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- #107: A bad day
#107: A bad day
Shem Opolot
February 07, 2025
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Who am I? I’m Shem Opolot, a health professional turned content creator, passionate about helping people be their best selves in life and work.
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Happy Friday 🎉 A new study found that apes can detect when humans act stupid and will actually try to communicate with them to bridge that knowledge gap. At this point, I don’t know who apes think they’re fooling, but I get it. I don’t want to pay taxes either.
LIFE.
A bad day.
Have you ever had a bad day?
You’re running late.
You wake up and the power is out, so you take a cold shower.
In the shower, you realize you forgot to buy shower gel as you danced in the supermarket aisle yesterday, pretending you’re in a music video. Now you’re palming the mouth of the gel bottle like it did something bad to you.
After your shower, you get the urge to do a number 2. You sit on the cold seat hurriedly and feel a wetness. You pray it’s just water. It’s not. You reach for toilet paper, but the dry cylindrical bone of the roll stares at you. You peep around the corner of the bathroom door and tiptoe to get some toilet paper. Success! One more roll. You’ll forget to buy more.
Once you’ve unfurled the requisite amount of toilet paper, you tug, but the paper tears unevenly, instead of along the dotted seam. You should really get a bidet. You should really, erm, make more money.
You dress up hurriedly in creased clothes and dash out of the door, but as you cross into the corridor, you stub your toe on the door frame. Your baby toe must’ve heard all those self-deprecating jokes you make about it not having a nail to call its own. You jerk backward in pain. Your belt loop gets caught in the bedroom door handle. A singular belt loop hangs from the cliff of your waist, defiant and discordant.
Beads of sweat well above your temples, threatening to bungee jump onto your face.
You want to get something quick and hot—perhaps a coffee or a tea—but no power. You gargle salt water, grab your car keys, and ignore all the morning’s omens to face the day.
You enter your car and rush to buckle your seatbelt, but its recalcitrant, refusing to extend itself like it usually does. Sappy tree huggers say it’s nature’s way of telling you to take a deep breath, but you just think it’s annoying. You take a beat, then pull on it slowly. It yields.
You whip your car into action, but it coughs peculiarly, like that first cough you let out that portends a minimum of two weeks of throat-clearing and room-clearing rockets. But after a negotiation with the ignition, the car yields.
You round the corner outside your gate, hit that pothole that has gained girth since you were last acquainted, and insert yourself right into a snake of traffic the end of which you can’t see.
But you make it to work as the better late in “better late than never.”
At lunch, you cross the street to get something small and decide to eat at the restaurant. You go to wash your hands in the restroom; you touch the tap, but there's no water. You’re famished, so greed causes you to bite your tongue and spill ketchup on your shirt. Normally, the ketchup would fall on the floor, but you’ve been eating, err, well, so your bulging belly fills the usual space between the table and your torso. After a mediocre meal, you step out into the relentless afternoon heat, which persists like a landlord on 31st . Your beads of sweat, your wayward belt loop, your belly, and your ketchup stain all step forward to greet your ex, who just happens to share the same taste in mediocre food.
Back at your desk in the office, you try to remove that cuticle in the corner of your index finger that has been bothering you. You try to pinch it off. Nothing. You use your teeth, and the cuticle unravels backwards like a loose thread pulled on a woolen sweater. There’s blood now. You’re done for the day. You linger at the office water cooler with your bag concealed like a firearm until you can find a window to escape. You escape. You think they didn’t see you, but they did. You’ll hear about it on Monday.
You think you’ve missed rush hour, but you find another headless snake of cars on the main road. “But at least it’s moving,” you console yourself as you negotiate with your coughing hunk of metal again.
[Two hours later]
As you get closer to your home, you hit all the red lights in the city consecutively, and your lane in traffic is always the slower one. When you switch lanes, you carry the affliction with you. You’re the problem.
You near the head of the snake and realize the head is really a traffic policeman. He flags off a stream of cars ahead of you, but once you reach the neck, he stops you.
You’ve experienced a full traffic life cycle.
You make it home after dark, and as you pull into the parking lot, you notice that your parking spot is occupied by a motorcycle, and your kitchen window appears to have missed the roll call for windows with light. This is odd because the maid should be home, busying over your dinner. You inconvenience the other late neighbor having a bad day by double parking in protest.
You head upstairs.
When you enter your apartment, you realize the power cut in the morning was your fault, not your country’s. And along with the light bill, the internet and water bills appear to have held an annual general meeting and conspired to put you on trial for your “I know my car” mentality.
Have you ever had a bad day?
It could always be worse. Celebrate your good fortune.
THINGS.
A quote.
…But, if you get caught up in self, you will end up sacrificing your youth and your sanity to this place. The same goes for any entrepreneurial or creative pursuit, Hollywood or not. If you don’t have a vision beyond the inflation of your own ego, life will crush you.
A picture.
This was me in church close to New Year’s, praying for more money, for this newsletter, for you, etc.
WORK.
Multiple lines in the same cell.
You have a gig, and you want to list individuals along with their roles in a table:
You can do this in several cells:
OR…you can enter each person’s role in the same cell by using Option (⌥) + Return (⏎) on Mac or Alt + Enter on a PC to jump to the next line:
It’s a matter of preference, but having more options is always good.
FUN.
The Friday Fix playlist
Shem’s picks
✅ Suggestions on how you might want to spend your time.
✅ The hardest tongue twister in the English language.
✅ Tips for building an emergency fund.
✅ The best and worst cities to find love (you can pencil in yours if you feel underrepresented)
✅ Why do people propose on one knee?
Have a great weekend,
— Shem
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