THE ESTHERIAN BLOG

This is going to be chaotic. I am learning to embrace things that are chaotic because chaos is not as scary as I have always made it out to be. I have been listening to ISWIS podcast episodes in the past weeks, and the chaos there has been delightful.   The past week has been the most unproductive week I have had in a while, all I have done was sleep, find something to eat and sleep a lot more because what else was there for me to do? The answer is a lot. I am way behind in class and I need to catch up on that. My laundry is piling up and someone has to do it. There is the data collection for my final year project that I am way behind on, but all I have done in the past week was sleep. The sleep has unfortunately not been as refreshing as I expected it to be. I went to bed tired and woke up way more tired than before.  In my defence, I was battling allergies and later caught a cold and as of the time of this writing, my nose is still blocked. I am also homesick. I had ini...

This is not a cooking tutorial. I had people over at my place yesterday and was bothered about it not going particularly well. But it turned out to be fun and with that excitement, I was happy to give a brief summary of how everything went down with my friend. His reply was funny, and it sort of had an inside joke too.  So because of that, I have decided to share a day in my life and today happens to be a perfect day because the plan is to spend the whole day indoors and I am making beef stew. DATE: 13/05/2023. 10:32 am. I just go back in from a short walk to a store to get breakfast stuff and also onions. I don’t have enough onions to season the meat. I am now in front of my computer writing the intro to this essay. Before now, I brought out the beef and Pomo I got yesterday from Shoprite and rinsed it.  I had to add salt to the water I used to rinse the pomo because it was slimy when I brought it out of the fridge, I am not sure why. 11:28 am. Breakfast: Bread and eggs Mesh...

Sometime last year, I was asked an essential question about Church. When that question was asked, I couldn’t answer it because I wasn’t sure which answer rang true to me. The question was quite simple, and I am sure many people can answer it. The question was, “If you always have to complain about the church you attend, why are you still going?” I am not writing this to discuss why this question came up in the first place, instead, I will focus on the answer to this question that I realised sometime this year.  Omid Armin Source: Unsplash Many weeks ago, I saw a tweet that referred to Nigerian weddings as third places and it led me to an article on sharing third places, the mental implication and the narrowing of such places.  Coined by Ray Oldenburg; the third place is not your home (first place), not your work (second place), but those informal public places in which we interact with people. One fascinating thing about third places is that they hold spaces for people without...