THE DISTRESS OF A (STREAM II) PROSPECTIVE CORPS MEMBER

You sit on the couch in the living room, staring blankly at the TV. You are not interested in what is being showed on the TV, after all it is Africa Magic Yoruba and their IQ-draining stories. You are lost in deep thoughts. “When will NYSC answer us na?”, you say to no one in particular.

You are absolutely tired of staying home. You are tired of the errands and the frequently asked, embarrassing questions like: “Did you see a black goat run through the backyard?”; “Please, go draw some water into these baskets!”; “Would you like to run an errand to heaven for me?”. People in your neighborhood are beginning to wonder if you ever graduated from school – even you also think the same sometimes. You no longer find your mother’s meal as delicious as it used to be, even though she holds a PhD in Culinary from the University of African Kitchens.

You remember how you went bonkers after writing your final paper. You almost tore your clothes into shreds in celebration. The exhilarations blinded you of what lies ahead of you. After a couple of days, you came back to your senses. You saw that it was time you took charge of your life. You neatly drew your plans on paper, even though you weren’t a good student of engineering drawing while in school. But for NYSC, you slowed down.

When you saw the notification that you weren’t in stream I, you felt deprived like a party guest who came fasting, only to discover that all the Jollof rice had finished before getting to his row.

You are still in deep thoughts. Then the 6-year old son of your neighbour walks in. “Uncle, when will you become a corper?”, he asks. This is the last straw. You try hard to fight back the tears with your teeth sinking into your lower lip…

It is the swearing-in ceremony. There are thousands of other corps members on the parade ground. The brigade are doing their thing. The Drums reverberate and the trumpets blare all into the atmosphere. You march with liveliness leaving a cloud of dust behind. In your slim-fitted khaki, you feel like you just got inducted into the US Marine.

You feel a rough and sharp slap on your lap. You open your eyes to see who it is. Your eyes met with your mother’s. You are still on the couch. “Oya, goan make eba for us”, she orders.

2015 IN RETROSPECT

And it came to pass the days of year twenty hundred and fifteen, that there came lots of bizarre happenings. Each year comes with its events, 2015 was not left out. Let’s take a quick look at some bizarre events that tookplace this year.

1) The Dress debate. It all started when a social media user put up a photograph of a dress and asked people what the real colour was. This sparked a hot debate amongst internet users. Some saw blue and black, others saw white ad gold. Well, what I saw was green and yellow.

2) Mayweather and Pacquiao’s fight. On this fight, the cheapest ticket was sold for $2,959. (I will take that again. $2,959 for the cheapest ticket!) Yet, people got disappointed in what supposed to be greatest boxing match of all time. Why spend so much to watch a boxing match when you can easily watch a fight between motor park touts for free? Maybe, that’s why they call it a free-for-all.

3) Bruce -> Caitlyn’s gender change. Bruce Jenner, a retired olympic gold medalist, claiming to have “the body of a man and the soul of a woman” switched from being to a trans woman. My candid question to him/her is: how often does (s)he see his/her period?

4) Cecil the Lion. Cecil was a Zimbawean lion that got killed by a white dentist. The world wept over the slain lion. Charity funds were raised for it. Meanwhile, blacks are been killed indiscriminately, yet nobody was talking about this. The wise man saw this coming when he said “a live dog is better than a dead lion”- Ecc. 9:4

5) Adele’s Hello. The world went agog when Adele dropped her single track titled “Hello” which shook the music industry from its roots. Covers came rolling over covers, social media hypes, and all that. You people SHU CAM DAN NA. It’s just but a song. Even If I saw her 1000 missed called on my phone, I would not flinch. But for mum’s 1 missed call…

The list goes on and on, of which time and space will not permit me to elucidate.

Over the year, I learnt to remain calm like Jega, not to cause troubles like Orubebe, and not to snitch on people like Dasuki. I would like to use this medium to notify the general public to disregard the rumours flying around that I was also among those given some amount of money by a top notch politician. These rumours are false and should be regarded as such. Thank you very much. Signed. Management.

