Drunk blogging

Hello and welcome, my dears.

It's 2:13 am Saturday morning / Friday night and I've just got home from an impromptu party-type event, my hands smell of perfume and cocoanut oil. Ageing Yuppie called me up three hours ago to ask whether I wanted to drop in for a drink. I said no (too tired, too late) so he handed the phone to Jana, the young (very) woman who is subrenting his apartment while he is at the college Oop Noorth. She said that it's her birthday, I should please come by for a glass to celebrate. Such an invitation is of course compulsory, one may not refuse a birthday drink. Three hours and far too many glasses later, I'm home again drinking water and cooking hot chocolate (the party continues without me).

Jana is Russian, studying something that I can never remember, pretty and sweet and very high-maintenance. She requires constant attention: not just that she dances on the table but that we must all watch and applaud. It's at moments like this that I realize that I am indeed getting older: the young have so much energy, and they waste it on such futile things! Pascal famously said that our miseries derive from being unable to sit alone in a quiet room, and this is something that one can hope to acquire with age. (AY hasn't got there yet, he is if anything even more frenetic than when we met twenty years ago.)

Still, a happy and pleasant event. It's nice to associate with the young once in a while, strenuous as they are. I got into a long discussion with a marketing type from a Quite Well-Known Automobile Company about the meaning of life, and why he is unhappy in a job that contradicts all of his ideals, values, hopes and ambitions. Well. I tried as politely as possible to suggest that maybe his unhappiness is a thing worth noticing, and that the discrepancy between his job and his ideals etc might just worth considering. What benefit it a man that he gain the whole world but lose his soul? to coin a phrase.

Actually it's not about age as such. (Stop reading, please! The drunkenness has turned from merriment to pontificating (an interesting word, actually: "to speak like a Pope." Before the Reformation, when the whole of Christianity was Catholic, it must have been the highest of compliments).) Jana is probably no younger than Noorster who said "Given a choice, I'd rather watch an interesting biopic on TV than go out to drink alcohol and rub up against strangers" and "if I fall asleep after midnight, I'm knackered the next day." N has already figured it out, while J and AY are still worrying about the externalities.

Enough. Sweet dreams be yours, my dears, if dreams there be.