21 Kurt Vonnegut Vacation Advices
Thanks for your email. I’ll be out on vacation until Thursday, October 20. I'll get back to you as soon as I can upon my return.
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Or, maybe. Not to work that tired "oh, I'm sooo busy, I get sooo many emails" routine. But let's be honest, the average emailee has 1,123 unread emails when they get back from a week untethered. So I'm gonna go ahead and say, I may never reply to the one you just sent, unless you’re the Dalai Lama or the ghost of Prince. Don't take it personal.
If you're here for the longwinded vacation OOO message, richly layered with references to artificial intelligence-powered robot overlords, wackadoodle conspiracy theories, flights of fancy pants, obscure lists and references, the scientific contributions of Phineas Gage, great names for your band, a scathing critique of scathing critiques, or any of the usual gimcrackery for which my OOO messages have deservedly earned very little notoriety at all, instead you will be treated to the following.
21 Kurt Vonnegut Vacation Advices
“It’s a terrible waste to be happy and not notice it.”
“I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.”
“Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.”
“Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.”
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.”
“Enjoy the little things in life for one day you will look back and realize they were the big things.”
“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”
“Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place.””
“And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.”
“I wish you'd help me look into a more interesting problem - namely, my sanity.”
“Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.”
“Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.”
“Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.”
“A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”
“Hate, in the long run, is about as nourishing as cyanide.”
“The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not.”
“The waitress brought me another drink. She wanted to light my hurricane lamp again. I wouldn't let her.”
"Can you see anything in the dark, with your sunglasses on?" she asked me. "The big show is inside my head," I said.”
“Sometimes I wonder about the Creator of the Universe.”
“To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it.”
“And so it goes…”
Please pick your fave and then keep it to yourself.
Do reach back out next week. Or, there's other folks here who we've hired expressly because they are smarter and more capable than I am (which, admittedly, was not alone a high enough bar to weed many folks out) who may be able to help sooner. You probably know one of them.
