When I woke up this morning, the first thing I did was change my Facebook status line to,
"Rachel expects really great things to start happening very soon. Sometimes you can just feel the winds of change blowin'...
I'm not completely sure why I felt so radically different in the span of just 24 hours. Yesterday morning, I was so low, I could have milked a snake. And I was totally focused on bad memories, loss, negativity, and zero expectations for anything positive ever occurring anytime in the near future.
This morning, for some unknown reason, I just woke up feeling hopeful. Partly because I was still digesting the best meal I've had since arriving in Nairobi 7 months ago, at this restaurant called "Talisman." It's in the upper-upscale leafy suburbs called Karen (named after expat "Out of Africa" adventuress Karen Blixen). The clientele is largely comprised of hard-core affluent white folks, mostly European I'd guess, so you know the service and the food were impeccable. (Rich folks don't play that when it comes to spending big bucks on eating out.)
Anyhoo, I was there last night with my new "best friends," Dr. Mario and Kelly. Dr. Mario is actually my Zanzi-buddy Ron's mentor, a newspaper design legend in his own time, and all around delightful human being. Kelly is one of his top designers, a former newspaper art director and also a friend of Ron's. It's such an amazing coincidence that we wound up being in Nairobi at the same time; after years of hearing Ron talk about his work with Dr. Mario, imagine finally meeting him in Kenya of all places, and all because he's redesigning the same paper I'm based at!
No matter where I am in the world, it's just so soul-nourishing to linger over great conversation with great people and great food. And when I say great, I mean GREAT, people. One of Talisman's signature appetizers are these feta cheese and coriander samosas that would make you slap your grandma hard enough to knock her dentures out, causing you to help her reinsert them only so you could slap her again.
I DREAMED about those bad boys. I kid you not.
Bottom line, I think I'm just increasingly able to revel in perfect experiences, knowing that my overall time frame for having them is inexhorably shrinking. Sadly, most of those experiences involve food rather than sex, but I'll take what I can get until my Karma changes significantly.
Zanzibar was perfect. Scoring a front page health article is perfect. NOT having a soul-searing hot flash always feels just perfect.
It's all about attitude, I guess. When I choose to dwell on what's sad, or bad, or missing, I wind up feeling like ass. When I choose to focus on things like the divinely-inspired combination of feta cheese and coriander wrapped in perfectly flaky puff pastry, and how fortunate I am to be able to taste it in the company of incredibly cool people, somehow life doesn't seem so suck-y after all.
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