by the way,

8 RANDOM THINGS ABOUT ME:

1. i love green. ok, that's not so random, that's obvious.

2. i find paractising Christianity to be the coolest thing ever. wait, it's supposed to be random stuff, right?

3. i'm not so much of a random person,

4. therefore there aren't many random things about me. the floor is open to any of my friends who would like to disagree.

5. but i do have random thoughts sometimes! if Ugandan females wore heels in the more developed countries, it would be more fun experience coz there'd be no potholes, eroded murrum roads, incomplete pavements with worn out manhole covers and incomplete tarmac roads with stones and pebbles on the loose. how this last sentence fits in with what i'm writing? it was just a random thought.

6. well, actually, that last thought was not so random. i was just walking to paragon hospital last night with my sister who is visiting til she goes back to UK, and who was persisting at her futile attempts to find some support from my thin arm as she tried to dodge loose stones, as we walked on that tarmac road between the hospital and the bugolobi flats. i always thought bugolobi roads were nice until she compared them to the ones at cambridge. today, i'm wearing heels because i'm going to an office. all of a sudden, the roads are so unfavourable for my choice of footwear. i can't imagine how i managed to walk through town in them before. how unrandom.

7. what i was doing in paragon last night? if i told u, i'd be continuing the story from no.6 and then it wouldn't be random stuff anymore. not that i'm really writing random stuff about me but at least there's not much of a logical flow! is there? but just to let it out, my sister karru gave birth yesterday to a healthy baby boy. yay!

8. i may not have random thoughts but my imagination does wander about randomly sometimes! there's no water at home. my neighbours don't have water either. the whole of makindye doesn't. my brother at MUK says there's no water at campus. my aunt says there's no water at kyambogo. well, there's no water in kampala for all i know! for the third day in a row now! i wonder...maybe the suppliers had a small problem. a big one, i mean. hmm, maybe some crook wanted to poison the population and nancy drew caught him in time to warn national water guys to cut the supply. maybe some psycho national census workor got obsessed with our evergrowing, already uncontrollable population and thought of the best way to kill some of Uganda's people; poison the water that's supplied to the area with the most dense population... ok, let me not make this another long story on its own. it's just my imagination anyway. nancy drew isn't even real. but i'll still read the papers. there could be clues in any story, if imagine hard enough.

p.s.:
9. i like pop corn, african jewelry and nice non-academic books. u could wrap my gifts in green wrapping paper too.

10. maybe i'll try this post topic some other time, when i discover random stuff about me.

i know the tagging days are done, but i beleive rae and the muganda didnt get their chance. lorna and ed, get your own blogs and give us the proper blognames, i've tagged u too.

about writing,

what, exactly, makes one a good writer? some talents are obviously unique to some people and can hardly be developed enough in those who dont have it, however much they try. take art and drawing for example. after two years of patient training and prodding and encouraging and teaching and reprimanding and anything else u can think of, some people in class just never got to be good at art. as soon we got to S.3, it was the first subject most people dropped. only a handful of interested class-mates were grateful enough for the exposure to take up the subject. art isn't like;-sports. i mean, if u have the build and the agility and watever else is needed, u could be trained to do various kinds of sports. who could discern if u were either talented or just trained that well? then there are some talents like (public) speaking. some people stammer or have the lisp, and still get the crowds' attention. in this case, it could be what they say that makes even the impatient people call them good speakers. then some people never really say anything useful or funny or nice or relevant, and yet when they're done, people will talking about how useful or funny or nice or relevant their speeches were. such people have a gift for gab that captures the listeners' attention, even if all the person was talking about was, well, gab. and this is where writing comes in.

is it the style? the proper grammar and punctuation? or the story? if i had something nice to write about, wouldnt i be called a good writer even there were just a few grammatical errors? would it be fair to call me a good writer if i had the commas and fullstops in the right places but still bored you to death? if ernest bazanye did political articles, would his fans still consider him a good writer? (sorry baz, but you're the only professional writer i know of who blogs, you're example is relevant to my fellow bloggers). and thinking of art, if i went to writing school (or whichever place that teaches people to be good writers), would it be a gurantee that i'd come out with a perfect blend of all the above? or can that only happen for people who've got 'it' in them;- u know, the innate linguistic intelligence (or something like that)?

to cut the long questioning short, what does one have to do, how does one have to write, what does one have to write about, to be called a good writer? let's not go to the why, it will bring up an argument of interest Vs ability.

i hope this pot is short enough.