The Lowlands Tooth Fairy #37. [Weekly Head Voices #55]

In this week’s Weekly Head Voices, looking back at weeks 33 and 34 of 2011, there are three important topics that I’d like to discuss. For your convenience, I’ve arranged them in order of increasing significance. This has the added advantage of guaranteeing that this post ends, at least technically speaking, with a sort of climax. Oh yes, the theme of today’s post is dry.

Photo of the Bravo tent during Lowlands 2011, taken by Andreas Terlaak for NRC Handelsblad. I hope they don't mind me linking to their picture. You can see more of Terlaak's Lowlands 2011 work by clicking on the photo.

One

I turned 37 very recently. This is the last prime number I’ll have the privilege of gracing before shooting past the big four-oh. I remember when I turned 32. Amongst other defects which I believe I’ve gotten more or less under control, I was extremely smug, and I would probably have irritated the living daylights out of 37-year-old me. I’ve been very much desmugged in my search for harmony and balance in life, although I’ve been told that I tend to be self-congratulatory, an observation that I personally think might have been triggered by my extroverted optimism. Whatever the case may be, I’ll take 5 more years to de-self-congratulatorise myself as well. It’s really a small price to pay for harmony with the universe.

On my birthday, many wonderful people left sweet messages on my facebook wall, in my email inbox, in my SMS whatever and even to my face. It can’t be understated what a positive experience this was. Thank you wonderful people.

Two

I had the awesome privilege and unbridled pleasure (when last did you read about unbridled pleasure in a blog post?! hmm?) of spending 3 sunny days at Lowlands 2011, an alternative reality where it’s sunny (if you were in NL this “summer”, you would know that sunny weather is a purely theoretical concept) and you get to hang around on the grass drinking beer or in tents experiencing Amon Tobin doing ISAM, or Little Dragon being absolutely gorgeous on Sunday morning, or Trentemöller and his band being superbly Danish. Of course you get to do this with a group of Exceptionally Wonderful People (EWPs). There is one thing you should take into account before starting to hang out with EWPs: They attract even more EWPs, resulting in huge groups of like-minded EWPs that renders linking up with your favourite EWPs (a subset of the larger group) an interesting challenge, further complicated by the fact that 65000 people SMSing at the same time in the middle of nowhere tend to clog up the few available cellphone towers, which in turn delays any SMS by a random amount from a few seconds to a few hours.

Whatever the case may be, I had an awesome time and am already very quietly counting down until August 2012. EWPs, get ready!

Three

Genetic Offspring #1 lost her first milk tooth and this is of course a major life event. So the Tooth Fairy, or the Tooth Mouse as we call it (GO#1 has ascertained that fairies don’t exist, but she has visually confirmed that mice in fact do, so she’s willing to play along for now), or actually just Yours Truly, had to sneak into her bedroom and exchange said tooth for a sizeable (compared to what my teeth went for back in the day) amount of cash. Remember that this is her major life event, but I did spend a few moments pondering the fact that I’m now someone else’s Tooth Fairy. That’s just huge man…

Conclusion

That’s (almost) all I have to say kids. This is my fourth blog post of the weekend: I also wrote one on Django testing with selenium, one on getting a Windows console that doesn’t suck, and another pre-dated one on my newest toy.

I really liked writing them all, but I enjoyed this one the most.

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