tooth soup

photo credit: joyrex

Today myself and

some colleagues visited Ikea during lunch time. I had my lunch already (pre-packed and waiting on the kitchen table thanks to Lou forgetting it on her rush out the door) but I was planning on staying late at uni (where I am right now) so I decided to buy a cheap lunch at Ikea and save the spaghetti bolognese for dinner. Plus I needed to pick up a couple of last elements for the long-overdue installation I had been planning for (and since) Lou’s birthday*.

So we drove up the highway, me in the back reading a powder diffraction book and Dino and Irene in the front exclaiming about how beautiful the day was. And it was really beautiful; how this is at all considered Winter I have no idea. Nature must have some serious catch-up planned for the rest of August.

We arrived at Ikea and followed the circuit (“Your Ikea journey starts on the second floor!”) like ants in an antfarm, occasionally stopping to run our feelers over some foreign object that might have some use to us. Most of the shinies were passed over in favour of sticking to a strict regime of only picking up Things We Actually Need. In the end we made it through the whole place with only minor casualties to our objectives.

Next stop was lunch (half-price meatballs on Tuesdays: sure they might return to haunt you for days in your burp-breath, but damn if they weren’t tasty going down), during which Dino offered a thoughtful explanation of the entire layout of Ikea, especially the lunch-time queueing system, with respect to the sale of items. Which got me to thinking about how the awareness of the consumer with regards to advertising and marketing techniques has increased dramatically over the last decade or so. Far from being the ignorant purchasers of snake-oil that we may have been a century ago (though there’s still plenty of that going on in the cosmetics department), most people nowadays know exactly what techniques any advertisement is using to lure us in, and we make our decision in full awareness of those techniques. It’s a strange state of affairs, one in which the duck can tell not only that a hunter is using a duck call to attract it, but the brand of duck call and where it was manufactured.

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*I have a tradition of organising things other than purely useful/material presents for Lou’s birthdays and our anniversaries. Unfortunately the fact that I always like to improve on the last time means that the complexity of each surprise has increased at a steep linear gradient. Last time I created a network of diffuse lighting from ping pong balls and christmas lights and strung them around our room on strings; pegged to which were the photos of Lou and I that I loved the most. This time around it’s practically a third year art exhibition. I had to buy a friggin’ hacksaw.

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Note: I’m fully aware that this blog post comes less than a day after a blog post that explains how drastically short for time I am and how I won’t be able to write anything substantial while my Thesis remains unvanquished. Thus me posting another blog post might seem to be contradicting that, but I assure you it isn’t. Blogging is cathartic, at least it was until I decided to focus on the production of ‘content’. I want to return to that catharsis and see if—by employing blogging and critiquing—I can’t keep the old writer muscles from withering away and dying.

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