A Chair Burning, and an Unfortunately Outspoken Girl (Part 5 of 5)

A Chair Burning, and an Unfortunately Outspoken Girl (1)

A Chair Burning, and an Unfortunately Outspoken Girl (2)

A Chair Burning, and an Unfortunately Outspoken Girl (3)

A Chair Burning, and an Unfortunately Outspoken Girl (4)

I cleared my throat and then mentally kicked myself because the crowd was already looking at me. Including Loud Frod, who looked smug and expectant as if I were about to back him up. Or something equally insane.

“Everyone,” I fixed on my best bureaucratic smile, “I am pleased to announce that the unusual course of this burning will produce a unique, perhaps unprecedented, cosine function. I would like to thank you on behalf of my office,” I added, clenching my fists but keeping my eyes from rolling, “for as you all know, more data is always good.”

A few heads nodded sagely at the ‘more data’ sophism but I was not getting a convincing feeling from my audience. A brilliant, wicked idea surfaced.

“Anyway, as I anticipate this burning will be of interest to the-powers-that-be, I intend to submit with it some notes for posterity, in the finest text-boxes which office guidelines allow. Our good Pollericks will hopefully find his words on our ‘essential emotional reaction’ to the ‘curious state of resembling certain auspicious Betelgeusian ancestors’, and his advice that this confusion be ‘cleansed in fire‘ –”

I took a breath.

“– near the beginning of our next departmental report.”

A Chair Burning, and an Unfortunately Outspoken Girl (Part 4 of 5)

A Chair Burning, and an Unfortunately Outspoken Girl (1)

A Chair Burning, and an Unfortunately Outspoken Girl (2)

A Chair Burning, and an Unfortunately Outspoken Girl (3)

“ – as if this weren’t alarming enough – ”

Her voice faltered and broke. The unfortunately outspoken bundle of hormones was targeted by a sea of glares. And my PLOC plocked the first chairs.

“I mean…” she gathered herself up again. “Burnings are supposed to be ‘vehicles for collective resentment’! So why is there a sign out front saying this is for people who exclusively burn chairs?

“And you,” she went on recklessly, pointing at Loud Frod, “your speech didn’t make sense! How can we be the Vegan counterparts to our Betelgeuesian forefathers? That doesn’t even-”

“Young. Girl. Subsist!” Loud Frod was on the verge on combustion himself. An angry growl rose in the crowd along with his stentorian rebuke.

“We are in the middle of a burning,” he proclaimed, “which is not to be interrupted. Should you have any concerns you can take them to the Municpal Office of Burnings, where they have a complete process for any dissention dissenters.”

A Chair Burning, and an Unfortunately Outspoken Girl (Part 3 of 5)

A Chair Burning, and an Unfortunately Outspoken Girl (1)

A Chair Burning, and an Unfortunately Outspoken Girl (2)

Frod Pollericks just gave the introductory speech, as he is wont to do. A few years ago (I suppose it really has been that long) there was a healthy, heterogeneous pool of MC’s for chair burnings and I toyed with my parameters depending on who started things off.

However, there is something about politicking positions like these that attracts the most officious and unfortunate of our species. Just as bad money drives out good, Loud Frod Pollericks has installed himself as sole king of chair burnings.

If he ever relents in his daily expressions of scorn for all other sorts of burnings their invasion will be a forgone conclusion.

He had a new spiel on symbolism today which was a trifle less putrid than usual. I gave my customary blank stare and nod of approval whenever he glanced my way, for he was keenly conscious of his audience and sometimes pretended interest in my cosine functions. Namely, the ones which were plotted based off of his burnings. Because he really just wanted to talk about himself, and I remain deeply disturbed that we once snogged for upwards of two minutes.

A Chair Burning, and an Unfortunately Outspoken Girl (Part 2 of 5)

A Chair Burning, and an Unfortunately Outspoken Girl (Part 1)

I think the linguo-statisticians and the plebs have caught enough flak for today. My own relatively ignominious work is to apply a cosine function to anything and everything.

• To the quality of muffins produced at various speciality dessert cafes at various times of day

• To the number of things burned per minute during the course of various burnings (factoring in the volume of yelling, if I so please)

• To the growth of men’s moustaches depending on how close we are to the coveted vacation season

• To the correlation between output of self-published poetry anthologies and gloomy weather.

There are infinitely many more insipid examples, more than I could ever complete in my lifetime – for this is it, busy work to safely occupy an entire existence! Do not be deceived by the fact that my job falls under the field of “New Enquiry into Vital Existential Phenomena”. That is pure korba shit¹.

A Chair Burning, and an Unfortunately Outspoken Girl (Part 1 of 5)

Wherever there are many important people doing incredibly ignominious jobs, there will be certain byproducts. Crowded specialty dessert cafes, burnings (curtains, chairs, wigs, etc., they are quite tame all things considered), pervasive vacation advertisements, and an overwhelming number of self-published poetry anthologies.

Since everyone in our arm of the galaxy enjoys relatively ignominious work, and everyone believes herself to be amazingly important, we have a lot of the above.

Just for the record, that “herself” may be credited to our “womankind” cycle this lunar year. Some time ago, when the plebs in office were even more in need of occupation than they are now, the-powers-that-be set them to work on the problem of how to make up for womankind’s long use of “mankind, man, and the general ‘he'”. The plebs mulled this over for a while, and then leapt at the suggestion of some lonely linguo-statistician as to how they should go about this project.

Conditional Holidays are Always Less than What They Seem (Part 4/4)

Conditional Holidays are Always Less than What They Seem (1)

Conditional Holidays are Always Less than What They Seem (2)

Conditional Holidays are Always Less than What They Seem (3)

It felt like an age had passed while I was in the restroom. Yet it hadn’t been long enough. The older I get the less these conditional holidays seem like holidays at all, and more like work in disguise.

“Lalantree?”

Reluctantly, I turned towards the voice and the mountains. Either it was my imagination or the twilight on that side of the plaza was deepening; shadows darkening the flowers among the scrub, and far above them, the pines and the crags. Someone had seen fit to leave a stone table on the grass not far from me, and its weathered scrollwork, and cracked surface, managed to convey forlornness amid the rest of this zytocoke-fueled fantasy.

Mavind was sitting there, waiting for me with her cream self perched upon the faded grey, feet off the ground and legs swaying slightly. The table might as well have been placed for her. A creeper was growing up one leg.

“Lalantree, it doesn’t seem like you are enjoying my advances.”

Conditional Holidays are Always Less than What They Seem (Part 3 of 4)

Conditional Holidays are Always Less than What They Seem (1)

Conditional Holidays are Always Less than What They Seem (2)

I forged a path toward the washroom through the thinner bits of the crowd, conscious that my newfound powers in clearing away knots of people were 100% due to the Junoesque figure following me. And this, I realized, was one of the most exciting things that had happened on any of our CLPFC days; the expressions around us were awash with curiosity, shock, and delight. Everyone here would know that Ibrander’s date had jumped ship to Lalantree before lunch was served.

Trying to scan as many faces as possible without making eye contact (now this is a true art) I almost bumped into Loddi’s mum. This in spite of her neon floral mumu. “Oh, hello Lalantree. Loddi isn’t with you?”

“No…” Mavind had come up close behind me, and Loddi’s mum did a double take.

“Goodness! You’re looking very well.”

“Thanks.” She seemed genuinely sceptical of my appearance, what with her forehead noticeably Rejuv-smoothed since I last saw her; however, my secret was no more and no less than I had never tried very hard to look my best on these occasions. Always set low expectations. “Um, if you don’t mind, I should…”

Conditional Holidays are Always Less than What They Seem (Part 2 of 4)

Conditional Holidays are Always Less than What They Seem (1)

Nonchalant and all that, I waited until the last moment to look up at the welcome interlopers.

“Ibrander,” said a poised, throaty, laughing voice, “won’t you introduce me?”

They stopped in front of the bench, my third cousin Ibrander¹ (who detests Loddi, making me instantly suspicious of his coming over) and a tall, glossy person who was all rich brown hair and expressive mouth and hand gestures. One hand was on Ibrander’s arm but she still managed to be gesturing with it. Her clothes were nothing less than dashing – a wide hat and a one-piece dress suit in cream, its tailored A-line skirt skewing physics by ending in a sway. This was one case where I didn’t have to worry about the polite game that people played of trying to guess-without-guessing whether someone was visiting in-holo only. She was most definitely in person.

I mercilessly crushed the wish that I had worn something better.

Conditional Holidays are Always Less than What They Seem (Part 1 of 4)

Loddi Frisket is a black hole of neuroses. His very existence centres on an unstable singularity, which sucks in anxieties, crises, and the most outlandishly negative possibilities. From prior experience I can attest that his event horizon fluctuates around a diameter of approximately 15 metres. Sometimes the emotional debris which gathers on his accretion disk is an accurate enough warning that I can reverse course, and get away before his attention fixes on me. Sometimes it is not enough.

To give you a sense of just what I am dealing with, Loddi once asked me if I would rather lose my heart (and dignity) to a psychopathic baker, or flee the civilized world, giving up everything from clean pillow shams to NutriPills, only to waste away in boondocks replete with SABs¹ and smugglers.

In my humble opinion, the baker of Loddi’s bipolar love was not psychopathic (I still buy rolls there), but merely possessed of poor judgement, seeing as she countenanced his Gothic style of flirting in the first place. Furthermore, it is well known that the Carwallian smugglers (the only smugglers within 50 lightyears to whom Loddi could have possibly been referring) live very well in their off-planet colonies, though the latter are admittedly remote places. Politics may be laissez-faire over in the Esten Economic Zone but they still don’t want blatant crime polluting the fine views and real estate values of the elite.

The Loidial Trade in Medium-Sized Domestic Animals (3)

The Loidial Trade in Medium-Sized Domestic Animals (1)

The Loidial Trade in Medium-Sized Domestic Animals (2)

Some people prefer a socialist distribution of resources. I am one of those people, because I don’t believe that 96% of the population (that is, anyone with an RIQ¹ below 145 and/or poor entrepreneurial instincts) is capable of earning a living, whereas the remaining 4% would live like Altarian Empresses in the absence of redistribution, and I am too jealous-natured ever to be at peace with that. My preferences have been duly influenced by my surroundings; I am situated in the Loidial Economic Band, the second-most liberal of the six Economic Zones of the Huniverse.

Thanks to the Huniversal Policy of Free Movement (HPoFM²) we are rather ideologically homogeneous. Anomalous beings who develop a strong antipathy to the Loidial way of doing things usually get the hell out by the time they reach adulthood, and are thereafter among the first to throw stones at their native space. The Zones most dissimilar to us are constantly lashing out with petty squabbles and nasty comments – and we are so kind as to oblige them in return. Happily, our Chiball Team won the last SuperRing, so let them stew on that for the moment.

All this to say that I wrote a very witty commentary on those backward Zones (without scruple, too, criticizing everything from cuisine to belly rings) to Cassandra as I waited for the tranquilizers to take effect.