Men have endless talents but the most dominant, which happens to be annoying to the fairer sex, is that which allows us to go on watching TV, playing a video game or napping while there’s a domestic crisis going on around us. 

This can be a kid breaking glasses or banging on the door, an unwanted visitor with stale jokes or the bulldozer leveling the soon-to-be neighbours land. Usually I don’t find any of these disruptive to what I seem to be interested in at the time. 

Whenever my niece Keza visits, my sister is always speechless and usually a little resentful that I show total disregard when Keza marches through the house banging a spoon on a frying pan in an attempt to gain attention.

She usually can’t get her to stop and eventually attends to Keza’s demands such as food, a bicycle ride or juice that she will not touch and instead run to her dolls. Well, women might wonder how men do it since they are the people most known for multi-tasking. 

It is a special inborn gift that has been passed down from our cave-dwelling ancestors. In the stone-age period, it was important to have enough rest and be prepared for abrupt attacks by major threats of the time, including mosquitoes and sharp-toothed big cats.

Because of the major threats at the time, man trained the brain to sieve out minor incidents and less important drama that might drain his energy and leave him powerless when serious danger came around. 

It is that in-built sensor that guides us to this day, it runs non-stop all year around, consistently filtering all the happenings around us to let us know when we actually have to make good use of our precious power reserves.

Nonetheless, there are some incidents that happen and I’m forced to doubt how effective this filter is. Like a time when Keza jumped off the dining table or when she smeared herself with charcoal when I was left with her. Nothing big happened and I consider both occurrences as a test-run of the filter. 

By the way, there’s a chain of thought that wants us to believe that we are evolving or should have; but this inborn gift is harder than the evolution process. Houses have evolved from caves to mega structures that even a jet plane would find hard to knock down, and using this basis, women are arguing that this whole theory of preserving our energy to repel some imaginary "threat” is wearing a bit thin and we should all share in the joys of being interrupted by kids for the most flimsy of reasons.

I will wait for that day when the filters actually wear off, but until then, I am bound to my genetic programme and have no option but to turn a blind eye and deaf ear to the constant shrieks for attention from kids. Or relatives. I just don’t hear them.