Friday, March 28, 2008

Nostalgic nonsense

Someone needs to help me understand this phenomenon becos i bet i'm not the only one that has been thru this. About 3 yrs ago i noticed that whenever my ex-boyfriend was having problems with his girl friend he would start to call me regularly and expect the same from me. It wouldn't have been a problem except i never heard from him when things were rosy between them. When i left Nigeria, he was more like a best friend than an ex-boyfriend cos we had stayed good friends after we broke up. So when i got here, i expected that he would still call be and all that good stuff. He was the only one I gave my dad's address, and phone no, plus he knew my email address, yet i never heard from him. Instead i was hearing from people i thot would forget me as soon as i was out of sight. It took me a whole year to finally hear from him, and this was after i had call his home number, left a message with his mom, and did not hear anything after 3 months. Then i finally got his number from my best friend who was dating his best friend at the time. They just started having cell phones in Nigeria at that time.

Anyway, come to find out that this guy started dating his girlfriend about a week or two after i left which (i assume) was why he completely ignored me. Over the years i would get on him about how he would never call me, until i noticed that he would call me whenever he had problems with his girlfriend. One time he was calling me when his girlfriend cheated on him, if he doesn't hear from me in a day, he would start whining. He was trying to decide if he wanted to stay with her or not, and we were in the process of figuring that out when he stopped calling. I hear from other sources that they are back together. No shit.

What really annoys me is that when they are not getting along, he starts to tell me how much we wants to be with me and all that bull crap. Towards the end of last year, he started calling me again, by this time i was on to him and i knew immediately that he and his girlfriend were having problems. Then he proceeded to tell me that i was his soul mate and he would like to eventually get married to me. He believes i'm the perfect one for him and all that jazz. I bought into his crap for a hot minute and i asked him if he was completely done with his girlfriend, of course he said yes. I wasn't completely convinced that he had changed and i carried on talking to the guy i was talking to over here. After about a week of professing his undying love, i stopped hearing from him again. Hmmm........ I called him on his birthday which was about a month after i stopped hearing from him and he mentioned his girl friend's name for some reason, so i asked him straight up if they were back together. He hesitated for a second and then said "kind of". I saw RED! I was like, i thot u said u wanted to be with me, why are u still with her. He really opened his mouth and said "So? Does that mean we cannot still be together?"

I was so pissed off. I held back from cussing him out cos it was his birthday, but i hung up on him and we didn't speak until a month ago. He ask me if i expected him to sit around waiting for me without having anybody. That's when i knew he wasn't the same person i thot i was dealing with. This was a different breed. If that was the first and only guy that has done that to me, that would have been fine. I've had two other people do the same thing to me, but i didn't take them seriously, cos by then i knew the game. So na me them wan use take console themselves?

2 days ago, my very first boyfriend whom i haven't seen since 2001 was telling me that he misses me and asking me if i missed me? Wetin u talk? Miss u? Me? Why? After all the nonsense he pulled, granted we were really young, but why should i miss him after all these yrs. I can barely remember the details of that relationships. He started telling me about first love and all that jazz after i asked him if he was okay. I really thot something was wrong with him and yes there was something wrong with him. His girlfriend just dumped him. Ha!!!

This dude was rubbing it in my face on my birthday last yr when i met him online. He was like, how's ur boyfriend? I said i don't have one. Then he proceeded to console me and tell me that i shouldn't worry that God will provide (really!). Then he says i'm here with (girlfriend's first name)(his last name). I was like who is that cos i knew that was not his sister's name. He tells me it's his girlfriend who he has been with since 2002 ( i knew her as another name). He proceeds to tell me how lovely she is and all that. In my mind, i was like God punish u! Anyway, now that she has dumped him cos according to him he lost his looks and had to sell his car, he has remembered me. Hisssssss............................... nonsense and ingredients.

My question is (and i'm serious) what's with all these dudes? Why do they remember me when they are not getting along with their girlfriends? What am i? Someone to fall back on or what?

Saturday, March 22, 2008

The M word

There are only three things in this world that actually put fear in my heart; rats, menstrual cramps and relationships. Yes oh, relationships are my number one fear these days. I don't encounter rats anymore, except when i venture into someone else's space in the animal facility (thank God my lab works with some other kind of rodent), and as for menstrual cramps, i have learned to heavily drug myself up with pain killers.

