I often have little moments that I think people would enjoy hearing about, but it’s hard to compose a whole article about them. So I’m going to try to remember a few, and just put them here in no particular order, with no particular theme.

1. The other day I got off the taxi at a different place and explored a new route to the internet cafe, because I now know so many vendors on my regular route that it adds between 10 and 40 minutes to my walk just to greet everybody properly.

1. a) I’ve come to a new appreciation of celebrity public meltdowns, particularly violence towards photographers and aggressive fans. For myself, I find it hard to ignore people who speak to me because it seems very rude, but on the other hand it can be exhausting, and sometimes it is not at all rewarding (for instance, I once told some people that I couldn’t stop because I was meeting a friend, they asked man or woman, and I said man, and then they made some rude comment about me meeting him for sex.) Sometimes you’re having a really bad day, and you just want a few minutes to collect yourself but there’s someone who keeps pressing even when you’ve done the polite “I’m not interested” thing. And sometime, on those day, sometimes, you just loose it and find yourself yelling at a beggar to “Go!!!! AWAY!!!!!!” And then you find yourself with a new appreciation for people who punch cameramen.

2. You can buy really cheap movie and tv collections here. They come in a shiny box with collages representing the collection and a nifty copyright notification assuring you that they have permission to distribute these movies but you, the buyer, do not. They are low res and the tv shows often have a television stations water mark on them (I get the biggest kick out of watching tv programs with “Global” or “Citytv” on them). But the funniest thing about these collections is the bizzaro titles and themes they have. There are a number of “vs.” collections. I recently purchased “Jennifer Lopez vs. Kate Winslet”, basically a collection of about 20 movies, 10 each “staring” one or the other (“staring” is a stretch for some of the movies). I wish I could remember some of the more bizarre titles. I will keep my eye out and write them down next time, I promise.

3. Incongruous t-shirts are a constant source of private amusement and/or speculation to me. Did the mayoral candidate in Iowa ever envision his campaign t-shirt on a woman in Africa carrying yams-for-sale on her head? Does that respectable teacher and father of four know who “Black Sabbath” is?

3. a) I don’t want to make fun of people wearing incongruous t-shirts, because they’re pretty much seen as work clothes that can be worn until they’re too grubby and then turned to rags. So it’s a private amusement, just a humourous note to myself that I exist in two different contexts. But then I occasionally see something incongruous on a child, one of those overly sexual slogans we’ve taken to putting on children. I find these distressing, not because of the context here; I think most people are indifferent to t-shirt slogans and even literate people may see them more as designs than messages. But the incongruity of seeing a man wearing a pink “Princess” t-shirt is one of cross-culture context. That type of incongruity highlights the fact that the incongruity of a 7-year-old child wearing a t-shirt with large block letters saying “SED/UCT/ION” is a purposeful one that was intended, and that people bought into in the first place. I’ve always found it distasteful, but somehow seeing it in this context, it seemed more profoundly disturbing. I suppose because it seems that the people who made and bought these shirts for children were using the children to create their own private amusement, similar to the one I feel looking at recycles, out of context slogans.

Well, that’s all for now. I’ll try to think of more.

Filed under: Ghana Daily-Living