If you have that one laptop that has been with you through thick and thin for many years put up your hand. Thanks. Put it down. I was not going to write about my laptop journey but then I turned on this thing only for it to shut down after ten seconds. Reason? Battery. It is now a desktop. I can only use it when it’s connected to power. Another handy trick that makes it last for a few minutes is charging removing the battery while it is connected and then putting it back. It’s annoying. I am not about to get a new battery. Why? This is the second battery to have served this laptop. The first died the same way.
Thoughts and Stuff Posts
It’s Sunday. You know me. I love me some Sunday. Today was different though. It was Founders’ Day at AHS. The 90th anniversary. Coincidentally, it was school birthday at AGHS. But as they say, there’s no such thing as coincidence. School birthday was supposed to be last Sunday, but it was pushed to today for some reason. So I cheated on my alma mater and spent the day at across, mostly because my brother is in form four. Back when we lived at across, Founders’ Day was a modest ceremony. We all fit in the chapel, it took just two hours or so and we ate nice little baked stuff from the kitchen in the lawn behind the chapel. Kimori and I loved these times! Nowadays, the service takes the whole day, in the sun or if you’re early, the tents, and there are no sweet little snacks at the end! Just kawaida food. Childhood memories are just the best!
Anyway, that’s not why I’m writing. I’m writing because of something the preacher said.
I was eventually going to run on near empty if I wrote everyday. Hehe. Anyway, it’s 11.21 pm and I’ll beat the deadline.
If you’ve been here a while, you must remember my many posts about my Samsung phones. Well, I can tell you now, without mincing my words, that I’ll never buy a Samsung phone again, for myself. I added that part because I just bought one for my dad. He insisted he only trusts Samsung, now that he doesn’t have his beloved Nokia choice. Oh well. At least I got to be offered a drink at that Samsung shop near Lifestyle. Lol.
Depending on whether you live in a cave or not, this may or may not come as a shock. It started as a bluff. Everyday I’d wake up and joke about it. I’d comb my hair different just to see what people would say. During the combing, half my hair would fall to the floor of my bedroom. It was just sad. A visit to the salon would make me feel stupid. Nothing would change despite leaving money behind with the hairdresser. The pixie cut lost its form. A colleague asked me if I go to the salon at all because it looked bad. And that was the end of me and that pixie, in my head. Everyone thought I didn’t care about my hair. That was bad. I stopped going to the salon. I would wash am treat my hair myself at home, contemplating my next move.
This is a story about a girl. A girl who was in love. A girl who was in love but didn’t know it. A girl named Clara.
You know what, let’s not beat about the bush. I know Clara. She told me this story herself. I didn’t know what to think or to advise her, but I’ll let you be the judge.
Don’t you just love the feeling when you get home and loosen all your clothes and feel free to be you? You know, get rid of that annoying bra that you only notice is tight at 7 pm? That pair of pants that gets real tight at the tummy when you sit in your swivel chair after lunch? That pair of shoes you bought this weekend that only became tight when you walked out of the shop? I know you know what I’m talking about, girls. I don’t know about the boys in the building and whether they ever wear things they can’t wait to get out of, but hey, who knows, right? Maybe they will tell us.
Sometimes I get mad. Real mad. Super mad. Very angry. Most times, it’s not even the big things that drive me up against the wall. Nah. It’s the little things. When people insist on talking rather than doing. When someone does not do their work and I suffer for it by doing it on their behalf. There are times I get ticked off for a second. Like when my brother opens the tin of jam and leaves it open. Or when he leaves a completely clean kitchen littered after one food adventure. Or when mum keeps calling out my name while I’m on phone. Or when dad misreports something I did to mum. Or when my sister won’t sleep and finds all sorts of reasons to move around the house at 11pm banging doors and visiting the loo ten times. Or when my other brother decides to not do what I say. Yeah, big sister syndrome. I will shout. I will shout louder. I’ll make sure everyone in the house knows I’m mad,including the cats. But I forget I was mad a few minutes later.
You sigh a lot nowadays, whether in text or physically. You rarely feel anything anymore. You have lived long enough to know some things are not worth wasting your emotions over. Even when you do feel something, you’re human after all, you move on very fast.
You have a crush in the office building. He looks like a sweet chap. But every moment you get, you ignore him, pretend not to see him, unless your eyes lock and you have no choice of pretending not to have seen him. Hi there. He probably has a girlfriend or wife, in all likelihood.
I am seated on my usual chair in the living room typing this. My brother makes fun of me about this chair. He says it’s like I was cemented here, on the dining table. Anyway, it’s been a quiet weekend. I wanted it that way. I was rather irritable at the end of the workweek. It was a crazy one. I just wanted to shut everything out and move on to February. So far, so good. I remembered to write after reading Murithi Mutiga’s piece today. It’s been a minute since I read him, or anything in the newspaper for that matter. I like how he argues his points. Very legit. He will say something you disagree with and somehow you will just nod your head along. He wonders why there is no street named after Jaramogi in Nairobi. The other piece I read this weekend was pushed to me by B, this week’s piece by Ciku Muiruri. It’s about her name or rather our names. Names. Names. Names.
Sigh. It’s mid Jan. How did that happen? You struggle to get out of bed today, as always. You remember sleeping without answering all the texts on your phone. One was about an engagement on Facebook. Facebook will never leave you alone, will it? Despite you not logging in for two months. The other was a good night from another friend. You wanted to reply but couldn’t. Not that you had something else to do except read that book that has you glued to its pages and lying in bed in all sorts of awkward positions.
First of all, allow me to go backwards and start without much ado because I am just itching to express my thoughts on Americanah. I know I said I’d never read it but one Sunday evening I was feeling like I had nothing else to read (which was obviously not true) so I reached out to the book and turned the pages that looked like they had been turned by 20 people before me. Chimamanda got my attention on that first page when she talked about braiding and on the second page, where she mentioned that Ifemelu had a blog. Just because she captured me with this character with a blog, I hang on when she started making it look like women who straighten their hair have a missing part of their africanness than those who braid theirs. I always get pissed off at people who want to make one way of maintaining African hair superior to the other. At this point, I would rather Njoki Chege than Chimamanda. Okay, maybe I have gone too far but you get my point.
Conversations start with either “Sasa wewe…” or “Nani…” Sometimes, the conversation starts with “I hope you have something important to tell me…”
The conversations can last a few seconds or even two hours or so.
But before I digress…
We all want to have the “kind, caring and understanding, soft-spoken, always there” kind of friend. You know the ones we keep in our colourful imaginary lists of must-have traits.
So I just sat and thought that this would be a cool thing to do every year to take stock on de blog. This will be a great way for…
Warning: If you think I break grammar rules, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Sometimes I just exist. Just exist waiting for the next big thing to happen so I can start living again. That’s the reason I have not blogged and it’s mid month of my favourite month. Something must seriously be wrong with Shiku, you must have said to yourself. Wonder no more, because here is the lowdown.
Argh. I’ll be so late for my driving lesson. This Uber driver decided to get lost so I waited over 20 minutes. That never happens. They are always right on time. Anywho, I can’t wait to tell my instructor the weekend drama. Thanks to the Pope, I haven’t been to class since Tuesday. So I got tired of waiting and decided to take matters into my own hands. I am literally that driven.