I'm at the point in my life where very soon my mother is going to start fasting and praying that i find a guy. I don't think I'm that old, but you know Nigerian mothers. Towards the end of last year, she came to meet me and was like, we have to fast and pray becos i feel that there is a reason why you keep meeting useless guys. She said she feels I'm the reincarnation of my grandmother and knowing my grandmother as well as she did and what she went through, she suspects that my grandmother probably vowed not to get married in her next life (my life?) and she thinks that's what's affecting me. I was just looking at the woman, like..... are u serious? Finally, i told her that i don't think i have a problem, and if she thinks i have a problem she can fast and pray for me and I'll support her mentally but I'm not fasting over that. Then a couple of weeks after that, we were shopping and she said something about wanting to carry my child, and i was like you would have to wait a long time for that. She was like, no... as soon as you get into medical school, you are going to get married. See me see wahala, this woman is just over there planning my life for me.

I have dealt with so many useless guys that at this point i am scared of being in a relationship. Worst of all there's the dreaded "M" word, marriage. I can't imagine myself being married. It's not something i dream of, long for, imagine myself being in. In 2006 some Indian girl asked me what would be the song that i would walk down the aisle to, and i was like what???!!!!. I have never ever thot of or imagined my wedding day. She on the other hand, had picked the colors and song for her wedding. Hmmm..............In the back of my mind i know I'm going to get married (african culture anyone?), but I'm not looking forward to it becos married to me equals lots of heartache and tears and dissatisfaction. I remember a few years ago, i was saying this exact same thing to a guy friend, and he was like you can say that cos you are still young, wait until u are like 24 and see if you'll still say that. Time has passed, all my class mates (in Nigeria) are getting married, one of my best friends, and another of our very close family friend just got married in December and I'm older than both of them, and still I'm not any more eager to get married. In fact one of my class mates is getting married today. I'm so scared of relationships i can't even begin to think of getting married.

Why am i scared of relationships/marriage? Even though my parents were "married", my father was never there while i was growing up. He has been based in this country since the early '70's way b4 i was born. I would see him once a year for about 2-4weeks and that would be it until the next yr or next 2 years. I was told he lived in Nigeria for 3 years in the '80's that's when me and my younger siblings were born, but i can't remember that. I watched my mother raise us on her own, and i saw her struggle seriously sometimes. I was the one who would go with her to the hospital in the middle of the night when my brother would get his asthma attacks which was frequently. Imagine driving at 2am in Nigeria, where there is no single soul besides armed robbers on the road at that time. I heard her say many times to herself "but i have a husband, why am i going through this alone". Of course, as is expected of a lot of (Nigerian) men, my father had a second family here.

The situation with my parents did not make me scared of marriage, I just never had an opportunity to know first hand what a married couple should look like. I thot it was weird whenever my dad came home cos it was strange to have a man in the house. Until i was about 15, i always looked at him like a visitor, i couldn't relate with him as a father. The same goes for my younger siblings. The last born was just the height, whenever he would want to address my father he would say "excuse me, sir", like we said to our teachers in school. I laugh now that i think about it, but then i didn't think it was funny. It was just sad. The good thing about my father not being around was that my mother was able to raise us to be independent women. I wasn't raised with the usual gender roles in place. From when i was little i was told that i could be anything i wanted. We did all the chores that boys were supposed to do cos my brother was the last born and there was nobody else to do it. Seeing her situation, my mom basically raised us with the belief that we had to make our own money and never depend on anybody else to take care of us.

So not only do i not have a good model of what marriage should be, all the stories i hear about marriage are discouraging. All the relationships I've being in leave a lot to be desired. One of my older sister's ex-husband (thank God) used to beat her. When she would call the police and have him thrown in jail, she was referred to as a bad wife by the Nigerian community here. He would cheat on her and do all sorts of nonsense, yet she was supposed to keep a stiff upper lip and console herself with her children. I know a lot of women go through the same thing and yet they stay in the marriage because divorce is frowned on. Well, i frown up being beaten to a pulp by a man who is supposed to love and cherish me above all others. My sister stayed in that marriage for 11 years suffering all that abuse becos she was trying to make it work. She's a better woman than i am. I was chatting with one of my friends in Nigeria yesterday and she told me that more than half of the married women she knows are dissatisfied with their marriage and would leave if they could, but they can't. The guys feel like they did the women a favor by marrying them in the first place so the women should suck it up and deal with whatever way they chose to treat them. She said 80% of men in clubs in Nigeria are married, and she cannot begin to count the number of married men that ask her out. The only consolation these women have are their children.

