Friday, November 4, 2011

Do You Want To Wait Forever?



Today is Waiting For The Barbarians Day! Today's holiday is related to (according to the internet), the book by J.M. Coetzee titled, oddly enough: Waiting for the Barbarians. Having never read this book or even heard about it before, and also having believed that anything with the word 'barbarian' in it is very unlikely to have anything to do with any kind of written literature; I was sorely unprepared for today. I also am sorely afraid I used that semicolon incorrectly. The basic gist of the story is: People living fairly peacefully, new government people come and claim ensuing barbarian attack, government people go out of their way to find and torture/kill barbarians, people end up evacuating the city out of fear of the barbarians, and finally: (SPOILER ALERT! SCROLL DOWN TO NOT SPOIL BOOK!) The barbarians never come because they never were going to, and the town is unprepared for winter.

I can't REALLY see how that can translate into a celebration I could easily pull off without creating my own society and then hoping my government becomes corrupt enough to try such a tactic. What I CAN do is watch Conan the Barbarian. So... Barbarian HOOOOOOOO! ... Conan didn't have a catchphrase for me to yell.

Thanks for reading!
~Kyle