After A while

After a while you learn the subtle difference
between holding a hand and chaining a soul.
And you learn that love doesn’t mean leaning
and company doesn’t mean security.

And you begin to learn that kisses aren’t contracts
and presents aren’t promises

And you begin to accept your defeats with your head up
and your eyes ahead,
with the grace of an adult, not the grief of a child.

And you learn to build all your roads on today,
because tomorrow’s ground is too uncertain for plans,
and futures have a way of falling down in mid-flight.

After a while you learn that even sunshine burns
if you get too much.
So you plant your own garden
and decorate your own soul,
instead of waiting for someone to leave you flowers.

And you learn that you really can endure;
You really are strong,
you really have worth.
And you learn,
and you learn,
With every goodbye, you learn.

The Generation That Doesn’t Want Relationships

We want the façade of a relationship, but we don’t want the work of a relationship. We want the hand holding without the eye contact, the teasing without the serious conversations. We want the pretty promise without the actual commitment, the anniversaries to celebrate without the 365 days of work that leads up to them. We want the happily ever after, but we don’t want to put the effort in the here and now. We want the deep connection, while keeping things shallow.

We want to be swept off our feet, yet at the same time remaining safely, independently, standing on our own. We want to keep chasing the idea of love, but we don’t want to actually fall into it. 

We don’t want relationships – we want friends with benefits, Netflix and chill, nudes on Tinder. We want anything that will give us the illusion of a relationship, without being in an actual relationship. We want all the rewards and none of the risk, all of the payout and none of the cost. We want to connect – enough, but not too much. We want to commit – a little, but not a lot. We take it slow: we see where it goes, we don’t label things, we just hang out. We keep one foot out the door, we keep one eye open, and we keep people at arm’s length - toying with their emotions but most of all toying with our own.

We hope to swipe right into happiness. We want to download the perfect fit like a new app - that can be updated every time there’s a hitch, easily compartmentalized into a folder, deleted when we have no more use for it. We don’t want to unpack our baggage – or, worse, help someone unpack theirs. We want to keep the ugly behind the cover-up, hide the imperfections with an Instagram filter, and choose another episode on Netflix over a real conversation. We like the idea of loving someone despite their flaws; yet we keep our skeletons locked in the closet, happy to never let them see the light of day.

We want a placeholder, not a person. We want a warm body, not a partner. We want someone to sit on the couch next to us, as we aimlessly scroll through another newsfeed, open another app to distract us from our lives. We want to walk this middle line: pretending we don’t have emotions while wearing our heart on our sleeve, wanting to be needed by someone yet not wanting to need someone. We play hard to get just to test if someone will play hard enough – we don’t even fully understand it ourselves. We sit around with friends discussing the rules, but no one even knows the game we’re trying to play. Because the problem with our generation not wanting relationships is that, at the end of the day, we actually do.

Wanting Everything. Getting Nothing.

She wasn’t afraid of difficulties. What frightened her was being forced to choose one particular path. Choosing a path meant having to miss out on others. She had a whole life to live and she was always thinking that, in future, she might regret the choices she made now. ‘I’m afraid of committing myself,’ she thought to herself. She wanted to follow all possible paths and so ended up following none.

Misogynist Predators

"Violence against women was never a women’s issue. We took it on because nobody else was taking it on. We don’t rape ourselves, it turns out. This has always been a men’s issue. Now men need to make it their issue.

They need to say we care as much about this as we care about sports, as we care about any of the things that occupy us because our sisters, our mothers, our daughters, our grandmothers, our wives, our girlfriends are suffering in a very major way in this world. One out of three of us are being beaten and raped every day. Every day!

We lived with this forever. It’s killed our will. It’s killed our sex drive. It’s killed off our intelligence. It’s killed off our agency. It’s killed off our ability to be employed. It’s a sickness in this society and men need to take this moment and say, ‘We care. We’re gonna change. We’re gonna look into our hearts and souls and figure out what went wrong and what patriarchy has done to us or we’re not gonna be here anymore.’