When she said that, it really resonated with me, cos my mother used to say that a lot. It got to a point where she would say she was married to us (her kids) and Jesus. Meanwhile, her supposed husband was still alive and breathing. Is that what i want for myself? NO! People would say if you looked carefully, prayed and picked the right person it wouldn't be that way. Tell me about it! I know people who thot they were marrying an angel, until he changed up on them after marriage. We were all shocked back in sec school when my best friend's sister's husband started beating her, right after they got married. He even beat her so much one time she had a miscarriage. He had never shown any sign of being violent in all the time they were dating. They are both "good" Christians, so they prayed about the marriage. So what went wrong?

Marriage to me right now, is like a trap of sorrow, and (insert whatever negative word). I know it's a horrible way for me to look at it esp since i would like to get married one day. I don't know how I'm going to meet the "right" person. Hopefully as i get older, i will become more positive about it. I think the worst thing would be to be married to someone who doesn't care about working on the marriage, is stuck in his ways and believes that anything he says goes just becos he has a penis. Nah!

Thursday, March 20, 2008

On Friendships

I'm one of those girls who generally prefer to have guys as friends. I adore guys. They are easier to get along with, don't have petty hang ups and my guy friends adore me also. What's not to love about that arrangement. All my best friends are females, but those are girls i grew up with. So we know each other too well. I'm naturally a reserved person, and i used to find it really difficult to talk about myself to people. My friends would call me whenever they needed someone to listen and becos i didn't talk much (back then), they loved talking to me. It's really ironic now that my friendship with Cynthia ended becos she felt i had stopped telling her stuff about myself, while she told me everything about her life. I have never in my life being open to anyone as much as i was with her, not even with the girls i call my best friends.

When i first came to America, i was talking to my friend Cynthia but we were not close. Instead, i was close to the guy she introduced me to until he fucked up (to cut a long story short). That's when we started getting closer. We really became tight after my crazy ex almost killed me and she was there for me while i was dealing with that mess. However, throughout the course of that friendship, i completely changed. We would sit on the phone and talk for at least 2hr almost everyday. When u are on the phone yapping away for hours on end, u have to have something to say. That's when i got comfortable talking about myself and my issues with someone else. Whatever i was going through, i would tell her every single detail and vice versa. If i was talking to any guy, i made sure she got to talk to him also. I think it got to the point where our lives were becoming too enmeshed.

After i graduated last year and i started trying to figure out which direction i was going to take with my future, talking on the phone for hours about nothing lost its appeal. Over the years, i had kind of lost my autonomy. The boyfriend i had in Nigeria, told me he liked me because unlike a lot of girls, i thot for myself and i could make my own decisions (with regards relationships) without talking to my friends about it. Now, i had become the type of person who could not do anything without telling someone about it. I know it's good to ask for advice sometimes but not on every little thing. It was almost like i lacked a mind of my own and this is the exact opposite of who i was.

When i was dealing with a guy, it was almost as if me and my friend were dealing with the guy. The day that i knew things were going too far was when something happened btw me and one guy i was talking to and my friend took it upon herself without telling me, to call the guy and cuss him out. I wasn't even that mad at him and her opinion on the issue was completely different from mine. I told her i didn't agree with her assessment of the situation, yet she picked up her phone and called him to cuss him out. I know she had my best interests at heart, but when did i stop being my own person?

I'm really glad that whatever friendship i had with these girls has taken a different turn because i'm in a completely different place in my life and it think it's time for a change. I need to be able to think for myself and not rely on anyone to sanction my actions. I'm ready to go back to being who i was b4 the physical assault i suffered in the hands of my ex-boyfriend. I believe that incident affected my life for the worse in a lot of ways. My whole relationship with him shattered my self-esteem and my self-confidence. I used to be a very self-confident person. I had people telling me from when i was very little how wonderful i was in many ways. I was totally confident in who i was as i person. I didn't have any self-esteem issues until this son-of-a-bitch treated me like trash. He would even go as far as saying beauty is not everything, just because people say u are pretty doesn't mean shit. That phase of my life has passed. It's been over 2 years, i'm thankful i'm alive to talk about it. I'm trying to heal from it. My therapist helped me a lot and i think it's time i take steps to continue to help myself.


Got my rejection letter yesterday from the one Med school i applied to. I knew my MCAT score was too low so i'm really not tripping about that. Just have to figure out what to do until August 2009.

I was going to Blog about the guy that Desperate Lady asked me about, but i'll just cut to the chase and say i'm no longer talking to him. I completely lost interest in the dude. Now that i'm no longer interested he's trying to be nice. That's not my problem anymore.

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

I'm Free!!!!!

