Hublots and the People Who Hate Them

I'm still really new at being a watch fancier. But I have learned one thing: It's impossible, at least for me, to really get a sense of how a watch looks just from photographs of it, no matter how numerous and high-definition and from how many different angles the photographs may be. Photographs are not the same as having the watch in front of you, and looking at a watch in front of you is not the same as holding it, and I'm poor -- although I was able purchase a Seiko 5 --

(there are many like it, but that one is mine) -- and I imagine, although I have not tested this theory, that if I constantly went around to high-end jewelers and asked to be allowed to touch the high-end stuff, and never bought anything, that it might lead to my becoming persona non grata in those stores. I don't know. Might depend on the store.

A lot of people really despise Hublot. Which would mean, if I wore one, that judgmental douchebags would see the Hublot on my wrist and avoid me, sparing me the trouble of having to avoid them. One of the many reasons why I want an MP-05. I love to read the Watch Snob, but, unfortunately, he actually is a snob, and not just about watches, and he hates Hublots, which, as I strongly suspect, has to do not only with the watches themselves, but also with the sort of people who wear Hublots, whom the Watch Snob and his inbred acquaintances would refer to (in private, of course. Amongst themselves) as not our sort of people, and my God, snobbery is tiresome.

This is an MP-05,

a watch made by Hublot "in partnership with Ferrari." I still haven't figured out what exactly the nature of this partnership is. I'm sure that it consists almost entirely of one company giving money to the other, but I've no idea whether Hublot gives money to Ferrari or the other way around. There have been many partnerships between watchmakers and car makers, and I've found almost all of them to be very silly. They say again and again that the design of this watch in "inspired by" the design of that car or that the design othis car is "inspired by" the design of that watch, and almost always I find it all very silly, but in this case, the design of the MP-05 actually and undeniably is inspired by the design of a Ferrari V-12 engine:

I happen to think the watch looks really cool.

You know what? I have to pause now, and remember where I came in, and rephrase what I just said: I think that photos of the watch look really cool. I haven't actually seen a MP-05 yet, just pictures of them. I suppose it's possible that if I held one in my hands, I might be appalled. I might suddenly understand perfectly well why all of those people despise Hublots.

I might become one of those people. I might even suddenly despise people who wear Hublots, if not instantly upon seeing the watch itself, then upon meeting 10 Hublot owners and sensing undeniable trends in them and what they do. Who knows? Not me.

However, in the meantime, judging only from photos and realizing the limitations of that evidence, I think that the Hublot MP-05 look really cool. And besides its looks: you wind it once and it runs for 50 days. It's hard for me to imagine how even the most snobbish Hublot-hater could not find that cool, at least deep down in secret, even if he or she never admitted it. Small as a normal watch, but runs for 50 days. That's sort of like a car which you could very comfortably drive to the supermarket and back, but which can also go 500mph.

Speaking of cars, and imagining that you'd like things without having seen them or having other crucial bits of information about them: when the Bugatti automobile brand was re-introduced in the 21st century, at first, just reading about them and looking pictures of them, I was certain that I would love having one. Then, late in 2004, around the time when the first 21st-century model, the Veyron, went on sale to the public, I actually saw one in a shopping mall in Berlin. And it was so low to the ground, and I am so tall, that I found it just about impossible to believe that I could sit comfortably inside of one. (Right next to the Bugatti was a Bentley which looked much more like my sort of thing.)

Then, over the years, I learned more things which made the Veyron even less attractive to me: such as that it got 7mpg when driven gently. Such as that the tires had be replaced every 1000 miles if driven gently, and every 62.5 miles (15 minutes) if driven at 250mph. And that 4 new tires cost $30,000.

So: the previous 5 paragraphs all by way of saying that I think it's possible that I would hate Hublots if I knew more about them. Still, with what I know right now, Hublots look really cool and Hublot haters look like hateful people, often with extremely severe cases of stick-up-the-butt. The way it looks to me now is that Hublot is adventurous, and that people who only like watches which look like this --

-- are incredibly boring.

Not that I would necessarily find that particular watch to be boring, if I saw it in person and held it and put it on my wrist and wore it for a month, because I had become a well-known and respected writer on the subject of watches, so that watch manufacturers loaned me new watches for a month at a time just on the hope that I would write about them.

But I am fairly certain that I would still strongly object to the notion that ALL watches should look more or less like that. Which, I'm afraid, is not very far from the position taken by the Watch Snob and many other watch snobs. I still like the Watch Snob's writing very much. I'm going to decide for myself what I like and don't like, that's all.

Dream Log: Mom's Formula 1 Ferrari

In real life, my Mom passed away a week ago last Friday. Last night I dreamed she was still around and relatively healthy, and had gotten herself a Formula 1 Ferrari and was racing it, or at least driving it very fast on racetracks and getting ready to race. I and a few other people were quite surprised about this. She was rushing around from track to track and I could barely keep up. I just wanted to talk to her and see how she was, but by the time I got to one track she was off to another one.

I don't know very much about Formula 1 cars. I assumed that Mom's Ferrari was not a brand-new Formula 1 car and that she was not actually going to race in Formula 1 but in races for Formula 1 cars which were a few years old. How old Mom's Ferrari might have been, I don't know. I saw her driving it on a racetrack just once, and I would guess it was newer than 2000. She drove it very, very fast, broke very, very hard for the corners. The engine screamed and growled, the tires squealed. She was going very, very fast.

I finally caught up with her at her apartment when she took a break between racetracks. Her landlord was being mean to her, trying to get her to move out so that he could rent the apartment to someone else for more than he was legally allowed to charge her. I knew this, but I never learned exactly what the mean treatment was. I wanted to confront the landlord but I was unable to do so because he literally ran way from me and hid. Mom seemed unruffled by whatever it was the landlord was doing. The Ferrari was in a trailer and the trailer was parked in a 6-car garage in Mom's apartment building. There was no sign of any pit crew anywhere throughout the dream. It seemed that Mom was acting as her own mechanic and crew. The garage was mostly empty of cars, but there were a lot of people in it, coming and going and pausing and socializing, as if it were a hotel foyer and not a garage. From some of them I felt an unexpressed hostility, a snobbish awareness of their being in a different social class and looking down on my Mom and me and wishing she would move out of the building. Other people seemed to belong to the same circles as the snobs, but were friendly to us and seemed to dislike the snobs and the landlord and everything they stood for.

I was flabbergasted about the Ferrari, but there seemed no possibility that anyone was going to talk Mom out of doing whatever it was she was doing with it. I wanted to at least make sure that she was eating enough. She looked thin. I found some apple tarts in her freezer. She grabbed one of them out of my hands, microwaved it and ate it, seemed to think that had been a full meal, and went back out to the garage to exercise. Exercise was part of the racing program. Since I was there and it was Mom's exercise time, she and all the other people in the garage expected me to exercise too. So Mom and I both did a lot of push-ups and sit-ups. Mom seemed to be in better shape than I was.

Again, I wasn't sure whether Mom had actually raced in the Ferrari yet, or was just preparing to race, training as a race driver. But every time she drove the Ferrari on a track, whether it was a race or not, she recorded the result with a number which was the product of 6 and a number ending in 7: for example, it might be 102, 6x17. She wrote down each of these numbers with a pencil in a spiral notebook with lined paper. So, she wrote down 42 for one track, 162 for another, and so forth. One time, she broke the rule of multiplying 6 by a number which ends in 7: she wrote down 72 for one racetrack. 72 is 6x12. But that was okay, because the product still ended in 2. I didn't know what the numbers meant. I thought maybe they were the numbers of miles she had driven at each track, but I wasn't sure.