My Last Personal Post On MN?

Professionalism Vs. Personalism

You know my P, don’t you?

Your “P” according to Naeto C. as I once saw him explain on the Glo show is your persona, your personality or your swagger. It is what makes you, you.

But this is not about Naeto C. This is about me.

Over the past couple of months I’ve had serious dents to my “P”. I don’t have the “right” job. I seem to be on the wrong train. I’m stuck in the mud. I have had several personal problems that I won’t trouble you with here for now.

My swagger it seems has slowly turned into a stagger.

When I started Media Nemesis, I had dreams, I had goals. I had in mind a blog, an open forum, something akin to 14th & Serenity, an arena where anybody and everybody who had something good, bad and downright ugly to say about Entertainment could log in, express their views and log out.

I envisaged a gathering of intellectuals, an assemblage of literary geniuses each one contributing his / her part towards making the great Nigerian entertainment dream a reality. A place where we would work together with our chisels, gradually, painstakingly chipping away at The System until finally mediocrity would be uprooted not just by its roots but all its seeds and leaves would be burnt and blown away like chaff before the winds of creativity.

It would be through Media Nemesis (and our constructive criticisms) by which would ride the vehicle towards achieving the “impossible”: The Oscar-winning Nigerian movie, the Grammy-winning Nigerian album.

This vision, sadly, has remained very cloudy. MN has taken an about-turn and evolved into another phenomenon of its own entirely.

For months I have battled with my Nemesis (and Media Nemesis), trying to determine what exactly my P is. I’ve debated and asked opinions if the current trend with which I have published posts is truly the way forward. It has become a big dilemma for me. Do I focus solely on entertainment or do I incorporate elements of my personal issues in MN? Is professionalism been overtaken by personalism?

I even thought of incorporating a poll on the blog in search for a public answer. That might still be necessary in the long run. But for now I think I’ve found a temporary answer and it took a sharp dig in the ribs from a friend for me to grasp what it was.

Only the observant might have noticed it but some mild drama has been going on behind the MN scenes that eventually saw me modifying the Blog Header several times and removing my Contributors from our blogroll. It’s entirely my fault really. Good manners dictate I ought to have notified them first. The thing with me is that I’m always mentally hyper-active, toying with ideas, introducing new stuff, removing old ones and all that.

And now I, JonXavier, like Obama have decided to go for Change (it’s becoming an over-flogged cliché, I know). 

MN is going to revert to its initial idea of being a Media, Entertainment and other such gist platform.

I will contribute occasionally to Esquire’s Spoken Word blog, a task which I’m beginning to like actually.

My other blog, The Phoneparazzi will still remain exactly as it was.

My other other blog, Not The Office is just coming online.

And now after some very serious thinking, I have decided to create yet another new blog for my personal views, gossip, ranting, insanities and womanizing.

Five Blogs? That’s IMPOSSIBLE! I know…

You’ll just throw your readers into confusion and get fewer comments! I agree…

It’ll mean even more hard work and absolutely no play! I’m fully aware of that…

It’s MADNESS! Well, in case you never knew it before, I do believe I am insane so that’s no news actually. I just want to see how far I can carry this madness. Maybe in the end I’ll tire of it all and just merge all the blogs together. Or leave blogville entirely. There’s enough time so let’s wait and see.

If you’ve ever visited these pages and remotely enjoyed what you read, I now invite you to check out the remainder of it scattered all over blogville. I can only promise to make them just as good. Please feel free to click on the links on the right.

And oh, my Contributors, I truly, truly do want you back please? I’m sorry for being a tit, I really am.

There! I’m done. I’m sure that somewhere out there there’s someone who’s reading this, shaking his head and saying “This guy is not serious! I’m very sure a woman is behind all of this.”

You know what? You’re right as usual…

You know my P, don’t you?

Re-Introducing The Phoneparazzi

Foreword: Shortly after creating a photo-blog called “The Phoneparazzi”, I happened to later lose interest and even contemplated deleting it. Imagine my surprise when upon going through my first post again, I discovered certain people had previously left comments on it for me! So here I find myself heralding its launch and re-posting what was originally meant to be the foreword to that blog…

Blog - Real Life - The Gist

Saturday 22nd March, 2008: I was the cyber-fresh author of this blog. I had a vision and I was beginning to see MN as a long-time legacy I’d be pursuing to re-educate the Nigerian media on what I feel is wrong with the system. There was plenty to be done and I had lots of time to spare.

