I woke up for someone standing next to my bed. For real.

It’s an Airbnb with two rooms rented out: us in one, another couple in the next. The guy from the next room got confused when returning from a nightly toilet run, took the wrong turn and somehow ended up standing next to me when I was asleep.

If you’ve never had to wake up for a stranger standing next to you and trying to recognise your shape in the dark, well, it doesn’t feel very good.

Those nightmares when aliens gather around your bed while you’re asleep and paralysed, and then all sorts of shit happens.

The all sorts of shit in this case was mostly, someone with an Italian accent saying “Fuck I’m sorry I’m so sorry sorry I’m sorry” and rushing out of the room.

Which is all my girlfriend could remember of the next morning: some weird mumbled Italian swearing.

It might very well have been me.

I’ve overheard someone comparing washable diapers with the non-reusable ones. One supposed to be environment friendly and the other less so.

In the comparison the washable diapers were almost free from all environmental damage. Which would obviously only be true if you skipped the washing bit of the reuse.

If you haven’t heard of the Penny lick ice cream glasses: in the 1800s London, one happy customer would get their ice cream, lick the glass clean and return it to the vendor, who would refill it and give it to the next customer. Apart from being yuuuck, this is perhaps the best way to spread tuberculosis, which the Penny lick did very well on until it was banned in 1899.

Don’t skip the washing bit when reusing a diaper, it’s super-ill-advised.

However, washing a reusable diaper makes the whole thing very unfriendly to the environment. When you compare the two options, apples-to-apples, you’re only choosing between the lesser of two evils.

This was a cafe chat that I’ve overheard and this is a Friday morning, so clearly we are not expecting scientific evidence. Also, I love when something is environment friendly and I’m on the same side: I too want the reusable stuff to win. But, for a mathematician, it’s nice to have the facts straight.

People don’t cheat when comparing stuff on purpose, and I’m certainly no exception. Humans are generally not good at rational reasoning.

Like now, I want to think that all this cappuccino will disappear if I swim for an hour. Sports are a great way to burn a gazillion calories.

Do you know how many calories would I burn simply standing still instead of swimming? Surprisingly, still quite a lot. Simply living-and-breathing consumes almost the same amount of calories as swimming for the same period, the difference is only some 20%.

Turns out that people mostly compare calorie consumption during sports with: being dead.

Both Berlin airports were shut down for 24 hours last Friday. No flights in-or-out of the German capital for a whole day, but I only know this because my girlfriend was lucky enough to be on the last Berlin-London flight before they closed the airport for the strike. The news outlets were pretty silent.

This week then, now for two consecutive days, both airports were shut again on Monday and Tuesday. No flights in-or-out of Berlin, again, for 48 hours.

Shouldn’t it have been covered in the news somewhere? I’ve seen it on Reuters and Twitter, but really, nothing on CNN and BBC.

I mean, this is the Germany capital being cut off the maps for all international and domestic airlines for 3 whole days now, with thousands of flights cancelled, and BBC doesn’t seem to care about it. The German Zeit doesn’t care much either.

Is it only me who’s missing this in the news? Or is this uninteresting and all people care about is random boobs and futballists?

Bori is my girlfriend’s newborn niece, now two weeks old.

Kuki is the Hungarian kids’ word for penis.

My girlfriend and I were really eager to visit Bori right after she was born. So eager that, together with rescheduling our lives and flying in from two different countries, we made it on the very weekend Bori and my girlfriend’s sister were released from the hospital.

Bori has an older brother. Berci is 3 now, and knows a fair bit about the world. In a big part because he’s as curious as a young gentleman of 3 could ever get. He wanted to be part of the first bathing experience of his little sister.

We wanted to be part of the first bathing experience of his sister too. Bori and Berci, the mom and dad, my girlfriend and me, all lined up in the hot and steamy bathroom, to watch as this super-cute blob is being washed at home for the first time.

Berci was just next to his sister, watching the events very closely.

He noticed something.

He noticed something missing, to be more precise.

“Mami, where is Bori’s kuki?”, he asked.

I bit my lips while my stomach started to feel funny. This was going to be awesome. Mami was about to respond.

“She doesn’t have one. Bori is a girl, girls have vaginas.”

I was quite satisfied with the answer. Berci wasn’t. After a beat he had another question.

“Alright, but then, where are Bori’s boobs?”

I popped in to Tesco on the way home for some dinner shopping. They seem to put the evil items next to the healthy stuff nowadays? Either way, I went for avocados but doughnuts caught my eye.

This being Tesco, it’s never just a doughnut, they come in packs of four, so this required some planning.

“I’ll eat two in the evening, two in the morning, and otherwise it’s only carrots for dinner and skimmed milk with the morning coffee”, I thought. That sounded fair.

The doughnuts in my backpack misbehaved on the way home. The pink, sugary topping melted and made everything inside my bag, the phones, cables, the laptop case, everything, covered in syrup. It looked the way I imagine a unicorn murder scene. Very, very sad indeed.

It took some time to recover the content of the bag, then the bag itself, and then I looked at the plate of the still semi-perfect looking doughnuts. Maybe I’ll still eat the two pieces set for today, the damage is done anyway.

Doughnuts are awesome.

Once finished, I looked at the other two pieces left on the plate. Without the safety of their box, they will go dry and tasteless by the morning. They will no doubt look terrible. Also, we’ve seen what they are capable of. The safest is to eat them all up.

When it comes to syrupy stuff, I say.
Safety first!

This newly developed addiction for Snapchat messages, Facebook likes, retweets, pokes and what not, it’s nothing new. Attention economy is eating our life for forever now.

Some 15 years ago, when email was the enemy, I implemented a rule to avoid going down the interesting-links-in-emails rabbit hole: I could only open URLs that I listed the day before. The list could be as long as it needed to be, the stupid links from emails could also make the list, but there was no clicking on stuff that I didn’t put on the day before.

The stupid links immediately lost their fake relevance and urgency, so even if they were on the list, the next day I largely ignored those.

Also, this being in 2001, when I ran out of stuff to do on the internet (whoah!), I started inventing new stuff for the next day’s list, like “what does McDonald’s sell in India?”.

(It’s the Maharaja Chicken Sandwich. As expected, beef burgers were not on the menu.)

Without going too much into the details, I’m trying to implement a similar system now, where I try to regain control over my attention. I want to get into the habit to take out an hour in the evening to schedule everything for the next day – on paper, without any screen that might work my Pavlovian reflexes. The goal is to move impulsive action to planned action.

Please ping me if you have anything to add.