The Communication Authority of Kenya(CA) & National Cohesion and Integration Commission(NCIC) published guidelines dealing with bulk SMSes and social media[PDF] for public consultation. The entire document is an interesting read and I encourage you to read it yourself; I would love to hear what you think in the comments. For this post, I’ll focus on Part 2 of the document: Guiidlines(sic) with regards to the use of social media for political messaging.

Some time late last year, I’m going to say in November but I’m not certain, the Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) released 6 documents that would amend the Kenya Information and Communications Act, for public comment. You can find the notice for public comment and the drafts here. These documents were zero drafts, which means they are the first versions of these documents and are not yet even on the path to becoming laws as they are not even in parliament. The amendments would touch on the following issues:

I found this post floating about on my facebook and thought I’d share it with you guys because a lot of what’s said I’ve felt and still feel.

It is when you stop going along with the crowd and start realizing that there are many things about yourself that you didn’t know and may not like.You start feeling insecure and wonder where you will be in a year or two, but then get scared because you barely know where you are now.

Happy New Year!! How are y’all doing? This is my first post of the year which should make it special but it really isn’t, mostly because I don’t really have anything useful to say. So instead what follows next is mostly going to be me rambling on about random things.

image:http://www.staceyshipman.com

First of all this is my last semester of school… I’m not really excited, more scared. At the end of these four months I should become a man, which has little to do with my age or level of maturity and more to do with the fact that I’ll be expected to take care of myself. No more handouts from the parents. In fact the only thing I can expect from either of them is a place to sleep and to be fed(and who knows how long the feeding will last?).

The other day I attended a meeting for our school poetry club. I had wanted to see the performances and a friend of mine had said that they were beginning at 9 am. I arrived at 10 because I had spent the night before not in my room.;) Turns out my friend had it wrong, idiot!!!, and this was actually a meeting between the school club and the guest artists that had been invited. Since I was already there I decided to stay.

First I’d like to thank Sgyreju for allowing me to put up her posts on my blog and I’m sure all of you thank her too. She wrote them almost a year ago but the ideas and questions she asks are priceless and I’ll continue to cherish them forever. Second this is an edited conclusion of what has been a very fun week of posts that Sgyreju originally had on her blog. It contain mostly her thoughts interspersed with mine.

Gender is something I have only begun to think about very recently, and I still have work to do in order to understand better where I stand in relation to it. But, even though I have only been exploring my own gender identity for about three months, I had known for a while longer that it is quite a complex matter.

The first thing to know is the difference between sex and gender. While sex is a biological fact, gender is an identity; it is about how one perceives oneself. For a long time, I did not know about gender; this is not a widely known concept in mainstream France (recently, someone I know wrote a survey with a question about “gender”. She told me her professors had said it was the politically correct word to use for questions about biological sex.). I knew about transsexual people, but I only knew about them as “people who feel they were born in the wrong body and need to change their biological sex”. As to myself, my being a girl was just a fact, like my height or my birth date – a fact about me I had no control about, and which meant even less to me than my height or my birthdate do – and I could not imagine it mattering at all.

Most people divide relationships with people who do not belong to their family in only two categories: friends and romantic partners. A specific set of expectations and “normal behavior” is associated with each category, and transgressions are frowned upon: One is not supposed to kiss one’s friends, or hold hands with them, for instance, but on the other hand, it is not considered “normal” not to kiss or have sex with one’s romantic partner.

Very often, people use the word “relationship” to refer to romantic relationships – just as they use the word “love” to refer to romantic love. It rather annoys me to see those words trapped into one of their specific meanings, especially as this specific meaning is not one I can relate to. So, be warned – in this blog, “relationship” refers to all kinds of relationships, and “love” refers to all kinds of love.

I did not always identify as aromantic.

For a long time, I did believe in the whole romantic myth that one is truly happier with a romantic partner, and I wished for one. I longed for the time when I would finally live those idealized shared moments with my beloved: having breakfast together, taking long walks hand in hand, talking about everything and anything for hours, kiss passionately like in my favorite love scenes in movies…

Sex is a complex matter. It is hard to define – for some people, only genital penetration counts; for others, anything involving someone’s genitals is sex. It also has several meanings: an expression of romantic love, a fun activity, a way to experience pleasure, a way to prove one’s worth… and many more. Some use it as a means of pressure (withholding sex in punishment or offering sex as a reward in order to obtain something), while others plan strategies to obtain it.

I will not lie to you: Questioning one’s identity is scary.

The evening of June 4, 2006, when I finally became aware that I probably was not heterosexual as I had always assumed, and the night that followed were, at the time, the scariest moments of my life. Now, four years later, they have only been pushed to second place by another evening that I do not want to talk about (and anyway, it has nothing to do with asexuality or any of the other matters that I wish to discuss in my Petri Dish).

Since today is the fourth anniversary of the evening during which I realized I needed to reconsider my assumed and never questioned heterosexuality, I thought I might as well tell the story of what exactly happened then.

I had a LiveJournal account in which I wrote regularly – and there are entries about that event. The first one was published at 10:18PM that night, which means that the event happened before.

So while I was narrating this story( Catch part one here) to you guys-and girls- I’ve tried to as objective as possible and tell the story as I saw it then, through my eyes, without giving you too much of what I thought of the situation after really thinking about it. So that’s what this post is about.

I don’t know about you but I’ve always been of the opinion that get pregnant at my age-which is rather young, think kid, baby-is stupid. Yes, I’m saying that Q was stupid to get pregnant. I mean think about it in this day and age you only get pregnant if you want to, what with condoms, contraceptives, e-pills and of course abstinence, it’s either that or you’re stupid. I told Q as much.

I needed to out this up quick which is why I’m doing this on a day I already have on post up but I feel the longer I wait the less relevant what I have to say becomes. Also I’m not a political scientist or any sort of expert on revolutions and such matters, these are just my thoughts.

Recently, ever since the Tunisia and then Egypt protests and revolts there’s been a lot of chatter on my time-line(Twitter) about whether such a thing can be repeated in Kenya. Today there was even talk of one  on 28th February. I don’t know where this one came from but there were a lot of tweets tagged with it in the morning.