ROBOT'S LIFE
ROBOT’S PIANO LESSONS
Tuesday afternoons the adolescent robot takes piano lessons. The robot's teacher is a woman named Monica in her mid-thirties. She raps his knuckles with a ruler. You play well, she says, but you will never get past a certain level. You will never play with soul. You don't understand why Bach makes people focus and Brahms fills people with longing. The robot doesn't respond, but privately he thinks it's the other way around. Brahms is a response to Bach's questions, but Bach is the silent field of questions. Monica repeats her criticism. The robot lays his flat lovely hands on the keys and prepares to play again. It is almost the end of the lesson.
ADULT ROBOT’S HOBBIES
Every so often he reads a few pages of a classic novel, impelled less by curiosity than by a curious sense of duty.
ROBOT’S PRIVATE KNOWLEDGE
“The” is a lovely and sensuous word
ROBOT’S PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE
Becoming a millionaire is simple, if unimaginable for many: graduate from college with no debt, get a $50,000 starting salary at 23, save 8 percent per year, get 2 percent raises every year for the rest of your working life, and at 65 you will have $2.7 million socked away, ready to burn on a long-term care facility.1
ROBOT’S IDENTITY, PART I
He wants to be the type of anxious robot that works too hard, but instead, he's the type of anxious robot that anxiously thinks about other robots and cries.
ROBOT’S IDENTITY, PART II
Oranges: they want to have real blood.
ROBOT DREAMS OF HORSES
The robot wants to love himself. But how? He only knows how to hate himself. And when? Not yet. I will love myself later, he says, eventually, when I have earned it. He's reticent. He might as well try to love a stranger. He might as well try not to think of love at all. One morning brushing his teeth he blushes and smiles shyly at the mirror. This in its own way is flirtation, the imperceptible beginnings of familiarity, fine hairs trembling against skin. A touch, a smile, a winter morning. He holds these little intimacies in his heart and dreams of one day being loved, loved, loved, at last.2
https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-41/the-intellectual-situation/billionaire-follies/
adapted from “sadoeuphemist” tumblr