Sic Transit Finance-ia Mundi

Today I watched a vast quantity of television. At times this activity leaves me feeling as intelligent as a bunny rabbit looks as it chews grass and stares straight ahead of it in a creepily vacant way, and sluggish, but today it entertained me no end. Early on there was the Super G ski run at the world championships in the Val d'Isère. It is a very steep course, marked out in blue lines and red or blue banners on springy posts, snaking down the mountainside into a square pen surrounded by a lively crowd, at the end. After a while I could sort of see where the excellent skiers differed from the middling ones; they had a secure feeling for distances, shifted their body weight well, kept their leg muscles good and tense so that their skis wouldn't glide apart and out of control, and went at risky speeds and trajectories so that they would reach the bottom faster. Often they would glide over the blue line, and I spent much of the time wondering how the penalties for that are calculated. Three or more of the skiers wiped out, and two of them slid spectacularly and alarmingly into the double perimeter of orange fence to the left and right of the course. At one point the descent was so sharp that the angle seemed to be almost literally 90 degrees.

In my online book reading, I've reached a tome on household science, which even inspired me to tidy my desk a trifle. At the same time I realized that the pile of socks that are yet to be mended, and which is distributed in subsidiary piles about my room, is huge, and that it is best to begin reducing it again. So I seized a pair of lilac socks and darned it, whilst watching an interview with our former chancellor Helmut Schmidt, primarily on the world financial crisis and how to deal with it. The interviewer industriously squelched any glimmer of humour, which is ordinarily one of the main reasons to watch a Schmidt interview, but at least the conversation was substantial. It was interesting how gloomy the interview was. Schmidt, puffing away at cigarettes as per usual but not gazing with melancholy eyes through the smoke as he sometimes does, was not inclined to lament or forecast doom, but nonetheless took the financial crisis very seriously.

His interlocutor, in the meantime, was suggesting scenarios of unemployment-related rises in support for radical political parties, recurrences of the 1920s, and half-a-dozen other cheerful and alarmist things. Another peccadillo of said interlocutor was to insist on discoursing directly of the German situation, whereas I found it more interesting when Schmidt pointed out that countries like Brazil and the members of OPEC should also have a greater say in international economics, and (indirectly) that we shouldn't bewail our own lot whilst completely ignoring the plight of others. It did irritate me a little that the Greed of Managers came up again. I doubt that it is fair to cast an odium on all managers, and am generally of the opinion that he who is without sin (e.g. irresponsible credit card debt, disproportionate wealth, or cupidity) should throw the first stone. Often the louder people moralize the more they are compensating for a glaring shortcoming in themselves. (Which I never do. Cough, cough.) Besides, I dislike the superiority that those who have not even been in positions of temptation assume over those who have. Involuntary chance is not voluntary virtue, people.

Anyway, I also watched The O.C. and Gilmore Girls. Both of these were "cool" when I was in school. We did watch the latter from time to time but I was ashamed of watching it and found the romantic plots entirely lacking in credibility. So it was fun to watch them now. The O.C. is strikingly void of reality, or so it seems. It is possibly still a good window on middle-class white California, by portraying what it aspires to be and the shortcomings thereof. At times the script is clever; the acting is competent and the characters not unsympathetic. At first I found myself viscerally resenting how well-to-do everyone is and how they don't appear to work much for it (my internal commentary ran something like "stupid people, having enough money to own a house and buy clothing and have matching furniture," etc., etc.) but I've overcome it. (Of course I don't work myself, anyway, but two years of scrimping have given me a better, if irrationally bitter, sense of what it is to be lower-middle-class.) As for the Gilmore Girls, the later episodes are, in my opinion, a snooze, but the earlier ones are reasonably funny. The scenes where Lorelai Gilmore very, very awkwardly reestablishes her relationship to her WASP-y parents ring true, I think, as does the dynamic between her and her daughter, and I like the satirical but not overly antagonistic depiction of the lifestyle of the rich and stodgy.

In the evening, after I had cooked lunch (wild mushroom soup out of a package, and spaetzle with fried onion and apple) and watched more television, Papa and T. came home from the university, bearing with them a bottle of gin and bars upon bars of chocolate. The gin remains, to my knowledge, unopened, to be enjoyed discriminatingly later, but the chocolate is mostly opened and we've enjoyed it undiscriminatingly. Besides chocolate with a peppermint filling, which I love though it is a glaringly unsubtle and therefore presumably plebeian preference, there were chocolate bars with exotic fillings, e.g. lime, pecan and mascarpone, cranberry, and cognac. Unfortunately the alcohol had predominantly crystallized into bulbous stalagmites/stalactites of sugar, which did not prevent one or two of us from spilling the goopy remainder, but altogether it was most delectable.