Personal and Rambling 2

Caribbean Women are not like Caribbean men, and of course, it goes without saying that Caribbean men are not like Caribbean women in their manner of thinking. We are able to clearly see one of these differences when Caribbean women ( particularly younger Caribbean women- teens and twenties) are forced to deal with one of the more common features of Caribbean life: the mater of village gossip.
 These days Caribbean women are not confronted with just village gossip any longer, it is now much more widespread than gossip limited to the villages in which they live. Women now own cars and easily make connections with people far from their own hometowns. They have cellular phones and access to the internet, so that the gossip they are compelled to deal with is no longer limited to what the women  outside their own villages have to say about them, but also what those in the village nearby and far away are gossiping.
 Caribbean men don't seem as affected by gossip as Caribbean women are.
 Gossip is a way of life for humans everywhere; humans simply love a good story, particularly one about people we are familiar with. This is clearly understood when women get together to talk about their favorite television personalities. They discuss the characters as though they truly know who these people are, and this is a key component in determining how much pleasure they receive from the discussion. Women sometimes feel so intimate with television characters that many claim to have fallen in "love" with them. This sense of familiarity somehow seems necessary in order to make gossip worth our interest. The more familiar we are (or feel that we are) with the persons gossiped about, it seems, the more interested we become in hearing it.
 The working of the Caribbean female mind is beyond the understanding of the Caribbean male. Caribbean men, for instance, do not seem able to understand that when they meet a new woman they are interested in, and attempt to give reasons for the breakup, or the breaking-up, of themselves and the former, or soon-to-be former lover ( Caribbean men do this quite a lot. They think they must malign the former lover in order to gain the empathy of the lover they want, perhaps believing that this opens a gate to the heart of the desired woman) they are really not doing themselves any favor.
 Caribbean men must understand that there is evidently something in the  Caribbean woman's brain which instinctively sees herself in every other woman there is on the planet, and that while he is telling her how awful his former lover was or is, the woman is listening to him, but deep in her mind she is very likely wondering, " Well,if this man can talk so terribly about a woman who carried his child, pushed out that child who now calls him daddy; made love to him in the still hours of the morning; cooked his meals and fed his tail, what in hell would he say about me who have not done these things for him?"
 Of course he cannot know this because he cannot understand how the minds of the Caribbean  women work. He thinks she is listening to him, and quite likely she is, but she is also listening to the turning  wheels in her brain, warning her that  he will be  telling some other woman the very same things about her too, if she gets involved with him, and he, for whatever reason feels he ought to move on.