Location/current state of being: Directly across the street from Fingalix in an internet café that is also a barbershop. True story. Jazz music playing. Pineapple appetizer from the fruit stand has been eaten. Just completed my daily bathroom run diagonally across the street at the gas station (the finest establishments in Ghana, believe me. They sell top dollar items like Obama in Africa wine). Jollof and kelewele and fried chicken dinner from Fingalix has been delivered to my internet cubby. Currently, the barber seat is empty.

Ready to hear about my fully awesome and eventful weekend in Ghana? Ready? Here goes!

I spent approximately five eighths of my weekend in a sorta broken and misshapen bed in my first floor room in the Telecentre Bed and Breakfast. Of those five eighths of my weekend in my bed, approximately three quarters were spent sleeping and the other quarter spent killing How I Met Your Mother episodes on my laptop. I read about 40 pages of Catch-22. I did my laundry yesterday so that I would not have to pack my suitcase for outreach this week with wet clothes that would make the rest of my clothes smell musty… and they’re all dry! I’ve been wearing the same clothes since Friday night because of yesterday’s laundry adventures. I am simply not one to upset a perfectly harmonious balance of yins and yangs. My laundry pile was overworked this weekend, and it would be terribly unfair for me to just dump more on her after all that she’s been through this weekend. I also did some mild exercise yesterday and today and also ate some food and watched several minutes of Ghanaian commercials on the tv in the Telecentre’s lobby. My favorite was the advertisement for the fitness center’s “pilates” classes which was a video clip of a bunch of people sitting on big blue bouncy pilates balls and a series of camera zoom ins and outs of their pelvic regions, which were ever so gracefully thrusting forward and backward. It reminded me of my favorite dance move, the Epic Sax Guy dance.

Exciting? I thought so. This is the kind of thing I’d do on a lazy weekend at home or at school.

Ooooo wait… there is that… one detail I’m leaving out. The one that explains my fortune cookie paper that one time that said that all of my dreams would come true and that I’d be wealthy someday.

Yes. I’m a Ghanaian celebrity! Friday night after returning from a very hectic car ride from a Crystal Eye Clinic outreach near Cape Coast that involved my first experience with motion sickness and an emergency bathroom run at the gas station that was so perfectly timed with the traffic that it wasn’t even necessary to move the car out of the lane of ongoing traffic, there was a mysteriously attractive group of casually dancing people in front of a bunch of lights and cameras plopped on the Telecentre’s driveway’s brick ground. We couldn’t help but to wonder what was going on, and so I asked if they needed an extra actress for whatever they were doing (we had assumed a music video filming) and they said “sure!” despite the fact that I was all sweated up and dressed in a pair of jeans that had ripped on my front thigh that day to reveal a battle scar from a clumsy stumble into a protruding nail from the corner of a wooden plank in the outreach’s church (thank the almighty Buddha for his grace in making me get a tetanus shot, for that darn rusty nail broke my skin!) and a blue Samsung Chelsea football t-shirt that like everyone has because it costs like 10 Ghana cedis (the equivalent of about $6.66). So I joined in and danced next to the guy in the suit, who was apparently the star of the Ghanaian film to be released in July. In English, it’s called “The Woman.” I’m sure it’ll be a soap opera-like film typical of the Ghanaian media industry. If you know me, be prepared for a mandatory viewing party next time you see me. They’ll be sending me a copy of the movie once it comes out.

Long story short, I’m finally agreeing that it pays to be obroni in Ghana. Even if you get overcharged when trying to buy things sometimes, and even if kids chase you around and say “obroni, cash! Obroni, cash!” and don’t let you have your peace when you’re trying to exercise solo outside, and even if taxi drivers honk at every sighting of you because they assume you’re lost and need help finding your way.

Currently, my biggest problem is how I am going to go about watching the next episode of How I Met Your Mother. I had downloaded the entire seven seasons before I left for Ghana, expecting that all of them would function properly. While I was bored on my plane ride, I discovered that season 4 was dysfunctional. I had held off completing season 3 for fear of arriving at season 4 without any episodes to watch besides season 5, and so I began to download a torrent that took me three weeks to complete with my on and off dial-up connections in Ghana. Yesterday I had realized that the first 12 of 24 episodes of season 4 had actually downloaded properly on my laptop with my first torrent! So I was set for the first half. My extremely lazy day made it too easy to complete those twelve episodes, and now I am at an internet café struggling to deal with the fact that the season 4 torrent download I had begun a few weeks ago produced 24 seven seconds of blank MVK videos. Do I move on to season 5 after having completed half of season 4, or do I endure the torturous wait for an uncertain outcome from a third torrent download? And if that doesn’t work out, do I wait to finish the episodes when I return in August? How do I resolve this huge dilemma?

…clearly, my life is in shambles here. I love Ghana.