30. If we make up a ridiculous company and keep the joke going?
Mailbag, mailbag! A reader writes:
Starting up a company takes a lot of effort and a high tolerance for stress and many other respectable traits like (probably/hopefully) creativity. Starting a hypothetical one doesn’t but we still get to act like we did all that hard work and talk like we’re brilliant. Over the course of a conversation with a very cute girl we created our own hypothetical company and lived out our rapid rise to leg trafficking and bottled hiccup peddling ascendancy.If you’re feeling brilliant, you’re flirting. At least you’d like to hope so. All the best flirting should have that spark in it: a dash of amour fou, inspired mad chatting. It’s more Jazz Age c. 1921 & “The Future” — “darling, how might we take over the world?” — than Silicon Valley in the crashing-down days of 2009. I won’t hazard a guess as to where you’re writing from, but psycho-historically, I’ll say it’s more romantic than anything that might lead to Serious Business. Let us know how it goes, if you take your Series A or make out in the back of a train car, etc. And yes, it is flirting. And good flirting: it looks like your intentions with this “very cute girl” weren’t just to show-off, but to show-off together.
