Fope's Blog

Photo credit:  San Diego Shooter  via  Foter.com  / CC BY-NC-ND   Picture this: I'm at a new church, my first young adult gathering. Aka, the best place to be judged for coolness, how spiritual (or not) you are, and the best time to leave a good first impression or even catch potential bae's attention. All is going well and no one is starting too much at the new girl. A simple question is asked, "who has ever been to a young adult conference", and as you may know (hello long time blog readers!) I have been to quite a few of those. Remember  this  and  this ? So, I eagerly raise my hand and proceed to share my experiences. I talk about how different my experience might be from what they have in mind for their upcoming conference (a one day conference). Then I go on to say that all the ones I've been to have taken me out of town, sometimes to rural (internet-less) areas. The part about not having Internet access caught their attention - it's 2016,

You know, just a Friday night Netflix and chilling, and thinking of launching a YouTube career. But boy, that thing is more work than it appears to be.  Isn't this picture just stunning? It's from  here I have a pretty nice camera, I know lighting is your best friend, I also know video editing is to awesome videos as packaging is to any product. But what is knowledge if you're not going to act on it? Well, I actually did act on it; I shot my first video. It was a nice ramble and I guess you could say it had some potential. However, as I re-watched it six hours later, I realized that I roll my eyes upward when I'm talking and thinking at the same time. So in the video,  I look slightly lost and unsure of myself. But hey, Rome wasn't built in one day, so maybe there'll be a second shot and third, or however many it takes to nail this thing. Or maybe I'll just add a tab on here and do with my blog, what I had hoped to do

It may sound silly, but I've only now fully realized that just by virtue of being mine, my story counts.  For someone who has a personal blog, a blog that isn't necessarily centered around her taste in fashion, or faith or some particular interest,  you'd think I would already know that my story has to count. People actually take the time to read it and some enjoy it.  Although, that's no measure of the validity of my story, it should have been a reminder that just being uniquely me is enough. But somehow it still takes grand revelations to bring this fact to consciousness. Thinking of the books and blogs that have captured my heart in the last few months, I've realized that they've all been heavily-laced with personalities of the authors that make it feel like I know them. It's like they're telling me about something that's really important to them and why it is. And because I like what I'm hearing (or reading), because there's somethin

As I sit here in Murtala Mohammed Airport Lagos, waiting a gruesome four hours for my boarding time to come (thanks to over-factoring in the Lagos Traffic), I can't help but reflect on the most memorable moments of my eighty three-ish days in Nigeria. Was it worth it?  Most of the time it was, but there were definitely some  meh  days. Somewhere around day 60 of 83, I started getting tired of everything. I got frustrated with the amount of time being in traffic wasted, frustrated with how many hours in the day I lost because I had to factor in the security of travelling in dark hours and then there was the need to wait on someone to take me out because going out and looking like a clueless "I just got back" wasn't really an option ... there are plenty people out to milk you.  Yes this picture again... Nike Art Gallery is such a beautiful place. Some of my aunties and I in my late great-grandma's living room. Moneywise , I didn't spend a lot.

It's 5days late...but whatever! Yeah, my blog turned 3...five days ago! Every year, on the Blogiversary, I go back to read my very first post . There are some typos there and some messed up formatting, but I'm leaving those there so that every year when I look back, I can actually see how far I've come. The bulk of this year was spent trying to find my blog's niche, but now that I've gone back to read that first post, I have no idea why I stressed about the whole niche thing. I made it pretty clear at the beginning that I would be "writing whatever I please on here". Maybe it's the broadness of that statement or maybe it's my preoccupation with the potential of monetizing my blog that drove me to look at other bloggers to see how things were being done. Or it could have just been me trying to grow. It most likely was a mix of all of that. I'm big on mentoring; whether it's active mentoring or just close observation of an obje