Category Archives: autobiography

My belated superpowers

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Unfortunately I can’t manipulate time to slow down or speed up other people, but evidently I am slowing down myself. Not that this will surprise many… ^_^

The report from the cardiologist arrived, and I left it on the fridge for a while. Turns out it actually contains more details than I got when I was there (or at least other details – while there, I got to look at the ultrasound pictures and cool stuff like that).

The report could barely have been more upbeat if it were ordered by an elderly presidential candidate trying to convince the world that he was not going to keel over at the start of his term and leave the country in the hands of a pretty but cheerfully ignorant vice-president. Not that such a thing would ever happen. Anyway, upbeat. Vague pun intended at heartbeat.

Did you know I have physical superpowers? My mental superpowers are a matter of record, of course. I mean, you see them here almost every day. Plus, I used to be an amazing programmer, back when it was necessary to be an amazing programmer. These days, you can make whatever you want in some high-level programming tool, and the super fast computers will run it at a decent clip even if it is sloppily written, as long as the logic is not insane. I don’t really feel there is need for me as a programmer anymore. But the good news, if true, is that I now have superpowers of the body as well!

I refer to the observation that my resting pulse, which used to be around 55 back in 2005 and 50 last year, is now evidently 44. The portable heart monitor came to this somewhat disturbing conclusion, at least. Disturbing how? Disturbing in the sense that this is the resting pulse of a national level athlete. Well, for small nations like my native Norway, I guess. World class athletes may have slightly lower, though not all of them do. Just the outliers, the ones most people (but not me) have heard about. Yeah, baby. Magnus Itland, world-class athlete without even trying.

Actually, it is not quite that easy. On the contrary, the good doctor admits that “the patient has however a lower physical capacity than one should expect”. Uh, not if one bases one’s expectations on the patient not having exerted himself for even half a minute for the previous 45 years, I think. But yeah, the pulse rises really fast if I actually exert myself. Jogging for a brief stretch raises my pulse to 140. Of course, I have never actually jogged before, beyond a few steps now and then, so there’s that. Evidently to translate that ridiculously low resting pulse to actual working capacity, I will have to actually exert myself. Perhaps one day!

While I was at the lab, I asked him whether my low pulse wasn’t a case of bradycardia (as the Wikipedia rather strongly implies it is). The doctor did not think so. He said it came from there just not being much resistance in my blood vessels. He showed me ultrasound pictures that indicated less rough surface and plaque than normal for my age. Overall, I seem to have a body that is several years younger than my chronological age. This makes sense, I suppose, if my heart has beat less times than the heart of people much younger than me. By that measure, I may be closer to 40 than 53. Someone please tell my hair.

In fact, I suspect this is a lifelong trait: I reached puberty later than all the other boys my age, and I kept growing taller for longer than all the other boys my age. That probably means I was also immature for much longer than other young men my age, which certainly fits the fact. If this keeps up, I may die from old age much later than the other boys my age too. On the other hand, the sad truth is that most people don’t die from old age. They die from cancer, or heart infarcts, or stroke, or blood poisoning, or the flu, or being too demented to realize that the cows don’t need to be milked and they are not on the farm and it’s below freezing outside and the nurses who should keep track of them are playing Facebook games. Stuff like that. So my 120 years birthday is far from secure, alas.

But at least my cardiologist is giving me a chance. Thanks!

Me, a hollow flickering image?

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Insubstantial or larger than life? Or just having my head in the clouds?

As I was walking near the largest bridge here in Mandal, I reflected on the fact that I was as shallow as a picture, as hollow as an outline, and as insubstantial as an image projected on a canvas. Evidently I forgot to reflect on just how temporary I am, but I guess that kind of follows. ^_^

No, I was not tempted to jump off the bridge (it is anyway not high enough for instant death, although I am sure I would have drowned pretty soon). Rather, the reason for the somewhat extreme imagery was that I compared myself to the heavenly things that exceed my highest aspiration. By comparison, I am a very flimsy thing in whatever aspect of me you may study.

It is said that God does not exist, and in a literal sense I tend to agree, at least for a particular aspect of God. To exist literally means something like “stand out” (ex = out, as most exes may painfully know). God certainly doesn’t stand out. Rather, God is what everything else stands out from. If you watch a movie projected on a white wall, the pictures seem the only reality; they are colorful, ever moving, a variety of shapes and activity. In our mind, they are all there is to what we see before us. But in reality, the only substantial and lasting thing in front of us is the wall, which we do not see, and without which we would not see the images either.

