toonday's perspectives

Living is a quadratic equation with a pre-determined answer (death) yet we keep trying to solve the equation. Year 2017 gave a fair share of answers to many lives. From international, national, to local personalities, lives were lost. To us, at first it appeared a distant reality until someone close to us succumbed to that harsh reality. To the young, it's a distant rumor. To the old, constant topic heavily brooded. If living is an act of dying, how can we then be gracious in dying? I came across this term: death cleaning and alas it's the much needed answer. How we can shroud in our living (dying) the preparatory kindness that can live after us and make neighbors happy?  Every breathing being will one day taste death.  No amount of science, or achievement, or bitterness or super-humanness can change that. If so, won't we live in all preparation for the constant exit? Death cleaning is a Swedish term that describes a conscious and deliberate preparation for death...

Travelling, to me, has been a kind of muse I can hardly explain. My degree of retarded-ness still gives a room for an ample curiosity. My mind will imaginingly crawl into co-commuters' minds, trying to discern the thoughts that crease into every minuscule smile, accidental frown, angry jolt and retort, battle-ready poise inside commercial buses. They are extension of Nigerian stories. This only happens inside public transport because in my personal automobile, I am always busy trying to survive the hazard of highways. Since, I find myself in a job that demands most handsome hours of the day. My curiosity seems to be dying a good death but alas it often re-incarnates when I sit hours in a commercial bus travelling to a compulsory destination. One boring weekend, I happened to witness a memorable but not unusual altercation inside the bus. On boarding the bus, I subconsciously declined to take the seat at the back as my Aunt has insistently warned against seating at the far-ba...

Those seemingly insignificant pleasures--cheap but relish-able home-made food, licit amorous cuddling--keep our sanity in check in this maddening enclave where fighting for ones fundamental rights is jostled and declared anti- government: where every governmental ministry acts hypocritical to its publicly encoded functions. Thus, we are spoon-fed: “Police is your friend" bold, capitalized, and placarded in all offices. Yet, how friendly have our friends been? How friendly will they get before we grasp our rights back? Maybe soon, as those little pleasures we abandoned ourselves in, are even further stifled.  When we realize that 'heaven' and 'hell' actually reside on earth first, and that we were all born bloodied without choosing a particular family. By chance of birth, some are poor but our penury is not a denial of rights. Would you be disinterested in the kind of future your children would have when you realize the total stipend you earn cannot even ...

Pleasures can be very expensive but a discerning mind knows how and where to cut his suit according to his affordable and available cloth. A delicious egusi can be "condimented" within and beyond our means: depending on how many of the scarce national cake you have accrued. A mind that knows that real wealth is in your wants not exceeding your means would be wary of condiments that are unreasonable.'  A meal has a way of deepening our hope: for a vested stomach won't mind the empty pocket but projects its relishing palate to a visualized better morrow and hopeful pocket. Delicious egusi can fester our religiosity because we hope. Therefore we humble ourselves as prototypical Omoluabi the ethical person. Yet we decry our pettiness as against our leaders’ largess. Haven't you realized? Humility is a religious strong-preach but an economic fall point. Economics as a study starts from obvious scarcity and pretentious values not designed for humbled ...

The other girl heard a yell. A screech. No angel to any rescue. She watched how several years of prayers and cares fizzled to naught. Her mates were all frisked away. Then she understood principalities. All mores, all norms lost their polemic morality. She knew the "power of power" where there were no angels to shield the innocence.  The other dapchi girl in nation where children lost their innocent smiles to abduction, war, bomb and neglect, where being an orphan is rite of passage, and children terrorized into an adulthood. The other dapchi girl has a final curtain drawn on happiness, as fear of insecurity she has witnessed. She won't understand a concept of government nor the pledge in any anthem but the idea of power principalities. She saw fathers' cowering and mothers' screeching and soldiering not effectual and the vices winning. The other dapchi Girl might have seen another "morality of principalities." -Toonday

Traffic, like we are conversant with, is the amount of people who pass through a certain place at a certain moment in a certain way. The likes of facebook posts, the views on YouTube uploads  and blog posts, the retweets and favourites on tweets, the clicks on your links and the comments on all these are regarded as social  traffics. The viability of these platforms depends on the traffics pulled. Thus, getting any amount of traffic becomes an obsession and a compulsive disorder to social media users. Since grief arrests human attention than any other emotion it has frequently been exploited and commercialized to serve the wants of traffic.  The stages of grief are said to be five (Elizabeth Kubler Ross and David Kessler). The stage of denial when the bearer denies the reality and wishes away the calamitous happening: the stage of 'no' it can never happen. The stage of anger induced by the dawning of the harsh reality: where bearers questioned even their gods. Ba...

Today, virginity may not be morality. There are so many untoward ways of sexual knowledge without the carnal. Whereas we consider a lady's moral aptitude through her virginity, a guy is considered a free agent in that regards. The double standard is an issue, as parents at times find it convenient to question and facilitate sexual activeness of the male but shy away from sexual discussion with females. On a lighter note, could it be because a male did more of the coital work in those days in contrast to our sexual modernism? Morality should be impressed on every gender regardless of the 'propensity to be promiscuous'.  The erroneous belief is that females are more susceptible to promiscuity thus we maim their pleasure organs, derail their freedom, and chastise them. The male should be subject to equal morality check while stigmatization of female and that unhealthy circumcision should stopped.  Sanitary pads should be as cheap as condoms. ...