To those I might have disappointed in the course of the year, I say I’m remorsefully contrite. I promise to make it up to you come 2016.

Feliz año nuevo, everyone.

THE UNANSWERED QUESTIONS

WARNING!!!
The piece you are about to read is nothing but just a mere work of sarcasm. All rights reserved.

Lately, people started trekking long distances to congratulate one politician or the other over their victories in the just concluded elections. However, I was not left out too. I trekked through the intellectual path to the minds of great men/women to seek answers to some disturbing questions.

My head has been spinning with several questions I had battled with in my childhood days. These are some of the trivial questions:

“Why are all the members of Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) in our church older than my Grandfather?”

“Why does Superman wear his pants outside?”

“Who/What pushed the ten green bottles off the wall in the nursery rhymes?”

“Why would a person work so hard to be popular and after the fame comes, he starts wearing sunglasses in order not to be noticed?”

I was so ‘Orubebetized’, but I ‘Jegaly’ took the bold to ask these great people with great minds these trivial questions. Find our conversation below:

William Shakespear: O ye, Lad. Thy grace flourisheth like the green meadow. Wherefore bothereth thou thy mind?
Me: I thank thee, sire. I shalt rest my youthful mind

Pete Edochie: The goat that ladens itself with worries may not live long to eat yam peels
Me: May you live long, Papa

Hon Patrick Obiaghon: My ignotum per ignotius to your investigative scrutiny may put you in a state of non compos mentis. So I obsecrate you to…
Me: Your responsum is just too supercalifragilistic expialidocious

Sir Isaac Newton: A question will remain in a state of rest or motion unless an external answer is applied.
Me: So what you are trying to say here, sir, is that, for every question there is an equal opposite answer?

Professor of Chemistry: Your questions undergo substitution reaction with their answers. This is where the first order kinetics comes in. Given that,
A+B —> C+D
Me: Forget about the questions, sir. Just give me a glass of H2O

Bill Gate:
CLS
REM Program to answer trivial questions
INPUT ‘Question’; Q
INPUT ‘Answer’; A
PRINT ‘Your question is’;Q
FOR Q=1 TO ∞
FOR A=1 TO ∞
IF Q=A THEN
PRINT ‘Your answer is’; A
END IF
NEXT Q
NEXT A
END
Me: Please, try to take it soft with me like the Microsoft.

Mathematician: Your questions are tangential to each other on the same plane but at different angle as 0°<Ө<360°
Me: Show me the angle to the door that will lead me out of your office, please.

Mad man: Hahahaa… Huh! Buhahaha… You must give me my own share of the spoils! Hehehe… Ahaha…
Me: Haha… What spoils?

Native Priest: Your answers lie with the seven witches in the evil forest. You will have to cross seven rivers and fight seven giants before you get there.
Me: Baba! Can't you take jokes again?

Master Yao Wu (Shaolin temple at Shanghai): Huang xing chow jin lao ying kung dong ngo hai sieung wai tong lei pak ju wun.
Me: Xie xie. Huang ying.

Mom: Sha go and carry your food when you are done with your rants.
Me: *grins*

In conclusion, some questions on the Whys, Whats, and Hows of our society are better left unanswered. The more you know, the more you know you don't know. False knowledge is more dangerous than ignorance.

TO GOD BE THE GLORY

CAST
William Shakespear
Pete Edochie
Hon. Patrick Obiaghon
Sir Isaac Newton
Professor of Chemistry
Bill Gate
Mathematician
Mad man
Native Priest
Master Yao Wu
Mom
Me

WRITTEN BY:
Giwa Oluwatobi

The Chronicles of a Sarcastic Boy Production
c. 2015

http://www.sarcasticboi.wordpress.com

HOW TO WORK ON YOUR SELF-ESTEEM

Is your self-esteem below the sea level? Has your self-esteem dropped like the drop in oil price in dollars per barrel between 2014 and 2015? Or maybe your reputation has fallen like the Olympus. It is time to turn-off that noisy generating set and listen to these few rules.