I guess this month has officially become "Lose all ur friends month". I can't remember the last time i got into a shouting match with any of my female friends. My friend i referred to in my previous post (Cynthia), did not even give me the time of day and our friendship disintegrated over text messages. For me to get into a shouting match with a girl makes me feel like i'm in secondary school again. God forbid. What was the fight about? I'm not exactly sure. She feels like i don't know how to handle other people's opinion and i get mad whenever she says something i don't want to hear. Hmm.... I am a very blunt person, i have been told that since i was in JSS1, so it's not something i picked up along the way. I don't expect my friends to tell me what i want to hear cos i don't tell them what they want to hear.

The thing is, the way she states her opinion gets on my last nerve. Two people can say the exact same thing and get completely opposite reactions cos of the way in which they said it. Now the problem is whenever she has gotten on my nerves, all i want to do is get off the phone to go cool off. I just became friends with this chic and honestly i don't have any other friends that piss me off. My friends tell me things that are contrary to what i want to hear all the time and i don't get pissed off, but she takes it to a whole nother level. It's almost like i'm dealing with my mother. She talks to me like she's talking to a child. Anyway, the main problem is that she thinks i get off the phone abruptly and she feels it's disrespectful and insulting. I don't get it. Would she prefer me to stay on the phone and cuss her out? Whenever i'm pissed, i need time to cool off. I don't see how that is rude or insulting. I don't hang up the phone, i just say i have to go to bed or something. She said it's almost like i hang up. Then she brought up an incident that 5 months ago which i apologised for and had totally forgotten about, and i just gave up on the whole thing. I kept asking her how that had to do with the issue and she went off on another tangent, talking about Cynthia's reaction at the time and how she was justified in acting the way she did. I'm like, is the conversation about me and u or me and Cynthia? I can't deal with people who hold grudges and worst of all she said she hasn't being herself around me becos she's scared of speaking her mind cos i'm so touchy. Jesus H. Christ. Someone would think i'm such a monster. I have never had to deal with this kind of crap since i was 16yrs old when i graduated from that crazy all girls school. I wasn't born yesterday and she is the first person that has ever said that to me.

The thing is my friendship with this girl is relatively new. She would never have become my friend if she had not come to America. We went to the same secondary school, but she wasn't in my class and we never said a word to each other. She was in the same class as one of my best friends and that's all i knew about her. I spent a long year in uni in Nigeria before coming here. We happened to be in the same Hall, and given the fact that we were in the new environment, i would say hi to her whenever i saw her. She later told me that she was shocked when i first say hi to her cos she told i was beefing her all along in secondary school. See me see wahala. I wasn't surprised though cos i had a lot of unknown enemies in sec. sch. All those people who thot i used to "feel" (LOL).

After i broke up with my boyfriend at the time, he didn't see anyone to ask out, he went and asked this girl out. Alright, personally i wasn't tripping about it cos it wasn't like she was my friend or anything, but my crazy troublesome best friend took the matter on her head. Whenever we would see her in the hostel, my friend would make a comment and we would laugh. Hey.... I'm allowed to laugh. They ended up not dating cos she said she felt guilty. Besides that, according to her it was obvious he wasn't over me and he was just trying to date someone to forget about me.

Moving on, six years later i get a phone call out of the blue. When she mentioned her name, i couldn't for the life of me remember who she was, not because i forgot about her but becos she was the last person i expected to call me. It took about 2 phone calls b4 i figured out who she was. Fear catch me. I quickly bought a phone card and called my best friend who was in her class back in the day. I was like, "why would XYZ decide she wants to be friends with me after all these years?" We couldn't figure it out and after a while i chilled.

A couple of months after that i get a call from a US phone number and it was XYZ. Apparently, she knew she was going to be coming to the States and she decided to get my number from my ex-boyfriend and call me. That's how we became friends. Initially, i was busy with school and all that so didn't talk much but towards the end of last year we started talking regularly. Now after all this petty nonsense, i really don't know if i want to continue the friendship. We obviously are not compatible cos she feels she can't tell me her true opinions and the way she talks pisses me the hell off. I don't fight with my female friends this is all new to me. I don't know whether to give the friendship another go or just let it go. I find all this petty quarrels very stressful and it really does bother me.

Sunday, March 16, 2008

On blogging

This is my fourth and final attempt at blogging. I deleted my first blog after 30 posts in March'07 cos i was depressed and didn't want the added chore of blogging. My second blog which i loved lasted from April to Dec and i had 81 posts b4 i basically had to run away from the blog cos my anonymity was severely compromised. Then my third blog i deleted after 8 posts cos i hated the way the blog was, all dark and gloomy and also cos i was freaking out that someone i knew had found my blog again.

