Sunday 15 August 1999
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Pic of the day: Proof that I've actually been outdoors! And that I'm
still able to keep my stomach in for a few moments. :) I once learned, by the way, that male "pot bellies" disappear when we fall in love. (Not that I've ever tried.) It makes sense. A higher muscle tonus all over, reduced apetite, and more energy spent on ... lovemaking, I guess. Perhaps we males collect a quick energy reserve for times of heightened erotic activity, in a similar way that females collect a slower energy reserve for pregnancy and lactation. (Is that the common name for it? Lactation? Producing milk for babies, it means. It takes a lot of energy, as some of you may have noticed.) In entirely unrelated news, of course, I called my best friend (the Supergirl) and reported from the wedding. She knows most of the people there better than I do, and asked more questions than I could answer. I gallantly offered to stop by their next Wednesday meeting to try to learn more, but she cautioned against it. She has a lot more social intelligence than I (not that this takes much) and warned me that showing up on a meeting so soon would give them false hopes about me joining the flock.
The ancients must have had way too much time on their hands. Look at
the way they made up language: A flock of sheep, consisting of rams and
ewes and lamb, and if you slaughter them you get mutton. Or a herd of
cattle, which are bulls (or oxen) and cows, heifers and calves.
Slaughter them and you get beef. These people must have lived way
before Occam's Razor decreed to not multiply entities beyond necessity.
It seems that they just pointed to things and made up a name.
If they had thought about it for a few minutes, they could have
called it a group of sheep, consisting of male and female sheep
and immature sheep. Kill them and eat sheep meat. But try to say
that today, and people think you're a foreigner or something. Anyway, I called my friend and told her what little I remembered. I also cordially invited myself to visit her and her loving parents as soon as she was back on Norwegian soil in the beginning of September. Not that she had expected anything else from me. I miss a woman's guidance when shopping clothes. Of course, it helps if most of the clothes are for her... (This past season has been unusually dry on both men's and women's clothes, with very few exciting things. Good for all those who are literal about not loving the things of the world, I guess.) As I've said before, it irks me slightly that men are not supposed to be interested in clothes. Women's magazines are full of pictures of women in beautiful clothes. Men's magazines are full of pictures of beautiful women without clothes. For grown men, the difference among clothes is mainly one of price and perhaps quality. You may show off your increased income with a more expensive suit, and that's it. Reminds me of some games where you upgrade from "plasma cannon mark IV" to "plasma cannon mark V". I find this boring in games, and no less so in real life. Even so, I can't help but wonder who decided that it was a good idea to send me an adressed catalogue for children's clothes. I tend to throw away any mail not adressed to me personally and read any that is (this applies to e-mail as well as snail mail) but this one has to pass me by. I am a bit ambivalent about being reminded about my unusual family status. But I guess I feel orders of magnitude better than the many men of my generations who had children and no longer get to see them, much less spend time with them. Man, that must hurt! Ack! I was going to write a detailed analysis of the effects my ca 45 minutes walk had on various parts of my biochemistry, and how this relates to the theories of evolution and creationism; but this entry is long enough already. I guess reflections on the future of communications infrastructure in Norway and Brazil is out of the question too. And the thin black chick on the April issue of Psychology Today. And my dirty secret and why AltaVista hates me. Ack. If anybody is still reading, thank you for your time. |
Another sign that I need a vacation is when I spend my Sunday singing "Work, work, all day long" again and again to my favorite tunes. |