More delays (What a good boy/Smooth Operator)

It really is coming soon. Should have been now, but the distraction of gnat bites, plus the need to find 15 multiple choice questions on Child Language for a makeup midterm tomorrow morning, have combined to delay this effort for one or two more evenings. In the meantime, two trivial notices from a day spent taxiing children around Kobe:

Click to play
The first is that one insect bite may not be a bad thing—even if it's not John Donne's Flea—since the itch reminds you forcefully that you are human with a real body, and not a brain in a vat. (Or at least that you were human once—it's hard to exclude the possibility that you are now an envatted brain with a recollection of having been bitten. But then I realise that in my memory, I was much younger and fitter than this, and my flesh a good deal more perfect, so this itch must be real, for better or worse). The same principle as a hairshirt, I suppose, without the self-hatred. However, though one bite may be sobering, several—all performing a complex symphony of irritation—conspire to become a very bad thing indeed. Eeyyaaaa!

Click to play
Second is the observation that for as long as there is Starbucks, Sade (the 80s singer, not the 18th century aristocrat) will not want for a royalty check (cheque). I'm not sure how many times it is now that I have drunk a tall cappuccino—which is neither one nor the other—to the tune of Smooth Operator, as again today. And yet, how marvelously apt, for this is a marriage of souls 'as dreams are made on', the café and its song: both professional, innocuous, welcoming; both transcending national and cultural boundaries with ease and poise, pleasing to the senses, contemporary yet 'established', devoid of class, yet studiously bourgeois; both ultimately as unsatisfying as they are inauthentic—the places where we pass our lives while aspiring to something better...

Tot straks/à bientôt.

For German speakers looking for an antidote to Starbucks, click to play

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