Is this creepy or wot?

My friends & colleagues are divided into four delicate categories: those who neither can nor want to pay (their conversation starts with a mean “anchi beQa…” and ends with complaining against the government); those who would like to pay if they can (they avoid spending an evening with you unless it’s the first week of their pay day, comprising a large number of Ethiopians); those who can but aren’t willing to pay… and those able and willing to pay!! For some reason, though, I end up paying most of the time. Which is why the salary I earn at the end of the month (which would take care of a family of seven comfortably: 4 kids under 12, the parents & a sister-in-law who doesn’t mind doing all the chores) is finding it hard seeing me through to the next.

So I’ve been heading home after work lately. To cooking dinners, catching up on my reading, watching movies and being amused with the assorted people my neighbor has over every evening. If he was gay, it would have made sense. He’s got a gorgeous girlfriend, so.. yeah.. his loud friends who come and go as they please and the fact that he coughs his guts out every time he hears a door open are quite bewildering!

A photo copy of Chinua Achebe’s “No Longer at Ease” was the book I was planning to read last night. It’s the story of one Obi Okonkwo (grandson to the tragic hero of “Things Fall Apart”) in a colonial-Nigeria with the post-colonial “disillusionment” for a theme that I was intriged with. After preparing my dinner, a snack really, I tucked my legs under the cushion of my chair and flipped the first of the final 18 pages of NL@E. It wasn’t long before I heard a “drip” “drip” sound coming from the toilet/bathroom. Knowing full well I hadn’t left any of the taps unclosed, I walked in there cautiously. It didn’t take long to locate the source of the dripping noise. It was coming through a long crack on the roof. Albeit a clean water, it upset me to no little degree. This has happened before, and that time, the water has managed to crack half the living room roof and screw up with the electric wires so bad I’ve been made unable to use some of the bulbs. (Didn’t call an Electrician to fix it for want of a closet to hide my half Caucasian husband in, and afterwards I guess i got used to going without).

Furious, I went to the room upstairs and started knocking.