Just curious!

Ever wondered what happened to the cat? The one that got slain by it’s own curiosity? I wonder what sort of cat it became after shaking off the dust of death from it’s back and returned to the land of the living for the 2^nd, 3^rd, 4^th or … 9^th time. I wonder what it started doing when curious (old habits die hard). If it turns on the tv, grab it’s bag and go out window/shoe shopping, get stonned or spend all night partying. Or if it refuse to cave in, got curious and died another death.

Don’t you think, perhaps, that a cat who isn’t curious would resemble this generation? A generation so unmotivated, so bored that it would go to great length for a bit of excitement? To perverse or self destructive lengths, most of the time?!

That’s what i feel whenever I see my little brother (14) going in and out of the house, “as if there is a pin on his behind”, whenever a film he’s seen before or a talk-show he doesn’t like comes on tv. A curiously uncurious generation scared to be left alone with it’s thought!

I’m not saying, although decades older, I am any better. I have none of the wide eyed interest and the feverish excitement of my teens when hearing about something I’m not familiar with. No more reading everything that fall in my lap. Or trying to hook up with a follower of every strange religion I heard about. No Bob Marley, no UB40, No Don Williams! But I get curious from time to time. Like yesterday evening, for example. I got curious about boxing. If it’s a sport, or a bad day? Why the word “the ancient Greeks started it” seems to encourage things that should be condemned. And if curiosity killed the cat, lack of curiosity won’t kill us all dead?

It’s all in the “kuul” babe

My uncle, not my deserving uncle, the other one; used to be a chess-game addict in high school (it’s a wonder where he got the time to play, what with everything he was into: vollyeball, women, etc). And he used to tell us how, when walking on the street, he’s always trying to figure out which person he should “move” to “win” which person; assingning a piece to each according to their manner of appearance (I imagine ;-)).

 

To my mathematics teacher of 7^th grade, a car constitutes of only one part: a plate number [that is] he can add & subtract from on the way to & from school. To my ex-painter “nutcase” colleague in the communication department, life is all about paintings! All the projects she ever came up with, all the children competitions she prepares, all the brochures she makes & pictures she takes are painting-related. It’s as if she feels all it takes to solve Ethiopia’s children’s problem is, you know, painting it out. Sort of like that princess, what was her name? The one that asked why the French farmer won’t eat “cake” if he is so hungry? The bible has a word for this tendency of mortals: “wherever your treasure is, there your heart would be”.

 

My treasure, as my many lame attempts on a number of blogs prove, has always been with writing. Even when I couldn’t come up with a decent line, i lie on my back and feverishly dream of the day in which I would give interviews about the kind of childhood I had that resulted in… such.. a work of art [Starting with those I’m “grateful to”, ofcourse :-)].

Now, after taking my inspiration from Arefe (of http://arefe.wordpress.com/) who goes ahead and posts what he read on the internet if not inspired to write his own, and led by a request from a friend to post articles about Addis if I wanted his following; I’ve started looking out into the world through the “writer’s” eye. Always trying to figure out what sort of posts I can come up with from a given situation (like that incident on 1^st floor earlier, for example, one that had to do with a boy & a pail of water .. No kidding!! .. that inspired a five line story entitled: “Yederejaw lay Tebel” – The Holywater from the stairs) and the sorts of words that could best describe it.

 

Oh well, I guess there was something to that Ethiopian proverb about eyes after all: how your vision (peception/whathaveu) is only as good as the eye-liner you put in it!!

The power of “paper and ink”

Sunday morning: at my home listening to Tracey Chapman’s “Money’s only paper, only ink” (a valentine day’s gift from my husband which arrived 4 days previously).

 Now, I’ve always been a Tracey Chapman fan. Mostly because I’ve a feeling she looks a little like me, or I her, to everybody’s indignant cry! (God knows why. Hey.. that rhymes :-)) and because she strikes me as an individual, the kind of person I fancy myself to be. I have always loved her songs, and on our first night in Awassa I’ve even tried singing one of my favorites (‘Last night I heard’) to my husband-to-be from the toilet. (Been always a shy girl, especially when it comes to making the vocals work. Something somebody advised me at an early age should be limited to the privacy of the shower room).

But none of her others songs (even “Fast Car”) has hit me to the core more than this song did. You see, lack of this particular brand of ‘paper and ink’ was what kept me from going to my parent’s home, to eating what the heart desires while watching “The Morning After the Night Before: A Barbara Walters Oscars Special”, and more importantly to keeping my littler brother company who looked so heart-broken that he told her not to come back when his older (13 years my junior) sister left to have a study-night with her friends at the university. (He didn’t mean it!)

It’s not that I don’t have any money in the world. However, being one of those handful Ethiopians who use money to give them the ‘power of buying’ instead of the power to keeping it at home and looking at it as if it’s a long lost cousin, the green I thought would pull me through the weekend and bring me back to the office on Monday has run out. So here I am, broke and bored, yawning every other minute at an ETV special ‘Live from Tigray’.

Now, I don’t know how that would strike God, ‘who created the sun, and owns the sea’ as Tracey said; the fact that having no money to well functioning adults means being as good as paralyzed. But it makes me reminisce bitterly over the evils of the “paper and ink” genie. Bothered by the one and important question: how could humanity let this happen?!.

That contrary to it’s created purpose, how money has become a slave who enslaved its master, the only power the free man in the free world bows for, a genie able to order the lamp owner about instead of running around eager to do his bidding!

If the creation of money wasn’t a sin all humanity is responsible for, the man responsible for coming up with it would have been turning in his grave for all eternity. Knowing full well that the demon he unleashed on the children of Adam and eve is responsible for most of the world’s ill, innocent animals and nature included. What’s more, there doesn’t seem to be an end to its tyranny and, perhaps, “we ain’t seen nothing yet”.