About the author
It’s Sunday and you’re hungover, angry at the world, at bartenders and most of all: yourself. No worries, we feel the same. That’s why we’ve invented Sunday Roast. A bi-weekly conversational ‘column’. A written one. Online. Every other Sunday, Mark and Sabrina vent about the horrible burdens and ungodly mishaps of their 21st century life. Usually reserved only for bars, we bring our problems right into your home. Sharing is sexy, and a problem shared is a problem halved.. You are cordially invited to our pity party.
Last week’s Sunday Roast here.
Dear Sabrina,
Why I find the concept ‘dating’ so fascinating is the fundamental pressure and forcedness of it. Instead of meeting someone at a party, then meeting them again at another party, then again, and again, slowly but surely finding out you might enjoy each others company, a date pulls you out of the casual atmosphere that facilitates easy-going social behaviour and places you right on the spot in a context that is inherently awkward. Because let’s face it, the human race didn’t evolve to go on dates.
It’s a bit like what I imagine gay saunas to be like. Seriously, can’t gays just go to normal saunas? The term itself implies that there is more to it than just sitting back in a hot room. I can imagine going to a gay sauna brings with it the pressure of exercising your gayness. Hell, it will probably even make you grossly exaggerate your gayness. Because surely you want to live up to the expectations of the gay sauna. These kind of situations deliberately remove every casual social context and block every exit. We put ourselves right on the spot, and we love it. We love these self-cultivated situations that are solely designed to catalyse a certain desired effect, but only do the opposite. “Let’s date, it might speed up our love.”
Thirty years ago, nothing happened in seconds. Every single thing you could possibly do on this earth took at least ten minutes.
Why do we have the need to speed everything up? I seriously don’t understand why I get annoyed when it takes more than four seconds for a YouTube video to buffer, but believe me, I do. And I’m a patient person. I honestly don’t mind waiting half an hour for the bus to arrive even when it’s pissing rain, but when I finally get on that bus and it doesn’t drive off within ten seconds after I sit down, Mr. Busdriver and me got a problem. When I get out my phone and it takes my email longer than eight seconds to synchronise, I’m never buying an HTC again.
The problem started when we began quantifying our lives in sections of seconds, rather than minutes or hours. Thirty years ago, nothing happened in seconds. Every single thing you could possibly do on this earth took at least ten minutes. People must have been more relaxed back then, because your perception of time gets blurry beyond ten minutes. It doesn’t matter whether you have to wait 13 or 17 minutes, it’s practically the same. It’s these goddamn seconds that make us aware of the agonizingly sluggish passing of time.
And that’s why I am banning seconds, the sneaky wiseass terrorists of time-land, out of my life. I’m slowing the fuck down, because I can’t take it anymore. Are you with me?
Mark
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