Hi, my name is Gloria and this is For Butterflies, so the new thing this week is Adekunle Gold’s new album – Gold. Ridiculous though the price may seem, the songs are not half bad, as a matter of fact I thought he was brilliant, there’s currently no one with his style of music, a mix of the old high life with today’s afro-beat just speaks to me the way only few Nigerian artiste have. My special favourite is Nurse Alabere, if you’re gonna listen to this song, do it with a good earpiece, the beat just floats you on an imaginary cloud, I could put it on repeat and plug my ears to the world and just go to that corner of my frontal lobe that’s assigned for dreaming, it gave me the same vibe Hello by Adele did, I’m not exaggerating. Second to that would be Temptation because of the hilarity of the story, my third would be Paradise.
Oh and lest I forget my baby brother has a crush, I asked him if she was beautiful, you know what he said? ‘Very, her beauty even scares me’, he hasn’t talked to her for more than 20 seconds before, he always makes something up and leave (his words), ahh young love….
So, a colleague and I went to clerk a patient the other day (‘cause that’s what medical students do, not really a glam job, is it), we did our jobs and on our way back, the following conversation ensued;
Colleague: I should ask that girl (the ward nurse) out, she’s really pretty
Gloria: yeah she is but she’s talkative (keep in view that yours truly is guilty of the same sin, such a Pharisee)
Colleague: hater, you’re just jealous
Gloria: lol, but she’s talkative
Colleague: just tell me you want me to kiss you
Gloria: if you kiss me, you’ll fall in love
Colleague: Na so, you know you’d be perfect except for your tendency to raise your voice when you’re arguing and you know you argue a lot
Gloria: lol, yeah yeah, it’s the Ekiti in me
And so the conversation continued…
There’s a characteristic saying that we all possess flaws (well except Queen Bey of course, she wakes up flawless) but it’s a classic case of George Orwell’s Animal farm, all animals are equal but some are more equal than the others, we all have flaws but some flaws are just more obvious than others if we’re being honest. I for one possess a nasty temper and a penchant for arguing, for some it’s a problem with giving, for others it’s finding a fault with everything and everyone. Some people do not have a mouth filter, they possess no form of impulse control, some think too highly of themselves while others possess what is called a gutter mouth… we all have one (or more) less than good behaviour, I won’t argue that, but some just outshine others, those are the ones I term flaws that floor.
It’s like walking into a room full of people in your birthday suit and to worsen it, you’ve got sores on your body, it chases people away from you, the sad thing is that some of us don’t even consider it bad because people are of this asinine philosophy that we are who we are and we can’t change, but is there any truth to that? Are we unable or just unwilling to change? Are we more comfortable to live with a bad habit than come right out to acknowledge it is one? The truth is it comes down to the battle between principle and laziness, if we as intellectual individuals can’t even look inside ourselves to understand that we shouldn’t accept some things from ourselves how do we expect the world around us to change? I can live with my foul temper and build a self righteous anger about people not accepting me for the tantrum throwing person that I am, you stay expecting people to take the double edged sword in your tongue in stride and hide under the umbrella of ‘I say it like it is’, she sits there with an unforgiving spirit and we all clamour for a change in the world.
The truth is we are a reflection of our world, what we do in our little portion of the universe has an accumulation, you may think your selfishness, pettiness, pride or vanity does not contribute to the GDP but it does affect the people around you and in the end accumulates into what we know as the world in general. Let’s take Nigeria as an example, I wouldn’t feel comfortable looting money meant for a bunch of projects if I didn’t have a past history of avarice, believe it or not, with all the complexities in governing and politics, it is simply boils down to who we are and what we practice.
So what’s it gonna be guys, do we unwittingly give power to behaviours to rule us in the name of self love and accepting people for who they are or do we want to stand and take responsibility for our actions and see them for what they are? I sure hope we will!
Gloria
