Inthync’s Ideagasm – It’s about what you think, together! http://storymojahayfestival/category/conversations

I bonded with Kenita the moment we met; I guess she was having a DeJaVue thing, she felt she had met me somewhere, but can’t remember where. Between me and her there really was an inordinate amount of giggling going on during the whole session. Truth is, you put a group of young people in a room on a Saturday morning and ask them to voice their thoughts and all sorts of things crop up:

Betty: “but HOW did the chicken guy do it?”

Wambui: “You know there was this Greek goddess who made a Trojan horse like thing in the shape of a female bull and climbed in so that the bull can mount her?”

Shiko: “what was her offspring called? Ah – the Minotaur!”

Betty: “what?! How did she?… OMG!”

Aziz: “Hey who here speaks Kikuyu? What do you call a lie in Kikuyu? ‘MAHENI’”

Terrible joke.

@Frenchfreddy: “Who here has slept with a man?”

Hands go up.

Kenita:  “You slept with that?”

Betty: “You know? Why would anybody do that?”

Shiko: “By the way Freddy, I just wanted to let you know that the sweet I gave you earlier, I had been given by a guy who wanted to feel me up, and so it might be drugged.”

@Frenchfreddy - gagging.

Betty: “Feel you up? Well I guess men will put it into any orifice, but I still don’t know HOW the chicken guy did it.”

Martin – “Now we know which came first, the chicken or the egg.”

This went on and on and on.

But I digress. What is an Ideagasm?  The idea of an Ideagasm is to engage in conversations where a conversational topic is introduced to a group of people; a provocation that we thus observe through a prism where each individual gives their different perspectives of that thought provocation. You get to see the light in different ways. 

The main aim of an Ideagasm is to allow people to actualize the thought or idea before finding out about the obstacles. A provocation is an idea that shouldn’t be within the normal bounds of logic; it may be probable even if it’s not necessarily possible. 

The purpose of an Ideagasm is to create a space, where people who may or may not necessarily know each other feel that this is a safe environment to express who they are and what they are thinking. A safe forum should be a place that strangers can meet, laugh, share coffee and reveal their inner most thoughts without judgment or egotism getting in the way of things.

Ideagasms should be happening all the time – especially on social media, where nearly everyone can be a stranger in a forum. But as Xhosi pointed out, most people in discussion seek to intimidate others.

“I am a big wig, you are a small weave.” The hope behind an Ideagasm is that these egos can be abandoned for the duration of the discussion – leave your bloated head at the door, pick it up on your way out.

Ideas like the salient question in society, “WHY are people homophobic?” (Did you see that? We went right back to sex and sexuality) lead us right back to the question of self identification – oh come on we said leave your ego at the door!

Who are you? “I am Juliet.” The end.

That one proper noun should announce to the world your presence. Everything that comes after that is an unnecessary description of things you do, which does not make up who you are. Who you are – a very intriguing question that you really shouldn’t have an answer to at any one moment in your life. After all, you are still being; being you.

In our life journey to self definition we should do what Aziz does, and become dream addicts; day dream and night dream, express ourselves subconsciously and in visions and then also experience DeJaVue; consistently allowing our minds to sort of misfire and make connections with experiences yet to occur. You cannot learn dream addiction; I think our collective inability to be dreamers is rooted in the so called regular education we receive – an Ideagasm provocation: “Why does there have to be regular education?”

What are we teaching our kids anyway? In Colombia it is a rite of passage for young boys to have sex with a donkey; in Kenya you get some Ass and it becomes the news.

What IS in the news these days anyway?

Tania is inflamed, aggravated and agitated by ‘Maina and King’ang’i’ in the Morning, a show on Classic FM. “In Colombia 8 year olds say, “I had my first Ass yesterday” like its nothing but each morning these two make having sex such a big deal, and they degrade and denigrate and let the discussion deteriorate it’s so offensive! I wouldn’t want my child listening to this!”

Immediately, Aziz ask the correct question.

“Do you believe in Aliens?”

Betty: “Yes, because how else do you explain George Bush (Jr.)”

In the noisy uproar of combined laughter and multiple conversations that ensued, I heard a very quiet voice give an answer.

