what i do when i'm on duty

another blackout stellar thursday night. i think the flu i've come down with only aided and abetted my obnoxious behavior (i'm just assuming as i don't recall the details).

but on the occasion of this stuffy saturday (which i've spent imbibing way too much television from the states) "on duty" (sitting around waiting for stories while you watch television), i'll pose a few questions/observations that have been plaguing me.

1. hasn't madonna passed the age when she's reasonably believable in leotards on roller skates? perhaps this video is old news to most, but i caught it for the first time this afternoon (luckily on mute) and had to laugh. and immediately following that? that kanye west video that he rides dirtbikes in and pam anderson frowns in the background... can i get a job conceptualising these things please?

2. did you know that there are automatic servers (a la tennis balls) for ping pong? i was recently on assignment with a friend who's covering kenya's national ping pong team as they prep for olympic trials and discovered this myself. unfortunately - only after one totally spanned me in the head as i was walking by unassumingly...

3. poor james spader! one, why is he on a crappy serialised legal drama? and two, it's only been three or so years since secretary, right? when did he puff up into this bloated version of his once perfect self? i mean, we all remember the feathered-mane of his gloried sex-lies-and-videotape days, no?

that's all i've got to say for the time being. will keep you posted on the job front - there have been a few interesting developments but nothing official so i'm keeping quiet for fear of totally fucking myself out of it...

xo xo

year end accounts

for those of you that know me at all, by now you must have realised that there's nothing i love more than to celebrate my own birth - as if it were a federal holiday or the biggest religious festival of the year.

not so this year. i'll peg it on the breakup but i think i've been in the throes of a huge emotional purge - trying to sort out my life and future now that there's no one i'm slightly beholden to. i've been on a couple of promising interviews but frankly i'm not so sure it's work that keeps me here for the sake of being here or engages me professionally. is this all just an endless charade to go "expat" as long as financially possible? or do i really want to be a "roving reporter"? and if the latter is true, why have i been more successful? am i really cut out for this?

these annoying inner workings of my besieged brain aside - although they provide a pretty accurate picture of my current, self-absorbed state of mind - when last friday rolled around i was not in a terribly jolly or festive way. i should also mention that several of my closest friends were out of town on assignment or other business and that it being mid-month most everyone was destitute (and when i say that i mean it in a much more real way than a flippant comment between paychecks).

but my friend gin - her husband is my colleague tony, who's a photographer - and my ethiopian companion threw me a surprise party at my favorite ethiopian restaurant (jote's got an in there being ethiopian and all). pretty soon the entire place was packed with friends and acquaintances - all in celebration of me. which really kind of jolted me into perspective.

why slum and mope around over some asshole named after a sitcom character? why have a crisis of confidence when it's readily apparent i'm the only one that doubts me? (i should temper that before anyone thinks my self involvement has reached unprecedented proportions - i'm sure there are many who doubt me but none as much as myself). why feel terrible and depressed over some ridiculously privileged notions of professional advancement or having to pack it in and call my two year adventure quits?

by the time i board a plane in september (whether for keeps, for a visit or en route to a different locale), i'll have kept myself financially afloat for two years (in a ridiculously luxurious way compared to the locals, in abject poverty compared to the other expats) as a journalist - my career of choice. and i'll have had the experience to explore a country and culture much more thoroughly than tourists or most non-journalist residents.

so why complain? why put a damper on the celebrations? if i can light up the entire exiled ethiopian community in nairobi, i'm sure there's more in store.

sorry for the sentimental, pseudo-inspirational crap. i'll be back to my sardonic wise ass self in no time.

by the way - congratulations to my former roommate gerry smith for his first A1 story for the Chicago Tribune. May it be the first of many. Not bad for two weeks on the job - and christ, if he can manage that with a ukulele festival...

breakup

yep. that's the word. alphie and i are kaput. i'll save the grisly details but it basically boils down to him going back to his ex-girlfriend because he wasn't up to the challenge of dating a non-kenyan. needless to say, he's not my favorite person right now.

trying to work on a feature illustrating that despite the exponential growth in the kenyan economy, poverty is only increasing and slums/informal housing settlements are only expanding. but distracted by obvious emotional upheaval and crappy nickelodeon-esque south african sitcoms...

