Vulturizing

I met up with a girlfriend of mine this past weekend, someone I had not seen in a while. Inasmuch as we had not seen each other for long, it felt like we were continuing seamlessly in conversation that had taken place the previous weekend, as though we had not been quiet on each other that long. We cracked up, teared while at it, and had some somber discussions before cracking up yet again. If we were imbibers, we’d have attracted much more attention than we already had. Two or three different couples/pairs occupied the tables around us, had their meals, and left, while all the while, we were in our own world. Laughter at self-deprecating jokes has never been done as hard, or felt so therapeutic, as though reminding us that our situation is not uncommon, or too serious.

You might wonder which “situation” we’re in.

You see, we’re fast approaching this “definitive roundabout” in our lives, and we are not in control of the speed at which we approach it, and this has nothing to do with our skills at the wheel. Life happens, and we are happening along with it. A fearful number is coming at us (no, we’re not approaching it, not in our right senses we wouldn’t!) and we can’t duck, or push the months back into another new type of calendar that accommodates 16 months instead of 12, just for our sake. If you’re as smart as I think you are, you’ll have figured by now that I’m talking about age. We are approaching our 30th birthdays within a month of each other, and taking stock of our lives, we cracked up at how behind schedule we feel we are in some things, like marriage, for instance, or in all things related to dating, at the very least.

We found it funny that the men we met who seemed to be good for a chance were literal clowns; it’s as though they are all being schooled for The Grand Circus, only that their acts seem misplaced, being staged in the dating arena, and not in the London Circus. Yeah, that’s how far removed from this continent these men should be! And who’s schooling all of them!? It’s not a coincidence that they are all behaving in the same way, unless, of course, it’s an innate characteristic of guys, which I doubt it is. For those men who we’d come across who did not fit the definition of clowns, we realized they were still in their mothers’ cradles.

We laughed about the next best move to “ponyoka na msee”: become a vulture. That’s right. And we even coined a word for it: vulturizing. Let me school you just a lil’ bit.

Vultures are scavengers, feeding off dead carcasses. They have the patience to hover around their intended prey until it dies; they while time away, just gazing, staring, actually gawking, at their prey, wondering when it will die, giving it “another minute” before they go in for the kill. They never panic. The prey will die, and they will have their dinner at the end of it all. When air borne, vultures can soar for hours on end, gracefully and effortlessly. Don’t mistake their hovering for a sign of a dead animal below their circuit; they love pockets of warm air as, in such pockets, they can hold their wings motionless and be carried around by the warm air in large sweeping circles. Playful huh? Yeah. On a normal day, vultures seldom go for healthy animals, only for the wounded or the sick. Wounded. Keep that word in mind. To rid themselves of the decaying flesh and bacteria on their feet, the birds urinate on them, and the acid in their urine acts as a disinfectant.

We found it funny that we could be like these creatures and ponyoka na msee! Why had we not thought of this before!? It certainly could be a solution to singleness! How, you wonder, would this sort out our single status? Read on.

There are women out there with good men (and I’m not talking about the married ones) and they take their men for granted. Forget the men who take their women for granted; we’re straight, so we’re not eyeing their women. The women who under-appreciate their men are our focus, the ones we laughed about vulturizing. This woman, the victim of our vulterizing, has a good man, one who loves her and is as straight as a man can be given the moral atrophy in today’s world. Yet, she does not respect him and cannot cook a meal for him as there’s Njeri the Domestic Executive to cater to these (and, eventually, other) things that should be her reserve. She’s a woman who simply does not go out of her way to be her man’s quintessential woman.

We thought of such women and could only describe them as pathetic. Whatever happened to a woman being her man’s Dream Girl, to catering to his needs, respecting him, being submissive, being to him what she wants him to be to her? Granted, he has his foibles that do not make him “deserving” of such kingly treatment, but it’s the basic call from God to a woman where her man is concerned; read Proverbs and when you get to chapter 31, you’ll discover that the woman given slight mention in the rest of the chapters is given ample praise in one full one; it’s no coincidence that Proverbs chapter 31 has 31 verses lauding this prototypical woman.

We laughed about being vultures in the lives of such men, who we considered trapped in cages they did not build and laughed at how we, in our inherent nurturing ways, can “rescue” these men from the arms of the anti-Proverbs 31 women. Obviously, the men are wounded, and we’d sit there and wait until they’d had enough of being wounded, and no sooner were they out of these putrid relationships, we would look at our Rolex’s, note that our time had come, and we would go for the kill, only this time not to devour, but to cater to the wounds inflicted by Drama Mama and eventually make the prey our own. So we’d be similar in most respects to the vulture in our patience and intelligence, and in our ability to rid these men of the putrefaction of their women’s words and ways, and this we would do by being a sweet balm, in word and in deeds. I’m sure you now get the concept of vulturizing.

We had another bout of somberness and it became obvious that our fear of God would not allow us to go this route just so that we’d be married by year end, regardless of how many around us had resorted to being vultures who did not wait for a man to bail from the decaying relationship and instead gave no-strings-attached stretch exercises (ok, sex) to an already taken man. We laughed about the fact that God needed a Rolex to keep time as He’s obviously been a tad late a tad too long! We sobered up and talked about how things work out for good for them that love God, how He comes through at just the right time, and how we’ll one day be sitting in a more exclusive establishment than the one we were at, talking about our husbands and our children and kindergartens and cookery classes and all that jazz. So you can now relax; we won’t be vulturizing you or your kin any time!

Three hours later, we left our hang out joint at 9pm to head to our respective homes, and our last laugh was about going home to our own men in our own rides without having to walk to our respective Kencom’s. Actually it stopped being funny, this singleness, and given that we had laughed all we could, we only had strength for a good bye hug. Our next rendezvous is at a soccer match in one of the bourgeois establishments in town. We hear there are dudes up for grabs. Is that true??!