The other day I attended a meeting for our school poetry club. I had wanted to see the performances and a friend of mine had said that they were beginning at 9 am. I arrived at 10 because I had spent the night before not in my room.;) Turns out my friend had it wrong, idiot!!!, and this was actually a meeting between the school club and the guest artists that had been invited. Since I was already there I decided to stay.

Hey guys!! People have been complaining about how difficult it is to comment on the standard Blogger template for a long while so from today we’ll be using Disqus comments which should make it much easier for anyone to comment. Let me know what you think of it by commenting or by e-mail. Peace!!!

So I was randomly checking out my analytics-something I do to make sure at least one person has checked what I’ve written- and noticed among the reports the search engine Keyword traffic the most hilarious thing. Some one googled “I’m in Kenya, I want a girlfriend” and landed on my blog.

This got my thinking about what this person was thinking when googling this and the post he may have landed at. I decided to do a whole post on the Keywords that had landed people on my blog.

First I’d like to thank Sgyreju for allowing me to put up her posts on my blog and I’m sure all of you thank her too. She wrote them almost a year ago but the ideas and questions she asks are priceless and I’ll continue to cherish them forever. Second this is an edited conclusion of what has been a very fun week of posts that Sgyreju originally had on her blog. It contain mostly her thoughts interspersed with mine.

Gender is something I have only begun to think about very recently, and I still have work to do in order to understand better where I stand in relation to it. But, even though I have only been exploring my own gender identity for about three months, I had known for a while longer that it is quite a complex matter.

The first thing to know is the difference between sex and gender. While sex is a biological fact, gender is an identity; it is about how one perceives oneself. For a long time, I did not know about gender; this is not a widely known concept in mainstream France (recently, someone I know wrote a survey with a question about “gender”. She told me her professors had said it was the politically correct word to use for questions about biological sex.). I knew about transsexual people, but I only knew about them as “people who feel they were born in the wrong body and need to change their biological sex”. As to myself, my being a girl was just a fact, like my height or my birth date – a fact about me I had no control about, and which meant even less to me than my height or my birthdate do – and I could not imagine it mattering at all.

Most people divide relationships with people who do not belong to their family in only two categories: friends and romantic partners. A specific set of expectations and “normal behavior” is associated with each category, and transgressions are frowned upon: One is not supposed to kiss one’s friends, or hold hands with them, for instance, but on the other hand, it is not considered “normal” not to kiss or have sex with one’s romantic partner.

Very often, people use the word “relationship” to refer to romantic relationships – just as they use the word “love” to refer to romantic love. It rather annoys me to see those words trapped into one of their specific meanings, especially as this specific meaning is not one I can relate to. So, be warned – in this blog, “relationship” refers to all kinds of relationships, and “love” refers to all kinds of love.

I did not always identify as aromantic.

For a long time, I did believe in the whole romantic myth that one is truly happier with a romantic partner, and I wished for one. I longed for the time when I would finally live those idealized shared moments with my beloved: having breakfast together, taking long walks hand in hand, talking about everything and anything for hours, kiss passionately like in my favorite love scenes in movies…

I will not lie to you: Questioning one’s identity is scary.

The evening of June 4, 2006, when I finally became aware that I probably was not heterosexual as I had always assumed, and the night that followed were, at the time, the scariest moments of my life. Now, four years later, they have only been pushed to second place by another evening that I do not want to talk about (and anyway, it has nothing to do with asexuality or any of the other matters that I wish to discuss in my Petri Dish).

Since today is the fourth anniversary of the evening during which I realized I needed to reconsider my assumed and never questioned heterosexuality, I thought I might as well tell the story of what exactly happened then.

I had a LiveJournal account in which I wrote regularly – and there are entries about that event. The first one was published at 10:18PM that night, which means that the event happened before.

