Freeday 24 September 1999
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Pic of the day: Time to add to my Y2K cache of pasta. I lacked
gnocchi in particular. (I never said I could spell it, but I can
eat it.) Actually I eat quite a bit of pasta, especially my home
mixed macaroni and cheese. I had that for dinner today too.
Overdosed on Roxette "Wish I could fly" today. (If you wonder why, you may look at yesterday's diary...) Anyway, I played it again and again at the workplace, late at day when the others were gone. And was hit by a pleasure attack in the supermarket on my way home. I'm pretty much familiar with the symptoms by now. It starts with a heightened muscle tonus, especially in the diaphragm and the upper body and the jaws. I start to lose focus (good thing I don't drive, since from here on I am for all purposes high, like, you know, stoned). I feel a (luckily resistable) urge to howl or keen. I start feeling ticklish all over, and my body awareness shoots way up. On the other hand, there is no diversion of blood to the genitals or any such. (You are certainly justified to ask, though.) It seems to be mainly an in-brain thing, like a very minor seizure, and it feels so good! Barely aware of the ready-made taco shells beside me, my mind is halfway to Heaven. Nameless energies of joy are coursing through body and soul. This time I was able to subdue the euphoria, slowing my breath and relaxing a bit before I got along to do something really strange, like gasping or moaning. I don't think humming "wish I could fly" in the supermarket is really strange. At least, not by my standards. And there were not many customers around.
(I hope God has a special reward set aside for the guys who invented
punctuation. Humming "wish I could fly" in the supermarket is, at
least to me, markedly different from humming "wish I could fly in the
supermarket". If not for some bright people long ago, we would not
easily be able to distinguish between the two in text. And where would
our civilization have been then?)
I was feeling much more quiet when I entered the bus, which is probably a good thing, because I saw one of the strangest sights I've seen on a bus ever. There were a small group of something like seven Africans. You know, black people. Actually they were deep brown, but you get the hint. The bus was nearly empty. Now the strange thing was that these people were spaced as far apart in the bus as mathemathically possible, or very close to it. Though a woman and a child sat together. As far as I could see, they were not just Africans, they even belonged to the same ethnic group. Like you can see the average Norwegian is different from the average Turk. Often as not the differences between various groups of blacks are even more pronounced. But these could, for all I knew, be close relatives. And they had spread out as if they were meticulously avoiding each other. After a while they all got off the bus at the same bus stop. And here is how: First two of them rose and went out, one through the front door and one through the back door. As they were stepping out, two others rose and walked out. Finally the last, but the woman and the child still went together - out the front door, while a man walked out the back.
A polite hint: If you want to be highly inconspicuous, you may consider
being so in a place where people have approximately your skin color...
In other random news, I paid a few bills today. It has been pretty hectic lately, and so the bills have accumulated. As have the thick questionnaire from Gallup. Their statistics are going to be noticeably distorted this month, I guess. It was funny to watch the unmentioned assumptions in the questionnaire. For instance that you actually subscribe to a newspaper (I leaf through my favorite paper, "Dagens Næringsliv", at work.) Or that you own a TV. I crossed out all the TV channels with "not able to receive". Simple but somewhat tedious, since there were lots of them. Similarly for the car stuff. I feel so happy to be able to distort statistics. Happy from my nose to my toes. |
Workplace music: "Wish I could fly" with Roxette. |