Then around 5pm on that fateful Saturday evening, my state of urgency changed. Cruising down the Benin-Asaba expressway with my elder bro at the wheel, relishing the fact that we had conquered the madness that was long-distance travel and anticipating the welcome we’d receive upon arrival, we lost our attention for just a few seconds. 20 minutes was all that was left of the time between us and home.

By the time 20 minutes were over we were still tied up with our seat belts to a car that had veered off the road, flipped once turning 360 degrees through the air and traveled an immeasurable distance without control to land upright in a ditch.

The loud grinding noises, the blackness, the sudden upside down / downside up feeling, the shattering glass, “missiles” flying through the air, the feeling of being carried along in a vehicle knowing there was absolutely nothing we could do… these are remembrances I’ll take with me to the grave. But that was not to be the day.

To the utter amazement of everyone we calmly opened the car doors and walked out. We survived the ghastly car crash with just scratches and a few bruises but the car? I didn’t know a car could go to pieces so quickly. I used to slightly detest that VW Passat car at first when my brother bought it but somehow I know GOD - and that car - saved us. And yes, seat belts sure do work too.

Oddly enough, if the accident didn’t kill us, the sympathizers would just as well have finished the job. The average Nigerian sadly, knows nothing of Rescue 101. Only the shouts of people forcing me to sit down on the road as someone upended a bottle of water on my head was enough to give me the high blood pressure I didn’t have in the first place.

I am very much aware that in every disaster scene there exists the other kind of “sympathizer”, the one who with no conscience whatsoever, steals your scattered belongings. Instead of doing the normal thing, jumping up and down and shouting “PRAI - PRAI - PRAI - PRAISE DA LORD!!!” my attention was caught by the other group of people who were helping us gather our widely dispersed luggage. I can’t start imagining how I must have looked covered in dust and a bit of blood, scrambling about looking for the portable DVD player that made up the centerpiece of my bro’s customized out-of-this-world automobile entertainment system before a sympathizer would “recover” it for me.

When the inventory was eventually taken the only casualties of that accident were the car and my Samsung SGH-C230 phone. Now, I really loved that phone but maybe someone on that crash scene loved it more than me. I don’t know. Before using (and losing) that phone I had previously used a Sony Ericsson T100, a Sagem My-X7 that mysteriously died after just 2 days and a Nokia 1110.

None of the phones I’ve ever used in my life have been classy phones but my C230 was my world. Due to its SMS - copying capabilities, I had archived cherished text messages from my very first phone line, crazy-sexy-cool MMSes, some treasured ringtones and anything else that could fit into its limited memory space. Best of all, I loved it’s radio and I didn’t mind its lack of a camera one bit.

After the jubilation of survival, the loss of that phone hit me pretty hard. The Good Lord, however apart from saving my neck from the Casualty Ward decided He wasn’t done with me yet. Since that fateful day in March, I have been offered a Motorola C975, a Sagem My 501C, a Nokia 6020 and a Samsung SGH-E250 by friends and siblings. All free! I have given away my original N1110 and the Moto and Sagem have issues so now I’m sticking to my 6020 and SGH-E250. They’re still not classy phones but both of them do come equipped with cameras and connectivity. (Of course, I’m still wishing for my dream Nokia E- / N-series, SE Walkman, Apple iPhone or Blackberry and Christmas is around the corner so please, don’t say I didn’t ask!)

I’ve always loved photography but those two camera phones unleash the paparazzi in me. A camera phone is a wonderful thing; it can go where even a camera can’t go. And I can’t help but to blog about these places. But I won’t say much about it here when there’s a brand new place somewhere else to do so.

Here’s re-introducing my formerly-new, temporarily-rested blog: The Phoneparazzi, where I’m hoping to present to you my mostly unconventional views on Life as seen through the eyes of not just my camera phones but other cameras as well.

I hope you like it!