you won't like this post...

I’m a bit of a lady, you know, with the many things on the shelf and the never ending quest for shoes and clothes. Most recently, bags have become a fad of mine. I’ve been thinking about closing down this blog. To start over.  A lot actually. Maybe once I do I might become a fashion blogger and showcase what’s in my closet. Or rather, the suitcase on the floor next to my bed.

I could do that, I have rather strange opinions about fashion and sensibility. But I don’t know much about makeup, or fads, or trends, or makeup, or makeup, or makeup. All those this-is-Ess-esque ladies who do this fashion blogging thing have a way with makeup. For me it ends with getting my eyebrows done once a month. I’d go for frequent mani-pedis, I love those, but I spend too much time in water and not enough in town. And chipped nail-lacquer just wouldn’t do.

So I guess I wouldn’t make the greatest fashion blogger. Unless we talk about bargain shopping. I love bargain shopping. I love shopping. Going into the market, spending endless hours leafing through weird looking things until you land that one awesome item and it’s Kshs. 30. My greatest achievement so far is this one dress I got for Kshs. 50. It’s so good it could do an interview.

If I were a fashion blogger, this would be the point at which I post three photos – front, back and side profiles. But really, all I’m doing now is keeping myself busy enough so that I don’t sleep before Colin gets here. He’s been gone two weeks, it’ll be nice to have him back in the house.

So, I can’t take three photos of my grey (gray?) dress to post and let you know that I got it from a guy in Kangemi who puts up a carton box stall in front of the mobile repair shop that’s next to the butchery that’s right where KMO Sacco javs simama to load passengers going to town. And cries out “Hamsini, hamsini!” in much the same way that sweet Molly Malone sold her “Cockles and mussels ‘alive, alive-oh!’ ”.

Were I a fashion blogger, once photos were up, I would go into excruciating detail about how I accessorized my dress, including where I found the three pairs of studs that stay in my ears permanently. It was that lady who has a tiny stall at the corner of Old Nation just before you get to the mats that go to Graffin’s College, BTW. Lovely lady, with cheap stuff. I mean that nicely.

Then I would say what should NOT be done while wearing a dress like the one I have on (the gray/grey dress worth Kshs. 50). How to dress it up, down, for the office, to a party, what shoes, what lipstick, what hair and maybe even underwear. Especially underwear. Somehow I am more peeved by bra prints – you know, how lacy bras’ textures show through someone’s clothes – than the all-annoying VPL.

I’d take a few pictures of coats and shoes that can be worn with the dress and write a post about “1 dress, 5 different ways”. But that usually only works if afterwards you add the name of a classy uptown boutique up on Mama Ngina Street (Avenue? Drive?) With a price tag that has a more than two zeroes after it.  You can’t go into those lengths only to talk about a carton box stall in Kangemi.

So maybe fashion blogging is not for me. But that cannot stop me from displaying my most recent and most awesomest bags ever. Which I got this weekend. Thanks to the generous contributions of the friends and partners of Let’s Make Joy Happy Ministries, aka my brother.

I’d been eyeing them for the better part of four months, I’d never imagined they could be mine, because you know, I could never spend that kind of money on bags. Even a set of five, royal blue, wet-look, classy, and all-round amazing handbags. And now they’re mine. Le sigh…

This is so not why I started writing today in the first place. The bags were supposed to be a by-the-way point – three lines tops. Now I’ve gone  and gone with it I have no idea what I wanted to say.

This is why I need to close this blog and start over. I started this blog in October 2010 after reading my brother’s blog. He’d been going at it for four years by then, he still writes occasionally. It’s still awesome as usual. Because I didn’t know jack about blogging, except that it was a web diary, I most wrote about my life.

Wrong move. My life is very boring. Those days I was in campus and at least there would be one or two exciting (stupid) things campus folk did that I could talk about. Now my life revolves around my editor Martin, my laptop, the kitchen, school and repeat. It’s easy to see why there’re so many gaps. The beautiful thing is that my posts don’t show dates, so that you can’t judge me.

I feel stuck, not in life, just in blogging. Okay, maybe a little in life, but that’s not what I mean. You know how the way you write sets the tone for your future writing? I started a certain way, and now I don’t like that way anymore and I feel like changing but I’m not sure to what. We’ve already seen fashion blogs are not the thing pour moi.

And I don’t have a kid. I don’t mean to sound like that person, but you know, when you hang around a toddler, man, you can never run out of stories. And they are always funny. Just ask Bikozulu, or Jackson? Wasonga – the guy from Wednesday Nation with a wife called Tenderoni. I forget the girl’s name – Peaches? Cuddles? Munchkin? Imekataa kuja.

I dunno, in the meantime I’ll keep doing this in my foolish little ways, like I’ve always known. Soon I will write something I’m ready for the world to see. And then I’ll scream it on the rooftops.