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- #67. Bolting to Baltimore
#67. Bolting to Baltimore
Shem Opolot
April 12, 2024
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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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Hi! I'm Shem Opolot, and this is The Friday Fix, my weekly newsletter. If you've received it, you’re either subscribed or someone forwarded it to you. If you fit into the latter (yes, I’m the kind of person who uses words like “latter”) camp and want to subscribe, then click on the shiny button below:
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Happy Friday 🎉 The word for the week is syzygy, which means a pair of connected or corresponding things. It usually refers to the moon and the sun during eclipses. But nothing stops you from using it to describe your relationship with someone…or your affinity for looking like your problems. Choose the former.
Also, Justin Timberlake has a song with Fireboy. That’s all I’m going to say on that. Check the playlist.
LIFE.
Bolting to Baltimore
“Hey, you. Yes, you. Come here.”
You look around incredulously before leaning in closer.
“Let me tell you something.”
My friend launched his new NGO at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, with pomp, pontification, and plantain.
I learned a lot:
1. Black Swans. So this is where all the black people in public health are hiding. In DC, I’ve hobnobbed in many public health rooms with as many black people as raisins in a cheesecake. And the few I meet are fleeting unicorns with names wrapped in enough prefixes and suffixes to survive a Russian winter.
But in Baltimore, I code-switched to the cadence I reserve for black people. I dressed well. Well…better.
Sometimes, I forget the power of representation until I’m in a room where I feel comfortable. Where I don’t have to speak for my skin color or my country. Where I can sit in the back, observe, write this, and wait for lunch so I can pack all the plantain and jollof rice (Senegalese, of course) on my plate—Ugandan wedding reception style.
2. A (somewhat) traditional train station. I’ve been to Moynihan Train Hall in NYC and Union Station in DC, and though grand, their train station experience didn’t match the picture classic novels painted.
I expected loud dinging, whirring engines, the buzz of bickering, and puffs of smoke shooting into the air—a checkered flag for the tardy. I expected raised platforms and files of people queued up on the cusp. I expected large grandfather clocks, high ceilings, wooden lounge benches, and large white pillars propping up all these things.
Penn Station in Baltimore delivered this in part.
The building gave the sense of unrealized potential but functionality, of romance but haste. You can surprise your lover at the station and maybe even kiss them. But you can’t linger to gaze into each other’s eyes. You must get out before you collide with another couple plotting the same on the limited floor space.
3. Bachelor of Science in Friendship. Now more than ever, the importance of formal education is to make friends. And this singular reason is worth the investment.
With the proliferation of AI and YouTube University, unless you want to be a doctor or an astronaut, you can probably learn that thing online.
But if I were distance-learning my doctorate, I wouldn’t have met my two classmates-turned-sisters who accompanied me to Baltimore. Every time I think Africa is doomed (and it probably is), I meet people who refuse to stay down while the blows of mediocrity, what has to be called witchcraft at this point, and antiblackness threaten to break us. As long as those two are alive, we have a chance.
And I’m just grateful to be in their orbit.
So, in a world where skills and expertise have been democratized, learn how to be a good friend.
THINGS.
A quote by the Phoenix Project
You can never leave footprints that last if you’re always walking on tiptoe.
Another business idea via Twitter
starting a cleaning service for people with ADHD. I won’t be doing any of the actual cleaning, I’ll just be calling you at random times to tell you I’m on my way to your house and I’ll be there in about 45 minutes
— Janel Comeau (@VeryBadLlama)
1:14 AM • Apr 7, 2024
A picture
I try to act cool, but deep down, this is who I am.
A family that matches together…
WORK.
There’s an app for that II.
If you use Calendly, you should be using this instead.
If you’ve never heard of Calendly, you probably don’t need it.
But…if you hate the back-and-forth of trying to find a time to meet with someone, you should start using this today.
FUN.
The Friday Fix Playlist
Five words that contain UG as a letter pair have had all of their other letters removed and placed into a pool. Put those letters back in their proper places. What are the words?
*UG**, ***UG, **UG**, ***UG*, *UG*****
Pool: A, B, D, E, E, F, F, H, I, I, I, L, M, N, O, P, R, T, T, V
Answer below
Shem’s picks
✅ An app for planning your future trips
✅ Is it too late to print a one-page calendar of 2024 with all the dates on one page?
✅ Get to know your friends with these 100 questions
Answer: OUGHT, DEBUG, FRUGAL, IMPUGN, FUGITIVE
Have a great weekend,
— Shem
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