#5 Office Ring
AI AI AI, I am the Frito Bandito
One of my uncles gave me the lovely gift of The Employees by Olga Ravn, particularly relevant since around the time I read it, I read AI-2027 and freaked out. I am tragically credulous when it comes to the written word, loving it as I do. A nicely designed website, a friendly tone, a compelling story… Sorry, I’m a Scientologist now. (I’m sure the baroque prose of the Bible is why I’m not Christian. The retellings, though? Oooh, boy give me a Red Tent and I’m making oat cakes and marrying my sister’s husband.)
The Employees does a fun oblique narrative thing where robots and humans essentially give HR interviews and you read between the lines to understand everything that has happened. There are these blobs they take care of that have scents and some workers have emotional relationships with them but they’re specifically not animals - the relationship is closer to religious, I'd say. I liked that there was tactility and scent to the blobs because touch/taste/smell is less common in fiction and in doubly in space fiction probably because many human sensations are deadened in the void:
facial and upper-body swelling also creates significant nasal congestion, and because odor is essential to the sense of taste, a decrease in the perception of flavors would occur. But there could be other taste-wasting culprits: Odors from different environmental and thermal systems in spacecraft are also suspected of distracting spacefarers' sensory perception. - Sci Am
Whether “actually” or merely perceptually (which I’m going to go ahead and say amount to the same thing), the body stuff was a plus for me.
A few days ago I started reading Orbital which, unless the bottom drops out, is an opposing spaceship-office narrative; something more pleasant and awed. (If Harvey didn’t read this Scientific American article I’ll put hot sauce on, and then eat, my hat.)
I'm sorry the love songs all mean different things today
I’ve been listening to Foxes in the Snow relatively obsessively - turns out I love art that brokenhearted people make. It does feel sort of like the only true art to me: heartbreak in the hands of talent that leads with opaque detail. The specific to the universal. Is this devastatingly, predictably Piscean? Yes. Not common heartbreak, to be clear, not cliche or teenage obsession, but apocalypse-level, life-ruining heartbreak.
Probably this is analogous to the horror movie impulse; microdosing pain to imagine one could vaccinate oneself against true infection. In real life, I would not want to be among the first wave of survivors of any truly apocalyptic event. If the options are get vaporized instantaneously while going about my business or slog through the emotional reality of the last gasp of human existence? I’ll have what the coward’s having, please.
And also the singer is the bad guy in the story so I think I enjoy his sadness more than I would enjoy his ex-wife's. But come to think of it, I did love Gaslighter and Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran so maybe I merely love messy drama.
One ring to rule like two of my fingers, maybe three
My final in my jewelry class was to make a sterling silver ring. It fits on all of my three smallest fingers and some other ones if I do the mid-finger ring thing which I think does look cool but I’m always afraid of losing the ring.
I'm absurdly proud of having made one, though! The design was very simple because I missed a class and wanted to give myself ample time but it was still very difficult and I did not finish on time. I asked my teacher to watch/help me solder it and she stopped me at least 4 times, moved my hands, re-positioned my metal, barked at me about the size of the torch flame, told me to get different charcoal to solder on - didn't I see that this one was totally wrong?, had me solder a second bit of metal on the inside of the ring because the first one wasn't good enough, and at the end said, Wasn't that easy?! And I said no and she said What? Yes, soldering is so easy! and I said It was like my fourth time soldering anything ever in my life and you corrected me a ton. It was hard for me. and she clucked and said No! It was easy! which frankly made me hate her a little.
I have not included a picture because it's very hard to capture its beauty in a photograph. It’s like this:
O ✨