Your House is on Fire! What do you Save?
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
It’s a game nearly as old as humanity, if you can call envisioning one of the most horrific disasters a person can experience a game. Someone posits the hypothetical situation: “You wake up. Your house is on fire. Your family’s safe, but you only have time to save one thing. What is it?” And then you’re supposed to uncomfortably stammer while you mentally rifle through your life deciding which of your accomplishments is least deserving to burn to cinders. Inevitably you will make the wrong decision. If you say your treasured diary with all your thoughts and experiences, the asker will say, “What? Not your family photos?!” If you say the family photos, they’ll say something like, “Not your lucky guitar? The one you first serenaded your wife with?” Now a web site called The Burning House is taking the game and eliminating the judgmental question asker, only to replace him with the entire internet…
“Think of it as an interview condensed into one question,” the site asks. And if there’s anything hipsters on the internet love, it’s giving you a glimpse into what makes them so unique and mysterious. Allegedly everyone is submitting their own photos, but so far everything looks like it was shot by a photog from Sentimentalist or Vice.
Still, the offerings represent an interesting, if not occasionally-nauseatingly pretentious, glimpse into what makes people tick. Those people being, apparently, mostly white and upper middle class. You can judge people’s choices and even leave comments if you’re particularly motivated, or you can put your money where your mouth is and submit your own photos and lists to be included.
And therein lies my challenge to you, Dear Wooters. These people saving their collections of Shakespeare (yeah, you’ll never find THAT again) or old champagne corks (CORKS?!) are living terrible, empty lives. They need some real, honest, teeming-unwashed-throngs types to show them how it’s done. Take a second to lay out your own list of what you’d save in a fire, snap a photo, and submit it over there. The more ridiculous the items/the more serious your justification for saving them, the better. Bonus points if you include your Woot Monkey collection.
Are you going to do it? Post your submission in the comments below! Either way, feel free to tell us what you actually WOULD save. We won’t judge you. Much.
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