1) DRESS SMARTLY. This incites confidence in you. You can’t afford to dress shabily and expect to get respect from people. Try this experiment, dress in a suit or a well starch native attire to the bank and playfully fumble a car key in your hand, (even if you can’t drive a car), as the transaction goes on. I bet, at the end of the transaction, the cashier would smile and say something like “Thank you sir/ma, for banking with us, we do hope to see you soon”. On the next day, dress in a sun-faded shirt, previously blue denim jean and a pair of tattered pam slippers to meet the same cashier, you’d hear, “Oga, don’t waste my time, where are your deposit slips?”

2) LOOK GOOD. Do away with those lumpy hair and unkempt beards. Get yourself some good haircuts, bro. Sister, enough of those seven weeks old weaves. Even if you can’t afford those foreign weaves, you can always get yourself some nice “shuku aladimole” braids at a local salon in the neighbourhood.

3) DON’T BE AT ALL PLACES AT ALL TIMES. Don’t attend every event or meeting too often. If you must go, don’t go too early, try and feign lateness. Take your time to explain how massive the traffic jam was and back it up with an apology. Don’t worry, you can apologise and get away with anything in this part of the world. Absenting yourself goes a long way because the eye that sees you too often tends to disrespect you.

4) TALK LESS, ACT MORE. Being called a talkative is a huge slap on your reputation. The world needs actors and not talkers.

5) ALWAYS LOOK SERIOUS. Always walk around with your brows raised. Smile often but not unnecessarily. Keeping of beards or moustache tends to make you look serious. Going through the world’s history people that were taken with seriousness either had beards or moustache. People like Adolf Hitler, Osama Bin Laden and Abraham Lincoln had neatly kept moustache or beards, and of course, they had serious-looking faces.

6) MIND YOUR BUSINESS. Try not to draw unnecessary attention to yourself. Always plug your earpiece in your ears, even if you are not listening to music.

There you go. You can thank me later. You are always welcome.

THE MILITARY SLAP

The saying, that goes that: “If a soldier slaps you, that is when you’d know that the police is indeed your friend”, is very valid. Infact, I need to buy whoever brought about that saying, a bottle of his favourite drink and a plate of pepper soup.

When I was very much younger, I happened to be a victim of a soldier’s slap. It was sometime around 1999, if my ‘memory card’ has not gone bad, then I was a pupil of a military primary school, Depot National Academy, Zaria, Kaduna State.

On this fateful day, my younger brother and I arrived late at school, although we used to be regular latecomers, the soldiers in charge of latecomers made fire in a big pit and asked us and other latecomers to pick refuse around the school and throw into the fire. As I dropped my handful of refuse, then came a troubled wind, at 55°N, blowing from East to West at a velocity of 70M/S, (don’t bother yourself with physics behind the wind), that blew off the refuse from the direction of the pit… GBOOOOOOOA!!! was what followed immediately, I guessed everybody around thought it was one of the explosives at the barracks, it was actually a resounding slap at the back of my neck from one of the soldiers which sent a electric impulse that led to the spontaneous opening and closing of the sodium-potassium pump of my nerve cells resulting to an unstable action potential (again, leave the physiology to me). The slap thrusted me forward, if not for the good ‘brake pads’ of my rubber sandals, I would have fallen into the pit of fire. Then I raised my head and I saw everything around had gone frozen including the soldier that slapped me, even the birds flying in the sky ceased to flap their wings. For the rest of that day, it was if the man kept hitting me repeatedly. I couldn’t get anything straight. As my teacher wrote on the chalkboard, all I could see was the Chinese mandarin symbols.

I know for sure that if he had used that magnitude of slap, he used on me, on a knocked internal combustion engine, it would send some power to the spark plug which would in turn cause the upward and downward strokes of the pistons and thereby, turning the crankshaft (in short, the engine would come back to life). I can not put words together enough to emphasize the Military slap.

P.S: Kudos to our military soldiers for their abilities to give galactic visions to bloody civilians through their slaps.

THE TALE OF A ZONED FRIEND

You tried to show her how you felt about her. As she laughed at your dope punchlines and wordpuns, you thought you were winning her heart. But then she said, “Uncle, I see you like a brother from another mother”. You nearly fainted from the shock but you managed to hold on to a nearby pole.

As you walked home, you felt like a cheif that was relieved of his cheiftancy title. You blamed yourself for wasting those rhymes and punchlines on her when you could go to the studio and do a song that could win you the grammys. Her response, “Uncle, I see you like a brother from another mother”, kept playing in your head.

You are 28 and she is 25. You wondered if you are old enough to be her uncle. Then it dawned on you that you have sent on exile to the land of the dreaded friendzone. You tried to find a name for this kind of zone. Friendzone? Familyzone? Just then a message alert came up on your phone. It read, “Dear customer, to migrate to the MTN Family and Friends…” you nearly smashed the device on the tarred road.

On approaching your street, a tiny voice greeted you, “Good evening, Uncle!”, you turned around to see who it was. You saw Yetunde, the dumbest kid you taught at a school in the neighbourhood. “Look here, little devil. Go and meet your uncle in your family house. I am not your uncle”, you barked at her.

On getting home, your eyes caught on some lettering written in red paint on the signboard of the church directly opposite to your house. It reads “Zonal headquarters”. You legs betrayed your body as you passed out.

You opened your eyes on the hospital bed with an almost exhausted pint of drip fix into your vein. You turned your head to the right, you saw a rose flower and a complimentary card on the cabinet near your bed. Turning to the left, you saw her. “Happy Valentine’s day, bro!”, she said.

HOW TO AVOID BEING CALLED A GAY

“Pss! Sister Kola! Pss… Sisteeer Koolaaa!” was the voice that I heard from behind. I turned around to see who the ‘Sister Kola’ was. I saw a baby-faced guy catwalking down the street. As she… he opened her… his mouth to respond, there came a sonorous voice, then it dawned on me why he is being called ‘Sister Kola’.

Are you in the same shoes with ‘Sister Kola’?. Here are the list of some things to do:

1) KEEP SOME BEARDS. Keeping of beards tends to make you look more serious. Serious-looking people are taken with seriousness.

2) WALK WELL. Walk smartly and briskly with a touch of confidence in your sways. Do not catwalk or wiggle. Leave that for the ladies.

3) GET A BARITONE VOICE. If you can’t get yourself a baritone voice, try to feign one.

4) HIT THE GYM. Do away with the pear-shaped or hourglass shaped body, bro. Get a firmer body.

5) DO NOT WEAR MULTI-COLOURED TROUSERS.
Just don’t wear them, bro. Aside camouflage trousers, wearing of multi-coloured trousers makes you look like a gay. Infact, the military have warned people against putting on camouflage clothes. Why put yourself in the risk of being beaten by a soldier. If a soldier slaps you, that is when you’d know that the police is indeed your friend.

6) DO A CHANGE OF NAME. Names like Blessing, Toyin and Bisola are meant for the species of human carrying the XX chromosome. I have seen several guys bearing such names. Even for masculine names like Gabriel and Ige, I don’t feel comfortable with people bearing them. In the secondary school days, I had unease feelings whenever Gay Lussac’s theory came up in chemistry classes. After his theory, no one ever heard or spoke of him again. If he had had a name like Brian Lussac or Abraham Lussac, maybe his name would have been re-echoed in the field of science like that of Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Louis Pasteur and host of others.

P.S. In order not to be called a feminist, ladies should stay away from works that can develop unnecessary muscles. The notion that; “what a man can do, a woman can do as well” may be true. But just don’t do it.

TYPES OF FRIENDS TO MEET IN THE COLLEGE

You only make real friends while you are in the secondary school/high school. But in the tertiary institution, the case is different. Although, you might make some few good ones. There are fake friends awaiting you. You meet all kinds of symbiotic friendship/relationship. Some categories of these friends are:

(1) The commensal friends; they gain but you neither gain nor lose. they are the “chairman, I wan dub your assignement” ones.

