Welcoming My Editor

Yes, my little blog now has an editor if you can imagine. I like to think of it as a sign of the growing popularity of my work; but in reality it's probably the result of the frustration of one of my readers at my atrocious grammar and spelling. The problem is, I can never proof read my work once I've written my first draft and I don't pay attention to the intricacy of grammar and what not when I'm writing.

Before I introduce you to my editor, let me show you a snippet of the conversation that leads to his hiring; it happened on twitter: 

Him: I want to be your editor
Me: Editor how? #interested
Him: Editor to your blog. Let's face it my grammar is way better than yours but you have better ideas than mine.

So without further ado let me introduce you to my editor!! @furry_kid (his twitter handle)!!!!! He comes to us from his own blog, called ummm… it doesn't matter anymore, he's with us now. He's an avid reader, video game enthusiast and one of my best friends (I should do a post about him soon). Wait, I've remembered the name to his blog, it's called My Beautiful Words.

Weird he should name it that, considering there's little beauty about his words J. Okay I'm kidding; but he did mention that my ideas were better than his (I loved that part the most)!!!! I'm going to think of him as my first employee ever (he'll hate that *evil laughter*). He'll be responsible for making sure that everything that appears on the blog, and in my name elsewhere, is proper: proper English, correct grammar and correct syntax. So if you see any errors in any posts henceforth, let me know so I can have a good reason to blast him!!

Finally, someone be a dear and leave a comment here welcoming @furry_kid. I'd really appreciate it! One last thing, my grammar and spelling isn't that bad, is it? Peace!!!!

Testing Friendship

I was feeling extremely shitty yesterday so I didn't put up a post; I actually thought I had gotten malaria but I'm feeling better now. Also, the heat around here was oppressive. There was no escape! It was so hot that even drinking cold water wasn't helping. Of course with the heat comes dust because most of the roads here are just murram; my shoes can't stay clean longer than 30 seconds.:(

Enough about my weather woes and on to today's post. It won't be a long post because I really don't have much to say. I think I may be about to get into one of my broody moods. When I get into those, I spend hours on my own thinking about whatever it was that got me in that mood. It can't be very healthy because usually the conclusions I come to are depressing.

Like this mood that's been hanging over me is about friendship. I've been contemplating about the people I call my friends and whether the sacrifices I'd make for them would be reciprocated. And how would you test it? How would you know? At what point do you call someone a friend? If you have to test it then it isn't truly a friendship because you don't trust them, is it?

I once read somewhere that you can count as friends those people you can call past midnight when in trouble and they'll get out of bed to help. I think that it's a very solid test, don't you? I've only ever been in such a situation once, of course. I had just dropped another friend of mine at her room after an extremely rowdy session of drinking in my room. I was drunk and on a whim called another friend of mine who lived in a nearby building. It must have been 12.30am. She came and kept me company in the cold for almost two hours mostly listening to me (I'm talkative when drunk). Yeah, she's a true friend.

So how do you decide who you call a friend? At which point, for you, does someone move from acquaintance to friend? Let me know in the comments or by email. Peace!!!

Why I got in...a relationship post

I just came to the end of the longest relationship (of the romantic kind) I've had so far. I could never claim to be experienced in relationships; I mean this was only the third serious relationship I had ever been in. It lasted exactly six months, one week and two days. Wow! That's a long time for someone my age.

There's a lot that I had wanted to write about while in the relationship but I felt it would better for it to end before I could start putting them online. While my girlfriend never knew of my blog, I felt it would be disrespectful to the relationship to put such things in the public domain.

However, I have got no problem with doing it now. So that's what I'll be doing for the next few posts, if I can, dissecting and writing about my experience in the relationship. I'll trying to write them as a block of continuous posts but that may not be possible. The post will be mostly in narrative form and probably pointless but I hope you'll, at the very least, be entertained. They may also be sparsely populated with advice (which you should write down and memorise because they'll be GOLD - yes, I'm blowing my own horn)

This first post will be about why I got into the relationship. With the benefit of hind sight I now can clearly see why I got into the relationship. Some of the reasons I had at the time were clearly wrong and I was just fooling myself. There were also reasons that were buried in my subconscious that I only really discovered later.

