What's In Me?

i've been talking in my sleep

Matchbox 20 - Unwell 

you ever hear that joke about the man that kept dreaming of the secret to all of life's problems?

a man would go to bed and every night and in his dream he'd see the solution to all of life's problems, right there, as clear as day. unfortunately by the time he woke up every morning, he wouldn't have the slightest recollection of what the solution was. so one day, he takes the initiative and puts a pen and a pad next to his bed just before he falls asleep. that night he again dreams of the solution to life's problems. immediately he wills himself to wake up and scribbles the solution down on the pad. satisfied, he falls asleep with a smile on his face.

he wakes up the next morning and remembers excitedly what happened the night before. he grabs the notepad and flips it open to see the solution to all of life's problems.

...and discovers he's written his house address.

*

i've been having dreams just like that.

only in MY dreams, i'm dreaming scripts. plot. dialogue so intricate i'm actually impressed in the dream that all this is coming from my head. then i wake up and the whole thing is vapour.

i know where all this is coming from, of course.

in the last three weeks i've seen one chap win a hundred and fifty million naira and another win a mind-boggling forty-five million pounds.

say it to yourself. Forty Five Million Pounds.

well, i'm realistic enough to realize life wont give ALL of us freebies. some of us (well, most of us) actually need to toil the earth and make that money, lubricating the wheels of enterprise with blood, sweat and tears.

see how i get poetic when i'm depressed?

the more i think of it, the more i'm convinced we all have that X factor in us that is pure genius and will make us ridiculously rich if we can just...nab...the damn thing. i'm not talking about your day job. your day job is what you do cause you've gotta do something to eat.

i'm talking about what you dream of at night. a chain of corporations with your name on it. designs and patterns so vibrant they could make you cry. music so beautiful you can live it.

a story so epic you cant remember it when you wake up. :)

i know somethings in me. i just don't know what it is.

Trick or Tweet

This year halloween fell on a weekend
Me and geto boyz are trick or treatin'
Geto Boyz-My Mind's Playing Tricks On Me
Happy halloween, bloggers. Anything scary happen so far?
Me, I've been home, taking it easy. Later tonight I've got a good scary movie planned to frighten the missus (Session 9; an absolutely TERRiFYING movie) even if she is notoriously difficult to scare.
But I'm just saying, there's absolutely nothing wrong with a good scare now and then. And in the light of this I bring you nine ways to get your scare on.
1. Watch Nightmare On Elm Street. even though halloween is usually associated with axe murderers, indulge in the brain numbing terror of Freddy Kreuger. He is Psychotic, athletic and had blades for fingers. The good news is he can only get you when you sleep.
The bad news is you WILL sleep.
2. Listen to Michael Jackson's Thriller. one of the greatest songs of all time from the best selling album of all time. Filled with howls, shambling footsteps and THAT LAUGH at the end. Won't terrify you, but might scare you when you discover how hard it is to do those moves now that you're older.
3. Read some Stephen King. my favourite author hands down with high definition imagination. Allow me to suggest the novel 'Salem's Lot'. Great pacing, fantastic characters and Vampires like you've never seen them. Twilight this aint.
4. Type in the words '2012 phenomenon' in wikipedia and slowly freak out. Wonder if it's remotely true and prepare to see the movie when it hits cinemas on november 13.
5. Tune in to African Magic and catch a home video. stare in horror at the bad acting. Be terrified at the length of the movie. Be afraid of the fact that these movies increase every year. There is no escape.
6. Read any nigerian newspaper and notice the rising number of kidnappings. Be afraid that even a vulcaniser's son was kidnapped. Be amused that he had to pay 30k to get his son back. True story.
7. If you haven't done one in the last ten years, do an HIV test.
8. This is a good one - wait till everyone goes to bed then watch the movie Dawn Of The Dead (2004). Turn the volume up.
9. Listen to news on Swine Flu. Wonder. What. Happens. If. It. Gets. Here.
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I Will Not Be Frozen

yeah, you can try

but I've found the antidote  
music is the cure

Little Boots - Remedy 

Yes. My leave is over.

it's interesting to see work is just as frantic as it was when i left it a month ago...I'm back and already in the deep end. a presentation on Friday, clients screaming insults over the phone and me creating copy for a  campaign AFTER seeing the artist's images.

it's like a drug. a poisonous fracking drug.

once again, i've turned to music as my savior from madness...and i heard the above little boots song on my ipod. apparently from this month's UK billboard top 40, it's a great work out song...even if not everyone online thinks so.

here's a little parting bit of geek news for all music lovers out there. almighty Google have incorporated a new 'music search' feature into google search that now lets you find the lyrics of any song just by typing in a phrase, sentence or line from that song. so even if you don't know the name of the song but cannot get that chorus outta your head, you can still find that tune.
Kewl, no?

