I remember them almost like they happened yesterday.

I was at school. My aunt hadn’t been getting any work for some months and when she did, it was from clients who kept owing. When a parent from our Port Harcourt group came to visit, I wrote a letter to everyone at home. It was fairly long, and most of what it said has been forgotten, but I still remember the message I sent to Aunty A:

You’re going to get a lot of work. You will work all the time. The offers will only stop when you get tired of the work.

Miraculously, the job offers started to pour in. People came from all places to get work done. She had a pile at home, and another in the office. She worked and worked, and the money couldn’t even be spent because she had no time to do so — until, as I said, she got tired of the excessive work. I don’t know what prompted me to make that statement and I don’t know why it worked but from then on my aunt looked at me with new eyes.

She’s unmarried and unhappy about it. A while ago, she approached me.

“Do you remember the time you said I was going to get plenty of work?” she asked.

“Yes. I was told you worked from morning till night everyday,” I said.

“Can you…” she hesitated. “Can you do the same thing again? Can you make me have a husband by the end of this year?”

I turned to her. I was tempted to say nonchalantly, “I’ll see what I can do about it” but inside, I knew I had no powers. I merely stared at her without saying a word until she walked away. She never asked again…

We were preparing for the inter-house games at Fedacad. Every night the seniors gathered us on the Kantoma courtyard to teach us the ‘malewa’ songs we would chant on the field to the beat of tins to cheer our players on. Those who could play soccer, basketball, badminton or table tennis practiced every evening. Competition was in the air.

I didn’t want to sit there with my rusty Milo tin joining the others in creating a cacophony of sounds. I snuck off with some friends to class — and got caught. While trudging back resignedly to the soccer field, someone asked,”Who do you think will win the match?”

“Purple House,” someone in Red House said.

“Gree-Yell,” someone else in Green House said.

I don’t play soccer — don’t even like to watch it or hear others talk about it — but I piped up suddenly, “None of them is winning the match. It’s going to be a draw.”

The others scoffed. “See Azuka talking. What do you know about soccer?”

“I know what I’m saying,” I insisted. “It’s going to be a draw — 2-2.”

I forgot about everything I’d said and managed to sneak off before the match even started. I was so out of touch with sports that I didn’t find out the outcome until a few days later when Blue House played against Green. I–, one of the guys who asked me the score the last time came looking for Azuka the ‘predictionist’ — if I remember his words correctly.

“What’s the score going to be this time?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said honestly.

“Just make a guess,” he insisted.

“Well, since you want to know,” I said. “Since you want to know, it’ll be 3-1 in favor of Green house.”

As luck would have it, that’s exactly what happened. I’ve been wary about making predictions since then.

Got any interesting stories to share?

When a person doesn’t talk much, it is almost a given that he develops two other skills to compensate — the art of listening, and the art of observation.

I used to be an artist. I would sit and stare at people, hoping to capture them in ways others never saw them with a pen and paper. There were the downward-sloping, submissive and almost resigned shoulders of the women, the (mostly false) tough look the men put on, and most importantly the wobble everyone’s rear moved with, impossible to capture on paper. The last was what fascinated me most and I would stare surreptitiously, understanding, even then that it wasn’t exactly unembarrassing to be caught looking.

Even then, the beginnings of a lifetime of fascination with, and dislike of bottoms were forming.

I’ve grown up in mostly male company and the importance men attached to that part of a woman’s anatomy baffled me. It would be interesting to get inside my head and examine the way my mind works. I see my fellow human beings as the sum of their parts — I’ve been known to stare at someone talking, observing the hinge-like motion as the lips parted and closed, or to observe the motion of two irides for close to an hour, oblivious to the presence, or even the existence, of the owner.

I believe I began to really hate them when I realized the role they served in the attraction of males, and the ways they were shown off — most tops stopped at the waist to maximize the surface area exhibited, tight clothing, and then, there was the exaggerated tail-wagging.

I’ve made mention of my preference for below-average bottoms almost ad nauseam and I would say it has less to do with liking bottoms than it has to do with not liking the implicit portrayal as a worthy feature, an asset, something to titillate. I’ve read with some amusement about members of the opposite sex who dress to show off busts and behinds to potentials, then get highly annoyed when the defining factor of the attraction is just that. I’ve been both shocked and amused at the disappointed yearnings of the ‘deficient’ whose only wish is to get a bigger seat.

I guess it might just be me, but where others see a bum, I see two deposits of adipose tissue. Enough said.

(Ranting in what I like to call my ‘Roundabout English’).
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Afropinay’s showing a new side. Pretty interesting post on love, I daresay.