We will perish as human beings because the people who run things now are the most misogynist predators who are not only destroying women, but they’re destroying the planet, they’re destroying poor people, they’re destroying African Americans, they’re destroying Mexicans, they’re destroying Muslims. They’re destroying anymore who isn’t a white man. and this is our hour. We’re here. Either we change now or we perish." 

—  Eve Ensler on WTF with Marc Maron

The Woman

I Love her… 
The woman who’s hands
Are calloused, 
whose back breaks 
From all the placements of babies 
Upon it. 
Years after years.

That woman who puts on
Various masks through life’s stages. 
First of a delicate carer,
Then of a strict teacher,
Then that of an enemy,
Before residing as a friend.
The woman with one thing constant,
Despite the mask-
Her soul:
The soul of a carer,
The heart of a lover.

The woman whose palms 
Have grazed various parts of 
My body. That woman whose arms 
Will always be open to me: 
Calling in silence,
No matter where I go, what I do
You are always welcome home.

That woman,
With her luscious frocks
And stout frame….
I love that woman.

Father’s Day When You Have a "Toxic" Dad

This is not a greeting Card Father’s Day type message. There is no shortage of the warm and fuzzy Father’s Day cards, quotes and sentiments for you to read, bouncing around the Internet.

No, this Father’s Day message is for all of us who have, or had, strained, troubled, broken or abusive relationships with dear old dad. So, if your dad is Ward Cleaver, count your lucky stars. You don’t need to read on. Go enjoy him. Love him and celebrate him. Just don’t judge those of us who struggle with Father’s Day because we had something far less than “Father Knows Best,” for a dad.

To begin with, it’s important to remember that the Bible says, “honor your father. “
It doesn’t say “obey your father.”
It doesn’t say “respect your father.”
It doesn’t say “like your father.”
It doesn’t even say “love your father.”

Of course, it would be wonderful to feel love for one’s father, however, love is a feeling and feelings can’t be commanded.

Some fathers are lovable. However, some fathers are not. For a myriad of reasons, they are outside the realm of our love: abuse, neglect, absence, abandonment, betrayal — many fathers have simply made it impossible for their children to feel the emotion of love or demonstrate it back. And if you are such a child, of any age, or even if your father is dead, particularly on Father’s Day when you are bombarded with messages of “love you dad,” you need to hear this at least once today:
- NOT LOVING YOUR DAD DOES NOT MAKE YOU A MONSTER.
-NOT LOVING YOUR DAD IS NOT YOUR FAULT.
-IS IT SAD? YES, OF COURSE, BUT IT DOES NOT MAKE YOU BAD!

Look, we are not judged by our feelings, rather, we are judged by our actions. It would be nice to love dad, however, for many of us, at least at this moment, it may not be there and maybe it never will.

What is a choice, what is always a choice, however, are our actions. How do we choose to treat our dads? That is always our choice to make.

To “honor” our father, at the very least, is to treat him with common decency and dignity. In my opinion this is the bare minimum of making sure that he is clothed, fed, and sleeps with a roof over his head. It is a minimum, it certainly isn’t a maximum, but it is a start.

Beyond that there are degrees of honor — if at all possible, picking up the phone and calling dad, speaking to dad in a dignified way and taking the kids to visit their grandfather are all rungs as we climb up the ladder of honor.

Honor, however, may also mean NOT picking up the phone, NOT visiting, or NOT placing the grandchildren into his life. Yes, that is harsh. Of course it isn’t ideal. It’s horrible. It’s hell. However, so is physical abuse, sexual abuse or emotional abuse. Hell is having a father who is a drug addict, a compulsive liar, thief, bully or all-around bad guy.

Indeed, there is a commandment to honor one’s father, however, there is no commandment to subject oneself, or own’s children, to abuse, forsaking their honor, or our own, to honor an abusive dad. As much as it is a commandment to honor one’s father, equally it is a commandment for a father to make it possible for his children to honor him and some dad’s seem to do all they can to make this commandment nearly impossible to fulfill.

Respect must be earned.
Love must be inspired.
Honor, however, is a set of actions that we have some control over.

As sons and daughters we must do everything we can to bestow honor, at least the lowest rung on the ladder of honor, upon our dad.

