On Shopping, Fashion, and Old People

Few tasks in life have the power to annoy me like shopping for clothes. The chore is so unpleasant. I really do not grasp how some people, mostly women I think, can spend a considerable portion of their life thinking about it, doing it, and the worst thing of all, after doing it talking about …

Undercover

As a boy, Big Mouth loved dressing up in his sisters' clothes. Big Mouth's childhood and adolescence resembled a Charles Aznavour song. He lived in a very old house with a crumbling façade and dirty windows. There were no trees in his street, just street lamps that blinked in and out all night and made …

Scroll down, if you dare

This morning, as I waited for my toothbrush to finish updating its directory, I couldn’t help wondering if the city bus I usually take to work would have finished upgrading its registry in time. There’s nothing worse than boarding a bus that’s in the middle of a major service pack upgrade. Having finished with the …

Tour de Worst Cyclists in the World

Here I go making yet another bombshell of a statement that is sure to offend and alienate the nitpickers among you. Serbian bicycle riders are the worst in the world. In case you should demand some kind of material proof or desire to go on a fact-checking mission, I suggest you visit any Serbian city, …

Getting in shape (yeah, I’m a circle, what are you?)

Once, as a child, I found an old book hidden behind the shelf in the living room. It was a weirdly-shaped soft-cover book called “Beginners Kung Fu,” and someone in the family had clearly been embarrassed about having purchased, or received it as a gift, at some strange point in his/her life. Inside was a “brief” …

Who inspires you? And why?

After days of terrible heat, with a nasty haze I've always hated draped over the sky like an ugly old dirty curtain, the weather changes abruptly with a delicious cool wind blowing hard from the Alps, I think. Yeah, the Alps, that's it; they must be close to where I am. For many nights I've …

A simple guide for knowing when to die

I’m concerned about the human race. I’m concerned about the race as a whole and, more importantly, I’m concerned about certain individual specimens of our race. My concern rest mainly in the following area. It appears to me that some very old creatures formerly known as humans no longer possess that natural ability of all …

Travel vs Tourism: a sad story of how little we know

Umberto Eco once said “I know the present only through the television screen.” It seems to me the same can be said about most of us today. Our lives are ruled by two things and two things only. The first is television. Television has been our constant companion (to some their only companion, sadly) and …

Standing in queues: or how I learned to stop worrying and love wasting my time

If you think moving to Europe means leaving all your worries behind and living out every scene from “Under the Tuscan Sun,” I have news for you: you are sadly mistaken, my friend. If you’re sitting in your cubicle right now, pretending to be working on that very important project no one really cares about, …