(Only by withdrawing to some degree could God possibly allow the world to exist. A candle cannot burn in the heart of the sun, and the difference here is far greater than that. If God were to be fully present, there would be no room for anything else.)

Even the grandest things of this world are in this way flat and insubstantial, flickering briefly in time, compared to the Eternal. And not God alone, but even the created things of High Heaven – the Thrones, Powers, Dominions and various spiritual creations known and unknown – far exceed anything down here. Believe it or not. ^_^ I just say how I see it at this time. And mainly in a purely thinking way, for it is not as if I have been up there and peeked, to the best of my memory.

And yet there is this flickering little image of God still in man, though some may not know it and some may deny it, and some of us may greatly exaggerate our likeness. But there is this flickering outline of something greater even than the powers of Heaven, albeit only in potential. A potential which now, given my record so far and my limited lifespan, will surely remain mostly (at best) potential. The audacity of hope goes only so far – but it goes some distance.

From across the river, I saw the rows and clusters of homes stretching along the other side. Wishing to bless them all, each home and everyone inside them, I was quite aware that the blessing of my heart was very little worth. Even with a single soul, when met face to face, my heart’s blessing is insubstantial and likely to go unnoticed. Only for my simulated little computer people may my benevolence have any drastic effect, those who live in a small, simple 2-dimensional world far less real than ours. How much less then are the multi-dimensional realms of Heaven, far more real and permanent than the shifting sands of timebound Earth, bound to notice the coming and going of my heart’s unsteady thoughts.

And yet… I aspire to this, to be known in a higher realm, more durable and more real than this one. To taste of the crumbs of immortality, not merely out of a fear of death, but in order to gain the merest little substance, that I may be able to actually do something useful as seen from a much higher place. We may excel in our earthly work (though I currently don’t, unfortunately) but without guidance from Above our work lacks direction. It becomes one of innumerable chaotic movements that cancel each other out on a grander scale. One builds, another tears down. The work of a lifetime may fall to the fires of an hour. What is popular in one generation is reviled by the next. Unless we aspire to something beyond time, we don’t aspire much at all. So it seems to me.

I come home, and later in the evening come across a formerly unread statement by Fridthof Schuon: “If a man seeks to realize that which in fact immensely transcends him, he must  a priori conform to this end or model, for otherwise he will fail either simply by collapsing of else by being broken”. I had to go back and read it over and over.
… that which in fact immensely transcends him…
Yes. It does. I am messing with things that are of a completely different order. And I may fail utterly in the end. But without this aspiration, everything is and remains hollow, just flickering images that are gone when the lights go out. I do not simply accept that as my life, all else untried. I may lose my courage and my patience, but I would rather not do so before even starting.

There are those who think we can go from nothing to something through effort, lift ourselves by our own buddhastraps as Robert Godwin puts it. As a Christian (even if a sucky one) I think we can only move upward through the power of grace. That is not to say that this happens without our consent in details, or that it happens through magic or ritual in an outward way. The new life can only grow at the expense of the old, and accepting this in practice may well be called an “effort”. It certainly can be called suffering, by the original human personality which experiences restriction and the prospect of annihilation, absolute destruction. Of course, if the New Man ever gets the upper hand and gets to write this journal on his own, the concept of suffering is likely to be very different.

A worker and his pay

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A worker may be worth his pay, but an abundant harvest is still a blessing. As is the ability to work in the first place, if you ask me.

Yesterday was payday, for me as for hundreds of thousands of other Norwegians. It came a bit suddenly, was what I felt. Suddenly payday again! That is hardly a cause for complain, though. Well, it may be that I am just growing old and time is flying faster than it used to. But I think the reason why I did not notice payday approaching was that payday no longer makes a difference. The things I can do the week before payday are the same that I can do the week after payday. In fact, I paid most of the bills for April before payday. And that is definitely not a cause for complain.

That is not to say that I have enough money to do everything I want. In particular, I want a small house in the countryside, and I can’t afford that. But I have more money than I need, at least for now. And that’s what counts.

I have observed the human mind for many years, and I call it a “desire factory”. It will produce new wants, wishes, longings, attachments etc like some kind of automated assembly line. Normally it will not even wait until the existing wants are fulfilled before throwing up new ones. And you cannot stop it by giving it what it wants for a long time. If you lived for billions of years and ended up having the entire universe except for a single grain of sand, your mind would be sick with longing for that grain of sand. Or in the vivid imagery of the Jewish creation story, our ancestors had a literal paradise with everything they wanted for free – except the fruit of 1 tree. And of course they had to eat of that one tree, even though the Tree of Life stood right beside it and they could have eaten from that instead and lived forever. This is a poetic but quite exact report on the human mind even today.

Knowing this, I largely ignore any inconvenient wants. I am happy to oblige when my body wants yogurt or sleep, but I am in no particular hurry to chase the dream of the small red house in the countryside again. Perhaps in this life, perhaps not. I have food and clothes, and nobody knows what tomorrow will bring. An economic crash will come to Norway as well, unless some greater disaster befalls us. These things go in waves, and there is no wave crest that is not followed by a trough.  But even I do not know when, how, and how deep. I know however that unless I suffer untimely death, I will be surrounded by fear and confusion, and I would rather not be in debt to above the chimney at the time.

Since I have the luxury of living and working in Norway, I consider myself blessed as is. In all my years of working, I have never been unionized, and never asked for a pay rise above the general adjustment for inflation. My pay has increased a bit over time, even so, but my coworkers who are all unionized earn quite a bit more even with half the experience I have. They may need it too, since they are either women or living with women, and in many cases have children as well. Women love money in a way that I will probably never be able to understand, having never been one.

When I mentioned to my then best friend (codename Superwoman) that I never asked for pay rises, she reacted with an immediate and probably automatic shock and revulsion, probably not unlike what a man will see if he tells a woman that he has decided to cut his gonads off. The idea of man as Provider is politically leprous, but it is still the unspoken assumption of women even here in Scandinavia. It is part of the “man image”, if you want. We don’t really have gender equality in economic matters, but rather gender balance: Women earn less than men, but spend substantially more. And not just on food and clothes for the family, but on travel, entertainment, clothes and jewelry for themselves etc. There is an unspoken assumption that “his money is our money, my money is my money.” Actions speak louder than words, although the words are quite loud in this matter.

I have a lesbian friend who is not crazy about using as much money as possible though, so it may not be entirely down to the ovaries. And there are certainly many men who are spendthrifts, to the point where they live in constant worry and suffering even though they have a high-income job. Being single does not help at all, because then you have to constantly impress new women. It is even worse than being married. Celibacy is the only safe refuge from economic worries, and I suspect that for most people this is pretty worrying in itself.

But for me, once I left the perpetuation of our family’s superior genes to my brothers, I have found that money here in Norway is plentiful indeed. When I think of the hard work of my grandparents, the small and drafty house they lived in, the simple food they ate and how they hardly ever could travel further than to the next village… My mind may come up with a thousand dreams, but I’ll eat my delicious food with gratitude and  enjoyment. Since the days of our first ancestors, there has probably never been a better time and place than here and now. It is written in the Christian bible that “a worker is worth his wages”, but in my case I wonder if that can really be true. I think there may be some grace on top of the justice.

 

Life: Short, narrow & shallow

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Beach with ocean

Newtonian worldview?

It is well known that life is short. In all fairness, it was generally shorter before. Life expectancy in the rich world is still increasing by about five hours a day. But even if I lived till I was a thousand years old – which is as unlikely as sprouting wings – I would still feel that my life was short, and wish for it to last longer.

There are those who struggle with suffering – usually of the mind – so severe that they prefer life to end. But I am unfamiliar with this feeling. And even that is not all.

Life is not only short, but also narrow. I have written about this before, saying that there are so many things that are mutually exclusive. You cannot be married and single, atheist and worshiper, or even hold different religions at the same time. (Well, at least it is hard to do, although Huston Smith came pretty close.) And so on. But even of the non-exclusive things we could do, there is not really time to do more than a sample.  This is what I say now: Even if I had a thousand bodies, none of them would get bored. There are just so many things to do, so many things to learn, so many thoughts to think, so many words that should be spoken before they are lost forever. There is just so much of everything, that even a thousand bodies for a thousand years would not find time for boredom. That is how I feel.

But there is yet another dimension! Even beyond the length of time, and even with only this one body, this one life, there is so little of that life that “sticks”, so little that is actually taken in, and so little that is actually done. I call this the shallowness of my life. Well, I can’t blame anyone else for that. But I have this thought experiment that I run in various forms. To make it simple this time, let us imagine I had some magic or technology that let me send my mind, with all its memories, one year back in time.