Straight From The Heart

Here's my heart
It's been broken,
It's been wounded
But I'll give it all to you if you will love me
...If you will love me
Out Of Eden &The Winans - Here Is My Heart

This is a long post. Get a snack.
*
A lot of ex's used to tell me I had a heart like stone.
How ironic.
They came pretty close.
*
The thing with heart problems is doctors tend to be nervous about it when they talk to you. Lots of hmmm's and ahhhh's while they listen to your heartbeat over and over without saying anything concrete. For two years I'd heard a whole lot of phrases, terms and gibberish till one had stood out.
Angina.
Now angina is a general term for cardio-related chest pains, much the same way the term 'flu' is a general description for cold infections. So yes, there's angina. I feel pain. But what's causing it? Enter another funny word; Arrhythmia.
Arrhythmia is a fancy word for saying your heart is showing off. Everyone's heart is supposed to beat say, Bop-Bop, Bop-Bop,Bop-Bop. There's a pattern.
My heart is doing a Bop-Bop Beep, Bop-Bop,Bop-Bop Beep.
See? It's like a Timbaland edition heart.
Now I never knew about the arrhythmia. I just thought I had a really strong heartbeat (some of you reading this right now are going 'hey waitaminute. I have a really strong heartbeat!)
So when you put it together, what do you get? You have angina, pain, which is the effect. Then you have arrhythmia which is not a cause in itself, but is causing the angina.
So what's causing the arrhythmia?
Yeah well. I'm STILL asking that.
Over the past few years I've done a few blood tests, cholesterol tests, HIV tests (they didn't tell me that was what it was for!!!) And ECG's. An ecg is when they hook you up with those white discs and wires and try to get a reading from your heart. Once, they put me on a treadmill and made me run for 10 minutes while they kept ramping up the speed.
Very Six Million Dollar Man.
But the one test I'd dreaded, which I had never done, was the echocardiography. Call it the echo for short. This is a test that uses sound waves to create a real-time beating image of your heart. Like an ultra scan for your heart.
Well, I finally got around to doing it last thursday. Got to the hospital, took off my shirt, lay down, had that freaky jelly smeared on my chest and the machine touched me. My eyes went wide as the image appeared on the screen.
Its one thing to watch Discovery Channel and see A heart beating. That's cool. Its geeky. But when you're lying on a bed seeing YOUR heart beating on a tv over your head, its something...more.
I lay there looking at the heart pounding away...strong and relentless like the wrath of God. I could see a valve opening to let stuff in (blood? Air?) and I could see how it grew and shrank with each beat.
It looked huge. Somehow more real than I'd imagined. The doctor did something with the machine and for the first time ever I heard my authentic, timbaland heartbeat.
And in my twisted, geeked out way I wondered absently if I could convince him to let me use it as a ringtone.
*
So there I was on the bed all emotional while the doctor asked me all the same questions (are you an athlete? Does physical activity bring you pain? No doctor, I have sex just fine) and once again, acting nervous.
He explained my heart was pretty normal...only the left wall seemed a bit thicker than normal.
I
crazily heard a million female voices screaming 'heart of stone! Heart of stone!'. I battled to keep a straight face.
So, the doc explained. Was there a history of timbaland hearts in the family? Did I have healthy relatives that had suddenly just keeled over?
Over the years I'd learned to answer these gruesome questions quite calmly. And honestly. I put my heart into it. :D
So as the missus and I left yet another test with fewer answers and more questions, I patted myself on the back for finally doing the echo. Seeing my heart had made me realise two things.
1. It had been made by Someone.
2. And since I'm pretty sure He has the manual to fixing it...I should probably hand it over to Him to look at it.
Because you all know.
 They don't make these 1979 models like they used to. :D


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Seeing Things Differently

And the sun will set for you
And the shadow of the day
Will embrace the world in gray
And the sun will set for you.

Linkin Park-Shadow Of The Day

Man, I am so addicted to Flickr. It's true we can't all be photography maestros like Cereberus...but if you love having fun taking pictures, check out flickr.

