http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/01/12/things_vladimir_putin_is_not_too_busy_for

1. Sometimes – Beach Fossils

2. Golden Haze – Wild Nothing

3. Beach Comber – Real Estate

4. Dirty Cartoons – Menomena

5. Book of Revelation – The Drums

6. Child – The Maccabees

7. Red Socks Pugie – Foals

8. Boom Puma – Morning Teleportation

9. I Woke Up Today – Port O’Brien

10. Consequence – The Notwist

11. 1 Samuel 15:23 – The Mountain Goats

12. The Sea Is a Good Place to Think About the Future – Los Campesinos!

13. 1930′s Beach House – Movietone

14. Sleep Forever – Portugal. The Man

Dear Jacques,

I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says “If you see it in The Sun it’s so.” Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?

Virginia O’Hanlon,
115 West 95th Street,
New York City

Virginia, your little friends are right. So is your father (but is that not always the case…?). You have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. You strive for socio-symbolic completeness. You think that nothing can be which is not confirmed by some larger sociolinguistic entity — in Seminar XX, I call this the big Other. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s are incomplete. In this traumatic universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him and his inability to come to grips with the constitutive lack.

No, Virginia, there is no Santa Claus. Or, perhaps Santa Claus exists as exception to the universal — the not-all. Which is to say, only in the sense that he does not. Your father wants to control your jouissance. He does this precisely through the Superego imperative to enjoy!

No Santa Claus! Thank not-God he does not live, and he does not live forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now we will still reside in these elaborate fantasies constructed out of a need to explain the unexplainable. I suppose in that sense, Santa might as well exist.

Sincerely,

Jacques Lacan

1. Fitz & the Trantrums – Moneygrabber

2. The National – Twenty Miles to NH pt. 2

3. Los Campesinos! – By Your Hand

4. Tennis – Origins

5. OnCue – Can’t Wait

6. M83 – Midnight City

7. Gary Clark Jr. – Bright Lights

8. The Donkeys – Oxblood

The Donkeys, Oxblood by Daniyrselfclean

9. Cults – Go Outside

10. Mausi – sol.

11. Grouplove – Lovely Cup

12. The Antlers – I Don’t Want Love

13. Big Sean – Memories pt. 2

14. OnCue – Running

15. The Wombats – Techno Fan

http://t.co/ajtaUJar

Two sets of skanky middle school eyes are sneering at me, momentarily distracted from pawing at iPods they will never own to take in my difficulties.

“Can I help you with something?”

Can you? There are so many people working in the Apple Store today, I start to wonder if unemployment even exists.

“No, thanks. I’m here for a Genius Bar appointment.”

“Oh, let me get Craig.”

If you insist. She does.

“Craig, paging Craig, can you put up your hand?”

He does not, and I awkwardly stand right in the doorway of the store. I fiddle back and forth doing the little dance with my feet that signifies aimlessness. At least the angsty acne-ridden monsters have become distracted again. We have technology to thank for many small miracles.

“Craig, Craig, are you back there? Throw up your hand, Craig!” She chuckles.

Throw up your fucking hand, Craig.

“Craiiiiiig, can you wave real fast? I’ve got a Genius Bar guy.”

His hand shoots up from the mass of obesity, opulence, and red-shirted Appeople at the back of the store.

“Do you see him over there?”

No, I have suddenly become blind. Lead me to him!

“Yes, thank you.”

I walk through this thrawl of people. I’m not claustrophobic, but if I were, this Apple shopping experience would be infinitely less comfortable. I wonder briefly about people who fear Aluminum, and how hard walking to the counter would be without crying. I then imagine the oddly short individual next to me crying. It fits him.

“Hi, I had an appointment, but I’m a little late.”

“What was the name?”

“Brad.”

“Oh– I see, well you’re going to have to sign up again.”

I already signed up. I’m not that late. Can’t I be squeezed in?

“Oh, really?”

“Yep.”

“Um… so can you do that for me? Or do I have to go home and come back?”

“No, no, can’t, sorry. You can however grab one of these desktops and sign up — HA HA — not these kids computers here.”

I was planning on using the kids computer so I could feel like a giant. The Appeople will deprive me of even this small pleasure.

“Ok, cool.”

I walk over to the computer, next to an avid white man transfixed by the magnificence of an Apple Cinema Display. It reminds me of what I picture to be the general pants-pooping that followed early public demonstrations of electric lighting.

I sign up for an appointment an hour later. After spending too much (which would really be any) time in Eddie Bauer, I head back.

This time, things will be different.

I am a few minutes early. Craig, you will not again deprive me of the opportunity to fix this computer. I am on a mission.

I burst through the doors like the Sultan charging into his highly profitable, all-white harem. Apple’s annoyingly pretty industrial architecture will not catch me off guard like before. The doors do not really burst because of their hydraulic systems, but it is nonetheless dramatic.

I shoot devil stares at all non-adults in the room. Those roving pre-pubescent eyeballs will not fuck with me. They recoil in terror. Unfortunately I also pass my evil glower over a baby. Sorry, baby. You were a casualty of something far grander than yourself.

Out of nowhere, multiple red-shirted employees appear, readying their memorized introductory sequence:

“Can we–”

THERE WILL BE NO HELPING ME TODAY, APPEOPLE!

