Grief, Apparently, Costs Money
It’s warm outside and my head is splitting, which tracks—I didn’t drink anything last night but the end of Giga still feels like a hangover. Some losses hit different when you wake up the morning after.
The obvious cure was Munich. Becca, Mille, Annette, and I drove out yesterday and spent money we didn’t need to spend. It always works, briefly. The haul: The Sims 2: University for my Mac, two Ai Otsuka CDs, a couple of picture frames, two magazines, and the usual miscellaneous stuff I’ll have forgotten about by Thursday. Pizza Hut for lunch, which was exactly the kind of comfortable and slightly embarrassing meal a grief-shopping day calls for. Didn’t look like much to show for it. Cost a fortune anyway.
The weird purchase was a €20 magazine—thick, CD-ROM bundled inside—dedicated entirely to building cartoon characters in Illustrator. Not crude comic-book stuff but genuinely well-designed figures, the kind with personality baked into the line weight. I’ve been wanting to design a mascot for Tokyo Punk for a while now and haven’t known where to start. Maybe this is where I start.
Ai Otsuka I’d been meaning to pick up properly for months. Japanese pop that sounds like it was made by someone who genuinely loves both music and sugar—sweet without being cloying, which is harder to pull off than it sounds.
It’s raining now. Of course it is. Also: belated happy birthday to Apple, who turned thirty yesterday. I was too busy spending money to write anything. Thirty years of making things I can’t stop buying. The cycle continues.