The Friend Who Defies Every Category

Some people are easy to shop for because they have legible interests. The runner. The baker. The one who is always reading. You know the category and you go find the best thing in it.

And then there is my friend Nour.

Nour does not have a category. She is equally likely to spend a Saturday at an estate sale, a pottery throwing class, a lecture on Byzantine history, or lying completely still on her couch watching competitive baking shows. She has a collection of antique maps and also a very strong opinion about which brand of instant ramen is best and she does not see any tension between those two facts.

For years I found her impossible. Every gift idea I had felt like it was for a version of her that was only partially accurate. The antique maps person. The food person. I kept hitting the edge of who she was instead of the center.

Then I stopped trying to find her category and started looking for the thing underneath all the categories.

What Nour actually loved was the feeling of unexpected discovery. The surprise of a thing you did not know existed before you found it. The estate sales, the Byzantine lectures, the ramen opinions. They were all expressions of the same appetite. She wanted to be surprised. She wanted to find out about something she did not already know.

I found a subscription to a quarterly curiosities box. A curated collection of rare, odd, beautiful, or bizarre objects, books, foods, and artifacts assembled around a different theme each quarter. The kind of thing with a story behind every piece. The kind of thing you could not predict.

I included a card that said: for the person who is most alive when something surprises her.

She texted me when the first box arrived. She said: how did you figure this out about me.

I said: I stopped trying to find what you were into and started looking for what you loved about being into things.

That is always the second level. The interest is the surface. Underneath it is a way of being in the world. Find that and the gift finds itself.