Personal

Dear Santa, I have been a good bloke this year.. Kindly review and revert… Images do not belong to me…… unfortunately…

I told The Friend I wanted something to occupy me all December….Bar the first two weeks of December - when I get to wrap up multiple work projects - I will be lazing around on an extended holiday… She knows I have a thing for writers… and writing…. and that I’m more comfortable writing stuff than saying stuff… So we thought I’d blog every day for sixty days.. First thirty will be following the 30 days of truth meme over at Hope Blog; the next thirty… I’m yet to decide… Hopefully, its therapeutic…. Even I am slightly concerned at what I might see when I begin to dig beneath the surface of me…. ...

The Big Freeze hits…. [Pics included] Sigh….

One of my essential life principles is never allowing myself to exercise regret. Time and time again, when decisions appear in hindsight to have been poorly thought out, I try to prevent myself from slipping into regret mode.. I am of the opinion that time spent in regret analysing the what-might-have-beens would be better served breaking the problem into smaller bits and devising a means of resolving its constituents. Recently though, I have allowed that tightly held principle to slip from my grasp. ...

Or an apology for all the nights you worry about me….. One of my mother’s slightly more compelling arguments against the notion of - in her words - entrenched singleness is the false simplicity that being single and responsible for only oneself brings. Over the past ten years I have learnt to do my things, my way and in my time - considering the consequences only as they impact me. That has been useful when I have had to make potentially life changing decisions - like quitting my day job at a fairly well known engineering firm to head back to full time study in 2008 or loaning a friend a hefty pile of money (which he is vacillating on paying back by the way). Mother is wrong on one count - my being single isn’t the only cause; there is after all my natural proclivity to be a loner of sorts. Perpetually plugged into my iPod, having my nose stuck in books, emailing and SMSing friends instead of calling have all contributed to my increasingly tenuous connections with the real world. Living alone for all those years hasn’t helped either. ...

Almost on a whim, I signed up to sponsor a child via World Vision. The decision was taken without much thought whilst passing through the Mall at Union Square. November 11th is a special day in the RustGeek household; its the day the patriarch and the matriarch completed their nuptials as well as the day the one we lost to the genes was born. In the part of the world where I am, it is also Remembrance day. ...

For Gracie, who the genes took… You never saw the thirteenth summer through- before the genes claimed you. You always were - the sallow one, knuckle- kneed, paper thin, but - the lights in your jaundiced eyes shone: through pain and fear, and hope and tears. The strength in your voice never dimmed, never waned, until the genes - like a belligerent marabout’s curse - turned you, to a mound of red- dead earth ...

A bloke can do no worse than believe his own hype… Sigh.

Things about some women I still don’t understand….. How they manage to go from hag to wag in twenty short minutes on bus 23: Each day I get on the bus, I am treated to a minor miracle. The ladies - and they are the same ‘offenders’ in the main - unfailingly whip out their boxes and mirrors and get to work. Within the space of a short bus ride, the transformation is complete. Several brushes, colours and peeks in the mirror later, they are virtually unrecognizable. Just why that couldn’t be achieved at home before hopping on the bus beats me hollow though. Why odd coloured shoes make it into the aso-ebi list: Last April, I was hounded well nigh to death by purple shoes. Thing was a good friend of mine had to keep up appearances attend some function - the specifics of which escape me. The clothes were done and dusted - only problem was that purple shoes were required. It just so happened that purple shoes were out of stock in all the shops she knew to check, and yours truly was called upon to devise a solution. Needless to say I failed woefully - not through lack of effort as I even went the distance of setting up a conference call just for them shoes - but due to the sheer absurdity of the choice of colour. My theory is that the first women who had aso-ebi’s had major shares in a shoe manufacturer and chose odd colours so that the shoes could not be re-used thereby guaranteeing increased revenues! Why some people think lime-green eyeliner works on their ebony-black face: Whilst quickly looking through lounging on amebobook the other day, I stumbled on a picture of some random chic with lime-green eyeliner. You know how a friend of a friend comments on a picture and amebobook somehow manages to put them onto your news feed in all their gory glory - that was it. Granted it was in the spirit of the Nigerian Independence celebrations, and people had to pretend to be patriotic by wearing green-ish stuff, but surely there were mirrors at home… and in the rare event of there not being mirrors, friends and family could have alerted said chic to the incongruity of the eye-liner? How they manage to still feign surprise over stuff they knew would happen anyways: The ladies at MO Corp have banded themselves into some sort of fraternity. Ladies-only lunches, baby club discussions (at my desk no less), and the ‘official’ baby shower for the pregged ladies on their last day of work. Its all well and good to have baby showers - great pizza, us blokes get to leave a wee bit early on a Friday and all, but I never can quite get over the false sense of surprise them ladies seem to muster. I mean, its standard practice that you’ll get a baby shower. Expect it, and spare us the excessive oohs ahhhs, and the drama! arghhh… Why you wear ‘six’ inch heels to church and then take them off midway through the service: I am an ‘apostle’ of functionality which is why them ladies who wear six inch heels and then take them off midway leave me worried. Surely, the shoes can’t be so uncomfortable that they can’t stay on for two and a half hours only? Why you manage to tear up ever so freely in church: Every time I get the misfortune of being sat next to a particular young lady in church, I groan inwardly. Problem is not that she’s got a massive dose of BO, but that she manages to contort her face in so many twists and turns that I’m left wondering if I am safe. 90% of the time, she’ll cry during the worship - often times that is the precise moment I am discreetly reviewing my twitter timeline, an indicator of just how bored with the whole experience I am. It really is just the worship right?I have a sneaky feeling, that it might be more than just the worship, perhaps she is remembering what Bro Okon did the night before… Sigh… ...

The sudden realization, that it took me only a month and a half to fill a Nandos loyalty card has left me with a mixture of sadness and fear - sadness at the sheer number of chicken that have lost their lives to feed my lust for peri-peri chicken, and fear at what those loads of chemical laced proteins is doing to my innards… So for a week - to pacify my conscience, i will eat vegetarian only… That will be difficult because my early morning bacon sandwich and coffee from Sainsbury, my company paid bacon/egg/mushroom roll on Fridays, and all the other good meaty stuff I live for will get tossed out.. Healthy eating was one of the four critical categories for 2010, I need to get a jump on it….