I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time. For the next week,every day, starting tomorrow, I’ll be featuring a number of posts that I read a long time ago from Rainbow Amoeba’s Petri Dish . She called it Questioning Week.  They really inspired me, so much so that I started my very own Questioning Week inspired by the series of post I’m going to share with you during the coming week

…the Storymoja Monthly Blog Posts Expo. Yeah I was nominated along with a host of other more talented writers such as Savvy Kenya. Yeah someone considered my writing to be at the same level of Savvy!! Yeah I’m feeling rather good about myself right now. You can read about the nomination here, doesn’t seem like there’s any prize to be won though.

Here’s what was said about the nominees

"…today, all I wish to celebrate like we have every month on the Storymoja Writers’ Community, is the diversity of writing and the creativity of forming that can be found on the Kenyan blogosphere.

It’s been so long since I’ve updated this blog, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. The psych to do anything has been at nil recently. I can’t seen to find the psych to do much other than look at what other people are doing. I check into twitter only to watch the tweet stream not to contribute.

I went for Bake happy hour quite sometime back and was inspired to statrt blogging by seeing all those bloggers gather. I didn’t really keep that promise to myself did I? Perhaps I should make a resolution to start doing so. You can read all about Bake here on Savvy’s blog.

Hey y’all! Starting tomorrow I’ll be dropping a bunch of posts I wanted to put up last year but didn’t have the chance or means to. There are 4 or 5 posts that were actually written as one but would have been too long for one sitting/post in my opinion. So I cut it up. I’ve done it such a way that it provides the most entertainment while still managing to convey what was happening. I hope you like it because I personally think I did a great job on them. Either way your thoughts on them would be much appreciated so stick around. Peace!!

Hey guys! Did you miss me? I missed you. Really I have. This should technically be a new years message but it’s already so late in the month there’s barely any point of talking about it except perhaps to say" I hope you new year has gone well so far. How are the resolutions coming along long? I mean are you still sticking to them?"
I personally don’t do new year resolutions. I think it’s because I’ve usually have made my long term decisions long before the new year checks in. And also because I’m awesome. I mean why wait for new years to take a look at your life and make decisions about it? Anyway before I go rambling on for too long without saying much of value. I just wanted to do this post to let yáll know that I should be posting more regularly now.

So I couldn’t do a whole week of posts. I’m sorry but I ran out of things to question, I don’t know why. Maybe I have nothing else to question or I just haven’t figured out what else I’m questioning in my life yet but when I do you’ll be some of the first to know.

So this is the official end of questioning week. I like to think I tried my best and I really  hope you’ve enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. So what was your favourite post? Let me know? Until next time, peace!!!

Yesterday I had a security breach on the laptop I use to write the posts I put up for you. No, my posts for you aren’t so important that someone would spend their time trying to hack my laptop trying to steal them as creative secrets(Though to me they are) and anyway the laptop is never connected to any network.

BREACH!!!!

Yeah, a friend of mine found one of the posts I had written for posting some day. The way she found it was kinda suspicious. She asked if she come to my room and use my laptop for 5 minutes. I, at the time clueless, just thought she wanted to use it for programming or something. You see, not many of my classmates have laptops yet despite being computer science students but I suspect next semester most will.

@eGichomo recently launched his Kenya Blog Contest asking people to vote for their favourite Kenyan blog. Voting is currently on going and as of the time of writing this post this blog was leading with 33 votes. Thanks guys! However polls will close on 30th of this month after which the winner will be announced. There are three categories:
Art Award: Recognition and appreciation of poetry. Creativity, choice of words, originality and show of talent.
Beauty Award: Best layout, design, cool features, attractiveness and finest integration of themes and magnificence.
Action Award: Pursuit of ingenuity. Most interactive and frequent in content update.

This is continuation from yesterday’s post, I told you I’ve been busy and there’s much to write about.

On Friday I was at work reading the paper, Nation, when I came across the an article on asexuality. Usually I don’t read the zuqka, mostly I peruse, prefer the Pulse by far, but asexuality was something I had actually talked about on my blog not so recently so I decided to read what they had to say about it.