The lamest of all days

It was raining cats and dogs. I wanted to hop on a bus but I didn?t have a bus pass. I had barely made myself visible to the driver through the rushing crowd, and poked my head in to ask, ?May I get in? I don?t have a pass.?

He replied, ?Give the money to a passenger and use their pass.? Everyone was busy getting on the bus and nobody could pay attention to me. I was about to leave but the driver called me, ?Come back. Somebody used their pass for you.?

I made my way to the woman who used her card for me and asked, ?How much do I owe you?? She told me, ?Nothing.?

I?m sure you have also had this experience - receiving a gift from someone you don?t know and will probably never see again. Gifts are normally on a reciprocal basis in modern societies. You buy someone something, then that person buys you something. You do a favor for someone, then that person does a favor for you - that?s the arrangement.

When I receive a present from someone ? a gift, a meal or a drink ? I want to reciprocate soon afterward because I feel that present as if it is a burden, a load. I don?t want to owe something to anybody or be grateful to anybody.

This does not mean that I expect a response when I give someone a gift, but frankly I do not want anybody to feel grateful to me for this or that reason.   

What?s more, in today?s world gifts do not have a ?soul? as people believed in ancient times, nor are they hand-made. They are standard, uniform objects bought in exchange for money.

Like Adorno said, ?a wrong life cannot be lived rightly.? An order that makes people addicted to objects does not allow gift exchanges to be anything other than commodity exchanges.

Maybe because of this, I like the fact that somebody...