garlic is to cooking as vanilla extract is to baking in that the amount i add to my food is guided by reckless extravagance and utter disregard, verging on mild contempt, for the recipe as written
If you are very good at taking quality photos with your smartphone, this update is for you.
Go to Shutterstock, Adobe Stock, or Getty Images on your Chrome browser and create a free contributor account. It costs nothing.
Then start taking high quality photos of anything and everything around you. The sky. Beautiful places. Trees. Markets. Cars in motion. People walking. Celebrations. Landscapes. Those clean, aesthetic shots that people use for designs, wallpapers, and creative projects.
Upload them. Every time someone downloads your photo, you earn a royalty. You do not have to be present. You do not have to do anything extra. The photo earns for you while you sleep.
Photographers with large portfolios earn between $200 (about 300k Naira) and $2,000 (about 3 million Naira) every month from stock photography alone.
You are already taking photos for fun. You might as well get paid for it.
Do not sleep on this.
Above all, love God.
i was shocked to discover that there are some people who actually can't visualize images when reading a book coz for me, an entire movie is playing out in my head with the perfect cast
The problem started when I said "e choke" in a meeting.
My colleague Linda from accounting paused mid-slide. She said, Is everything okay with your throat?
I said, No, Linda, it means the numbers are impressive.
She wrote that down. She literally wrote it down. Three days later she told our boss the quarterly projections were choking her. HR got involved.
I work in Toronto, in a glass office where the only other Nigerian is a man named Tunde who has completely assimilated. The kind who pronounces "schedule" like he invented the language. He avoids me in the breakroom because I remind him of jollof rice and his mother's expectations.
So I suffer alone.
Last month I told a project manager that the deadline was giving me wahala. He emailed my supervisor asking if wahala was a vendor we needed to loop in. I now have a meeting on Friday about clarifying communication styles.
The worst was when I said "abeg" to an intern. She thought it was a new productivity tool. She searched the internal software catalogue. By Tuesday, IT had opened a ticket.
I tried explaining slangs to my coworkers once. Big mistake. Now every Monday morning, Kevin from sales greets me with "How far?" but he says it like "How far, my good man?" and waits for a response as if I am a foreign exchange student he is sponsoring.
Linda has started saying "e choke" whenever she completes a spreadsheet. She does finger quotes around it. She has made a PowerPoint slide titled "Nigerian Business Expressions for Cross-Cultural Synergy."
I sat Tunde down last week. I said, Tunde, you need to help me. They've weaponized our entire lexicon.
He adjusted his cardigan. He said, I'm sorry, I don't really speak it anymore.
I said, You were born in Owerri.
He said, That was a long time ago. He stirred his green tea. No sugar. No milk. Just assimilation and regret.
Yesterday I overheard my boss on a client call. She said the deal was giving her gbe body. I had told her "gbe body" means being alert. She now uses it to mean proactive. The client loved it. They want it in the brochure.
I have created a monster.
The office Christmas party is next week and Kevin told me he is planning to say "shey you dey whine me" during his toast. He has been practising pronunciation with a YouTube video titled "Speak Nigerian in 5 Minutes."
I will not be attending.
Every diaspora office has one person fighting for their slangs and one Tunde drinking green tea pretending he cannot remember the taste of chin chin.
You’re God’s girl, and eventually you stop seeing life as random. You begin to notice the quiet ways God takes care of you the prayer that gets answered silently, the timing that works out perfectly, the exact conversation you needed at the right moment, the doors that closed and later made sense.
You realize God was present in places you almost overlooked. Not every blessing arrives loudly. Sometimes His love is hidden in ordinary moments a deep breath after a hard week, peace in chaos, strength you didn’t know you had.
Being God’s girl means learning that even in an imperfect life, God is still intentional with you.
I blew it today.
I was washing my car when a sketchy looking guy walks by and says "nice car, what's the retail on one of those these days?"
I recognized that as being very close to a line from The Fast and the Furious, but not exactly it.
I thought no way this guy is giving me Brian's bit, and the reply is pretty rude if that wasn't what he was doing ("More than you can afford, pal").
So I said "uhhh....[price of car]."
He says "I prefer the 1970 Dodge Charger," thereby confirming he was in fact doing Fast and Furious. It was too late to course correct.
There are no true do-overs in life. Sometimes you need to risk it.
You are not the only one who has felt this very peculiar and unspeakable thing. Someone has already written it down. Someone sat alone with the same unbearable weight you are carrying right now and they survived it long enough to find words for it. That is what the whole of human literature is. Millions of people saying: me too, me too, me too…in the dark, across centuries, reaching forward through time to find you. You are not alone in this, you never were. The writers were always writing specifically to you. They just didn’t know your name.