’s always best to keep busy, to plow your anger into something positive.”

I think I agree with them because…why not?

The Others

I watch movies a lot. An insane amount of time for someone that wants to be rich enough to install secret cameras in everyone’s home and watch them poop. The first time I watched Lost was around the time the Mayans trolled us all and said we were all gonna die. I tried to watch enough movies before the Mayancalypse and Lost happens to be one of those tv series you have to watch before you die, because I say so.

The series revolves around a group of plane crash victims surviving on the island they crashed on. They face off against a hostile group of island natives, the others. Over the course of six time-consuming seasons, there were a lot of fascinating clashes: physical, moral, psychological, the whole package.

When I recently saw Terra Nova with my sister, I was bored, and jobless, and bored (thanks ASUU). And because she loves to see me suffer, I had to half-beg and half-threaten her before she would let me watch it. Barely had I settled down on my movie mat when the plot unraveled: Terras vs Sixers. Set in year 2197, when humans have finally succeeded in ruining the planet with overpopulation which led to shortage of air, scientists find a tear in the blah blah blah, and humans could travel back 85 million years in time and depopulate earth. The sixth batch to travel to Terra Nova in fine human fashion, for purely human reasons, finally rebelled and moved out of Nova into the wild and earned the cool name Sixers. And with more brainless confrontations than drunk idiots on a Jerry Springer show, the Terras vs Sixers war sprawled across the single season of the series. I honestly would not recommend you see this series. I’m still seeing my psychiatrist from the mindfuck it gave me.

Now dear reader, before you skip to the comment section and type, “Dude, you brought me here for a movie review? Eat shit and choke on it!”, I promise you, this is not a movie review. I’m trying to make a point. There’s a pattern:

Humans are dualistic animals.

Exactly like Harvey 'Two-Face' Dent.

The concept of good and bad was already established before monkeys learned to climb. And to make another quick dash into movies, 99% of Hollywood productions revolves around good guys vs bad guys. Coming closer to home, 70% of Nollywood movies revolves around the good lad that can’t make it in the city (usually Lagos) vs the old witch in his village he didn’t give a present on his last Christmas visit (the rest 30% is about clueless strangers doing clueless stuffs in front of a clueless camera).

To put it more bluntly, there are good and bad people. You’re born, raised, you start a family, you give alms to beggars on the street, you die. You’re one of the good guys. X is born, X is raised, X steals from hardworking beggars, X kills homeless people, X dies. X is one of the bad guys.

For every kid that closes the toilet seat when he’s done, there’s a kid that shits on other peoples lawn just for the kick of it. For every kid that wants to wear a cape, roam the street at night and be Batman, there’s a kid that wants to wear make-up and be the Joker. For every kid that wants to have a killer moustache and become Hitler, there’s another that wants to wear less clothes and be Ghandi.

Sometimes we lose sleep thinking about why bad people exist. Why can’t everybody be decent, jolly, church-going folks like we are? Why must others bring chaos into the order of the world? Why can’t we all just get along?

"Why won't Tom and Jerry kiss and make up?"

What we sometimes fail to realise is that other people are just not us. We weren’t born the same, didn’t have the same upbringing, didn’t have the same experiences, therefore, don’t think the same, and definitely not act the same. Not everyone has the heart to bear the good that exists in the world. Everyone has to blaze a trail. Everyone believes they’re doing the world a huge favour.

However, our bigger problem is we pass judgements. In our little warped head, we’re judge, jury and executioner. The world would probably be a better place if we didn’t judge ourselves so much. We decide who’s as decent as we are, and who deserves to serve as the devil’s admiral. There’s us, and there’s them.

But then again, it isn’t so easy to decide between who falls on the bad side because they made a mistake or because they’re just plain evil. We just put them on the stand. And when I just said ‘we’, I included myself in the the good people category (like you also most probably did). But then again, I steal credit from my mom’s phone, and I use MTN cheats. Maybe I’m not so good afterall. Maybe neither are you. Does cheating on your wife make you less evil than Hitler that killed approximately six million Jews to prove he has a better moustache? Okay, maybe a little better, but it still shows you’re not perfect, and you don’t make excellent choices all the time. There’s no absolute evil. No one can live in the light all the time. There’s a grey patch we all fall into sometimes.

I guess we’re just supposed to live and let live. And of course, avoid the bad people from snuffing life out of you before you live to be very old and die of runny nose.

Or internet porn.

Like big ol’ Alfred said in Dark Knight, “Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

Damn! This was almost a movie review. Almost.

Jackpot

Hello shipmates, this is your Captain speaking, and I realise it’s only been 3 days since Priorities but you know what they say. Dankaro is the only one nice enough to send me posts, and if you don’t know him by now, you probably haven’t read Not Science Fiction! He’ll send you nudes if you follow him on twitter, and he has another story for you…

“Our special dish today is grilled Duck on a bed of wild rice and English tomatoes.” My mind instantly tuned out the waiter as my eyes caught the prices in the menu.

