Hamburger(Hotdog)

Yesterday was a bad day. I woke up at 730 am and realized that the power had gone out in the apartment. It got hot pretty quickly with no fan and I couldn't go back to sleep, giving me 3 hours of sleep to go to work with. When I took a shower the drain in the bathroom was doing the opposite of what its supposed to and flooded the bathroom with dirty water. Gross.
I still wasn't feeling well, which was simply a result of trying to have too much fun over the weekend. I knew I had a meeting with the owner of the magazine which would decide my future in the company. I was not fully prepared for this meeting which caused a lot of unnecessary stress. Then I received an email that my family dog was going to be put to sleep due to an inoperable disease. That would leave Ethan without a lil partner in crime. Apparently, when 'jack' was sick he couldn't even walk and so Ethan just pulled up a chair next to him outside, sat down and just talked to him. A big difference from the memories I have of them running around the backyard together.
Then I received an extremely disturbing email from someone I thought was an old, dear friend. I'm not going to go into the details, but it just came out of nowhere and was terribly hurtful. I seriously thought someone had gotten into his account and sent it out as a weird joke, but that was not the case. It really bothered me all day and its something I'll never forget.
The lack of sleep and poor physical state did not help my situation.
Then we were really busy at work trying to decide and agree on the cover design for the next issue and I have to finish an article and a book review by tomorrow, so the important meeting did not happen.
As I walked home I decided to just walk along a bridge above the nile. It was beautiful. I was fortunate enough to cross right at iftar (break fast), so I could look down and see all the people along the shore sharing a meal with each other. The food smelled amazing, I had a great view of the city at dusk, and it was the first cool evening I've experienced so far. That's when I realized I wasn't experiencing the wrath of Allah, simply a bad day among many great days. I live in one of the craziest, weirdest, busiest cities in the world. I want for nothing. I work at a great magazine with the cutest Egyptian couple (my surrogate Tony and Eva) . I am learning so much and I can already see the personal progress I've made here. I wish I was better at Arabic and the metric system, made a living wage, and had a sassy, tattooed hairdresser, but these are all problems that will solve themselves. I just have to focus on living simply, having fun, being nice and producing quality work for everything to work out.
"When you see things in the world like banana peels that have no value to you, then you're free to walk without being moved, bothered, or hurt in any way by all the things that come and pass -both pleasant or unpleasant." -Ajahn Chah
As I typed that my coworker just gave me some banana milk in a little juice box. Then I looked over at his computer and realized that has spent the last 15 minutes quietly looking at pictures of cute cats. Today is already better than yesterday.