You may have seen the movie “Groundhog Day”. If not, you should at least read up on it. It is pretty good. As a friend of mine said, she could watch it over and over. ^_^ That is basically what it is about, a man living the same day over and over until he learned his lesson. Well, that was what I got out of it. Anyway, my thought experiment is a kind of “groundhog year”. How many times would I want to live the last year over?

A year is long enough to make some different choices, but not to live a completely different life. I would not be able to get a new job, probably, or at least not anything radically different. I would not be able to move very far. I sincerely doubt I could marry even had I wanted to, much less have children. So basically a minor variation of the same life I have lived this past year. Would I do that once, ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times?

It is hard to say, but my best guess is a few thousand. I mean, if I could take my memories with me. There are so many books I would want to read, so many stories I would like to write and rewrite to see whether they were worth it, so many people I could get to know, so many languages to learn, so many problems to get better at solving in my job… there is so much even in an ordinary year of an ordinary life, that I feel like dart hurtling through time, barely seeing and doing anything.

I don’t think I could do it millions of times though. Not that I would not enjoy it, but at some point I think my mind would run full, so I would forget as much as I learned. Eventually I would read what I thought was a new book, while I actually read it 5000 rounds ago and just forgot it in the meantime… Perhaps. Or perhaps my mind would evolve and expand, to see things from an ever higher perspective, in ever greater depth and richness. There has been a vague, halting tendency in that direction, I think.

(But realistically, I would probably spend some of those years playing Sims 3. -_- Even now that I don’t have unlimited time, I still play either Sims 3 or City of Heroes at least a bit, most days of the week. And even more on the weekend, such as now.)

Anyway, those are the three dimensions of how much larger life is than me. There may be more. Perhaps if I live long enough, I will return with a fourth or even fifth. Actually I can kind of vaguely see at least one more even now, see my mention above about the possibility of seeing things from a radically higher perspective.

How I feel about life is that I am like a bottle with a few drops at the bottom. That is all I have managed to get out of my life so far. Even though it seems to me that my time passes slower than for most, I still feel like it runs through my fingers. Isaac Newton said: “to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” That is the same feeling, I think. Except his ocean was wider and deeper, because he was.

From the day we arrive on the planet
And blinking, step into the sun
There’s more to see than can ever be seen
More to do than can ever be done
There’s far too much to take in here
More to find than can ever be found…
-Tim Rice, Circle of Life.

To incarnate light

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This is how I appear in a roleplaying game, but not in real life. I guess that was a bit unrealistic. 

See, this is my longing ideal, my highest aspiration, I guess. To become an incarnation of brightness, to protect the innocent and keep the darkness at bay. But in real life, it is not that easy at all.

In the emergency room, when the second wave of the unidentified illness was rising in my body, when there was nothing I could do and I did not know what was happening, I started to worry. Well, in a way I started to worry before I called the emergency number in the first place, but it was more a kind of caution. They had asked me to call that number if it happened again, after all. But it was only between a quarter and half an hour later, as I was shaking and my heart was racing even while sitting in my outer jacket and a quilt-like thing over that again, that I began to think this might be the end.

I did not want to die. I think that is a fairly reasonable attitude, for someone younger than 80 and without grievous pain or sorrow, at least unless one dies for some great and noble purpose. Blood poisoning, as I suspected at the time, is not a great and noble thing. (I still don’t know what it actually was, and I can speculate on that elsewhere.) But the thing is, this went a bit beyond that reasonable attitude. I began to fear. What next?

If the materialists were right and death was the end of me, I would resent it, but that is pretty much it. I had my rough patches when I grew up and did not understand the Laws of the Mind, but most of my life has been a very good one. Should it end now, and my own joy and pain were the only things to be weighed, I would definitely have pulled the longest straw, as we say around here. He who dies with the most happiness wins, in which case I would at least qualify for honorable mention, I like to think. There has been a lot of singing (albeit severely out of tune) in the last three decades. Long may it last!

But if death was not the end, but rather the beginning, there was more reason to worry, I felt. If I were to be weighed not in the happiness received but in the happiness given, I was not too optimistic about my fate. And if I were to travel through the astral realm on my way from this world, would I be able to pass through it without being held back by claims to my soul? Would attachments snare me and pull me down? Would I fall to the Darkness? As I sat there, shaking with cold and weakness, I did not shine. I was not the one who cold help others, but had to impose on others to help me. I was painfully aware of that.

