"His" game was basically Tink (aka "Tom & Katie"). It's a party game where you're given some cultural phenomenon and you have to explain why s/he/it/they must be or have been made by, bodies. But in Timo's version, the items to be explained (or "debated" as he put it ) are the songs on my iPod. I'll give him this: Timo is the only body I've ever known capable of this, or frankly, any other sort of mind game.
In Dutch, to squirrel stuff away, like nuts for winter, is hamsteren, to act like a hamster. This is apparently seen as a positive trait here. Timo hamsters bits of personal information. When he hears any body say something about their parents or when their dog died or the first time they saw themselves reflected in a dark window on the way home after, you can see him calculating (Is this emotional? How is it important? What does it mean?) and if the calculation returns a value above threshold, he locks it in by blinking his eyes. Really. It's that mechanical.
But I didn't know that when I started hanging out with the monks last year. I told them my story. More or less. It's just what you do in a new pod. I told them how the very last thing I did before I left home, after arranging things for my mother, was copy everything off my dad's laptop. Most of the songs in my iPod came from there. When Timo heard that, he blinked and asked if he could copy the songs. I bet he thinks he's uncovered some leveragable emotional residue he can use to monkify me.
Also, he'd been suspiciously quiet about Ibu since I told him about my visit. Normally, that's the kind of tidbit he'd tear into right away with a sermonette on liefdenk/lovethink, his clunky Dutch neologism for the thoroughly American idea that bodies can somehow get on the good foot through the power of positive thinking. Now I see he was just waiting for the right communication platform, this game.
So we played iTink. Mostly because if I said no, he would have just started asking why and that would be even more annoying. So we put it on shuffle and I went first.
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