Xhosi: “DeJaVue is considered a symptom of Temporal lobe epilepsy by medical doctors and a simple fantasy by psychiatrists.” (She said more really but I started laughing at Aziz’s latest joke)

@Frenchfreddy says: “I am not an epileptic, I have epilepsy.”

The definition of self is akin to describing one’s expression of godliness. There is a consistent lesson, or rather teaching @Frenchfreddy is expressing here - You need to stop limiting yourself and others.

 ‘Fugue’ is a state when Juliet is being godly; she can create work for hours, do amazing pieces and never remember doing that work. For real; she cannot remember what day, or when or what is contained in that work.

A question; Do you suppose God created us in a state of fugue? 

I wouldn’t blame God if he was in a fugue state when he created a society that is violently homophobic and yet profess free will. I would blame the so called lucid people that choose to be homophobic. Despite someone else’s sexuality having next to nothing to do with you, we have people who take it upon themselves to further shrink the space we live in. The violence LGBTIQ people face in Kenya is disgusting, terrific, and an utter shame to our so called civilization.

Or as Juliet’s father said often,” You need to be open-minded just enough that the breeze can come in, but not so open that just anyone can walk in.”

Ideagasms. Let’s have them everywhere!

Why some men share and some women don’t

I am now officially a vegetarian. I cannot imagine what our poor animals have to go through just to make it to our tables and I am not just talking about the slaughterhouse. At the rate people are turning to our domestic animals for sexual comfort it’s only a matter of time before a half-human half donkey person is born. Thanks to a fellow from Nyeri taking exception to his son’s poultry we now have an idea why the chicken crossed the road; to get away from the Nyeri man. 

As if the act itself was not insane enough, because the bird died, the police sent it off to the Vet to establish a cause of death. I don’t know what is scarier in Nyeri, the men who like chicks or the police who sent a dead bird to a vet. 

In all sincerity what is going on in this country? Are women really THAT hard to please? Being a lady myself I am inclined to protest – you cannot blame women for the dastardly places men choose to put their appendages. It is a known fact that men will chase after anything in a skirt; these recent “creature comforts” are just an expansion of the things men like to play with. 

May I ask if it’s cheating if your husband sleeps with the dog? The Marriage bill recently introduced for debate in parliament should have had consideration for such matters. Why not, after all in attempting to police marriage in the manner they did, the drafters were truly delving in the absurd.

One particular clause just showed to the extent parliament wishes to dictate relationships – a man/woman can sue their ex- partner for not marrying them after promising to do so. Instantly proposals are no longer a proposal, something to be considered, but a deed of indemnity where either you marry the person or you face a lawsuit. It is completely absurd to enforce a relationship by state law, in other words, in Kenya you either get married to that person or face jail or a loss of property.  That is not a marriage that is slavery. It’s actually a clause that is unconstitutional in essence. 

I cannot even imagine what frame of mind they were in when they thought that up. Maybe someone had been jilted and was bitter about it. How in the world do you insist on marrying a man or woman who doesn’t want you? The possibilities of psychological abuses and fraud alone are mind boggling.

At first, the claim behind this marriage bill was that in totality it should give some level of equality and empowerment to women.  At second glance, certain tenets of this bill just express what fragile, insecure, sadistic and miserable creatures we are perceived to be. Do we really need a law to force someone to marry us “or else”? 

It looks like women have taken our way of relating to men to a whole new level of nastiness. What happened to choosing to love a partner and choosing to marry them? With this marriage bill, women will be able to claim a promise of marriage after a careless drunken sms.  It’s all the proof you’d need really coz otherwise how do you prove you two even know each other well enough to marry. Not unless you get me to sign some sort of pre-nuptial contract or agreement, can you prove I agreed to marry you.

Such clauses aren’t going to solve anything – how can government lend mending to a broken heart in such a manner! Being jilted is part of the relationship cycle, it can happen when you are with the wrong person and no law can eliminate that possibility. Marriage itself is hard enough without forcing two people to marry because they made a promise that they can’t break by law. Actually this is like getting divorced before you even get married!

As if that was not enough, yet another absurd clause is inserted – A man cannot marry a second wife without the consent of his first wife. The very idea that a man needs to request permission or seek consent from one woman in order to have a relationship with another woman is the reason we have mistresses.  I don’t see any woman granting consent if she required to be asked by law in the first place.

