Notice ME

My parents practically banned all forms of vernacular in our household to the best of my memory. Don't get me wrong, they encouraged us to indulge in our culture and speak our language but English first, because they aligned it to education. So in the end we could barely speak our mother tongues fluently and we were never allowed to speak Pidgin English, which is a kind of Creole common amongst western Africans.

Yet children often pick things up from school. One of these many linguistic strays I picked up would be the colloquial terms used by my peers to tease attention seekers. Notice me. Feelamonge. These two I remember fondly. They were one of those things that left you terribly hurt whenever you were on the receiving end of them, though you never really knew why. Even now, I think I would bite the head clean off anyone bold enough to accuse me of seeking attention. I remember the sting of choked tears at the back of my throat when someone I was quite fond of reminded me, with no shortage of nonchalance, that the world didn't in fact revolve around me.

Yet to some extent I know that I am. My blogging is proof. My social networking is proof. My interaction with friends and acquaintances is proof. So I begin to wonder: is it a sign of our times, a stigma on our generation? Are we cursed to constantly feel like we are incomplete, incompetent and therefore need to feed of off the attention we can scrape together from others, all the while feigning innocence and humility? Or is it just me? It's probably just me...but then again, I suppose it goes back to the cliche about no man being an island, because in all honesty, who amongst us can survive alone?