I spot Craig chatting with a colleague in the exact same place as before.

“Brad. I’m here for my appointment.” I say it with the maximum possible amount of gravitas — which means, very little.

“Ok, wait a few moments.”

Oh, Craig, I will wait decades for this fix.

And then after running all the tests in the book, I was told there was no problem with my computer. So I left with exactly the same computer as before. But with a much higher level of JUSTICE.

I extend my offering again, hopeful something improves in the second go-round.

Embarrassed, at a loss for a clever retort, I wonder, “Would saying yes even make it any better?”

“No, um… it’s not. But it’s my first time here.”

She has a shy grin, but boredom is her defining feature. It always happens this way with these girls.

“First-timers tend to go a little overboard.”

This is the moment I’m supposed to realize I’ve done something tremendously wrong, awkward; something in serious need of correction. But the defects that she sees in me so quickly are ones that I’ve long ago noticed in myself. Ones that will not disappear. They are me.

“Right… right.”

She can’t have graduated high school yet. It’s written in the way she holds herself; in the way straightened hair falls across her face. Her youth so vivid in the ill-fitting neon shirt.

I look down again at the mess I’ve made. Though I should only feel sadness and disgust, there’s something redemptive in the inspection of what I’ve done.

“That’ll be $5.35,” she adds, as I fumble for my credit card.

“I don’t need a receipt.”

I pick up my Peachwave frozen yogurt, filled to the brim with frozen fruits and boba balls, and walk out the front door, past the midget-sized, amorphous plastic chairs.

As the spoon grabs granola and yogurt, I think,

“I’m going to enjoy this one.”

1. We Bros – WU LYF

2. Wilhelm Scream – James Blake

3. Midnight City – M83<

4. Cannons – Youth Lagoon

5. Halocene – Bon Iver

6. free press and curl – Shabazz Palaces

7. It’s Real – Real Estate

8. By Your Hand – Los Campesinos!

9. Go Outside – Cults

10. Kaputt – Destroyer

11. Money – The Drums

12. California – EMA

13. Bizness – tUnE-yArDs

14. Polish Girl – Neon Indian

15. Amor Fati – Washed Out

16. Twins – Gem Club

17. Honey Bunny – Girls

18. Ice Cream – Battles

19. Ronnie Coleman – Action Bronson

20. LotusFlower – Radiohead

21. New Beat – Toro y Moi

22. Ten-Twenty-Ten – The Generationals

23. Night Air – Jamie Woon

24. June Hymn – The Decemberists

25. Space Is Only Noise If You Can See – Nicholas Jaar

26. Ritual Union – Little Dragon

27. Heart In Your Heartbreak – Pains of Being Pure at Heart

28. The Look – Metronomy

29. Blood Pressure – MUTEMATH

30. Peso – A$AP Rocky

31. Ffunny Ffrends – Unknown Mortal Orchestra

32. Romance – Wild Flag

33. Vessel – Zola Jesus

34. Gold – Delay Trees

Starting in Nashville, TN, the case proceeded to Knoxville, TN. That’s reasonable, after all, you can’t expect these people to drive forever, or fly, or however it is that packages even get moved these days. Trains? Do we do that?

After Knoxville, my case made its way to Virginia, stopping over in Roanoke, a city I’ve never heard of but appears to be reasonably sized. I don’t know anything about Virginia. I’ve never cared. After researching, I learned that Roanoke does happen to be the site of Virginia Tech and maybe UPS made its drivers take the day off to comemorate the police officer who was killed in another awful shooting at Virginia Tech. Rest in peace, sir.

I used to not like police officers that much because I think it was a “cool kid’s club” thing to do, but most of the ones I’ve met in Boston are quite pleasant fellows with appealing accents, so I have to say I’ve been relatively mollified.

The next day, the iPhone continued its Odyssey to Laurel, MD — yet another city that could probably not exist without changing much about my daily activities besides my reception of iPhone cases. My case decided to stop over a day in Laurel, maybe the sights are nice, who is to say? Laurel is near the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, so maybe my iPhone case needed to do a little bit of ballistics research with some of the nation’s top minds.

Next, it traveled into my mother’s ancestral state: New Jersey, deposited in some UPS building in Saddle Brook. Saddle Brook was really only a quick stopover though because then the case proceeded on its way to Shrewsbury, MA.

From Shrewsbury, you might imagine that we could make the straight shot to Cambridge, the final haul, allowing this poor UPS driver to take a little bit of time off, but I think as you can tell that would be a little too easy for UPS.

Instead, UPS decided it would move on to Watertown, MA in order to, who knows, maybe check out some of the great tourist spots like the old home of Boston frontman Tom Scholz or visit UPS’s friend, TV and movie heart-thief Eliza Dushku. Watertown is a relatively pleasant place I’m sure, but my iPhone is feeling awfully naked, and has felt that way for roughly a week. If I drop it again, onus is on you, UPS.

At this point, they were all tired out of driving and ready to take a weekend break. I suppose on Monday I’ll see if we finally unite at the Mail Center in Harvard Yard or if instead my iPhone case and its UPS courier decide to take a little more time and visit Martha’s Vineyard before returning to the city for a long work week. Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised.