And how horribly easy it is to be hurt. I am being hurt all day, & hurt by the tiniest & most subtle things. So on goes the everyday armour, and the self, even the wounded self, is hidden from so many.

“I don’t like this expression “First World problems.” It is false and it is condescending. Yes, Nigerians struggle with floods or infant mortality. But these same Nigerians also deal with mundane and seemingly luxurious hassles. Connectivity issues on your BlackBerry, cost of car repair, how to sync your iPad, what brand of noodles to buy: Third World problems. All the silly stuff of life doesn’t disappear just because you’re black and live in a poorer country. People in the richer nations need a more robust sense of the lives being lived in the darker nations. Here’s a First World problem: the inability to see that others are as fully complex and as keen on technology and pleasure as you are.”

The wound, / the past, is still bleeding.

“My delicious dilemma is language. How I structure it. How the fiction of history structures me. And as I’ve become more and more shattered, my tongue has become tangled … I am glassed in by language as well as by the barriers of my dark skin and financial embarrassment.”

on humans & earth & interconnection & the one reflecting the many & everything beautiful