Choi! This guy must be loaded to bring me here for our first date oh. Some of the food are written in French sef. How did they expect me, an Ojuelegba born and bred girl to decipher that? And who has heard of a Nigerian restaurant where prices were in dollars, ehn?

Well, I really like the guy and I don’t want to chop his money. At least not so soon. So I decided to look for the cheapest thing to order on the menu. There would be lots of time to gently slip a straw in his pocket and gently sip away his cheddar. My eyes skimmed through the menu as my head got bigger. The cheapest dish I could find here was fried rice and chicken.

Chicken fried rice with a side dish of baked potatoes and Italian salad – $75.

I furtively slipped my Nokia torch phone from my purse and did the maths. Shey one dollar is now worth 158 naira abi? My head big as I press the button for equals to. Fried rice and chicken for twelve thousand naira? I couldn’t take it anymore, I had a better idea.

“You know what darling? I’m not really into this place, its kinda ostentatious. Plus I know this great shop where we can get some groceries. How about we go back to my place and I make us dinner”

He smiled broadly and I could almost see the gears running in his head. I could tell he was thinking he would totally get some tonight. On the first date!

          *20 mins later*

“Papa Nnamdi, how much for bag of rice? Ten thousand abi? Ehn bring two bags, 1 carton of tin tomatoes, 2 crates of egg, 5 liters of palm oil and 10 liters of vegetable oil. Fast abeg! My man dey hungry”

My name is Caro, and I just hit the jackpot!

Priorities

I know it in my heart. One sunny day, I’m gonna find a lamp, an old lamp. And I’m going to rub it. Tenderly, vigorously. Then an indescribably beautiful genie is gonna pop out, gingerly. She’ll be a she. She’ll give me a warm genie hug (and probably a hot genie kiss) and then ask me in the beautifullest voice ever to make three wishes she’ll have to grant. And I’m going to fetch my prepared list, and ask her for:

1. An immortal phone that never dies.

2. Uninterrupted internet connection.

3. The wisdom to figure out what my damn priorities are.

You sure...that's it?

I need a new list.

It’s no secret, humans are comically confused beings. That’s something I just made up in my head, but I believe it deep in my heart. And the good news is I’m good at making stuff up, so I’m sticking with it: humans are confused messed up mortals. It’s probably what makes us human afterall. We are mutually clueless in our cluelessness. It comes with the territory.

Making life choices are by no means easy tasks. Deciding whether to save a bus full of scared little children rigged with explosives, or chase down the fleeing terrorist that put them there, and beat him into next Wednesday, has to be one of the most life-changing choices you’ll ever have to make. But you’re not Jack Bauer, so you don’t have to. You only have to yell at the tv from the sanctuary of your couch.

However, this doesn’t mean you don’t have to make life choices that impact on your day-to-day dealings. And most of these choices are cakewalks compared to what Dr. House has to deal with. No one is going to end up six feet under from your bad choices. But we still get these choices wrong anyway. Not because we’re unintelligent dipshits, but because we’re confused wackjobs. We just can’t help ourselves.

On the priority-ordering turf, you’ve to decide between what you want, and what you really need. What is important, and what is urgent. Deciding on what is important and what is not, is a headache that hits you harder than most. Should you do something that contributes to your life first? Or should you do that thing your new neighbour tells you is the new cool, which absolutely does nothing for you?

"Also, you gotta buy new furniture man. Your momma's surgery can wait."

It doesn’t take minutes to find stories of people getting their priorities laughably wrong. The story of Marcin Muchalski getting shot in the leg because he wouldn’t hand his Nokia 3390 over to a gun-toting mugger, is one of such stories. The story ended well for him though, because his mugger must have obviously thought going to jail over killing an idiot for a mobile phone won’t do any good for his criminal rep and scrammed, Marcin limped away and called the police, on the same phone. The happy ending however can not be said for an hospital that took a 74-year-old heart patient off her ventilator and moved her out of the emergency room, to make room for Michael Jackson with a stomach bug. Yes, that Michael Jackson. She died. We all know celebrity lives are more valuable, right?

We’ve all had our priorities screwed backwards at some point. You’ve probably had to decide between whether to first reply that Facebook friend that tagged you in a picture of their ugly kitten, or go wake your mother to take her sleeping pills. Or whether to first check out that unknown white girl that favourited your tweet, or forward one of those “Send this to 10 of your friends if you love Jesus or you’ll be unfortunate for 7 years and die” messages.

You know you want to forward that message!

Nobody gets these things right all the time, except if you’re still a kid whose biggest decision is whether to chew the chocolate bar or swallow it. There is no manual. You’ve to figure out what’s important to you over what’s not, so that when if you find that genie before me, you won’t ask for a lap dance from Joan Rivers first. But for the sake of humanity, I better find that genie first!