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Off for a testdrive for a possible car I’m going to buy. Somewhat nervous, first time behind the wheel without someone sitting beside me who can intervene if I make a mistake.
It’s hard to describe just how humid it is. It’s like the clothes I’m wearing are damp.
A while ago I bought some Rotring Isograph technical pens. I was so happy I got a good deal (they weren’t cheap still, but normally they’re quite expensive) and I was really looking forward to them. Man. I have no idea how people give these rave reviews. They’re supposed to be high-quality, long-lasting writing devices, but mine are both clogged and leaking at the same time. Every time I try to use them, I end up with ink stains and high blood pressure. I looked up how to clean them, and the first step is “buy an ultrasonic cleaner”. Dude what? There’s no way I am spending another cent on these.
I mean it wasn’t a huge amount of money, but I could have bought a decent fountain pen or at least three Micron pens for the price of each of these fucking Isographs.
What’s the worst case of buyer’s remorse you had? Let’s rage together.
Random and otherwise completely normal person in group I was having lunch with suddenly interrupts our lunchtime conversation with “Do you believe in astrology?” And I was like, no, I’m a planetary scientist, obviously not. “Well I believe in astrology, or oh actually, I should say I believe in a spirituality beyond myself”.
He then went into this bizarre story of this one time he had a bit of soot fall on his finger and, for reasons best known to himself, decided to interpret the patterns the soot made on his finger. Somehow, the soot told him that there was this random girl in the village next door who suddenly went missing the day before, and he read some lines in the soot that reminded him of a bridge over a river. A short time later, he heard the shocking news from a friend that a girl he never knew had actually gone missing and she was last seen cycling over a bridge. This was followed by a series of other weird stories of epiphanies and psychic moments that were too difficult to attribute to coincidence and that he showed was proof there was “something beyond ourselves”.
I didn’t try to ask him how the hell he could discern the shape of a bridge in a bit of soot or what even possessed him to try and interpret a bit of dirt on his finger and spin it into some weird shaggy dog story (we’d been waiting an absolute age for our lunch to arrive and frankly I just wanted to leave) but in general I really don’t know how to handle people who claim to have paranormal occurrences. Like, who am I to say that this incredibly precise and detailed set of coincidences is either genuinely a load of strange and unrelated coincidences or you’ve just made all of that shit up? I’m obviously not in a position to give a more scientifically reasonable explanation of what I think happened, cause I genuinely don’t know.
I just realized the Finnish word “tarjeta” doesn’t have an equivalent in English.
It is a verb that means feeling warm enough, in a kind of performance-oriented way. “If you intend to tarjeta out there, you best put on a thicker jacket than that”.
I’ve started a safety-based course as a distance learning thing, and it’s already taught me something – I really can’t write for any length of time at all now. I’ve been taking plenty of notes to try and make things stick, but I can maybe write for five minutes before I need a break as my wrist hurts and starts to lock up, after that point I maybe get a minute max. I can’t figure out if it’s down to being out of the habit of writing (the last time I would have done a fair amount would have been around 2010) or if it’s down to wear and tear (I did have tendonitis in my dominant wrist years ago). It’s actually quite frustrating, I did a decent amount yesterday and ended up having to ice my wrist later.
I’ve come to recently realise that fashion is probably the greatest barometer of the prevailing cultural ethos there is. Of course, as with pretty much everything, the actual embodiment of it is created by a small group of people, but what people choose to buy and wear is visible to the outside every day unlike one’s taste in music or film for example. Looking at a person walking on the street you can’t (most of the time) tell what kind of music they like or what kind of art exhibitions they like to visit, but you always see their style. Unless you’re in Cap d’Agde I guess.