anyways, later this afternoon have to take stel to the veterinarian because she's come down with some kind of allergy, cold - nothing like feline boogers and constant sneezing. i've never seen a cat with a sinus issue before. ah, the joys of pet ownership.

bombs

things have certainly been crazy and busy in nairobi this past week or so.

we've had this wave of death and dismemberment by the mungiki sect that i mentioned covering last time. we've had a police crackdown in one of the city's most notorious slums where scores of red-beret wearing paramilitary forces fired indiscriminate shots, terrorised civilians and destroyed houses, leaving at least 35 people dead.

we've had a poorly constructed wall of a compound in a different slum collapse in a torrential rainstorm, trapping dozens of people and killing at least 14 others. buried alive.

and then this morning, we had a bomb rip through a restaurant in the city center at 8 this morning, just two blocks from the office. police are denying that it was a suicide bomber at this time, but it happened just 200 metres from the former US embassy that was bombed by al qaeda in 1998. only one person is confirmed dead so far - the bomber who was carrying the explosive device in a brown paper bag - but we've got 34 people in the hospitals, although none of them are said to be severely injured.

the scary thing - it's a favorite restaurant among my friends and i after a long night of partying and sometimes we're in there after leaving the disco around 7 or 8 in the morning. thank goodness i'm trying to scale back my alcohol intake...

beheadings, barack and bono

so it's been ages, i know - three months, or so, i suppose. life seemed to be getting a bit too routine to post regularly about anything interesting - which may be the reason for my prolonged silence.

yesterday, took a drive to muranga, a small town about 50 miles northeast of nairobi, which has been the scene of some of the most grisly incidences of violence ascribed to the Mungiki - a shadowy psuedo-religious sect that's been killing cops, hacking people to death with machetes and even going so far as to behead and otherwise dismember their victims. i spoke to a woman the day after she lost her husband of 32 years and she didn't betray a trace of emotion - there are still some things that boggle the mind about life in kenya, like these intricate grieving systems they've established and how horrors often seem routine, a part of life that was bound to happen.

we've been catching dribs and drabs of the presidential candidate debates over CNN and BBC, and for the most part it looks like a high school election campaign with everyone pointing fingers at one another and making unrealistic promises (like free junk food in the cafeteria). i was glad to see richardson enter the race but am not sure that he'll be able to get many people behind him... it's fascinating how much kenyans are engrossed with american politics. i'm sure a great deal of it has to do with someone they perceive as one of their own (obama, of course) standing a decent shot at running the world (so they say).

they're in the midst of some serious politicking over here as well with the general elections due at the end of december. there are a number of candidates and the campaigning, so far as i can tell as much of it is done in swahili or tribal languages, seems to be talking shit about each other without actually outlining how they're going to change the country. it's a bit of a tribal popularity contest. one of the candidates, raila odinga, son of the country's first vice president after independence, is running a great race on the basis of the fact that he's the owner of the first - and only - hummer in the entire country (that may be simplifying it a bit but really the acquisition of such conveys such inordinate powers on the man that people fall at his feet believing he's the next messiah).

work's good, cat's good, alphie's good. visa situation, while just renewed for another three months, is getting to be a trickier and it'd be great to figure out a way to deal with this on a more legal and less frequent basis. things are pretty routine so i'm not sure that there's much exciting to report.

i did go to a rock night recently and was surprised by a number of things: one, i have not heard half of the music that they're playing around here before (hint hint could really use some new cds but not top 40, of course) and two, haven't seen that many white people in one place in a really long time. it was overwhelmingly surreal.

i'll end on this note: a friend sent a link to an article about the july african themed issue of vanity fair and asked what people here thought about it - and whether or not they were excited because of bono's involvement in it. to my knowledge - not a single kenyan i've ever met knows a U2 song off the top of their head and even if you start singing "with or without you" or "where the streets have no name", they're generally clueless (unless they've been stationed or schooled aboad). they've heard of bono but in a purely development context and his status as a rock star seems to be secondary to his work forgiving third world debt. that said, if you put jessica simpson or beyonce at the helm of this issue, i'm sure it'd generate a bit more excitement.