Now then.

Whoever said health is wealth was misunderstood.

'Health is wealth' doesn't literally mean good health is wealth. It means when you AREN'T sick you aren't putting money in doctors pockets so people like Bumight will have to go get a real job.

Two and a half weeks into my leave, I realised I still had boxes to tick in my 'things to do while on leave list' one of them was suck it up and go see an Ophthalmologist.

I've been wearing glasses since 1991. As far as dependency goes, I've accepted my fate; me and these babies are bonnie and clyde. If I aint going anywhere, THEY aint going anywhere.

However in the last two years, I've noticed lapses in visual detail. Put plainly, my eyesight has been getting worse and I was still making glasses based on my old prescription.

So, last week, I went to see the eye doctor. I guiltily sat in his waiting room, looking around at all the (mostly) hideous glasses on display and wondering if I'd one day be caught wearing these thirty years from now.


Seeing where I'm coming from, that's not impossible
.
I walked in when it was my turn, answered all the polite questions and we were off to the eye chart.
The eye chart is a cruel thing. Its an unflinching, insinuating assortment of letters determined to make you feel blind, stupid or both. A long time ago, I'd squint and fight for my honour.

Well, 10 years later and a few lenses thicker, I have seen (literally) the error of my ways.

My lenses are a minus two point five...and that's since my last eye test five years ago.

So we did the chart. Then the spooky machine where you looked down a road and saw (or if you're really f**ked up) or didn't see the little house at the end.

Then there's the piercing beams of light prodding your cornea as you look up down left right in the head brace machine.

After all this, the doctor sat down solemnly and scribbled away in my brand new file and delivered the news.
'Your eyesight is exactly the same'.

Well, not exactly. My left eye, hah hah, actually got better. Stepped up from a minus 2.5 to a minus 2.2. So even though my prescription was 18 years old, it was still relevant.

I felt very good as I walked out of the doctor's office. I mean, sure, I'm still short sighted. I will probably wear glasses for the rest of my life (his reply to my questions on corrective eye surgery confirmed THAT) but there's a good feeling in knowing that you aren't, you know, going blind.

Also tells you just how real your imagination can make a thing seem. I was sure my eyes were getting worse. But I'd been wrong. And that gave me the stones to book the next test I'd been putting off for the past two years.

An echocardiography.

Stay tuned.

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Of The Carrot And The Stick

But I'm never gonna make it without you
Do you really wanna see me crawl?

Air Supply- Making Love Out Of Nothing At All

I remember my girlfriend telling me once that there are no READY perfect boyfriends or partners. She said every chap a lady met that had good qualities was the end result of some previous girl slaving away to mold him right. It's a fascinating thought when you get right down to it-one for me which always leads to the idea of the carrot and the stick.

The older I've gotten and the more mistakes I've made, I have come to understand how the concept of a relationship can be prepared to naked flame and gunpowder. Two different people. From different backgrounds. With different ego's. Are meant to meet, coexist and condone each other for a lifetime. Starting now.

I mean. It sounds nuts.

But like everything else (and this might upset some people) relationships get better each time you fail and try again. I know some people nail it once; date, fall in love and marry their first love...well bully for you.

Some of us keep having quite a few first loves. I dunno.

But I digress. What I'm trying to say is its the women that come out of the first few relationships fully formed. Aware. Ready to make sure that shit NEVER happens again.
(Their hearts always make sure it DOES happen again...but that's another story). And because they gain sentient awareness first, they usually gain the upper hand in the next relationship.

Think about it. Who sets the ground rules? Lays out all the do's and don't's? Who is the person that always starts a sentence with the line 'I promised myself that this would NEVER happen again'?

Women.

Men, we just...go with the flow. And most likely, keep doing all the dumb stuff that ended the last relationship. That's when the woman decides that she HAS to step in and do something. Use a weapon. But what will it be?

The carrot? Or the stick?

Now the country we're in lends itself to some bias in choosing the above. Nigeria is a hard country. Nigerians are hard people. You HAVE to be to survive here. So naturally, a woman in trying to make her point grabs the biggest, loudest most assertive weapon to get through to the man. The motherf*ckin stick.

Sometimes its screaming. Sometimes its threatening. Other times she just throws a fit and all hell breaks loose. Now, as I see it, two things happen. One, you get his undivided attention. Which is good. You wanted that. Two, you have shown your hand.

You have given him a means of measuring your freak out; i.e: I lied to her and she broke my ps3 so if I cheat on her she'll stab me in my sleep. Women tend to see this as a good thing. A 'he knows what I'm capable of' kind of thing. The problem is the man'll just put his friggin ps3 out of reach next time. And sleep with a helmet. Problem solved.

Now I'm not saying being firm doesn't work. Its just that there's the Carrot.

Now. Man does something wrong. Gets nabbed by woman. She knows he was wrong. He knows he was wrong. He spreads his legs, braces for impact and prepares for the storm.

It never comes.

Instead your invited to sit down and patiently told that behaviour like the one you've just exhibited is seriously counterproductive to the relationship. And because she loves you, she wouldn't want anything to jeopardise the relationship.

Then here's the kicker. She kisses you on the head, smiles and walks away.

I speak on behalf of my species when I say there is no better way to f*ck a man up outside doing what I just described. We're confused. Unsure. Dressed up in tons of defensive gear and suddenly there's no battle to fight. You are weighed down by the shame of what you've done and her ability to forgive you.

Now once again I'm not saying all men are waiting for soft spoken women to see reason. That would be terribly naïve. Its just that I have realised now that sometimes the loudest and clearest way to get a huge point across is to speak quietly.

Screaming the word 'tiny' has never made it big.

Later, people. :)

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Is This Thing On?

Don't mind me, I'm just trying to see if blogging from a bb works as advertised. I doubt I could ever actually type a full post out on these keys. I'd be finger cramped and crossed-eyed after thirty minutes.

And only masturbation is supposed to do that to you.

I've started reading books again...which is a rightful return to geek status. Back to my Stephen Lawheads, Lee Childs and Terry Pratchetts. The beauty of a book has always been its non-dependency on the basic amenities we lack here in Nigeria like, you know, electric power (happy belated anniversary, by the way). Of course our generation is so entrenched in the future, we confuse things at times.

Example. I was reading a paperback novel some months ago when I wondered what the time was. Did I check my watch for the time? Look at the wall clock? No. I glanced to the TOP OF THE PAGE OF THE BOOK. True story. I looked at the top of the page for the time and was honestly confused when I didn't find it. Its a funny old life, this.

Argh. Finger cramp.
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Just Leave, Dammit.

We Make It Clap

Busta Rhymes - Make It Clap Remix

You ever see one of those toy monkeys that just grin psychotically and clap cymbals together till kingdom come as long as you keep them wound up?

See, the cymbals are your job. The wind up wheel is your salary. And the monkey is you.

I’m on leave. But i just cannot seem to stop clapping my damn hands.

*

Well, it’s been a while since i’ve been here. At first i thought it was twitter killing my blogging skills but then i realised it was just work killing my everything skills. Man I’ve had days reduced to ctrl-shift-delete, ctrl-c plus ctrl-v and done it so much i’ve lost my damn ctrl. A few weeks ago i knew i was losing it and i re-applied for my annual leave. My boss took a good look at me and approved it. Smart move. It was taking me twenty minutes to write one headline.

Saturday night had been award night in our neck of the woods and we did pretty okay...by anyone standards. Hell i even got to walk the stage and pick an award. I kept seeing Kanye jump out on stage, snatch the mic from me and go ‘yo Freaksho, i’m really happy for you and all and i’m gonna let you finish; but Rosabel had one of the best ads of ALL TIME!’

Heh. But it didn’t happen. Yaay.

*

In other geek news i dumped my Javelin for a Tour (which i suppose will become the new ashawo of the blackberry market)and upgraded from windows vista to the blistering new windows 7. As far as operating systems go, i cannot recommend this highly enough. It’s got the beauty of vista and then some (and i mean that) combined with the speed and stability of xp. I’ve been using this baby for two weeks now and it hasn’t locked up or crashed once. Score one for the Gates team.

*

I’m not so sure about this leave thing. As much as its fun to wake up in the morning and throw the duvet over your head, its rather sad to be polishing your shoes at 2 in the afternoon because you’ve got nothing else to do.

And i swear today’s just the second day.

*

Ah well. This is just to work out the kinks. Nothing terribly exciting has happened so far...but hopefully that doesn’t mean it wont.

At the very least i’ll be spamming my blog.

I’ve got this hilarious idea about audio blogging in autotune.

Stay tuned, baby.