It would be safe to assume I have been pondering human nature, considering this week’s title: Nothing human is alien to me, and last week’s: When it’s angel instead of when it’s human pt II. It’s something that I’ve become aware of just now —Thursday, 9:28 am— after choosing the title for this dispatch. The first thing that popped into my head was, You gotta change the title, you can’t use the word human, again! Then, I asked myself what would be a reasonable period before using the word human again in a title for this publication. Four weeks? Six? How about two months? Yeah, two months would be a safe stretch.
As I considered other options for the title, I became angry with myself for being ridiculous. So I did what I had intended to in the first place. And I also made sure to find an almost identical picture to last week’s for the cover. I’m into human. I’m into entanglement. And so, here it goes: A newsletter sin.
“Nothing human is alien to me.”
These words are attributed to Terence (in Latin, Publius Terentius Afer), a Roman playwright whose work I studied in school when I was seventeen. Around that time, I was also listening to a whole lot of electronic music. There was a song by Ladytron, Seventeen, whose iconic lyrics I still sing to myself to this day: They only want you when you’re seventeen, when you’re twenty-one, you’re no fun. They take a Polaroid and let you go. Say they’ll let you know, so come on. So come on. So come on. That’s the entire lyrics of the song. They only want you when you’re underage. As soon as you turn the age to legally drink in the US, surprise! You’re no fun.
That message —the one from that Ladytron song no one I knew back then listened to— worried me. I had no line of boys waiting out my door, wanting me. If they don’t want me now, at seventeen, I’ll die a virgin, I thought, I’m destined to eternal solitude. A few months later, a famous party-photographer from the US —yeah, remember those?— took my picture at a club. It wasn’t a Polaroid. But I got to keep it: