Birds are singing, and I’m sitting here thinking about government. The sun will soon rise, as is its wont; and the day will be a bad one, because I’m annoyed.
Easter dinner. That’s what we all were called to my mother’s house for, yesterevening. I don’t give a hoot about this holiday, but I like to talk with my family.
The reason I’m annoyed is that conversation never gets to happen. Phones get to happen; photos get to happen. Really bad music gets to happen. Yet whenever one tries to converse, one’s talk is cut short by some interruption or other.
The very brief “sound bite”—this concept has dominated the worlds even beyond the realm of audiovisual media. People speak in spasms and blips now, and any thought greater than the length of a punchline defies memory. People grow bored or confused almost instantly.
POLONIUS: This is too long.
HAMLET: It shall to the barber’s with your beard. Prithee say on. He’s for a jig or a tale of bawdry, or he sleeps.
Hamlet also says, earlier in the same scene (2.2):
…the play, I remember, pleased not the million — ’twas caviare to the general.
I feel better, having quoted that. It’s as if the air has been freshened.
Do mice dislike the smell of fabric softener?
Soon my only bottle of cologne will run out.
(The above bottle was given to me as a birthday gift some years ago by the same sibling who told me the rumor about the mice.)
P.S.
Today I tried my best to give a casual yet passable reading of the sonnet that is mounted inside the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty (La Liberté éclairant le monde, or Liberty Enlightening the World, designed by the French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi and built by Gustave Eiffel) – the poem was written by Emma Lazarus:
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