Do you know any of those people, or are you one of those people with whom it seems like everything is going smoothly? From those people who know how to express everything with a good dose of flexibility? As if convenience is their nickname. Such people are flexing. They make it look easy, you understand? The things that life confronts them with are easy for them. Within the Smibanese society we call such people flexers.
You also have those people who see a problem in everything, who seem to be a magnet for trouble. You know it, those people who, in every situation, make a mistake in the flow of the moment. The kind I’m talking about now are the stiff among us, and their cure is the flex. For it is when one expresses the flex that they heal themselves of all the suffering that being stiff brings.
Stiff doesn’t want to be you. Being stiff – in Dutch: being stiff – is an attitude to life in which people subconsciously deprive themselves of all the frivolous. People who allow themselves to be dominated by fear, frozen by insecurity or held hostage in their comfort zone.
We at Smibanese University are on flexing. Do you know why? Because that’s just that model. Nature imposes this on us because all things that sparkle with life force are flexible, right? Take a plant, for example: it is healthy when it is flexible. A healthy plant is bright green, moist and pliable. What happens when such a plant dies? Then that tori gets hard, and that shit starts to stiffen. The same with a body, when life has just left the body. A deceased person literally stiffens from the second he or she leaves life. What I’m trying to illustrate with these examples is that all living things are flexible, and inanimate things are stiff.
Flexing is showing yourself from your best side. For example, if you want to do something and don’t know how, but don’t let yourself be stiffened by ignorance: that’s flex behaviour. Or when you end up in an unfamiliar situation, but you bend that tori to your will: that is flex behaviour. Flexing is also when you wear that perfectly matching outfit with that brand new patta, and you come up with a nice scent that they can’t guess the brand at the Douglas. Even then you are flexing. We at Smibanese University demand the flex from our students. ‘Thou shalt not be stiff’ is one of the ten Smibological commandments. So if we can give you anything on this one, it’s the following, flex a little, man. Don’t be stiff.
Prof. dr. Specieskill (1993) is a writer from Bijlmer in Amsterdam, including the Smibanese dictionary, co-founder of hip-hop platform SMIB Worldwide and founder of Smibanese University, SMIB’s ‘fictional hip-hop school’.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of September 24, 2022