Soporific Days

Today was one of those days when despite electronic admonishments from emails urging one to *carpe diem*, it was just downright impossible to do so!

It was also a day when I felt I was in much-need of the leave I've been contemplating. The office is that much quieter with my immediate boss himself on leave and therefore being left unsupervised, but before he left, he put down an outline of outstanding issues, which include a revision of an article I am writing on mining codes revision and regional integration.

The latter is my forte; the former not. I am just not feeling sufficiently motivated to re-write that article, but I got myself a deadline of Friday, as next week, I don the press cap and cover another international conference coming to town.

It really would be in my best interests to finish it off, and just stop moaning! Sleep became me a lot today. I guess I need quite a lot of it to be back in the mood for tomw.

enjoy YOUR evening...
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(BBC) Forum for Thought: The Bearable Lightness of Being Silent

The BBC Worldservice has been running a programme on Sunday mornings called "The Forum", where intellectuals from all disciplines gather together to allow themselves to be queried on topics as vast as globalisation, global business, mathematical formulations of an African village, etc. You get the picture: wide array of issues.

Yesterday, an intervention by one Professor Trevor Cox (who works on sound engineering) featured on the one-minute-idea-to-save-the-world segment talked about the need to sometimes just - keep -quiet and switch our phones, mobiles, computers off . It had less to do with energy and more to do with getting back to a time and period when we could think without being interrupted by a text message and whatnot.

His major contention is that for business to work effectively, the quiet is very much needed.

I believe someone by the name of Carlyle said in a moment of epiphanous truth that "silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves."

The irony of this post is that I am writing it -- motivated by the desire to blog -- in a mall, where silence is virtually impossible (Celine Dion is blasting from the eatery, while muzak plays in the halls of the mall), but downright counter-productive to the business of selling all sorts of stuff!

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Many thanks...

...to all those who honoured my invites. I hope to revolutionise the blogging experience from hereonin!

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Weekend Woes: On the Fast Lane, I get some Wake-Up Calls

The folks always admonished my brother, Sam (who would have been 35 yrs old last Saturday) that you cannot serve two masters. The lack of attachment to blogging offlate brings this to significant sharp relief, as I'm torn between the professional (which rules my roost!) and the private, where I become schizophrenic in the different kinds of blog I maintain.

There are certain periods where there is a considerable lull--and this month and the last was one of them. No matter how "organised" you become, the desire to write just passes by. I guess I can only call it blogger's block.

Still, I'm no quitter, as I intoned in no country for tired bloggers and the desire to fight to write will be second nature.

All that said, at times, the planets decide to do something to you, and I notice that during the August-September periods, I feel this the most. It appears those are the times I am my most contemplative, most solipsistic -- which is pretty ironic, considering how this very blog in particular--and most blogs in general--could be conceived of as extensions of each blogger's ego;-)

So it's coming as no surprise, then, I would get a serious wake-up call this week--and not just because it was the same week that the seventh anniversary of 9-11 would be celebrated.

Relationship-wise, my significant other told me some home truths about the trajectory of our relationship, which gave me both the shudders and creeps. The creeps because I was thinking it myself over the previous weekend, and the shudders, because we were engaged in a rather compromising position when she rather understandably and angrily mentioned it.

I duly took note. There were no arguments that ensued, merely a sitting of us together to work on improving the qualitative nature of what we already have. The following day, she acknowledged that she might have "wilded me", but we both understood that it didn't change how we felt about each other--just that more should be done, and more qualitatively

Secondly, in a way that would remind me of how blogging can open up opportunities, a former blogger and reader of this blog (you know who you are!) contacted me that his friend who works closely with the UN was coming to my country of Ghana, and that he mentioned to the guy that I was interested in UN stuff, so we should talk.

Email exchanges came and went, and a meeting was established. Though it turns out I didn't get exactly what I bargained for, it certainly was a good meet. We will keep in touch.

The wake-up call? to get serious about heading for the UN in a decade's time, and to prepare accordingly (read: consolidating my knowledge on communications; web work and computer language!)