Party Dress Wahala..

How can I be invited to a cocktail party and the guys are all in jeans and sneakers ehn?! Look at me all dressed up like am about to see the queen and the girls are dressed in spandex like dresses. This is oh so wrong!!!

Ok, let me gist you people. So I was invited to this 'cocktail' party and instructions strictly stated that everyone should be properly dressed for the party. Girls should be in sexy cocktail dresses and the guys should be in suits. Seeing as I am an almost reformed tomboy (all you could ever find in my wardrobe was jeans and tees and being that I am almost reformed to dressing and acting like a girl) the closest I had to a dress is a shirt dress that I still wore with my jeans ;D. So I had to call re-enforcement to rescue me. Shopping, shopping, shopping...my favorite thing to do. You may ask...since this one is being reformed, what's then is she shopping for??..well, I shop for shoes.

This for me, is a compulsive obsession and not necessarily a hobby (like someone recently comically ranted on NS about shopping being a hobby..I loved that article btw). I love shoes, my wardrobe currently is full of them. I go online to my favorite shoe store @DSW and I have to at least have one shoe in by store bag before logging off. I collect shoes like others collect stamps...anyway that's gist for another day.

So, I called up a friend to rescue me from this uncalled for predicament and she suggested we go shopping for dresses. So since I loved shopping, even though not for dresses, I jumped at the idea and we headed to the store. Oh my goodness, the kind of fun I had that day cannot be described. I tried on dresses after dresses, pretending I was on the run way, and it was awesome. Apparently, I've found a new love after shoes..dresses. I couldn't believe how fabulous I looked in these clothes. I used to think I didn’t have the behind to pull off dresses but mehn, you just had to check me out that day. All I kept saying was..’Mehn…see babe!!!’. Short, long dresses; Full bodied, skimpy dresses. I looked awesome and I was loving the experience. At the end of it all, I had tried on over 10 dresses and then it was time to make a decision. When you’ve budgeted a 100bucks for dress and then you have at least 5 dresses you absolutely couldn’t let go of, each one costing nothing less than 50 bucks…..una see my predicament now? Serious wahala o...I couldn't decide which ones to let go off. For someone who didn’t like dresses, this was absolutely absurd but I was in pain….sighs.. Finally, I sadly made a decision and picked the two I thought were the best with the help of my friend. I left the store with a huge grin on my face, got home, laid the dresses on the bed and then matched them up with awesome shoes…and thought to myself…’ah! I go show them for this party.’ I felt like Cinderella going to her first ball.

Just imagine my anger and disappointment when I got here and only about three or four of us where appropriately dressed in the thirty or so people in the room. Guys in baggy jeans and baggy Tee shirts or shirts with sneakers. Girls wearing tops they called dress. Wait o, na only me see the instruction for the invitation? I am sure I look like one of those cartoon characters that when angry, their face turns red and you can see the heat puffing out of their head….Tchuewww, wey I for just wear my jeans and top come the party. Complete waste of baff.

So I am sitting down, watching all these people and then it hits me. ‘Girl, you look fantastically fabulous!’. With drink in hand and a huge smile on my face, I peruse more faces and from the look in many eyes, I can tell they think so too ;-).

Read more of "Party Dress Wahala.."!

Where is the love?

Where is the love? The bible defines love as patient, kind, not envious, not proud, amongst others (1 cor 13:1-8). How many relationships apply this definition in reality? Today, most relationships use love as a justification for sex instead of the words lust or infatuation. How easy it is to say ‘I love you’ when in fact it should be ‘I lust for you’.

One day I was being driven back from the mall by Jide, my boyfriend at the time and there was this talk on the radio about relationships and we kind of got into an argument about it and about love. The next thing I knew, he said, “I love you”. I looked at him as if to ask where that came from and he just looked back at me. Still perplexed as we’ve only been dating two weeks, I replied with a ‘thank you.’ I could have easily said ‘I love you too’ but I didn’t as I knew that would have been a lie, although I liked and cared about him. He made an issue of my not saying I love you back and refused to talk to me till the next day. Two months later, the relationship was over without any notice. We just parted ways. Thank God I still had my pride and honor intact. So what happened to this love he had for me?

How do you know you are really in love? “It is when you can’t sleep at night because of thoughts of him, you wake up after about 2 hours of sleep with thoughts of him, you wonder if he’s ok every time, you want to do everything to make him happy” my best friend Claudia told me, at this time, she was infatuated with a co-worker and although he had a girlfriend who was out of the country, he claimed he loved her. Where is he now? He’s married to his girlfriend and they have a daughter together. So what happened to this earth shattering love he had for her? “Girlie, when you fall in love ehn, you go just de kolo for the guy. Its only natural” says Kole a guy friend of mine. “Well no problem as long as the guy de kolomental for me. If it is going to be one sided and on my part, I refuse to fall in love, unless he is the one doing the loving. After all it was said in the bible that a man should love his partner as he loves himself and she should submit to him” I replied. Kole laughed “you are just being pigheaded and stiff. Let go”. Let go? And have my tender heart trampled on, no way. There is no rule in any relationship handbook that says a girl shouldn’t guard her heart and be cautious of men.

Someone once told me to make sure not to fall in love but rather walk in love because when you fall, it might take a while for you to be picked up that is if you get picked as you may be too traumatized to ask for a helping hand. But when you walk in love, and you see a bad path ahead, you can easily turn and take the next path. As the poet, Archibald Macleish once said “love, like light, grows dearer towards the dark.” He calls it the “late, last wisdom of the afternoon.” It is the kind of love that grows dearer as we age, survives all disappointments, misunderstandings, quarrels.

I may sound like I’ve been through a lot of heartaches and from being in love but the reverse is the case. I’ve never experienced what is it to be ‘in love’ with a man but I’m waiting expectantly to experience that “ late, last wisdom of the afternoon”, the self denying love that’s deeply rooted in God, a life long commitment that never gives up or fails.

this was written 7yrs ago…

Read more of "Where is the love?"!