I tried to be considerate and express my gratitude to the nurse and doctor who hooked me up to various measuring devices. Thinking that this might be my last opportunity to bless others, I tried (without acting too strange). I entered a meditative state in order to calm the shaking of my body, to make their job easier. (Although I did not manage to maintain it while talking.) But I was not shining brightly. I was not a hero. I was just a weak and somewhat scared human. If I were to die there, neither those in this world nor those watching from the other world would find reason to celebrate the way of my transition, that is quite certain.

It is not so easy to be a hero in real life. But for now, I live. Perhaps I shall do so for a long time, or perhaps not. I wish to shine brighter. There are other things I wish as well, like eat delicious prune yogurt. But my highest aspiration, I think, is to shine brightly. To radiate blessing so that people can feel better simply by being around me. That may take its sweet time as things are these days. By my estimate, which may be overly optimistic, I am still two dimensions shy of being what the Japanese call a “nyorai”, an incarnation of compassion.  Someone who radiates blessing, whose mere existence in this world and this age is a blessing to those now alive and those who will come later. There are people like that. But I am far from it yet.

For now, I need to set realistic goals, in so far as it is realistic to set goals when we don’t know the day tomorrow. But even the grandest castle is built stony by stone, and even should it end up just being a small piece of wall made of a few stones, perhaps someday someone will find shelter behind it.

Not perfect at all

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“Please spare me from the green vegetables.” That kind of attitude would not fly at all at one of St Teresa’s convents, I dare say. But it would fly like a wind in my home, where green vegetables are as common as gold coins. 

Contrary to what you may think from my journal, I am actually not perfect. This becomes particularly clear to me when I read St Teresa of Avila, this time her book The Way of Perfection. Unlike her Life and Interior Castle, this one seems to not be written with a clear progression toward more and more inner purity. It is more of a guidebook for her nuns, on how to live in the convent. So I think I should be able to get through this one, without coming to a point where I feel I am cheating by looking at a holiness that is so far ahead of me that I should not even be able to see it.

That said, the contrast between me and what she expected from her nuns is pretty damning. They were to live in such poverty that while she did not expect them to starve to death, she reminded them that if they did, it would be acceptable. After all, they lived for Christ who died for them, and if they had to die for him as well, it would not be a big deal.

The purity and selflessness she expected from these people is really shaming me, who at this time of my life still have hobbies.  They may be nice hobbies, but you really cannot fit that into the “way of perfection”. I assume even today, monks and nuns live a life of complete selfless devotion to God and their fellow humans, taking no time to indulge or even pay attention to their own interests. Living a life as God’s finger on Earth. That’s not how I live at all. Sure, I want to serve the Light, but it is more like having a job that interests you I guess. An employee is partly free, even if he thinks about his job a lot. A slave has no life of his own. He is at work even when sleeping.

St Teresa and her nuns (at least if they lived up to her expectations) were thralls of God’s love.  They had nothing else to do, no other goals than to serve their Lord. That may indeed be the way of perfection. But it is not how I currently live. I try to serve God in my way, and they in His.

I use to read a little in the book each day on the commute bus. (It’s on my Galaxy Note, so no one can see the title.) It may take a long time getting through it this way, but that is OK. I am not so much looking for revolutionary new information, as to be reminded over and over how far I am from perfection. Because, as I am sure my readers can notice if they will, it is entirely too easy for me to preen in my advanced knowledge and tuck away my imperfect life where you can’t see it.

Anti-temptation of silence

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"The silence is killing me"

“The silence is killing me” is the usual feeling among humans, so of course with me the opposite must be true: The silence is giving me life. But is that what I really want? I have to wonder…

You know that people have temptations, in which they are pulled toward something they expect to be pleasurable but their conscience says is bad. Light knows I have had plenty of that in my life, and almost certainly will continue to have for as long as I live.

But this is the opposite. A temptation toward something that is not fun but which appears to me as good and pure and praiseworthy. Unsurprisingly, such temptations are quite easy to resist.

The temptation started after I had gone through my archive removing buttpics. I had left some page (without said pictures) open, and looking at a nearby entry I saw my imagination of what my day would have been if it had been 1958 instead of 2008.  One conclusion was that without computers and Internet, I would have spent quite a bit more time reading, writing, and praying.  At least that is what I think now that I do have computers and Internet. But I also seem to remember that I did, in fact, do more of all these when I was young, before I became connected to the world via an AORTA – Always Online Real-Time Access.

