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The odd number

It was the first Christmas after Santa. My sister and I were on a mission to identify our gifts.

They locked themselves in the bedroom, my Mom and her sister co-conspirator. The crack under the door wasn’t big enough for us to see in, but big enough to let sounds out. Wrapping paper was meticulously folded and fingers were accidentally taped. Laughter teased from the other side.

On Christmas we had to eat a full breakfast, followed by Mom’s delay tactics like cleaning up. All along the gifts had been numbered.

I was the odd number.

Believers

You would have thought they had just met the devil. The tourists’ faces curled up in disgust.

It was on full display in the atrium of the shopping mall—the one that half-sits over Jewish graves hundreds of years old.

Christmas trees of all shapes and sizes slowly rose up and down suspended by a cable. Except these were no ordinary Christmas trees: they were upside down Christmas trees. Like those before Martin Luther uprighted them.

Believers stared in disbelief.

Who needs this seat?

I usually don’t sit down in the tram. There’s always a mom with a pram or grandpa who needs to take a break more than I do. Besides, when I sit I age too much.

This morning the cold was exhausting and I wanted to sit down. Inside the tram there weren’t many people until there were.

In front of me was a man in his 30s. He frequently turned to look at the door, his eyes half-hidden under a flat cap. At each stop he rose halfway from his seat. A weary woman old enough to be his grandmother sat down.

The disappointingly simple gift

My uncle Mike had a heart attack on Monday. It seems to be a common occurrence in our family.

Mike was the one I looked forward to seeing the most at Christmas. I never really knew much about his life or what he did for work, but none of that mattered because he brought the best snacks. When all the adults in the room were having their boring adult talk, he paid attention to me.

One Christmas Mike gave me a disappointingly simple gift: a plastic container containing ten, like-sized plastic monkeys. One by one, he showed me how to connect their wildly extended arms.

I still remember this gift.

Slop, it's what's for dinner

There’s a reality TV show famous around the world featuring Gordon Ramsay and struggling restauranteurs.

Price cuts on encyclopedia-size menus foreshadow bankruptcy. What could have been brilliant, local signature dishes are replaced with plates of mush that even zoo animals would send back. Customer faces resemble babies eating broccoli for the first time. And broken down owners can’t remember what made them different anymore.

Now it’s been spilled all over the internet. So much slop.

Does anyone really want to fix it?

There is construction across the street. When you live in a city—especially one this old—the only direction to build is up so that the sun can never see you. The construction workers start before the garbage men make their rounds and continue on weekends and sometimes even holidays, too.

I doubt most of the workers really want to be here. Some can be seen stumbling as they negotiate the heavy workload. With every drag on their cigarette, they try to forget how they got here, and the forces large than them playing a deadly game.

Two of them use wheelbarrows. One of the wheelbarrows squeaks. Tinnitus would be a blessing compared to this sound. It penetrates through thick concrete walls, all the way to the nearest tram.

The solution for that squeak is expensive for the workers. I could pitch in. My neighbours could pitch in. But we’ve all just become used to it.

When a house isn't a home

Imagine someone builds a beautiful house, but it’s completely landlocked. It’s entirely surrounded by other properties and there’s no road leading to it. None of the windows face south and the doors are all on the second floor.

Inside, the occupants worry about one thing: what color to paint their house. Because it’s a house and always will be. It will never be a home.

I was asked to edit a pitch deck last quarter. It was one of “those” houses. It would have meant a lot of money, but that would never be enough to cover the cost of the paint.

Is your muscle bigger than mine?

I used to be a news buff. It was as much of a staple in our house as sweet tea growing up. I learned a lot about the way the world supposedly worked around that dinner table.

Decades later and I had become the fact checker in chief. Over the past months, I’ve decided that most conversations about the news are just an exercise. An exercise in showing off who has the biggest bias, and that bias works like a muscle.

The more I flexed, the more it seemed to matter.

If you can't beat them, join them

It was precisely 15.15 on a Monday afternoon. Most office workers wouldn’t be going home yet, but these two were. They were dressed like people who had already met their quotas. They could have been brothers.

People tend not to pay attention to how much conversations bounce around in tight spaces like the tram we had all just sat down in.

After massaging the nicotine pack into his lower lip, the more rugged one blurted out with immense pride: “I wrote the best damn report ever in my life today.” His colleague asked him about it. I heard something about writing and so my antenna went up.

The rugged one went on to say that he simply summoned Mr. GPT to do it. When pressed further what Mr. GPT had written on his behalf, the rugged one couldn’t recall, but he was certain that it was the best report ever. On that there was no negotiating.

The colleague seated across from him wore his discomfort on his face. He pushed back on it a bit. The rugged one proclaimed: “If you can’t beat them, join them!”

Why this gym is failing

I go to a gym. It is a hole in the wall. I don’t go there because of the latest and greatest machines—because there aren’t any. I go there because of the people.

The receptionist and trainers, and some of the clients. Then again, there are plenty that rub me the wrong way. Like the dude that always inserts himself into my personal space. I guess we will be forever synchronised in our mutual frustration for each other.

There’s one thing everyone complains about: the music.

The owner of the gym is a metal head and could be easily mistaken for a festival goer from the 90s. He likes to work out there too. And for his favorite music to accompany his workouts. Meanwhile, most of the customers wear headphones.

He complains about business. And contemplates out loud about even selling the place. He used to ask me for advice, but stopped doing that ever since I pointed out that his gym is not his living room. Metallica blares on.