You know advertising is powerful when you walk into the ladies and hope there is tissue paper and then when you see it, you think, “Tissue si tissue, tissue ni Hanan.” Epic fail. I hate that advert. Nevertheless it is engrained in my head. In fact, come to think of it, if I was responsible for buying tissue in the house, I’d actually try it out. I will try you out when I move out, Hanan. You can go ahead and thank that guy. What’s his name again? I know it’s not Otoyo. Wait. Think, Shiku, think. Colourful clothes. Luo accent. I give up.

Anyway, who goes into a public facility and makes away with an entire roll of tissue paper?

If you have met me, you know I am small. Very small, or rather, small for my age. I did not even know I was small until around high school. For one, my younger brother just shot up overnight. Today, he looks like the first born in the family. Secondly I bumped into my frenemy one afternoon in the green city in the sun. He probably thought I was tall and all because my status updates on Facebook back then probably gave a sense of height. Lofty and high. Ahem. Anyway, he could not shut up about how small I was after that. Since then, 2009, to date, he has never shut up about it. He digs up blog articles on short girls on sites like Thought Catalog or funny pics and drops them on my Facebook wall. And since he has some strange influence among our Facebook circle of friends, he roped other friends in in re-emphasizing my height.

I laugh out loud at the jokes. Initially, back when I was too serious for life, I’d hate the taunting. But we grow up. Even if it is not obvious on the outside. Lol. I love being short. I love it so much, I will tell you why.

You know that bout of unwanted thoughts that invade you from out of the blue? That annoying urge to go far away from everything and just be alone. I have a lot of those. Especially on Monday mornings. I have nothing against Mondays. Actually, I kinda look forward to them. Mondays always breathe a new sense of being into me. Because you never know what will happen that week. You don’t know what weird man will honk at you as you take your routine 15 minute walk up that suburban Westlands road. You have no idea who you will bump into in the bus or on the street. Your employer may come up with a whole new way of doing things. You might even end up writing a post you had no idea you could in here. Your computer could decide this is the week it freezes a gazillion times between 9 and 5. The possibilities are limitless.

Today, I am feeling bad because I am still single. Yes. It happens. All the time. I always wonder how long this will go on. What my chances are of meeting someone while behind the keyboard for 3/4 of my days. The other 1/4 I am asleep of course. The thing about this feeling of desperation today is that it is different. It is different because I am no longer in campus. I am about a year old out here since leaving the great Moi University. That institution was quite something. If you frequent this space (or rather, the old blog) you know how I could go on and on and on about that institution.

By Okaka Felix 

2009 was a year of firsts.

It was the first ever Valentine’s Day that caught me with a Tortoise si Toto. Let it be well noted that by then I was on girlfriend number 3. Maybe, just maybe, I was a serial dater. 2009 was also the year I broke my tradition of courting a desktop girlfriend. You see, research by Synovate, Infotrak et al has shown that I have always had an affinity for laptops. I swear it was true love.

The day is finally here with us. I graduate from the unparalleled Moi University on the 17th of December 2013. Let us all breathe a sigh of relief. My endless posts on my dissatisfaction in the institution are almost over now. It has been an interesting journey. If it was not for Moi University, I probably would not have started this blog. We owe it that, if not anything else. I travelled to Moi this Wednesday the 11th to collect my ‘academic attire’ or, in layman’s terms, graduation gown (pictures coming soon). During the journey, I jotted this down: