Saturday, March 1, 2008

Dear Diary...... ahem!.... Blog....sic!

'I've got so much to tell you; but I don't know what to say'..... taken from a very poignant (for lack of a better word) coming of age movie I was watching the other day. Sorry, I remember not neither title nor actors nor anything about the damn movie for that matter...... other than those words...... and even those.....well.

I love hot showers..... sic! Let me rephrase that given my penchant for going on and on and on about that thing called love; yet when push comes to shove....... I know zilch about it.... Or as my friend Meredith would say, grab your shovel anytime I start on that subject - It's just a bunch of Bull-Manure and you better get busy or you'll soon be knee deep.

Anyway, I like my showers hot..... Hot to the point where I can barely stand it..... and stand (in there) I do until common-sense or, as is often the case, someone else needing the facilities urges me to get out and get on with my life.

There is something about the way hot water soothes my body that lulls my mind into that phase or mode that I like to call babble-land...... you may recall my talk of babblicious incoherence.... where the thought generator goes into overdrive and produces at astonishing rates thoughts that are not all-together......all together.

I'm what one might call a thinker in denial.... Given the opportunity, I can think a thought into obscurity..... think it... rethink it, rethink the thought and so on and so forth till I have no Idea from whence the thought came nor to what end it was intended. Knowing of my possession of this weakness.... trust me it is no strength.... I tend to curtail any semblance of such, the moment it rears its ugly head (for lack of a better phrase).

That is except for when I am in the shower(hot). There is something about hot water enveloping my body that weakens my mental faculties(the sentries that watch out for run-away thoughts), and it is not rare for me to spend upwards of thirty minutes under the shower-head if it is so indulging. As it is, the water heater in my Condo is in cahoots with my roomie or someone and won't indulge me that long..... after fifteen minutes the water temp. tapers off at a ridiculous rate.

And yet they still tease and complain; roomies, cousins, girlfriends.... the lot, that I take for ever in the shower. And it goes back to my days as a kiddo when I'd fill the kirai (basin) with hot water and submerge myself in it (best I could) and sit there till either the water went tepid or the mboch or even worse Mathee came looking for me....

You might be tempted to say that I was day dreaming, and in some ways, perhaps I was, but I would not just dream.... my mind would travel (I know that's what dreaming is)... from that day's class and theorem to the people in my life and what I thought of them. I remember analysing at the age of 10 why my life thus far had turned out as it had, what I had or didn't in common with my friends, why I always felt and was treated as different even amongst my peers.

I would think of ways to act, to fit in, to influence what others thought of or reacted to me... I'd think of funny lines to draw people away from those lines of questioning that I hated to counter and which they unfailingly brought on. I'd wonder at what others thought, how they functioned and try to see life through their eyes... I tried to to see into the future and how I would tackle the unknown and then the mboch would yell.... and I'd scuttle, barely noticing the water was now almost cold, and lifting with both arms would raise basin over head and pour......brrrrr....

Showers are so much more convenient..... hot tubs even more so....

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

bathtubs indeed are a whole other kettle of fish. i recall days i would sit in there till my skin closely resembled a prune, an endless supply of hot water did help in fueling my extended stays, including and not limited to reading my Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew and Moses books. It was a large family and the bathroom was my refuge.

KK said...

I hear you on the prune like appearance.
As it is with the novels, I read them everywhere but... chances are if I had brought them to the bathroom, you n I would be sharing shrinks today.

3CB said...

How i miss those bubbling karais!! must be one of those truly kenyan things like being called boi or toto or mami and calling every female adult aunty.

i wish someone would invent a karai in adult size.

And i wonder that they never singed certain derrieres and knees, what with being good heat conductors and all...perhaps rumination is a bad conductor, coz you're not the only who lost hours to mabati and sunshine ;)

Kenya's Dopest Chic said...

haha at adult size Karai...i thoguth i was the only one in love with hot showers....
On my day off...i spend half of it in the bathtub filled with hot steamy water that sometimes burn my skin...im i crazy!! NOT