Let’s face it, if your marriage was so good that you could approach your wife and ask for consent to marry a second wife and she agreed then your relationship is so sound that you really wouldn’t need a second wife.  

We seem to have become women who wish to possess our men as though they are commodities. The attitude behind this is expressed by this one sentiment, “I don’t share some things.” I don’t know when a husband became something that can be shared or not shared but I do know that it doesn’t matter what you think you are sharing or not – he will do what he wants, just a fact. A man does not need your consent to share out his body and love. This is why we have some sharing their bodies with all sorts of animals.

If this marriage bill passes as it is, it will result in even more divorce and sheer misery. Certainly it will not empower the average woman living in the villages; she can’t run to her lawyer whenever her boyfriend or husband cheats on her or dumps her.

Ramadhan Conversations – Counter Terrorism in Kenya: The case of the Somali People http://storymojahayfestival.com/category/conversations/

There is something so unique about Somali people. They have a great sense of humor; I suppose it’s their way of making sense of the myriad bizarre things that happen in the world. I was once at the OB-GYN’s office once when a Somali couple came in. The man was carrying a new born baby and the woman was behind him, carrying the baby’s nappy bag. She was covered from head to toe, but when she walked in she lifted her veil or niqab so we could see her face.

“Here is a present for you!” says the father, smiling cheekily.  The receptionist smiles and says, “Mashallah! What is his name?”

“Barrack Obama,” Says the wife. That nearly killed me, I laughed to tears.

This cryptic sarcasm is definitely a Somali thing – Soon after the Kenya Defense Forces invaded Somalia, Major Emmanuel Chirchir found himself in a twitter war with some very amusing twitter handles claiming to be Al-Shabaab. “@Emmanuel Chirchir – you are using made in Kenya vehicles that’s why you can’t catch us.” The joke there is the fact that Kenya does not manufacture any vehicles, for those who don’t know.

It’s truly sad, thus, that these same Somali people have faced the most brutal forms of tactics in the name of governance in Kenya and as Counter Terrorism measures.

You must understand that even in the pre-colonial period there was not one territory that had as large an ethnically homogenous population as the Greater Somalia, rendering them a uniquely unified entity among whom the tactic of divide and rule would take a more personal and intrinsic nature than how it inevitably worked among colonies like Kenya which was ethnically diverse.  So the division of the greater Somalia into the territories that now constitute Kenya, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Somalia which includes the former British, Italian and French Somalia, never went down well with the Somali people. This division of territory is a source of the conflict in the Horn of Africa to this day.

By the 1960s, as Kenya approached independence, a secessionist movement was born among the Somali people, mostly out of a desire to reunite with their kinsmen and fellow Muslims and also out of a fear of being marginalized in the new nation. So the Somali population in Kenya was pushing for the annexation of the Northern Frontier District to Somalia. At the time, majority of the Somali people voted to be joined to Somalia, but this was overridden by the Kenyatta government. What followed then was a civil uprising that was viciously and violently quelled by Jomo Kenyatta’s administration – They referred to the Somali as Shifta and declared all of them bandits and criminals who must be exterminated. This ensuing conflict led to a state of emergency being declared in the Northern Frontier District and the territory was deemed “a closed area” and remained that way for decades. Though the initial secessionist movement was eventually crushed, the Kenyatta government thereafter viewed all Somali with suspicion and any attempt to politically organize them was subsequently crushed as well.

To contain the Somali, the government applied a divide and rule tactic; they would instigate clashes between the different clans of the Somali people. These clashes and internal conflict have taken on a life of their own, to date, there is still a lot of insecurity and violence in the area.

This government fear of the Somali people was based on two fronts – they are ethnically homogenous and are also religiously united. The Kenya government has time and again applied very violent tactics in dealing with the Somali people, causing them to organize themselves around their faith as Muslims.  The Somali people became so radicalized due to their oppression that they even went so far as to declare Jihad against their tormentors, thus inviting the wrath and disdain of the global anti-Islam brigade.

It was only much later that President Moi reached out to the Somali people after a Somali general Mohmoud Mohammed helped to crush the 1982 coup. Moi brought the Somalis to the fore as he rallied the smaller Kenyan ethnic communities in response to the threat he felt from the larger ethnic communities whom he believed were against his regime. But this amiable situation did not last, as the ingrained government attitudes towards the Somali people and their brutal tactics were revived after the events in Nairobi of the 1998 bombings of the US embassy and were exacerbated by the 2001 September 11^th bombing of the Twin Towers in New York.

