Still Proud to be Kenyan.

I have been under mental fatigue for the better part of the last three weeks. It is of course no surprise that I have posted only twice in that duration, a far cry from the frequency with which I posted prior to receiving the shipment of my CFA books. I was warned that CFA will suck me dry and leave a zombie out of me. I guess a Zombie in the blogosphere would be that person, like me, whose words can no longer connect to make sense.

I have taken a short reprieve from – Financial Reporting and Analysis – to write this post, and any other that I will manage to type for as long as this writing juju lasts.

I have not been able to keep one line of thought for long enough to enable me to follow it up with another. After going through Volumes 1 and 2 of 6 of the CFA curriculum, all I can see and understand are financial formulas, equations, theories and definitions. I am so disoriented that I hesitated to get mad at our idiot VP for a remark he made after he helped fan the flames that burned this country last year. (Note to self: dedicate a whole, highly vindictive post to this Idiot immediately after my exams.)

But now that I can type one line after the other without the strain that has held me captive for a while now, I thought I should write about writing or whatever it is that will capture my imagination while I write…

After not being able to sustain a line of thought that is not finance related, I started wondering at what mental states people feel free to write. What is it that makes one feel like this is the time to go to that laptop, comp, or notebook and put that thing in their heads or hearts into words? Is it anger, fear, love, hate, inspiration, or simply a eureka moment? This ties in with the reasons why people write, and especially bloggers since there is no money in it. It may be  just for release. I will let you now if the studies get easier now that I have released this to the blogosphere.

I have not been able to write until some moments ago, my inspiration – dishes. I was washing dishes when my mind started wandering to all those places that I do not want it go but it does all the same – like that time I approached this chic and she turned me down flat – heartache. It also wandered back to that point in time when I was suspended indefinitely from high school and I especially I tried to remember how I crawled back from that hell hole that has doomed so many. But it finally led me to what I am writing today, now… writing.

This Monday, I traveled to my former University to handle some urgent matters. On the way, this lady who was seated in front of me really pissed me off. In the last few months in this part of the Sahara, there have been four suns each rising from East, West, North, and South and which meet up in the middle at noon. It was noon and the Matatu we were in was burning up. And being the typical Kenyan car, some of the windows could not open save for a few that included mine. But this lady in front of me was not feeling the heat. She at one time turned and closed “my” window while eyeballing me. I was pissed. I should have lit a fire on her ass, I did not. I only said, “Lady! Madam! It is burning up in here.” And I then proceeded to open the window.

As we traveled, I realized why I was not angrier. I was on that stretch of the road. I and this stretch of the road have a history.

My entry into campus was a baptism of fire. So many things had gone wrong and miraculously, the very few that had gone right are the ones that took me to the University doors in the first place, and even then, it was not a smooth sailing. But as I went through these many, many issues, I remember traveling to and from campus several times, and in each of these times, solutions came to me on this stretch of the road. Afterward, through my four years in campus, I figured out how to handle my girlfriend’s (usually sleeping on my shoulder on the couple’s seat) issues on this stretch. I thought up novel ways to get more funds to buy shares during the many IPO’s of the day on this stretch. I solved one problem after another as they came up on that stretch of road. It reached a time that I would travel to town and back just to be able to think with clarity, and that mostly happened on this stretch of road.

And now that I had come back to this stretch, I was in no mood to fight with this lady. I just opened the window she had closed and my mind went back in time (not waaaaaaaaaaay back) just back to the past two weeks that I have not blogged. I went over what I would have written about if CFA had not bought out all the tenants in my mind complex. There was hitting out hard at our VP which I will still do, there was the Kenyan delegation that went to Geneva to draw lessons from the happenings in the country over the past year after we slightly missed the flight to the great Abyss in January and February last year. There was the Land thing and more recently, the issue of being ruled by the living dead – undergrads in the Ancestral College, the only one in the world right here in Kenya.

I did my thing in campus, got mixed results, and then traveled back to catch up on the readings that I should have had that day. But as I traveled back, that stretch decided to take me to a far away journey, further than the distance I had traveled that day; to inflection. I know that I am really good what I do, and I know that I will get better at whatever it is that I have not yet mastered. And my thirst for more knowledge and expertise is usually the difference that makes the difference. But even then, I know that merit rarely pays in this country, and on that note, I feel I should adjust forward my plans to leave the country for greener pastures. With merit, I will walk a mile out there but only an inch in this country. That stretch that has helped me make the hard decisions came to an end having set forth a chain of thoughts that will probably see me leave the country earlier than I planned to.

I got home and made the mistake of embarking on CFA without first writing on the occurrences of the day. Late into the night, actually at 2 am, after I could no longer make sense of what I was reading, I decided to write before sleeping. I slept before I could write. Today, while washing the dishes, all that I would have written on Monday came back to me and hence this post. I have come to see that I am usually very creatively productive, when I am washing dishes, when traveling to my former campus, or late in the night when all is quiet save for the chirping crickets, howling dogs, horny cats, and CNN. Smoking was once on this list but I have since quit. I have been told that Yoga helps but have not yet started. I am however looking for new ways to keep my mind running on several fronts, especially now that CFA has monopolized my brain power.

Let me know what stirs your creative side, that thing that drives you to write?

But whatever the case, I will tell you one thing; studying CFA is a creativity killer.