Ten Small Surrenders to November
November will get you. Not dramatically—just through some coworker’s compulsive handshaking or a crowded train on a Tuesday, and suddenly it’s Friday evening and you’re horizontal with a box of tissues while your friends are somewhere dark and expensive, making decisions. This is the weekend, apparently.
First stop: The Useless Web, which deposits you on random corners of the internet with no discernible purpose—and somehow that makes them feel more honest than the corners that pretend to have one. If the button lands you on your own blog, close the laptop and start researching beekeeping. Or steel construction. Anything with less WiFi. From there: recent photos of Lindsay Lohan, enough to remind yourself that you used to find her genuinely attractive. Sit with whatever that produces. Then open Steam, where the Thanksgiving sale has games that normally run forty euros down to five—or possibly the other way around, it’s hard to tell when running a fever, and you’ll know when the charge clears.
A news item this week: Finnish police confiscated a nine-year-old’s Winnie-the-Pooh laptop over a copyright complaint. Filed by a record label. Against a child. With a Winnie-the-Pooh laptop. I made tea. It helped with the throat and not at all with anything else.
If the fever hasn’t killed the urge to go out, go. A techno basement at 2 a.m. is genuinely improved by the feverish unreality of being sick—everything sounds correctly wrong, the sweat is pre-loaded, and there’s a specific freedom in having already bottomed out. Friends will be furious in the morning, but they’d have found a reason anyway.
Better option: invite someone over. Warm bed, baked cheese, a hot water bottle each, season after season of Entourage on the laptop, and the kind of sweaty delirious sex you’ll both underreport afterward. If it’s someone you actually like, it’s measurably better. This is knowable in advance and people almost never use the information.
Somewhere on the internet this week, a 72-year-old Chinese grandfather became a viral sensation by modeling teen girl clothing on Tmall. The photos are remarkable—he has better posture than most working models and an expression that suggests he’s done more interesting things than this before lunch. Meanwhile, Mary-Kate Olsen’s romantic situation was a useful reminder that being single is fine. Possibly optimal. I’ll leave it there.
The last thing, which makes all the others unnecessary: this is exactly what I do when I’m not sick. The tabs, the abandoned carts, the TV until something aches. The cold just makes it honest.