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Sunday, July 31, 2011

Know Thy Rule Book

Going through my old stuff the other day, I found the shopping list I made for my first year. It was a comprehensive list, but it was just so that I could justify the money I was asking my father for. The hoax worked, except for the part where he withheld a small percentage and told me to get it from my HELB loan (story for another day, the worst things people have done with this ‘free’ loan). Anyway, I just though, if someone had written a manual for me before I ventured into this institution of higher learning, maybe I wouldn’t have had to learn the hard (and heard way). Therefore, I thought I would make one….

1. Know Your Campus: Visit at least once or twice before your date of registration, nothing screams FRESHER like asking for directions. Which reminds me, a friend of mine who-shall-not-be-named-because-he-has-a-dossier-on-me, did the blondest thing…So Day One, we are provided with a map of the campus, and the campus is vast as hell (which I presume, is vast, and really fun and rowdy, with the occasional Catholic priest doing his thing). So he-who-cannot-be-named marked the Graduation Square as his focal point and used it for the next four days to find his way around campus. It gets funny when you know that it was not only his focal point on the map, but also physically, which meant that he would walk all the way to the G.Square to figure out where his Department, which he had just passed on his way there, is located. He runs away when the story comes up…

2. Know Your Condoms: It is no secret, Campus is where morality met its death (some hints of it are still there, in the zoology labs where they breed turtles). Know thy rubber, it will separate you from the brood, or make you one in a thousand, which is not such a romantic number. Most campuses have condom dispensers, Government Issue ones that have a KEBS tab (talk of vanity) and come in yellow, gold, or a weird shade of grey packs and a horrible odor. Point is, rubber might save your life, whether you are male or female, or both. Trust Condoms are now 20 bob (Inflation caught up with this slippery bastard!) and Durex (The Lamborghinis of the super car collection) are about 160. Each of these pieces is quoted in ascending order of the probability to get lucky. Nothing tells shagzmondoness like pausing foreplay to run to the washrooms to frisk the dispensers, and nothing tells sophistication like a pack of Durex, but then again, you are working on a lean budget (unless it’s your HELB loan).


3. Know the Dealer: This point should know your shantytown, but that is not really the point. You do need to know your shantytown, know the cheapest hotels, the ones with the best food, best servers (wait, we are talking about shantytowns here). This shantytowns always have weed dealers ( I do not know about sterner stuff, and if I did, I would not), ghosts who keep the First Class Honors and Dropouts running. There are many reasons why you might need this person, the first of it being that second, to whatever deity you worship, he has something that can lift you up. Know him, even if you do not partake, just know the person (ant stereotyping here, unless someone knows a female Marijuana dealer who is sensitive about gender), you both might need each other, and more often than not, if your experience is a normal campus one, you will directly or indirectly use his products.


4. Know your friends: Unless you aim to vie for posts in SONU, KUSA, MUSO (Someone from Moi PLEASE tell me that’s not what your student organization is called), or any other, just keep a few friends. Nothing speaks of loneliness than not having a place to crash when your roomie decides to ‘hang the dirty sock’ on the door. Even for the loner, you still need someone to notice if you’ve been missing for too long (the normal period is 1-2 weeks, depending on the gender of the missing person, some might be gone for a whole sem, the girls of course) but if you are in UoN, you don’t need friends, there are people there who take amber alerts very seriously, they will kill a motorist to demand your release.


5. See no Evil, Hear No Evil: You will see things, You will hear things, You will be told things, You will do things, You will smell things, You will taste things, You will meet things, You will learn things, suffice to say, rub off your moral pedestal and make a new one as you go, adapt to what suits you and find a way around the things that threaten your innocence (it will come under threats more times than your life will).



6. Know Your Priest: Whether it’s the religious priest, your imam, guru, minister, barman, drug dealer or little voice in your head, know the one person who can bring you back to sanity without expecting something from you (except a bill of some kind, a collection, tithe, offering or black eyes). At the end of your period, just before graduation, seek a hypnotist to make you get amnesia. You will need to start afresh, your mind will be scarred, either by a boring campus life (you non-experimentee!), a moderate life (yah, yah, so you let your guard down in second year and stayed at a party) or an insane life (Like some guy who slept in a trench, or the girl who can outdrink most men I know)



There are many things that can be written about campus manuals, but the rules are clear, except for those posted on different posts in the campus, Mututho laws, those of organizations, clubs and societies that you will join, those that your deity requires you observe, and those your mother told you would attract the boogeyman, you make the others as you go. You are your own person now, do things!


and JKUAT( Juja Boys and the rumor of a girl), I take it that you haven't thought about rioting about this...

