Living alone diaries #32; robberies, sci-fi novels and job offers
Did you know there are 52 weeks in a year?
I’ve posted an entry every week for 32 weeks. That’s well over half a year.
Wow.
That’s so crazy, like. I’m proud of myself for that.
I still plan on taking the blog to WordPress, maybe when I reach the one-year mark.
You guys have to hold me accountable.
Bruh.
I’m so tired today, I don’t even know what I’m going to be able to write here.
This past week has been… eventful, I think.
It started well, I was having good days and structured mornings and all of that stuff, but in the middle of the week, I got some upsetting news.
The first is family stuff, and the second is someone I know getting robbed.
And this is the second time in under a year that he’s getting robbed, so it’s heartbreaking.
They (he and his colleague) got into a cab, and it turns out the people in the cab were robbers. After threatening them with a gun and dagger, they took all their possessions — phones, laptops, wallets, ATM cards — then asked them to call out the passcodes to everything, took them to a POS vendor and withdrew all the money in their accounts.
This is… insane.
You’re trying to go home after a long day and you get into a cab and you’re robbed of everything you have.
how is this normal? Nigerians are the most resilient people I’ve ever heard of because almost everyone has some sort of story where they’ve been a victim of a crime.
I can’t imagine how traumatic that was for him.
My friend and I have this thing where we take turns alternatively selecting and reading works of literature.
The secret history (the book I talked about last week) was my selection, so now we’re reading the caves of steel by Isaac Asimov. I just started last night, so I don’t know exactly what I think yet, but let’s see. (Edit from the future: I finished it and it’s not that good, honestly, only mildly interesting.)
I’ve had a soft spot for sci-fi for quite a while now; as a child, I was obsessed with the Star Wars movies, and once I was able to get my hands on the books, I devoured them. There’s just something so riveting about seeing the projections other people have about the events of the future, the worldbuilding, the technology, and seeing how the human race changes over time, even though it’s fiction.
It’s just fascinating to me.
The latest sci-fi franchise I’ve been obsessed with is the dune books and movies.
Frank Herbert (the author) is such a brilliant creative.
I read the book sometimes and I cannot believe that one person sat down and came up with such a diverse and expansive world. It is mind-boggling. I read about him, and if you’re familiar with the dune series, you know about Arrakis, the desert planet where a valuable substance (called simply, “spice”) is mined, and the barrenness of the land and the danger posed by the sun (it can melt metal) is a metaphor for what will happen to earth (its 8,000 years in the future) as regards to climate change and human pollution.
The ideas presented in the book were so fascinatingly and eerily accurate, that because of his series, people started to invite him to speak on climate change and he was a guest speaker at many a seminar on the future of the planet.
Then even the religions and the faiths in the dune world.
I don’t want to go on a whole rant about him and his work and even the movie (the most beautiful movie ever made, hands down) but I just want you to know that directors were afraid to translate the insanely popular sci-fi novel into a film because it would be obscenely expensive to create an accurate depiction of the world frank made.
That’s how detail-rich and complex the source material is.
Stunning, stunning stuff.
Okay, I’m done with my dune rant now.
It’s Wednesday today, the 25th of Jan.
I didn’t post on Monday — obviously — because I hadn’t written anything all week and I knew that if I tried to, it would be absolute nonsense and wouldn’t be because I wanted to talk.
I was watching one of my favourite YouTubers, Sadie Aldis, and she was talking about how at the beginning of her career as a creator everyone said posting content consistently was the most important thing, and the quality of the content didn’t matter. She realized later that ideology didn’t work for her, and she’d much rather prioritize quality over quantity, and that’s how I feel too.
Of course, I want to post as consistently as I can, and that’s still a priority for me, but writing something I feel proud of and happy reading back to myself is always going to be more important to me.
Anyways, this week has been busy, damn.
I’ve had long ass days at work and had to write two articles — one as part of an assessment for a job application, and one as a contribution to an online magazine — and I should be starting another right now but I’m tired of writing.
Writing seems like such an easy thing, especially because of the name.
It’s a simple enough verb; writing.
Writing isn’t hard, but writing well? Now that’s not as easy.
I do enjoy it most times, sha, so I’m not complaining too much. But it can be time-consuming; writing a thousand-word article from ideation to final edits takes me the better part of six to seven hours, and that’s on a day when my brain is cooperating.
Wish me luck on the application sha.
It’s Saturday, the 28th of Jan. 10:00 am.
I was going to write yesterday, but I was otherwise occupied.
I’m not complaining sha.
So, on the eve of Thursday, I got an email inviting me for an interview (remember the application I was talking about? Yeah) the interview is the last stage of the assessment process, and boy, was it an interview.
It was on google meet and went for well over an hour, but apparently, that’s standard for job interviews. I don’t particularly like talking for long stretches, so I’m sure you can imagine at some point I was like damn, this long stuff.
Being the perfectionist I am, when I think back on it — which I try not to because I just make myself anxious — I remember things I could have said or explained in better ways or other answers to questions I’d given that maybe didn’t show the breadth of my experience the way I would have particularly liked, but it’s in the past now.
I would say it went well anyways.
The interviewers seemed impressed with my knowledge, articulation and experiences, and they said as much. And I was also impressed by the depth of questions that they asked, and because you guys know I’m a very introspective person, it was nice to talk about stuff like that.
Of course, there’s always still a chance that I won’t get the job, and I’m very aware of that, but I also feel a bit confident about the whole thing. I know that if I don’t get the position, it won’t be because I’m not good enough or I did something wrong, it’ll be a decision based purely on them and their needs.
So, I’m kind of good about either outcome.
Should I even be writing about this? I don’t want to jinx it, hm.
But the point of this series is to document my journey, and this is part of it.
They said they’d decide within two weeks, so wish me luck!
It’s Monday, 30 January 2023, 12:20 pm.
The most insane thing, wow.
I came into work and was working on another assessment for a job I applied to, I slept late yesterday, so I already wasn’t in a very good mood, I didn’t even do my morning practices, that’s how drained I was. And this unknown number calls me — you already know I hate calls, but this is an unknown number, and it’s only the rich that can afford to ignore calls from the unknown.
So, I pick, and who is it? The recruiter from the job interview I had on Thursday.
Telling me that he was delighted to inform me that they have an offer for me, and he wanted to know if I’d accept before he sent me the email.
I am, quite literally, ecstatic.
Of course, I say yes. And he tells me I’ll receive an offer email before the end of the day.
I start the day after tomorrow and it’s fully remote too.
It’s so insane that some of the people in my actual life don’t know about this, but you guys now do.
Well, I guess at this point, this life I’m living is our own.
Ahmad, best in over-sharing on the internet.
Anyways I’m feeling really good about this, you guys know I’ve been crawling through the mud this whole time, so yeah.
I’m also hella glad that it’s just as my service year is ending. So, I won’t just be sitting down at home wallowing.
The universe works in crazy ways.
January is ending most unexpectedly, innit?
Alhamdulillah.
Anyways, I hope you guys are having an amazing week so far.
Thank you for reading and coming along with me on my journey.
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