Maybe this Father’s Day you’ll forgive your dad (alive or dead).
Possibly this Father’s Day you’ll love your dad.
Perhaps this Father’s Day you’ll find something, one thing, to respect about your dad.
However, at the very least, do whatever you can to somehow, in some way, show him some honor.

Even if he doesn’t deserve it — do it for yourself, do it for your kids, do it for God.
May we all be blessed with father’s we not only honor but we love. At the very least, may we all be blessed to be sons and daughters that do our very best to show our dad, whether in life or death, deserving or not, a sense of honor on this Father’s Day.

Have an Honorable Father’s Day

The Ultimate Buzzkill

Every guy has their "holy shit" girl. The one so twisted, so deviant, so possessing of a mind that conjures sexual scenarios rivaling the ones that live in our own fevered minds, we drop to our knees and exclaim, “Dear God, by all that is holy, please let me get a piece of this and I swear I’ll go to church every day and twice on weekends.”

For me it was… well, let’s call her Omontinya, because that’s her name. She was about five foot four, all hips, lips and tits, with a rear end that launched from the small of her back with such otherwordly curvature that rumor held she couldn’t slide her jeans on without applying for a city building permit.

Omontinya was a co-worker of mine at my first job out of grad school a couple years back, a gift of eye-candy from the heavens who reduced the menfolk to Spoon-Size Shredded Wheat and had the HR people scrambling to rewrite the company dress code. She also talked about sex the way guys talk about sex and by “the way guys talk about sex” I mean all the time. I’d listen to her describe a titanic blow job she’d given her boyfriend the night before while the circuits that direct blood flow within my body essentially lifted the tollgates and said, “Omu, you can take the day off.” After work, crammed into a dark corner at Bannilux and dizzy with beer and cigarette smoke, my eyes would glaze as she grabbed her spectacular breasts to punctuate a story or tried to stick her tongue in the ears of Isioma from Accounting.

Needless to say, little or no work got done on my watch. Days I should have been focused on the Airtel  file were spent tracing the outline of Omontinya’s mouth, imagining her fingernails tearing up my back, and dreaming of her ample derriere slowly being lowered onto my face. I was obsessed; not in a creepy “I saw you in my ewa-agonyi this morning” way, but an awe-inspired “surely that girl could tear me apart” way.

Then, one evening, during an after-work drinkfest, the stars aligned and the moon embraced Capricorn and every other guy she knew apparently left the east coast because I became the target of Michele’s affections. Or her drunken groping. Or whatever you want to call it, I was it. And I wasn’t complaining. It began with a few grabs of my thigh under the table, then a talking-so-close-to-my-ear-I-swear-she’s-trying-to-lick-it thing, then a full-on pinned-to-the-walls-by-her-breasts assault when I returned from the men’s room.

She kissed my mouth in a way that you could have worked over my nuts with a rolling pin and I wouldn’t have felt a thing, then invited me to her apartment to watch "wedding party,” which I assumed to be code for “screw ourselves retarded.”

Back at her place, things started working just as I’d always fantasized they might, although without the singing moose and sideline cheerleaders. Her shirt came off, her jeans went flying, and she jumped at me with a fervor. After about fifteen minutes of floor rolling, as I finally retained control of my senses and began priming myself for the task ahead, she started licking my ear and talking up a filthy blue streak that essentially dipped my brain in the fry-o-later.

At least until she rolled on top of me and whispered, “What if I had a cock?”

I could almost hear my hard-on collapsing. “Huh?”

“What if I had a cock?” she repeated. “What would you do?”

“Er… besides recoil in terror and run screaming from your apartment?”

Apparently that wasn’t the answer she wanted. She rolled off me, and looked forlorn for a few minutes  before getting up and taking a cigarette from her purse. A few seconds later, the TV was on, and we were watching wedding party. And that, as they say, was that.

For the record, she didn’t have a cock… and I sometimes wonder what that whole business was all about. But in the vast pantheon of strange-ass shit said to me in the heat of passion, this stands tallest. And still the single greatest buzzkill of my life.