Monday, July 18, 2011

The Dirty Sock on the Door

If you have ever read Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People then you would remember the part where Odili, the main character, details how he laid the ‘hardest girl’ on campus. His friends waited on the hallway for proof that the mighty lioness had been devoured and indeed, after sometime, the creak of the door opening was unmistakable, and he thrust his hand out, holing the condom full of seed! Mad, is it not? Remember that Achebe went to campus when it was for the select few, and yet how he describes the act is so vivid you can tell some parts are written from memory.
Everyone knows the legend of campus life, the dirty sock on the door. It is the crudest, yet most ingenious method ever devised by budding academics to warn their roommates and friends that they are not to be disturbed because they are engaging in coital matters. I have always wondered who came up with it, at some point I even suspected that it had something to do with voodoo, at least its origin. However, let us not bore ourselves with where it came from, but what it means.

No one hangs a dirty sock anymore, with the invention of phones; a text message should be enough for you to have the room to yourself. I have a million tales about ‘exile’, some that I have witnessed, some stories retold.
A friend of mine sent a text saying “ Niaje msee, unamind kwenda exile leo?” to his roommate on a Sunday evening. When his roommate replied in the affirmative, he sent another one “Aki sina rubber kwa keja, unaweza nigetia pack mbili nitakurefund?” As you can imagine, his roommate was mad as hell so he decided to revenge. He did buy two packs of trust Condoms, back when they cost 10 bob (things our children, pun intended, will never believe), but then he did something else. He ripped apart the pack, took the six condoms and placed them on the reading table in the room (don’t beat me to the genius part). The idea behind it worked perfectly, you all know that unless it is your wife or long-term girlfriend, or someone you will pay after, you need to appear aloof to what you are going to get. It is the nature of the hunt that once you are sure you have the prey, you do not have to remind it that you are going to eat it, if you catch my drift. Now, imagine you walk into a room with a girl, and being the man that you are, you let her get inside first only to find six condoms lay neatly on the table! It’s back to square one again, huh?
Legend has it that if Hall six in JKUAT Main Campus was to burn at any time of the day, there would be more girls than guys running outside, which would not be weird if it was not a guys’ hostel. It is the same in all campuses, there is one hostel that carries with it tales of broken beds, exiled roommates and blocked toilets. Irony is, if you walk into the washrooms in Ngong Hostels in KU, for example, the condom dispensers always have several packs, new as the day the government shipped them in from wherever it is they get them. Compare that to guys’ hostels where the dispensers are rusty because the rubber never gets there. It is handpicked before it the caretakers can lift the packs and empty them into the dispensers.
Campus is where mindset about shagging takes a completely new dimension. Where we all shunned it at first, it becomes a way of life. For example, Mark, a classmate of mine, once went to his friend’s room. It was one of the big rooms meant for elected student leader’s officials, but they are always full of people. So he walks and finds a couple on the upper bunk watching a movie on a laptop, four guys huddled on a computer and a nerd reading, but he could not see his friend. So he approached the lower bunk, which had one of those makeshift curtains you make with an extra bed sheet (I first saw them in high school, creeped me out). He lifted it without much thinking to find, alas, two naked beasts getting on with it right there. She was on top (small detail I thought I should add) and Mark just dropped and walked out. Everyone else just continued doing what they were doing, minding their own business.
Then John, who lived on my floor, left his door open once while she was down there blowing things up. SO you can imagine my shock when I banged through the door and found him lying down, eyes closed, sighing like he was asthmatic. When she looked up, those big eyes, that full mouth…suffice to say I have leverage on him now, he is very careful around me.
I have only been sent on exile once, by my last roommate. Actually, it was somewhat self-inflicted because I had introduced him to the girl. It was the first Mashujaa Day, last year (no pun intended, do not ask how I remember) and I spent it in the library online, doing much of nothing. When I got back to my room they were high, and the smell of rubber, the stench actually could have been the worst thing if my forensic skills did not indicate that they had done it on my bed! Being a self-confessed metro sexual, a fresh change of sheets and pillowcases still did not do the trick. But he was a man now (did I mention he was a fresher).
The moral of the story is, dirty sock or not, unless you live alone or with Jesus, someone is bound to exile you sometime in campus. They say when Lady Luck smiles your way, then you have gotten lucky, but please do not do it on someone else’s bed, it is rude. If you sleep of a top bunk, do it there, you never know, she might be into gravity and all.

