One of 'em days!!!...

Saturday morning is not exactly my favourite part of the week. There's no error in that statement...Friday evenings are great, but Saturday mornings not so much so. The reason is simple - I am usually so carefree on Friday nights because I don't need to get up early the next day that I stay well up into the night glued to the TV (I don't club, and night outs usually end by 10 pm at the very latest), after which I usually have to switch off the gen, and then endure a usually hellish night with no light and, of recent, abundant mosquitoes. By the time I wake up the next day, I would have slept very little because of all the factors above, and would be remembering that I do have to get out a bit early because I have a zillion and two things to do, postponed till the weekend because of work. And so I am grouchy, unrefreshed, confused about how to go about completing my tasks, and usually hungry (doing anything that involves concentration till late, even watching TV, actually eats up the food in you if you don't munch something while doing so). Not exactly good feelings.



This past Friday night was pretty terrible, as mosquitoes really tormented me in assistance to their loving brother, heat. For a while, I had come to the deluded belief that I am somewhat immune to mosquito bites - I would sleep without a shirt on, with no light, and while a roommate would be whining the next morning about the evilness of mosquitoes, I would be wondering what he was talking about, because I would've felt hardly any evidence of mosquito activity. My mum always insisted that it was probably just that I couldn't feel them, not that they weren't feeding on me. I certainly have been feeling them recently - and I suspect my cousin, who shares a room with me, caused it. It's not his fault really - he has just recently made it a habit to apply this anti-mosquito cream on himself before he sleeps. The effect this is having is that we are no longer sharing the responsibility of hosting insatiable mosquitoes; they have now focused all their attention on me. For this reason, Saturday morning did not begin very well for me.



There were other annoying factors as well. For one, I was supposed to go for a wedding in which I was to be an impromptu groomsman, but due to the stress of work, I had forgotten to cross-check the address and time before leaving work on Friday evening. So I had asked my colleague, who was to serve in the same function at the wedding, to text the details to me, and he had graciously promosed to do so. However, he somehow forgot to do so, and on Saturday morning, my unease was veering towards panic. I mean, here I was, expected to be a groomsman as a saving favour, with only a faint idea as to the venue, and no idea of the time of the wedding. The situation was not helped by the fact that I couldn't reach my text-sending-fellow-groomsman-colleague on phone, at least not by the number that I had of him. Another sour point for me was the fact that my room was upside down, and I was finding it difficult to find anything. My brother had just left town (he had come in from the US for his wedding), and while he was around, he had been using my room. In his packing, he had left the room in a little mess, and my mum had gotten it rearranged in my absence, in the process changing the position of almost everything. I managed to find the shirt for the wedding with some difficulty (thankfully still smooth), but everything else was proving elusive. I was afraid of the state in which I would find them, considering the absence of electricity at the time (the third sour point), which meant that no ironing or quick-drying would be possible if needed. To cap it up, there was no fuel for the gen to remedy the situation, and little of it in the car I was gonna go with - a cause for worry as regards how I'd fill the tank afterwards.



Altogether, I was sweaty, confused, worried, panicky and restless - altogether pissed. I was basically resolving to lie my ass back on the bed in frustration and go nowhere, wallowing in the guilt of having destoyed a colleague's wedding when, suddenly, I remembered that I had the number of another groomsman, and decided to call him. He was able to give me an (albeit vague) idea of the venue, and informed me to my alarm that the wedding was for 10 am. The time was already past 9, meaning that I had less than an hour to bathe, get dressed and transport myself to the venue. I wasn't helped much by the fact that I spent the next 10, 15 minutes looking for my towel, eventually settling for one that barely covered my ass, and getting into the room afterwards to remember that my shirt was the only item of my clothing already located. Luckily for me when I eventually found the other items after a disoriented searching exercise, they were all in good condition. By the time I was somehow able to finish getting dressed, I was looking like I had just done a sauna session fully clothed, and was going to be pretty late.



I hurried off on my way to the wedding area (not the venue, as my driver couldn't make head or tail of the vague description I had been given), and had to call and ask people along the way repeatedly to get the venue. I finally got there like 10:35, with barely any time before we were to go into the church with the groom. Luckily for me, the groom was not cross with me, only relieved that I had made it. Luckily for him, my dear text-sending-fellow-groomsman-colleague had not yet arrived - I was gonna really spark for him for putting me in limbo. But by the time he came around, we were already in church, and I was feeling much better - the joy of a wedding is always so infectious, even if (as it was in my case) you can't sing along or enjoy the praise-worship much because the person leading them keeps raising very rare and almost tuneless songs in a language foreign to you (Igbo in this case), which everybody else in the church appears to know.



In the end, i enjoyed myself tremendously and didn't regret going for the wedding, despite the start to the day. To make things even better, I learnt that a former classmate had just given birth to a boy. Great news to sweeten the day.