Hey, there, holiday shoppers! Can't think of any good stocking stuffers this year? No time to hit the mall? Never fear, eBay has got you covered. Nothing says I love you like -- the ghost of someone else's dead father! Cnn.com recently featured the story of a woman selling her father's ghost on eBay in order to allay the fears of her six-year-old son, who was convinced his grandfather was still haunting their home. The winning bidder is asked to send a letter to the little boy telling him how well they are getting along with the newly acquired ghost. That person would also receive grandpa's walking cane as a memento. The last I checked, the bidding was up to $20,000.
Luckily, if you can't afford a 24-carat ghost like this one, plenty of other sellers caught on, and now there is a plethora of faux-ghosts and Demonique for sale. It's free-market capitalism at its very finest. Now you can own all kinds of dead people, their socks, their favorite hats, even their apartment doors, all as vessels for these hapless and highly lucrative souls.
One auction describes a condo from the 1970s whose bathroom is being haunted by a friendly spook. Evidence: major plumbing problems under the sink. The winner receives a half-used bottle of "nice smelling" Avon lotion and other miscellaneous junk from beneath the haunted sink.
What a lovely memorial. I hereby pledge that, if I am hit by a truck in the near future, I will inhabit some useful material possession -- perhaps a garbage disposal or a stapler. I will then empower those closest to me to sell it. I will do my best to haunt it admirably -- confusion and hilarity will ensue.
Planning for the afterlife isn't something I've really considered, for myself or anyone I know. I've always been fairly certain that everyone I know is immortal.
Except, this year, as Thanksgiving approached, I was asking a friend of mine from high school whether or not he would be returning to Minnesota for the break.
"Yeah, I'd like to, but I'm scheduled for chemo that week."
I said, "What?"
He said, "You don't know?"
I didn't know. My friend since the ninth grade was telling me that he had been diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma. There was a mass one-third the size of his chest cavity sitting near his heart. He had been in chemotherapy for a couple of months.
My friend rides motorcycles he fixes up himself and knows how to pop a wheelie. He knows how to spin his car in 180-degree circles on patches of ice in huge bowling alley parking lots. He bends bike spokes into bracelets. He doesn't lie. If big, goofy, corn-fed Midwestern boys get lymphoma and die, I thought, then there really is no God.
And he dealt with it like true Midwestern boys do. When I asked him if his hair had fallen out, he said that some had but that his butt was now completely hairless. The butt hair was really the greatest tragedy at this point. He had named the malignant mass Boomer the Tumor. I imagined that Boomer wore a red baseball cap and ran really fast.
On Tuesday, with this dark cloud over my head, a headline in the DP made me feel even worse: "Students spurn city attractions, remain on campus". Apparently most of the Penn population is hiding out between 34th and 40th streets, and the world is reduced to a walk from the Moravian Cafes to Smoke's. That's not Philadelphia. That's not any way for college kids in their prime to be living.
We're young! We're curious, intelligent, while still gloriously stupid. We're healthy. So why is keeping to a six-block area of this huge city so common that there's a whole article in the paper about it? When our souls are trapped inside bathroom mats or nail files sitting on someone's mantle, they shouldn't be saying, "I was quite a steal. I belonged to a little old college student who only took me around campus a couple times a week."
So at the risk of sounding corny, and at this crucial moment before everyone returns to hometowns and high school friends, all I can say is this -- life is short, and these undergrad years only happen for a brief while. Philadelphia is more interesting than frat parties and Qdoba. The student body has got to stop living so myopically.
When my friend e-mailed me yesterday that his PET scan had shown that Boomer had shriveled into a little patch of scar tissue, I was overjoyed. The treatment will continue for the next few months, but it looks like he's out of danger. And that's pretty incredible news, especially since the last thing he tried to sell on eBay was a butt plug he made himself.
Jessica Lussenhop is a senior English major from St. Paul, Minn. Textual Revolution appears on Fridays.
