our story begins with elaine who, in response to kevin drum's periodic "where are all the chicks?" posts, was inspired to declare estrogen month. and so during the month of march elaine pointed out a bunch of blogs by women that i, for one, had not heard of before. after dealing with my guilty conscience i became an avid clicker of elaine's "estrogen month" links and ended up adding a couple of my favorites to my blogroll.
one of the sites i added was mshairi, the blog of a kenyan poet-blogger living in london. during one of my early visits to her site i left a comment, which prompted her to email me, which started a week-long correspondence between us. during the course of the correspondence, i mentioned i had visited kenya and threw in a couple of swahili* words i knew just to look impressive. actually, i think i almost completely exhausted my entire swahili vocabulary by the third email.
so during our exchange i mentioned that my brother used to live in kenya and i included a link to the project he helped found in korogocho, a slum of nairobi. (everyone pause for a moment, take a break, click on the link i just created and order a lot of sandals. tell em noz sent ya! when you're done come back here and start reading again.[/shameless nepotism]). this morning mshairi wrote back and told me she actually knows my brother in real life. in fact, she knows him rather well. my brother actually stayed at mshairi's house in kenya a few years back.
so there you have it. kevin drum's stupid women blogger comments ended up reuniting my brother with a friend in england. it's a small world after all
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* if i were a real swahili snob, i would refer to the language as "kiswahili"** which is what the language is called in swahili. instead, i'm going the even more pretentious route of creating a footnote just to brag that i know how to say "kiswahili" rather than "swahili."
** note the proper use of italics to mark a foreign word. i can't bring myself to hit the shift key and capitalize a letter, but, by golly, i will follow that damn italics rule. it doesn't get geeker than that. except maybe by putting a footnote within the text of a footnote.
