Hi, friends!
At work today we were chatting about unexpected downsides to otherwise interesting things. For example, being a vampire and living through literally centuries of political campaigning! I’d be tempted to just go out in the sun and crispify myself from that curse!
What We Do In The Shadows has some fun takes on being a vampire, such as your brain has limited space and there is too much to remember after a while.
I think if I had a photographic memory I would quickly get sickof being the reference desk for other people,like always having to remember where they parked their car or what was the name of the place they ate at five years ago with the bad ravioli so they don’t go there again.
I’m not much of a vampire person except…
The psychiatrist might be right about mom. Now that she is off antipsychotics and on antidepressants she is a bit better. I visited the parents today and she was sitting with dad watching TV.
She was happy to see me for about five seconds then she demanded my phone to call her friend. She gave me the number… It was actually their phone number.
As for the topic… I guess living in an action adventure universe would be hard on the nerves and expensive (with all that body armor, bullets and new cars every month.)
Romcom universe would be just as bad as relationships become roller coasters of drama and stalking would be a socially acceptable means of dating.
You have to imagine cars in action flicks, even if they escape the bad guys without a scratch, are going to need a ton of work on the alignment, need new shocks, probably have a transmission leak….
You have a far more interesting workplace than I ever did. Water-cooler chats about the inner lives of vampires! With us it was a lot of “Can you believe that X got the [Nobel or Pulitzer] for Literature? Who did they have to fuck to get that?” Plus stories of vacations gone awry. A long time ago there was a very salacious story about an extramarital affair being conducted in the office after hours. So if you walked by the closed door you’d hear all kinds of…making whoopee sounds.
I don’t really have any downside stories but Better Half has plenty. His boss adores him, so much so that he is the gatekeeper for when a job, any job, opens up. He does the interviewing. Problem is, it’s a global company so this morning he was up (and by, extension, so were Faithful Hound and I) at 4 am interviewing a guy who lives in London who would be responsible, remotely, for operations in Dubai. This all might sound very glamorous and even a little James Bond-ish but believe me, it’s not.
A Hologram for the King is a novel by David Eggars about a US businessman working for a consulting company in Saudi Arabia. I wouldn’t call it a great book, but it’s pretty effective in conveying the absurd situation so many Westerners find themselves in trying to be essentially courtiers maneuvering for an audience with the palace.
It’s short, and may be worth reading, and there was even a Tom Hanks adaptation if you want the even shorter version, although I haven’t seen it.
I love Dave Eggars! McSweeney’s, TheBeliever…One of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read is A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. And I’ve read hundreds and hundreds of books, thousands probably at this point, but that was a showstopper.