Once again, the Somali people as a wholly Muslim population became suspects. By this time, the situation in Somalia had deteriorated extensively; without a recognizable government, a thriving black market trade and proliferation of illegal arms across the Kenyan border made the Somali people even greater targets for human rights atrocities by the Kenyan Government.

To date, the Kenyan government tactics employed by US and British funded agencies like the Anti-Terrorism Police include rape, plunder, vandalism, torture and incarceration of entire families. More importantly, the Kenya government is guilty of flagrant disregard for the rights and freedoms of their citizens and this is most wickedly expressed in permitting CIA and FBI agents to perform Rendition. Rendition is just a fancy way of saying KIDNAPPING.

Rendition is the illegal extradition of “suspects” from one jurisdiction to another with the intention to extract information and also subject the suspect to a judicial process in a country or state where the laws are conducive with the overall objectives of the US government’s War On Terror. Because nobody has noticed, or rather no one reports these abuses and extractions, a lot of Muslims and in particular Somali people have disappeared into black holes in detention facilities mainly in Egypt and Europe.  Once rendition occurs, the suspect is tortured for weeks or even months with the aim of extracting information that will lead to even further arrests. Most of the people picked up by the Kenya Anti-Terrorism Unit are community leaders or activists; people who are deemed dangerous because they seek to raise awareness and also to unite their communities under the Islamic Faith. The fact is, on any given day, in any part of Kenya, a Muslim can be arrested and disappear forever.

With the support of the Kenya government’s own law enforcement agencies, and the full knowledge of members of our judiciary, our political leaders and even some members of the press, Kenyan Somali people have been subjected to incredibly inhuman conditions, torture, rape, violence, mental and physical anguish, and through all this, and despite all of this, the Somali people still manage to rise, in faith and hope. Somalis are – AMAZING.

The Kenyan War on Islam: A ramadhan conversation part 2 http://storymojahayfestival.com/the-kenyan-war-on-islam-a-ramadhan-conversation-part-ii/

The first friend I ever made in Mombasa Primary school was this tiny girl called Salwa. Salwa was a Kenyan of Yemeni Arab descent; small, even smaller than me, and I am only a few inches taller than a midget. We were quite the pair, always together, always getting into trouble. She was a little lady, I was an unabashed tomboy, try as she might, she couldn’t get me to stop climbing everything and picking up everything. “Yuck! Betty!” was her constant scream at break-time. I loved the look on her face when I picked up millipedes, and also how she ran away laughing. 

My first memory of Ramadan was when Salwa refused to eat my break with me. “I am on Saum.” My first lessons on Islam were taught to me by a very solemn Salwa. “Never ever put the Quran on the bottom, Betty, put it on top of your other books.” Up until that point, I did not realize that her hijab was part of her Islamic identity; I always thought that it was because her hair was so long so she had to cover it to protect it from getting dirty. 

I grew up in Mombasa with Muslim friends, of all ethnicities and it never ever occurred to me that I was a “foreigner”. But I am Kikuyu, and my family had moved to Mombasa just before I was born, so we were indeed alien to the coast.

The issues of non-coastal people inhabiting the coastal region has progressively become a highly contentious matter; a situation so volatile that in 1992 there were the first attacks on “watu wa bara” by militants who wanted them to return up country. 

This attitude is entirely contrary to the culture of the coastal people and Muslim communities; theirs is a non-resistant and welcoming approach to strangers and foreigners. For this turn of civility to occur, there were indeed historical injustices inflicted on the people of the coast. 

When the missionaries first arrived at the port of Mombasa, they were met with non-resistance; it was the nature of the Africans and Muslims to be welcoming, to share what they had, and to ensure that the visitors were comfortable. The missionaries found that the most advanced settlements were among the Muslim communities; towns complete with sewerage, sanitation and water delivery systems and building made of stones with beautifully crafted wooden doors. Naturally, the missionaries would turn to the Waswahili people to serve them as clerks, because they were the ones who were literate. Indeed, the entire region of Mombasa and greater parts of the Coast were under the rule of the Sultan of Zanzibar - a government that based its rule on Islamic principles fully entrenched with education, financial systems and judiciary. The Wali were the administrators, and the Kadhi courts dispensed justice. The con was to trick the coastal people that they would retain that system. 

This is indeed the story of Islam in all the colonies in Africa – that the Islamic systems were dismantled through cruel trickery and sometimes even violence from the colonialists.

As the missionaries advanced inwards, the Waswahili would establish “Majengo” settlements; miniature administrative towns that were complete with sanitation and ablution facilities. The Majengo settlements were found wherever the missionaries and later colonial administrators needed to set up office. The name “Wastaarabuni” came to imply a civilized people, as the Majengo were indeed the most civilized settlements to be found, complete with Wali and Kadhi court systems as was the norm with Islamic communities. With the proliferation of the Majengo settlements came the advancement of the Islamic faith among the ethnic communities living near those settlements. Islam spread as far north as Mandera and Wajir, and as far west as Mumias.

It became clear to the missionaries and early colonialists that the spread of Islam was entirely contrary to their own objectives and so certain decrees became part of their design to curb and control the Muslims. Because Islam was gaining dominance, the claim that Islamic education is illiteracy was a tactical development in an effort to formalize the colonial administration. Since that time, the absolute absence of Islamic education in Kenya’s educational system has been enforced. With the exception of Islamic Religious Education as a sole subject in classrooms, there is an absolute dearth of any sort of Islamic knowledge being passed on as far as government, jurisprudence, culture or economic systems are concerned.

 On the whole, everything Islamic was dismantled even at the coast and especially in the constitution – there was an absolute disappearance of the Wali and the Kadhi courts were restricted to dealing with the Muslim communities’ family laws. In all this, the Christian Church was actively pushing for the exclusion of anything Islamic in nature including the Kadhi system, education, wali system of administration and economics. Indeed the church till today is influential in blocking Sharia system of banking, rendering a lot of people incapable of accessing credit. 

A significant factor to disenfranchising Muslims in Kenya and especially at the coast was the fact that even in the Majengo settlements the colonial administration would refuse to give title to the Muslims. The same goes for the coastal people; they to this day hold no title to land that they have inhabited for centuries. This is a deliberate design to deny economic power or development and to keep the Muslim community totally marginalized.

Without title, one certainly could not lay claim to the very land their houses stood upon. Even after independence, as President Jomo Kenyatta redistributed titles to the indigenous people, the coastal people were not accorded titles. Instead, people from up country, “Watu wa Bara” were allowed to settle at the coast and later acquire title deeds even though they were not the original inhabitants. This is the grave crime that especially the Gikuyu people at the coast are guilty of. 

This sort of economic injustice and unfair acquisition of land was epitomized by Coast Provincial commissioner, Eluid Mahihu, the very representation of the “Gikuyu” grabbing mentality; a man who was the living definition of a “foreigner” and who was both a corrupt person and also the face of the church. His was a double injustice – as he acquired property through grabbing of land, he hid himself as a “pious” elder of the Presbyterian Church of East Africa. Indeed, over time, the P.C.E.A church has become predominantly Kikuyu and the activities of criminals among the congregation silently ignored. 

The hypocritical actions of church leaders have directly contributed to over all tensions and mistrust between the coastal people and “Christians” from other parts of the country. Indeed, where as once, the coastal people could identify themselves separately as Muslim and non-Muslim, today they identify themselves as one community regardless of their faith because to date they remain squatters on their own land, impoverished and marginalized. 

Without title one cannot borrow money, and certainly cannot develop anything on land that they do not “possess”. This is the essence of the poverty at the coast, the source of animosity among the coastals towards “foreigners”, whether white or African. From Vanga, near the border of Kenya and Tanzania to Kiunga at the border of Kenya and Somalia, the title deeds are owned by “foreigners”. Well. Not ALL titles. Just as in any civilization, among the people of the coast of Kenya, you will find the Collaborators, the Puppets, and of course, those closest to the centre of power. They too, acquired title.

 The claim is that these absentee landlords are people from Saudi Arabia and Yemen; the truth is that these landlords comprise of Kenyan nationals who acquired title through corrupt and unjust means. So called absentee landlords are just a camouflage for a select few, foreigners from up-country and actual foreigners to acquire property at the coast and turn the coastal people into squatters in their own land.