(2) The mutual friends; you gain from each other. They are the nothing-goes-for-nothing ones. “Bros, I get palm oil and pepper. Shebi, you get beans”

(3) The parasitic friends; they gain in bits from you, at your own detriment. They are careful not to exert much pressure on you, because they know that if their host goes broke, they will have nothing to gain from. “Guy, wetin you cook na?, Abeg I fit get 2H for your hand?”

(4) The predatory friends; they don’t mind ruining you. When they are done with you, they go to another prey. “Ogbeni, organise something for boys na” (if you decline, they’d say) “you no sure at all! Person nor fit collect something from you na wa for you o!”

(5) The Adam-and-Eve friends; in this type of friendship, they are the ones that cohabitate. They live what is called couple’s life. The female is at the giving end most times, and of course, they do often enjoy the fruit of Adam and Eve, I mean they… *Coughs*

Whenever you want to make friends, try and define the friendship first.

VEGEANCE IS SWEET

Back in the old primary school days, I used to be known as a legendary cane ‘duster’. I could take several strokes of the cane without flinching. Other pupils and teachers used to think I was a mutant until an event proved them wrong.

It was a friday, everyone in the class was chattering away excitedly in anticipation towards the approaching weekend. My name was never on the noisemakers’ list because the class captain used to copy my homeworks, this gave me the ticket to make noise as I wanted.

A day earlier, I got tired of my charity work for the class captain. So I intentionally did the wrong sums in my homework and allowed the class captain to copy my work. After he was done, I cancelled and did the correct sums. But somehow, he got to know my tricks.

On this fateful day, he decided to pay me back. Despite the fact that everyone was making noise in the classroom, he decided to write only my name on the noisemakers’ list. I begged him with every good thing under the sky, but he declined. After seeing that he wouldn’t change his mind, I insulted him. Who was afraid of being caned, anyway? He went straight to give the list to the dreaded headmaster.

When the headmaster came, fumbling his cane, he roared, “Giwa, come out here!”. Other pupils sat up to enjoy the show that was about to be unveiled. As the headmaster delivered strokes of his cane on my back, it was as if several scorpions entered my shirt. That man must have soaked his cane in a Juju potion. I couldn’t help but let out a deafening shriek.

The class captain was grinning victoriously on his seat. I was smiling in hot tears.

BABA IBEJI’S CATASTROPHE

“Nonsense!”, barked Baba Ibeji as he angrily slammed the door to his face-me-i-face-you room. He ignited the engine of his Nissan Sunny taxi and drove off.

Earlier, he had had a quarel with Iya Ibeji over the money to prepare dinner. Iya Ibeji had insisted that One thousand naira would not be enough and asked for an additional five hundred naira. “What! One thousand five hundred naira just to prepare dinner? Is it the last supper that you want to prepare?”, Baba Ibeji asked jokingly. But before he could understand that it was not a joke, Iya Ibeji had tied her scarf on her waist and held him by his cloth. He delivered a resounding slap her on her cheek. In just a matter of seconds, his ankara ‘agbada’ was shredded into pieces. He responded with a series of kicks and punches on his wife. “Yeee! He has killed me o!”, Iya Ibeji shouted. In no time the neighbours had filled the room to the brim. While neighbours were comforting the wailing Iya Ibeji, he changed his cloth and barged out of the room.

He was fuming as he drove to the car park to start the day’s work. He hurled curses and insults at other motorists that got in his way.

On almost getting to the car park, he got stucked in a traffic jam. After the vehicles in front of him had passed, he was still rooted at a spot. Then a man from the car at his rear shouted, “Hey, move that worthless piece of tin, bloody idiot!”. With his temper still boiling, he got down, walked towards the man and slapped him. After slapping the man, his eyes caught on something. He rubbed his eyes repeatedly to be sure that it was not hallucination. It can’t be hallucination, at least he was yet to take his daily shots of ‘paraga’ at Iya Tawa’s kiosk. What did he see? It was a military camouflage uniform that neatly hung at the back of the man’s car! That was all he could remember.

He was told the rest of the story, after he had woken from a three-week unconciousness.