End of Days
My favorite interview question: where do you live now? Recruiters ask this because they need to know if I'm willing or able to relocate to the city in which their office is located. I like this question because I can tell them honestly, "Nowhere. I live nowhere." Of course I go on to clarify what I mean by that, but not before letting a quick moment go by during which they can let their imaginations run with that.
I've told people that I've met recently that I'm homeless, which is technically true, since I've been couchsurfing around with everything I own in my car. My mail is going to my friend's place in Tucson, a friend who calls me once a week to see if I've accepted a job offer yet and gotten my own place so he can stop dealing with my mail.
When I lived in a house, I found that there was an easy way to kill time on a slow day: just rearrange all of the furniture and decorations in a room. During a slow week, you can just rearrange things every day, iterating through all possible combinations of positions of stuff. This is lots of fun to do, but only if you have roommates who get annoyed every time you rearrange everything.
If you're couchsurfing, you really can't do this in other people's homes when you're living with them. I haven't tried this, since I'm hoping to keep the ratings on my AirBNB profile on the positive side. What you can do instead is do this outside: go move your car to another space, and pick up some trash on the street. Or you can throw some new trash on the ground. Just change stuff.
I recently re-watched the movie Seeking a Friend for the End of the World. The film opens with people getting the somber news that the world will end in 3 weeks, at which point an asteroid will decimate all life on earth. So the start of the film is basically the banality of day-to-day life heavily altered by this revelation. No one goes to work, everyone starts to carpe the diem, and so on.
So I watch the first 15 minutes of this movie one morning, even before I had my morning coffee. I have no idea why I started watching a movie in the morning, because I don't typically do anything before I have my coffee. On this particular day, this premise gets stuck in my head. Then I shut it off, have my coffee, and leave the house to go about my day. (Rearranging trash on the street I guess.)
It was odd, because I spent the rest of that day strutting around and talking to people, all of the time thinking to myself, "Damn, all of this is going to get destroyed in 3 weeks." It was actually a very sobering day, because I had this fictional premise stuck in my brain and I operated from it as though it were true. I took absolutely nothing seriously, I made stupid jokes to every stranger I met, and I just had a very enjoyable day because whatever nonsense that makes my brain get anxious on a typical day left me completely alone. It was great.
I don't think most people, myself included, fear death. I'm not afraid of dying. I don't remember when I learned about death, or realized that I was one day going to die, but I think I was really young and I shrugged it off as, "Well, if I'm dead then I don't have to participate in any more spelling bees." I'm not afraid of this impending inevitability; what I am afraid of is that if I make a complete and total ass of myself in some social situation, that I'll have to live for another several decades with the memory of that humiliation. I learned that if we're all dead in 3 weeks, then I don't care how embarrassed I get. By anything.
So I've been chasing that feeling. Sometimes I just pretend that we're headed for Armageddon. I do and say crazy, shameless things to people I don't know. If someone gets annoyed, I just tell them, "We're all dead anyway", which is totally true on a long enough time scale. It really freaks people out. But it shouldn't.
I've told people that I've met recently that I'm homeless, which is technically true, since I've been couchsurfing around with everything I own in my car. My mail is going to my friend's place in Tucson, a friend who calls me once a week to see if I've accepted a job offer yet and gotten my own place so he can stop dealing with my mail.
When I lived in a house, I found that there was an easy way to kill time on a slow day: just rearrange all of the furniture and decorations in a room. During a slow week, you can just rearrange things every day, iterating through all possible combinations of positions of stuff. This is lots of fun to do, but only if you have roommates who get annoyed every time you rearrange everything.
If you're couchsurfing, you really can't do this in other people's homes when you're living with them. I haven't tried this, since I'm hoping to keep the ratings on my AirBNB profile on the positive side. What you can do instead is do this outside: go move your car to another space, and pick up some trash on the street. Or you can throw some new trash on the ground. Just change stuff.
I recently re-watched the movie Seeking a Friend for the End of the World. The film opens with people getting the somber news that the world will end in 3 weeks, at which point an asteroid will decimate all life on earth. So the start of the film is basically the banality of day-to-day life heavily altered by this revelation. No one goes to work, everyone starts to carpe the diem, and so on.
So I watch the first 15 minutes of this movie one morning, even before I had my morning coffee. I have no idea why I started watching a movie in the morning, because I don't typically do anything before I have my coffee. On this particular day, this premise gets stuck in my head. Then I shut it off, have my coffee, and leave the house to go about my day. (Rearranging trash on the street I guess.)
It was odd, because I spent the rest of that day strutting around and talking to people, all of the time thinking to myself, "Damn, all of this is going to get destroyed in 3 weeks." It was actually a very sobering day, because I had this fictional premise stuck in my brain and I operated from it as though it were true. I took absolutely nothing seriously, I made stupid jokes to every stranger I met, and I just had a very enjoyable day because whatever nonsense that makes my brain get anxious on a typical day left me completely alone. It was great.
I don't think most people, myself included, fear death. I'm not afraid of dying. I don't remember when I learned about death, or realized that I was one day going to die, but I think I was really young and I shrugged it off as, "Well, if I'm dead then I don't have to participate in any more spelling bees." I'm not afraid of this impending inevitability; what I am afraid of is that if I make a complete and total ass of myself in some social situation, that I'll have to live for another several decades with the memory of that humiliation. I learned that if we're all dead in 3 weeks, then I don't care how embarrassed I get. By anything.
So I've been chasing that feeling. Sometimes I just pretend that we're headed for Armageddon. I do and say crazy, shameless things to people I don't know. If someone gets annoyed, I just tell them, "We're all dead anyway", which is totally true on a long enough time scale. It really freaks people out. But it shouldn't.