So, as always, some background. I had gone to see my really good friend called Holly. Holly is one of my closest girlfriends. I've known her almost since I was 8 years old. We grew up together. From hide and seek, to kissing and sex; we've been together through most of it. So while I was there I told her of this girl, who I'll call Fanta, I was currently talking to a lot and who probably had feelings for me but I wasn't acting on them; I've got commitment issues. She asked me why not and at the time I couldn't really say I had a very convincing argument except I was scared. Then she asked me as simple question "Why not?"

Leaving her place later, I kept thinking of that question and when I got home I called Fanta and asked her out.

So you see the first reason in that background story? My friend. I let her talk me into the relationship which was a big mistake. You don't enter relationships because your friends talk you into them. I think this is a mistake many of us make. In my last relationships, while I may have had doubts, I overcame them on my own and got into the relationship because of my own conviction. I'm not saying ignore your friends' advice, nah, they usually notice a lot you wouldn't, what I'm saying is don't let it be a major reason especially if you hadn't been about to do it yourself.
Also at the time I thought I had feelings for her. I didn't. What I had was the hope, or feeling, that emotions would develop once in the relationship. I didn't realize this until sometime into the relationship and I was asking myself, "Where are the feelings?" and then later, "Why haven't they come?" What I know now is that what I thought were feelings were actually me just loving the fact that I had someone (new?) to talk to who would listen to my bull. I should have, you too, examined my feelings much closer. This was my biggest mistake.

My parents have been separated for almost five years now. I've recently just realized just how much that affected me. I've become steadily more introverted. I could no longer - maybe didn't want to - put effort in relationships (of any kind) except those that I had the deepest connections to and who were connected to me. Several of my old friendships are no more. I think subconsciously getting in to the relationship was a way for me to get out of a rut. A way to prove to myself I still had it. That the extrovert hadn't died within me. That I could still charm and get a girl. It may have worked. But it makes me kinda sad that Fanta may have gotten hurt for it to happen.

Finally I felt that it could be fun and interesting experience. One of these things it was. I learnt a lot about myself during it. These are solid reasons to get into a relationship at my age, in my opinion. You need to experience life and everything that comes with comes with it. Don't limit yourself because you're frightened that only comes with regret. So go out and make your own mistakes.
By the way, I was thinking that I'll have the titles of all future posts about my relationship have it mentioned in the title, like this one. What do think? What have you learnt in your most recent relationships? Let me know in the comments or email me, 'kay? Peace!!!

The difference between best friend and best pal

Hey everyone!! Miss me much? A little then? No? How's the first month of the year coming along for you? I trust that the year is coming along well. My holiday is over and I'm back on campus. The place is as dusty as fuck so my allergies are attacking up otherwise I'm feeling extremely good about this semester and everything I'll be doing during it. Oh and I just came out of my longest relationship yet, it lasted 6months, 1 week and 2 days, and I'm feeling quite relieved. More on that in other posts.

So I've received a few responses on the post I did about superstitions from my childhood. One person said they don't really have superstitions but just fears. Another mentioned something about now knowing exactly how she'll freak me out using them. However one thing that most people have been asking about is the part in the post where I say there's a difference between a best pal and best friend. Weird. That's what I want to clarify what exactly each meant at that time/age.

When you're younger most of time, if you're in a day school, and almost everyone in our hood was, is spent at home in your hood. Our hood had flats consists of 5 floors running from block A to J each with 10 houses. It was a massive complex with lots of space for us to play on. It wasn't like the flats we have these days that don't even have a space for football. Anyway my hood, called Zamsure Gardens, had a lot of kids I could play with of all ages.

Since most of my time was spent with these kids. I made several great friends who I still keep in touch with even today but there was one in particular whose name, ironically, I can't quite remember I was particularly close to. We were about the same age and of complimentary personalities. We like the same things and loved playing together (pretending to be Power Rangers, I was always blue, him red). He was my best pal.

Even as kids we realized that our lives couldn't revolve around the hood forever, we'd grow up and probably apart. More than that there was always the very high possibility that your family would move out and you'd lose touch and never see each other again. A best pal was local. It was understood that if you left the hood for good that title would pass on to someone else within the hood.

A best friend was different because this was someone outside the hood. That meant that your parents were friends already and so no matter where they were you could easily go visit them and keeping in contact- through your parents- would be easy or rather possible.

Don't get me wrong neither was more important than the other, then anyway, it's just that we both had best friends outside the hood and realized that our friendship may last not because we weren't committed but because our continued friendship depended on factors beyond our control. In those days there were no cell phones or emails or Facebook or twitter…

Now I'm missing him. Peace!!!!