Debbienho !

Hellooo. *waves* By now you know that when I start a post like that it’s going to be neither wordy nor sensible. I should probably stop shooting myself in the foot like that. About a month ago I showed my Mom a drawing. It was a hyper-realistic work of art made (by Kelvin Okafor; check him out on Twitter if you can) that had me drop my jaws. It was amazing! I saved it, and went to my old girl to get her to appreciate it with me. She squinted at my phone and said, ‘You now you don’t draw again.’ Ah. Like, just appreciate the thing eh. In her defense, the last time I completed a  drawing   was in April. I know. My record is iiimpressive. So… I drew. Again. Yaay. I’m sorry she doesn’t have fingers. Seriously. (Took about three hours—some of whose minutes I spent running around my hall, going to the kitchen and saying out loud that I was hungry, dressing up to go and buy roasted plantain, returning home in frustration because there was non

Raise your hand if 2016 has been the worst year of your life. Someone on Twitter captured it perfectly in a tweet: ‘2016 has been some like joke like play year oh.’ Perfectly . This year has been one of the most shocking, in all my life, to be mild. Swinging into 2016 I had a sort of vision, of how the year was going to go. No, I wasn’t praying that there’d be showers of gold, and unicorns, and rainbows. In 2015 some…foundations had been laid, and I figured that this year they sort of would be built upon. Things would follow a logical progression. In my subconscious I had a somewhat defined picture of how the year was going to go. But, it was like when this picture was forming, this was 2016.  Oh, you have no idea what’s coming to you! I didn’t. A lot happened this year that left me shaken, and broken, and utterly confused, and sometimes just downright mad. The jolly-yet-realistic expectations my mind had drawn up just took one look at me, gave me a lops

A ‘friend’ of mine performed a hat-trick at an awards show last night. Friend’s in quotes…because we’re not really friends. There was this one time in level 200 I shall never forget, when she made me come to school on a day I did NOT want to come to school. I CANNOT forget that. (I hug you when we meet but all I really want to do is pull your hair.) But she’s struck some gold these past days, and, to paraphrase Obi, when you hit success, everyone becomes famzy. Social convention demands a respectable level of ahosh from my side. (And I kind of need an excuse to update my blog. It’s been an age and a half.) Eerhn. So here it is. So the show was the Eminence Awards, created by one of our own in GIJ to honour exemplary students, but with a lot more pizzazz and fun to distinguish it from the usual blandness that comes with speech and prize day celebrations. The night’s ballon d’or winner was (the one, the onlyyyy) Tryphena Yeboah, who picked up the Best Print Reporter, B

School. It doesn’t get any easier, does it? But you don’t care. So I won’t talk about school. I put another book up on Okadabooks! Yaaay! It’s called “First Sons” and it wants you to read it! I should give some background on this story, I believe. It was for class, my Creative Writing IA, really. We had about one month and a half to produce a novel in exchange for what, forty marks? And, being as dutiful and responsible as I was, I waited till about twelve days to the deadline, and remembered I had to start. I know. No student more serious than me. I’m putting it out now because some of those who read Scaredy Cat! wanted something longer. Plus, better out here than only hidden on my laptop where only I can read it. Genre? Oh, it’s a lot of genres. It’s Christian, but I don’t profess to be a fount of all knowledge, and I don’t say this is a replacement for the Bible. God helped me write it a lot—no other conclusion would make sense to justify m

(When you have the time, check out Try . She’s an amazing writer with unbelievable talent. I’m secretly jealous of her but I can’t say it because I’m supposed to be nice. The hardship of living among humans.) I put something up, by the way. (I know, big news.) On Okadabooks. Whaaat? You don’t know what Okadabooks is? Alright. I’ll be nice (again, the hardship of living among humans) and explain it to you. Okadabooks is a…place where writers can post their writing and readers can…read the writing that writers post. Yeah. And it’s really simple to use. You could go to their page, www.Okadabooks.com , or download the Okada books app from your mobile app store. You create an account, and you’re good to go. Oh, and it’s all free.  Yeah. Yeah, what I posted. It’s a short story. I wrote it forever ago for a contest, then couldn’t enter it, so…it sat on a certain hard drive for a long time. And I found it again some days back. So I pimped it some, added a minimalist cover,

So Usain Bolt has really never stood on a lower podium in all the Olympics he’s attended. Always on the highest one, in the middle. Ei. Ghana. When? Wheeen ? Côte d’Ivoire has won some oh (I was so happy I almost cried). You too win some! (This is the second part of an earlier post. You can read that one  here .) 5. Can anybodyyyy find meee somebody tooo love? *Rachel Potter voice* Yeah I think I need one of those. I think. I imagine people in relationships stay up late having winding conversations that end something like ‘You hang up’/ ‘No, you hang up’ / ‘No, you hang up’ and MTN is having a field day. You know what I stayed up thinking about in the past three weeks? (Who am I kidding? This stretches beyond those three weeks.) The thrill of watching Elaine Thompson finish ahead of Dafni Schippers. Is Shaunae Miller’s fall across the finish line something athletes will be replicating in coming days? Why did Jebet slow down before she finished…if she’d kept up the pace she

Some of us became temporarily nocturnal this month. We wanted to see if Usain Bolt will do his treble treble. That guy is too much fun. I enjoyed his brief bromance with Andre de Grasse. How will the Olympic world recover from Bolt’s exit? Anyway, I learned a few things. A few. 10. I’m not that much into sports. So it’s been said, that I like sports, and I do well because I follow it. Well, it took seventeen days of competition to prove all of that wrong. Apparently there are tons of sporting events that I never knew of. The Olympics happen once in four years, but in those intervals there are mini-Olympics, you know, indoor championships, the Diamond League, the IAAF championships. Handball leagues. BMX. Volleyball tourneys! Listening to those commentators harp on and on about this competitor’s season’s best and personal best and who won what earlier this year made me feel so dumb. All I follow is the NBA, barely, and the WNBA is dead to me, and my football knowledge is

P.S. I discovered this amazing blog, www.delatheinker.wordpress.com , and I think you should see it. Especially if I’ve annoyed you before. And even if I haven’t, I assure you I will soon, so go and see it. Now to what the crazy fairy left in my room again. * Dear Indian Television Series, Namaste! I see you a lot nowadays. Sometimes because I want to, because in my rankings—and every one knows that counts for something—British humour comes first, then Indian, then…the rest. Sometimes against my will, because…I’m passing by the television set and you’re just…there! A lot. On so many channels. You’re almost…inevitable now. But that’s not the problem. Although it could count as one, because I consider how ubiquitous you are on local TV and I wonder if any of our series are on your TV channels in India. Do Ravi and Seeta cut conversations short and run home because they don’t want to miss a second of Bongo Bar? But who cares? I do. Whatever it be,

The English Premier League last season, a.k.a., How Leicester went from Ugly Duckling to Pretty Swan, turned out to be, as predicted, utterly unpredictable. For one, the defending champions, Chelsea, who’d maintained the lead in the previous season pretty much the entire season, struggled to find form in the 2015/2016 season under their manager and much-loved Mourinho, who may possibly have his third seasons jinxed. They disappointed and clutched at straws and breathed sighs of relief and sighs of despair and lost when you expected them to win and drew when you expected them to lose and became a delightful joke (of course, that you’ll find humour at Chelsea’s expense depends on which side of the divide you are) in the Premiership. Remi Garde. Steve McClaren. Roberto Martinez. What these three have in common—coaches all shown the door. Last season’s EPL was a rather fun coach exodus. Aston Villa, Everton, Swansea, Watford, among others, pulled a Pharaoh and let their coaches go