To date, Muslims remain impoverished and excluded because of their faith for two reasons – their faith does not allow usury or transactions with interest and they do not own title to property.

It is within these circumstances that the Kenya government thus seeks to enact a “War on Terrorism” that is targeted at the Muslim community; where as a search for suspects of other crimes results in only those suspects being arrested and detained, Kenya’s counter- terrorism tactics involve raiding, arresting and detaining entire families, blatant criminal vandalism, plunder, rape and extra-judicial killings. In Kenya, ALL Muslims are terrorism suspects. 

That this is going on within our borders, with the knowledge of our spiritual and political leaders is a testament to how deeply ingrain our collective hypocrisy and bigotry is a nation. WE are the terrorists!

Dear Mr. President – learn how to tweet!

Cabinet Secretary, Michael Kamau started off the hilarity this week with his unbelievable rant against the NIS – unbelievable because MK wanted us to swallow whole heartedly how he has been in some kind of time vacuum while this country’s security agencies have been used consistently against the people of Somalia and Kenyan Somali for the last 20 plus years. “The NIS obsession with security in Somalia has hurt the national interests and undermined economic development.”

What an applause his meaningless rant attracted though! He is right now ranked as the most thoughtful Cabinet Minister possibly in the history of Kenya. 

Never mind the known reality on the ground, as concerns this particular governments’ approach to Somalis and Somalia for over 100 years, we must acknowledge the miniature concern raised; that this Jubilee government should indeed pay less of their kind of attention to Somalia than they are doing.

I really don’t know what is actually worse: a government that has spent the better part of the past 40 plus years targeting raiding, massacring and raping Somalis and or having a Minister say “oh man, we pay too much attention to these people!”  

We do have a lot of crazy within our borders, but much more within powerful positions – is it true that Michael Kamau is so ignorant as to not realize the extent of the Kenya government’s atrocities against the Somali people? No. MK is not ignorant of that. He just thinks he and the rest of the government can make far much more money when NIS uses its “raid and rape” policy on OTHER people. So he decided to “expose” the NIS.

The search for “intelligence” within Kenyan borders has been going on for a long while. So long, even the President of Kenya decided to host Kenyan mainstream editors in State House in the hope that he may indeed find some intelligence and maybe placate it. Sadly, after you watched a rather disheveled Macharia Gaitho act so guile and ridiculously cute as he presents his speech, you know it is unlikely that there is any sort of intelligence in Kenyan news rooms.

It thus will not shock anybody when the president decides that someone should be tweeting on his behalf. Introducing Dennis Itumbi, Director of New Media and Diaspora - oh the way State house struggled to define this tweeter menace’s job description – it was rather hilarious! 

“Itumbi, who has worked as a journalist with local and International Media will be charged with the role of ensuring communication using new media and modern tools including mobile applications in State House and across government.”

I almost died from laughter when I reached the part that says “modern tools.” As opposed to ancient tools of course? 

I don’t want to say that NIS is just the tip of the iceberg, but hiring someone to tweet on your behalf just underscores the allegation as concerns a total LACK of intelligence.

It takes the most amazing sort of media manipulation to craft a situation where Teachers are worse than MPs but, here we are, in a situation where our president has managed to convince a room full of rather bedazzled editors that the teachers are expecting him to go borrow money to pay their miserable little salaries meanwhile he can easily pay off the salaries of MPs and of course the “misinforming” NIS and never to forget, he can always pay whoever tweets on his behalf.

I got to say; that twitter thing got to me. Not that I have an active account, no, I obviously cannot put my thoughts into a mere 140 characters, no sir that takes a special kind of simplistic thinking. But I did hope that our President could manage that on his own. After all, he really isn’t being pressured to think about poor people. We are supposed to pay tax even on our foodstuff.  Our children’s teachers should accept whatever deal he comes up with, and didn’t he pay our mothers’ maternity fee?

Malcolm X said it best when he quipped: “If you are not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”

That quote is about 26 characters. I know, not a single one of our newspaper editors can manage something so simple and concise. Not today, not ever, because of what they did this Friday morning.

The only thing I can surely ask is, since you have a smart phone Mr. Kenyatta, could you please learn how to tweet yourself? That way, you won’t spend my backbreaking taxes on someone who is so far, and up your behind, he only sees the sun when you talk.