Is it reasonable for me to expect that when my close friends discover my blog they tell me? Even though my blog is supposed to be anonymous anyone who knows me would know as soon as they read my blog that it's me. I don't try to disguise anything that i write about and in a huge way i think that has worked against me. I don't have a lot of friends, in fact i have no friends in the state i live. Last year, i suspected my closest friend had discovered my blog, i asked her and she denied it. However, using sitemeter and what not, i found out that someone who lives in the same area as she does was always coming to my blog. I felt it could be anybody and honestly didn't worry about it. I asked her if she would ever tell me if she discovered my blog and she said no. How could i tell her that i feel she ought to tell me, given the fact that she knows 98% of what is going on in my life and since it's my blog i might want to blog about her. Anyway, she said she wasn't going to tell me and i didn't force the issue.

When i knew for sure that she was coming to my blog, was when something happened btw me and her and some dude and i noticed from the "feedit" feature that someone from her area was constantly coming to my blog. I just knew it was her. She was expecting me to write about it and for that reason i didn't. Prior to that i had noticed that she didn't call me like she used to and when i would call her she would not pick up the phone or return my calls. It got to a point that i had to ask someone else to call her to make sure she wasn't just ignoring my calls and she was fine. Her excuse was that she was busy. We have been friends since 2003 and it was obvious that there was more to it than that.

When a mutual friend of ours called me and asked about her, i told him i hadn't heard from her in 2 weeks which is highly unusual cos we used to talk at least 5 days a week. I told him she said she was busy and i have to reason not to believe her, although i personally thot there was more to it than that. A week later, he sends me a text that he spoke to her and she said she was mad at me, that there was important information that i should have told her that i didn't. I was baffled cos there was nothing that had happened to me that i hadn't told her besides the medical school interview that i got. I didn't tell her about it, but i wrote it on my blog. Hmmmm..................


She went on to say that she was very open with me about her life but i don't tell her stuff about my life. What the fuck? I told this chic every single thing that happened to me, which is very unlike me btw. Did she want me to tell her every single thot i had in my head or if i had a boil on my arse? Funny enough, i probably would have told her if i had a boil on my arse. Anyway, my friend tried to get her to say what exactly i should have told her that i didn't but she refused to talk. I sent her a series of text messages inviting her to talk to me about it and she basically blew me off. I ended up telling her that i hope she had learned her lesson about being sneaky cos the truth is, she couldn't open up and tell me what was bothering her cos she had lied to me previously that she wasn't reading my blog, so there was no way she could explain how she found out all the things she claimed i didn't tell her. She couldn't have heard anything from other people, cos we don't have a lot of mutual friends.

I don't understand human beings. Me and her were supposed to be close, she was my closest friend in the States, i told her things i didn't even tell my sister, yet she reads my blog behind my back and has the audacity to get mad cos there were some things she saw in my blog that i didn't tell her. She totally turned me off blogging cos it was almost as if she had stolen my diary and read it. There are a lot of things i would write about on my blog that i wouldn't think of telling people that know me. Initially, i was upset that she obviously did not care about saving our friendship as much as i did, but now i'm okay with it. I guess she has served whatever purpose she was meant to serve in my life and it's time for her to move on. Some friendships are not meant to be forever and i think sometimes God places people in our lives to help us get thru stuff. She was there for me thru a lot of trying times. I made sure i told her how much i appreciated her being there for me but now i think it's time to move on. I'm not going to beg a grown woman to be friends with me or to act her age and work things out. It's sad that the friendship had to end, but i've made my peace with it.

I love blogging. It is a source of comfort/therapy for me. I'm not going to stop cos a bunch of people have got their britches in a bunch. I'm accountable to no one but myself. I don't think i'm obligated to tell anybody every single thing that happens to me.

To you: I never said you were my best friend and even if you were i reserve the right to keep some things to myself until if or when i feel comfortable to share.

Even though this blog is anonymous, it's very possible that people that know me might discover it and know it's me. That totally fine with me. Read at your own risk cos i will write about everything and anything i feel like. You have no right to start tripping over anything you read on this blog. My sister made me delete my beloved blog (81 freaking posts), a year of my life all gone, just becos i wrote about her. I didn't mention her name, but still i had to face the firing squad of my mother and my other sisters. How dare i write about my family online. Seriously???!!! Am i the only one that knows the meaning of anonymous?

Alright, i have said my piece. Read at your own risk!
Hey guys, welcome to my blog. Sit back, relax, grab a cup of coffee and enjoy!

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