The music worked. A hundred and seventeen minutes later, I couldn’t decide if “Music to Be Dejected By” was grammatically correct, or whether it should be “Music By Which to Be Dejected,” or simply “Dejecting Music.” I spent the rest of the evening depressed by my ignorance.

“Will that be enough?” she asked nervously after she noticed the way Aaron and I glanced at each other.

“Fat chance,” Aaron replied.

“Slim chance,” I predicted.

Even though fat and slim are usually antonyms, we were both right. It takes more than six Rabbit Rats to move a one bedroom apartment.

Inspired, I decided to become Sonja Heisenden for a day. I prepared fake identification papers, and rehearsed answering the phone by saying, “Hello, this is Sonja.”

The experiment was a failure, a complete failure. No one asked who I was or asked to see my papers, and no one called. Maybe it’s my fault; I didn’t eat any sheep.

“Don’t worry,” she replied with a smile, “business is never that interesting. Anyway, the answer is forty.”

“Forty?” I asked. “Forty whats?”

“It’s the rule of forty,” Susan explained. “Anytime you repeat something forty times it becomes a habit. All the men I love are so wonderful that I’d hate for any of them to become a mere habit.”

Love works in mysterious ways, especially when approached numerically.

I used to think that most people were boring. I was wrong. Most people are uninteresting, which is a very different barrel of fish from being boring. Example: when someone tells me about their uneventful visit to a garage sale, that’s uninteresting. But when someone manages to spend twenty minutes elaborating on the trinket he didn’t buy at a garage sale, that’s extraordinarily boring. In fact, I achieved a state of complete and comprehensive boredom bordering on narcolepsy, an experience I would have thought unattainable without an expensive cocktail of prescription drugs.

If there’s is a bright side to this debacle, it’s that it will be a long time before I describe an uninteresting person as boring.

I fear the venture will be a commercial failure. Even in 2001, you can’t make cheap inkjet prints and sell them to the masses as “fine art” without the requisite number of nudes. I’m not sure how many nudes you need to convince an average consumer that s/he’s looking at Art; I have no interest in peddling my visual wares the aesthetically illiterate.

I do know this, however. Since there’s only one bare breast to be seen on “the future of art” site, I fear Internet riches will elude my friend and his cronies.