#179. Rollercoaster (Thursday, April 2, 2026)

What was your best day…of being inanely silly with a friend?

Between him switching departments, a generational pandemic, and both of us just being really bad at staying connected, my previous best friend Faroz Mansour (when we were teammates circa 2016-2017, #3) and I had not hung out in six and a half years. Let alone make an after-work, same-day round trip to Montreal to see Lady Gaga at the Bell Centre.

All it took was both of us reaching sufficiently stressful stretches at work. Two weeks earlier, during one of our roughly quarterly Friday-afternoon chats in the atrium,¹ I mentioned the upcoming Lady Gaga concert, and we basically said screw it. We had no real plans that Thursday or on Good Friday, we both liked her music, we could afford it, and we both needed the release. So we went.

The concert day was already full before we left. I had been working on a joint policy paper² with a colleague at an international institution in France, and senior management wanted it out almost immediately. Twice that week I’d stayed at the office until nearly midnight so he could pick up my revisions when his workday started six hours ahead. Thursday morning we finally settled the content and publication strategy.

With that out of the way, I could truly enjoy Lady Gaga.

Before the concert came the two-hour drive: six and a half years of biographical info-dumps, excellent souvlaki in Vaudreuil, and old Gaga hits as we crawled into Montreal traffic. Outside the Bell Centre, four different lines stretched for blocks in pouring rain, with nobody quite sure which one was correct. Eventually we made it inside.

Faroz had insisted on floor seats at the back for the full experience, and he was right. Whenever Gaga came out onto the center platform, she was only a few rows away. We even found a bar through a hidden ice-level entrance.

Great concert. Exactly the high-energy spectacle we’d paid for. But the night still had another act.

Afterward we hit Orange Julep, the nearly century-old Montreal diner shaped like a giant orange. Faroz grew up with it; I’d never been. I tried the namesake drink—basically an orange creamsicle in liquid form—and we grabbed giant poutines for the drive home.³

As the rain gets heavier and visibility starts becoming a legitimate concern, we somehow end up discussing old female pop acts. B*Witched comes up, which reminds me of “Rollercoaster” and one particular line just over a minute in, which goes, “So don’t be shy. You’ll soon be high.” Inconspicuous enough, except the singer delivers it in a way that sounds unmistakably like: “So don’t be shy. You’re so Mihai.” The first time I heard the song, that’s literally what I thought she was singing.

Which is hilarious, because I used to work closely with a guy named Mihai who was famously intense and vocal when things weren’t being done correctly—which, to him, was basically everything. Making that misheard verse the least accurate romantic judgment ever recorded.

I explain all this to Faroz, who knew Mihai well, put on “Rollercoaster”, and tell him when the line is coming. It hits, and he explodes laughing—probably not ideal given the weather.

“She’s literally saying that.”

For the next half hour we sing along to B*Witched and the rest of the early-2000s girl-group catalogue, both realizing that this exact setting—a car on the highway after midnight, full surround sound, nobody around to judge us—may be the only place we’ll ever occupy where this is completely correct behavior.

Just two guys, vibing in the car. Nothing more than that.

Despite the high activation cost, once our chats started they were almost impossible to stop; we both liked to jabber endlessly. That’s why we scheduled them for 3:30, so Happy Hour could impose a natural endpoint.
On an important, timely topic that built from my previous work on hedge funds (#121) and debt distribution frameworks (#74).
Faroz is the biggest poutine purist I know, and apparently Orange Julep gets its potatoes and cheese curds from the “correct” Quebec farm.