Watching Other People Burn Money

As another year has come to a close, it's difficult to recount all that transpired in the past twelve months. With the dawn of the New Year, a plethora of fresh opportunities await. Despite the allure of new beginnings, we still hold fast to old traditions. Superstitions run high during this time of year. From donning polka-dotted attire to gathering twelve round fruits, these rituals are believed to bring "luck" for the coming year. It's a mystery to me, but the belief is ingrained in almost everyone. Markets are flooded with last-minute shoppers, eager to amass the twelve-round fruits, even if the prices are ludicrously inflated. I've observed the fruits my mom purchased. Is it just me, or do people consider pineapples, bananas, papayas, and mangos as round?

What would a New Year celebration be without fireworks? Here's an observation that often goes unnoticed by many (cue the inner geek voice that resides in my head). Fireworks and firecrackers are two distinct entities. Fireworks are the awe-inspiring and costly displays of pyrotechnics that illuminate the sky (well, pyrotechnics is just a fancy term for fireworks in layman's terms), while firecrackers simply produce noise. There's quite a difference. These are the items that populate the shopping list of last-minute New Year's Eve shoppers.

Since firecrackers are unsuitable for children, and yet they yearn to make some noise on New Year's (for reasons beyond comprehension), parents opt for the alternative: torotots. These must be the most infuriating creations ever devised by humankind. The way they sound, coupled with children's propensity to test them out days before New Year's, is enough to frustrate even the Dalai Lama. My nephew possesses one that features a rubber glove affixed to a cardboard tube, housing a whistle mechanism. He blows (no pun intended) into the tube until the glove inflates with air. Upon release, the air escapes through the tube, activating the whistle mechanism and producing a noise that makes me contemplate tossing my nephew off a bridge.

Now, after expounding on these aspects of the New Year, one might wonder how I spent mine. Since it's customary to generate noise during this holiday, all I needed was a playlist featuring Slipknot and System of a Down, while I watched others burn their hard-earned money on fireworks and firecrackers.