Purple Lipstick

When I was younger we used to have chickens in our yard (like most Zimbabweans at one point in their lives). They weren’t the pretty white expensive Broilers that would make the yard look organized and economical. Oh no, they were those kumusha type, few feathers missing, road runner chickens; and they were as anxious as they were unattractive. They were constantly on edge and would be scared of almost anything. They would run at the sight of even the slightest disturbance and blurt out loud clucks as they did. For their security we would place them in one room at night. But that was no comfort to them. The slightest sound, even the sound of a branch landing on the roof would send them into a panic and like an orchestra the entire flock would erupt into exclamations of desperate pleas for help.
What was worse was we had dogs, and for a few days we had to drill it into them that the chickens were not food. The chickens could not have cared less about our scolding and instructions. They were horrified every time Rex and Tiger ran about.

 When they would make their noise from whatever trivial thing would frighten them, my mother would ask me to go check on them and see what was going on.  As you can imagine this quickly became unpleasant and frustrating and after many nights of waking up and finding nothing there I eventually confronted my mother with this question
 “why are they so scared all the time!?”
My mother, who is always kind and thoughtful with her answers to my questions, smiled at me and said,
“That’s what chickens do. Chickens will be chickens””

Flash forward a few months, and the chickens have become part of our regular scene at home. My siblings and I (as children tend to do) began to find ourselves attached to these chickens and ended up giving each one a name, petting them, and treating them as if they were babies. We’d rush home from school and scramble to grab some mealie meal and feed our little squad of pets. We’d add grass to their nests, chase the dogs away if they got too close, and save the chicks from whatever mess they would find themselves tangled in.
It was while we were doing all of this that I noticed something strange. The chickens began to act very differently. They would still panic here and there but they were far less noisy at night, far less cowardly at the sight of danger or disturbances. In fact they started to become brave! Chasing little children that came too close to their nests, sitting right in my lap as I ate my lunch, and walking on top of the napping dogs as they roamed their yard.   The chickens became unreasonably brave, chasing maids and gardeners who entered their territory, climbing roofs, and eating food that was not for them.
This may have been funny and often times scary to observe, but when it came time for the chickens to be slaughtered (much to the children’s dismay) , the chickens were too confident to realize the man with a knife was here to kill them, and they would only run last minute. Baffled and annoyed at their failure to flee, I approached my gardener and asked him,
“why do these chickens not run!?”
He laughed and pointed at some roosters fighting and said back to me,
“that’s what chickens do. Chickens will be chickens”

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Chickens are both symbols of cowardice and fearless pride. What determines which characteristic we see, tends to depend on what the chicken’s environment promotes.

I wonder what it means when we think of boys being boys as an inescapable truth that only applies to their weakness.

I wonder if like the chickens we assume their behavior is justified and permanent.
I wonder where the line is drawn as absurd or nature. Like the chickens and the dogs versus the chickens and the branch on the roof; a cat-call versus writing an inappropriate comment on their photos or posts.

Boys will be… what we allow them to be.

In the academic world, there is a group of words that are a nightmare to deal with. They are a nightmare, not because their bad or anything like that, they are a nightmare because we know exactly what they mean but have no way of defining them well enough to match the meaning in our head. There are quite a few of these words, but the most popular ones are “justice” and “love”. 

At first it may feel really easy to define them (that’s the meaning you have in your head speaking), but when you try and write it down, chances are you’re going to have either a biased description or a description that is describing something else. By “biased” I mean, your culture, beliefs, or experiences are determining the meaning of the word; and so outside of you, the meaning isn’t always applicable. People who ascribe to a religion tend to meet this problem more.
By “describing something else” I mean that you’re probably associating the word with a concept that runs really close to it. So for “justice” for example, people tend to confuse it with the word and concept of “fairness” but the two are very different. Or in the case of “Love” sometimes I tend to confuse it with the idea of “generosity” especially generosity in food.

Ironically Purple Lipstick’s motto is “Love Always”, a really intense application of the word.
As a part of the Purple Lipstick team I couldn’t walk around with this really powerful statement and not at least try and define what I meant when I said it. I feel as though my research turned up really successful, and though I haven’t had time to run them by my professors and peers (mostly because I’m scared I’m wrong, because I really like this definition) I think you might like it too.

What is Love? Love is not a feeling, it isn’t an emotion, it is not a chemically controlled reaction; it creates and expresses itself through these, but it is not them. If it were, it would be flimsy and inconstant, like anger or jealousy. Love is far more complex...

Love is a decision to expand your identity.

Before things get confusing let me first give you a decent philosophical definition and then we’ll break it down and you can decide what you think ;] :
“Love is the decision to include the other into the identity of the self, it is the expansion of what the self sees as “I” ”
key words here are “the self”, “expand”, “the other”, and “identity”. By “the self”, I mean “the thinking thing”, the voice reading this in your head; the thing, that the body feeds, defends, and holds as a priority for its existence. By “the other” I mean the things outside of the “thinking thing”. By “expand” I mean the action of including something else into the boundaries of the “thinking thing”, and by “identity” I mean the name you give your existence.

I know that was a lot of “things” and quite a lot to process, read it twice and slowly, and I guarantee it’ll sound less busy. What I define Love as, and what I mean when I say the word Love, is: I am expanding my identity, expanding the severity of relevance of something/someone to me. The way my limbs rush to my defense in reflex to danger, the way my immune system sacrifices and commits to threats to my survival, the way my heart pounds with the joy of my little successes, the way I take care of this body that makes up the “I” that it holds as the beginning and end of its identity. When I love something, I extend this behavior to them. Their life becomes as relevant as my own, and I rush to their defense, their goals, safety, and happiness are worth my sacrifice, their joy, sadness, experiences are as if they were my own, because “I” no longer only means me, but it means “them” too.

I really like this definition, but I’d really appreciate it if you have a different definition in mind, or if you had something you wanted to add. Go ahead and tell us what it is on one of your social platforms.

Love Always,

Albert