Quarter Life Crisis

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Christmas Leftovers¶

433 words

During out photo and fun spree in Bremen after christmas, Richard left me an envelope stuffed with papers. I only got around to giving it a careful look now. And the envelope’s contents are as weird as they are amazing. In the collection we have:

• A ‘quiz’ in the form of a ‘test’ based on the paragraph Her leg brushed up against yours. Its first multiple choice question is 1. Did she do that on purpose with answers (a) Yes. (b) No. (c) Maybe. (d) Don’t know. and things going downhill from there all the way to 22. What’s wrong with you? 23. When will things start going your way? 24. Get a job. (Looks like this has been copied/printed from McSweeney’s)
• A short text by Baudelaire on Sea Ports. A sea-port is a pleasant place for a soul worn out with life’s struggles. … With foot prints on it!
• A page from a book/article on Political Order and Political Decay in which it is attempted to express social facts in formulae. Driving both the social studies and the maths ad absurdum. This really reminds me of the Huntington stuff Serge Lang criticised in his book Challenges
• A Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses ad.
• The short story Above the Law, below the Box Springs by Woody Allen copied from The New Yorker. With the remarkable sentence Stubbs had entered their funeral parlor one day, just to browse. (And being the lover of punctuation I am, I just love the subtlety of using a comma there where in the internet age everybody else would have used a dash.) Anyway, read half of it on the net.
• And another short story The Year of Spaghetti by Haruki Murakami from The New Yorker as well. Just google that yourself – apparently it was originally written in 1981 but people dissect and discuss it nonetheless.
• Some inlay of Wired magazine called How To – A step-by-setp guide to making the most of your digital life. It’s quite pretty with loads of silver ink used to make it. And apart from that it’s shallow, superficial, unfunny. Which I guess is just what you expect anything labeled ‘Wired’ to be in the twenty-first century.
• Uh, and as the very last I found a postcard showing a devil driving a car called sin which slipped to the bottom of the envelope. The message reads Sven, I’m using the mail to get rid of paper which does not have any use for me anymore. Richard.

Quite good for useless stuff. Perhaps I should just pass it on now?

January 26, 2007, 0:12