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#150. Talk to me
Shem Opolot
December 05, 2025
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HAPPY FRIDAY 🎉 “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.” Decades happened to me this week. I’ll write about it some day.
For now, let’s talk about how much I’ve enjoyed seeing people’s Spotify Wrapped artifacts and stealing some of their bangers. Send me your top song, please.
My top 5 genres featured pretentious, obviously made-up categories like AfroSwing, AfroPop, and—because of my love of Dan + Shay—Country.
The real tragedy, however, is I couldn’t smuggle Tems’ Big Daddy into my algorithm’s calculus. What a banger!
LIFE.
Talk to me.
Giphy
The side of my head resting on the glass, I was on a train home when a jolly old man, who I suspected was homeless, grabbed my attention.
This city is ruining me. I greet overtures from strangers with caution and averted eyes. Either in fear of being accosted or, worse…having a conversation.
But it hasn’t ruined me completely.
Loudly, disregarding the quiet in the train car, the old man bellowed:
“Excuse me, has anyone ever told you you favor Morris Chestnut?”
Blushing bright purple, obviously, I said, “Huh?”
He repeated himself slower, enunciating this time.
I asked him if he minded repeating what he said while I recorded him, and he obliged gladly. That video was the last proof I needed to confirm that I’m sexy, so you can’t tell me nothing. My children and my children’s children will see that video. It will live in our family’s audio-visual museum forever. Big Daddy was sexy.
Anyway.
The old man and I had a long conversation about life. He was indeed homeless, but he regaled me with tales of his sports prowess, of his military service, of his children long passed, of a life that was filled with promise but is now suffocated by the urgency of survival. Despite the content of his tales, he was in such high spirits.
I listened attentively until he asked me what I was doing in D.C. My accent is a snitch like that. I told him about my doctorate and shared more with him about my career aspirations than I’ve told most people. We talked like we had all the time in the world, but when we heard my stop announced on the intercom, like you and that old friend you bumped into that one time, we made promises we couldn’t keep. I even invited him to my graduation, and he said he’d come if God willed it, yet neither of us knows the exact date. I just said it’d be in late May next year. I told him you can’t miss graduation season; the city buzzes with that young, freshly minted optimism, yet to meet reality.
That’s one of the best conversations I’ve had all year. We stood quite far from each other, but it felt like my heart was in his hand, and his was in mine the whole time.
I still think about the conversation I had with that jolly old man on the train.
***
Have you observed two little kids under five having a conversation? We can learn a lot from them.
Kids don’t experience sonder, which is the occasional awareness that other people lead lives as real and complex as your own. Kids don’t wonder what others think of them. For them, every conversation is raw, driven by vibes and specific, simple goals.
They don’t consider the other person, not because they’re sociopaths, but because their brains haven’t expanded to accommodate the seeds of insecurity. Of self-awareness and self-doubt. Of “what if I’m wrong?” Of ‘what if they don’t like me?”
They are Eve in the garden—pre-apple.
When they get a little older, real character development begins. Shyness—not out of fear, but out of a worry of how they are perceived—develops. Calculating and miscalculating. Self-isolating. They finally discover the bedroom door that has been there the whole time—as a boundary, not another toy. They discover privacy.
This developmental milestone is the perfect time to throw kids into tons of social activity. Because you learn about people and about yourself by talking to people.
In a scientific study reviewed by science writer David Robson, researchers followed students over a semester, periodically asking them to share their relationship status à la Facebook in the early 2000s, and then answer the question, “Who are you today?” As the students fell in and out of love and made and lost friends, their definition of who they were changed a lot: a girlfriend, a lover, a confidant, a leader, a teammate, a friend, an enemy of progress (I kid).
As you get older, you avoid talking to people because of all those insecurities little kids lack. But talking to people is an opportunity to learn, and that’s how you should approach all conversation. Each conversation arrives pregnant with the possibility of friendship or camaraderie, and that unlocks a new universe within you whose big bang moment, whose ‘let there be light’ moment, begins at “Hello!”
Everyone you speak to holds a mirror to you, so, when you get the chance, every now and then, don’t avert your eyes, and don’t place those earphones in your ears. Lean in. And after leaving that conversation, ask yourself, “Who am I now?”
THINGS.
A quote.
The camera did not kill painting. It made painters find new reasons to exist. AI will not kill creativity. It will erase undistinguished outputs that depended on difficulty that is no longer difficult.
A picture
I added another side hustle last weekend, selling crafts at a local flea market in D.C., because I like money. It was cold, it was rainy, and I couldn’t feel my feet, but I made some money and some new friends.
The jacket should tell you how cold it was.
WORK.
Mind the dot.
You have data:
Sometimes you want to pull data, e.g., the names in this table in the first column, from one sheet into another.
You want the names in the new sheet to automatically update whenever you add a new name to the original table, like so:
To pull data from an entire column, place an equal sign in the desired cell of the desired column, go to the desired column in the original table, and click at the top of the column (around the letter - - A, in our example) to select the whole column. You should see the entire column light up, then hit ENTER/RETURN.
Or: simply type = A:A, which is the notation for grabbing everything in column A.
This is a great trick, but it’s not pretty. It brings the names with zeros because Excel is saying, “I’ve brought you everything you asked for, and the zeros mean there’s nothing in the cells below the names.”
You can leave it as is, or, since you’re not basic, you can clean it up by placing a dot (.) right before the second “A” in the formula:
It’s a little hard to see, but I added a dot right before the second “A” in the formula.
Update the formula to this: =A:.A
The dot takes away the zeros and creates what we call a dynamic array which will expand or shrink depending on the original column it references.
📌 This dot trick may not work in older versions of Excel. In which case, taking my course is your best bet for alternatives. That was smooth, right?
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