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Campus is Sin City, Do parents really need to know that?

I am embarrassed. The last time I blogged here was on the 29th of November in the last year of the last decade? Then a friend of mine happened upon it while reading @savvykenya‘s old blog ‘The Diary Of a Kenyan Campus Girl’ and texted to ask why I have no current posts. Talking of Savvy, she graduated from campus which means that a gap remains that must be filled. I do not think I can, her shoes (although I have never met her) are far too big when it comes to blogging. Every good writer has an area of expertise, as it is with porn stars and assassins. I am more of an academic writer (and I make a decent living off of it) and my mind is (or rather used to be) too dynamic to keep up with the stagnation of campus. Suffice to say, life always has its way.
A lot has happened since last year. Some of which cannot be blogged without a legal agreement from the parties involved. Martha (read the second post) is now headed to her second year, baptized with fire from ‘Judy’, the girl who ran away with her 16 k. Life has taken its inevitable toll on all of us, I think I spotted a single hair on my chin, maybe I wont be a thirty something year old with a chin like a baby’s butt after all. Something got me thinking today, reading through the different witness accounts of those who were present at the party where Mercy Chepkosgei Keino was seen alive last before her body was found on Waiyaki Way. Morbid as my interests in life might be (I think death is God’s gift to humankind, it is the question we answer with our lives), reading the dad’s candid defence on why he knows for sure that his daughter had never touched a drop of the –COOH products brought me to near laughter. How many of us partake without our parents’ knowledge? That would be 97 %, and the biggest number is obviously the ladies. For guys, suspicion begins once you hit puberty and your mother catches you in the house with a girl (or fondling the house help, whichever comes first).
The first time I ever tasted beer was when I was in my mother’s womb (story for another day). I avoided it for about 16 years after that, until a few months before I joined campus and I blacked out on 16 bottles of Smirnoff Black Ice (unbroken record in a house of drunkards, do not underestimate that ‘panty remover’). Even for a narcissist like me, it would be unfair to say I drank it all in one sitting and in my right mind. I also think I took 15 and a half because, if my memory serves me right, I poured about half a bottle on myself when I missed the glass. I woke up four hours completely sober, and sat through a lecture by my grandmother as to how moderation is key.
Fast-forward to a few months later in campus when one Thursday (it was the only day on the timetable that we had a single class, meaning much of the day was do-as-you-wish) I had my first taste of a brandy. Piece of advice, if you are going to introduce someone to brandies, please make sure it is not Napoleon. The small brown bottle retailed at 140 /= if my memory serves me right, and my classmates and I bought about four. We walked to the hostel and at 10 am in the morning, listened to music as we sipped through badly mixed coke and cheap brandy. Hours later and four more such bottles down, Eric was on the floor, having thrown up all the bread he had eaten, Levi was trying to salvage Phil’s laptop after a jug full of water tipped on it, Tim was fast asleep on his bed and I....I was staggering to my room to meet up with this girl I had been trying to get for the previous three weeks. Picture a room in slow motion, everyone doing things at -10* speed, at 2 p.m on a Thursday afternoon.
Karma can be a nasty bitch, when you are not prepared for luck, she shines it upon you. Mercy forgave me for throwing up so close to her feet that some of it splashed onto her long dress (tells you something, does it not) but she has never forgotten. She also helped open my door after I missed the keyhole about five times (could have been more, everything was so blurry). Now? Now my friends and I are the gurus of pinting, we hardly ever pint together and I have been on a sabbatical for no logical reasons. I can never do brandies, even the sweet Viceroy (bloody drinks nearly annihilated my libido *shudders*) and Phil is the guy you buy ten beers and he still drives you home and gets to his place without a mishap. Levi does not drink now, and Eric knows better than to eat bread while drinking. Do our parents know of our experience? You all know the answer to that question, they were once in campus too, were they not?