Little Odd Stories

Let’s be honest. A trip to the supermarket is never just a practical errand. It is a psychological experiment, a tactical mission, and sometimes a full-blown test of human optimism. And two things prove this every single time. We always pick the wrong queue.And we always try to carry all the groceries in one heroic, slightly unhinged trip. Let’s take a closer look at this very specific kind of everyday chaos.

Let’s talk about saying no. Not the dramatic kind. Not the “NO YOU MAY NOT HAVE ICE CREAM FOR BREAKFAST” parenting voice that suddenly appears from somewhere deep in your soul. I mean the other one. The slightly scary, slightly liberating, slightly suspiciously grown-up kind of no. The kind that quietly translates into: I am choosing myself today and I will not be apologising for it in three different WhatsApp messages afterwards. That one.

I genuinely do not understand it. Give me a bottle of cola, a jug of lemonade, three coffees, and a smoothie and I will drink them all back to back like I am training for a very sugary endurance sport. But tell me: “You need to drink two liters of water today,” and suddenly I become a dehydrated cactus with commitment issues.

Here we go again. After my earlier blog about the eternally passive-aggressive phrase “with all due respect”, another linguistic gem has surfaced. One of those sentences that makes my skin react in places I did not even know could react. It starts off soft, almost empathetic. Harmless even. And then it quietly shifts into something else entirely. “What about me?” Blegh. There it is again.

There are people in my life with whom I am never done talking. Never. Not even in theory. If we were stranded on a deserted island together, with no WiFi, no coffee, no social media, and absolutely nothing new happening, we would still manage to have conversations about coconuts, the color of sand, or why seagulls always sound personally offended. We would probably even end up discussing whether a coconut is actually a nut. (It is not. Go check it.) That is the first category of people: the ones with whom silence simply does not exist.

The day I became a professional tag player in a very different kind of game. I thought adulthood would look different. On my respectable age, I thought life would be more… dignified. I am deliberately not naming a number here, but let’s just say I am old enough to always know where the scissors are, and young enough to not need ointment for everything yet. In my imagination, I would be doing very grown-up things. Working a bit. Reading quietly in a peaceful home. Quietly, I repeat. And my children, now fully capable of speaking in complete sentences, would occasionally send me messages like: “Hey mom, how are you?” Spoiler alert: that is not how it works.

“With all due respect…” The moment a sentence starts like that, you just know. This is not going to end in warmth, kindness, or mutual understanding. This is going to be a carefully wrapped piece of verbal aggression, served on a plate of fake politeness.

Dear people, I tried something new again. I promised I would write about it, so here we are. It was one of those things where I thought beforehand: what could possibly go wrong? The answer is simple. Everything. And yet, it is fantastic. Let me introduce you to my latest athletic adventure: aquapole kickboxing.

Sometimes it catches me off guard. Sitting in the car at a red light. Or standing there with a measuring tape in my hands, suddenly unsure if I needed forty or fifty centimeters. And then I feel it again. The absence. The quiet. A kind of emptiness that is not really quiet at all, because it is filled with him. My father.

There are mysteries in life that keep us up at night. How does gravity really work? What is the meaning of life? And perhaps the most urgent one of all: why do so many people smell so bad on public transport? Seriously. Between the stops of tram line 5 or 19, there exists an entire hidden world of scent profiles. A kind of olfactory safari. An aromatic adventure. Just without a guide and with far too little ventilation. Let me be clear. I am not the smell police. I understand that not everyone can smell like lavender and spring fields all the time. But come on. Some smells are no longer accidental or human. They are a direct violation of basic nose rights.

Okay, quick recap for those of you who just got here and are wondering what on earth “phase three” means. Yes. Phase three. Because in this house, we do not renovate in one go. That would be too easy. Too normal. And honestly, far less entertaining to write about.

I Thought I Was Social. I Was Wrong. I used to think I was a social person. Turns out, I wasn’t. Or well… “social” is a big word. Let me put it like this: I can be social. I have the skills. I know how to ask questions, nod at the right moments, laugh at things that are only mildly funny, and keep a conversation going about a topic I don’t care about at all. For years, I thought that was my personality. That this was me. Social. Easygoing. Always up for a chat. But the truth is different.