The Christian Church of Brunstad, back in the days when it was even purer and more innocent than today, had a story circulating. I think it may not even have been one of the Friends it happened to, but perhaps some other serious Christian, of which there were perhaps more back then. A Christian man was buying a TV for the first time, when he saw the following text on the packaging: “Jetzt kommt die Welt ins Haus!” (Now comes the World into the house!) Immediately he realized the errors of his ways and undid the purchase.

It bears mention that the TV is now the rule rather than the exception in the Christian Church. Whereas in my home there is no TV, nor do I expect there to every be. Of course, I have the Internet, which is less brain-numbing but quite distracting.

So what I have been thinking since, is that perhaps I should try to establish a “computer-free zone” of time, perhaps on the Sabbath until sundown or something? First just to see for real what I would do. Would I actually spend more time reading and praying? Not writing, probably, since my manual typewriter eventually made it to its final resting place during one of the last couple moves. But my book backlog is still growing and could need some extra hours. Of course, reading the kind of books I usually do would probably inspire me to write. A lot. Still, it would probably be better than playing The Sims yet again. Not that there is anything outright evil about The Sims. But sometimes, not being evil is not enough.  Or so I am anti-tempted to think.

So bright…

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I kind of know that feeling. (Picture from the anime “Laws of Eternity”.)

I think there is a tendency, particularly for us men, to think of ourselves as “brighter”, smarter and more knowledgeable than others. This is usually because we easily forget our own mistakes, or explain them away, thinking that we had a good reason for them, or that someone else caused us to make the mistake, or that it would be unreasonable to expect this or that from us. When it comes to others, it is much simpler. They really are that stupid, or coarse, or lacking in character. Savages or degenerates, barbarian or superstitious, they are just hopeless and can’t be counted on. They are not like us.

So when I notice that almost everyone is ignorant and prefers to stay so, I have to wonder whether I am just caught in the same trap as the rest. Do I simply mistake my own collection of illusions for the Truth, and consider everyone else deluded? Certainly they would think so, and without a trace of doubt. In fact, the trace of doubt is one of the reasons why I feel that I have actually “seen the light” as the saying goes.

The other is that in many cases I have been where they’re hanging, I think I can see how they’re pinned. If I have not gone that far in their direction, I have been far enough to survey the terrain. The Zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, is not something you casually overlook. Even if you have massive help fighting it, you can hardly avoid noticing it.

Also: When you dream, you do not know that you dream. Becoming aware of the dream is the beginning of waking up. Or in another metaphor, if all you know is night and twilight, the twilight may seem to be day. But once the dawn breaks, it is impossible to maintain that illusion anymore.

And the brightness is not one that conveniently shines only on everyone else. It also painfully drives home my own life up to now and various errors and omissions habitual to myself. And perhaps that more than anything makes it hard to write about, because writing is to hold judgment on myself. If I ignore that part, life will make sure to arrest me again.

In other words, I am surrounded by idiots, and so are the people around me. It is just that my foolishness is the opposite of what they think it is, by and large.

Although it is probably tilting at windmills, I am tempted to try to convey some of this brightness. Although today certainly did not do so.

 

My housing karma

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Yeah, it still hurts just a little bit. But what counts now is to learn the lessons so as to not make necessary even more “disasters”. Wish me luck with that.

There is a whiny little post up on my even more personal journal, called “Shouting!” It is basically just whining  dressed up in see-through multicultural clothing. Here in Norway we aren’t racists – we just hold people from elsewhere to much lower standards, primitives that they are. ^_^

In reality, I would not lose big money betting that many Norwegians have Norwegian neighbors that keep them awake at night too. A steadily growing portion of the populace is retired, and a pretty stable but rather large portion is on disability pension; neither of these have any particular reason to sleep at night when there is excellent daylight to sleep in. And of course there are people who actually work at restaurants or cinemas or whatever and come home after midnight, it seems unlikely that they will tiptoe to bed one and all. So if you have neighbors in the same house, it is a significant chance that they will wake you up in the night. Even if they are in another house, the marvel of high-powered stereos makes it quite likely that they will keep you awake at least some nights.

Which is an excellent reason to rent a house for me alone if I can afford it, one should think. But ironically, it was my insistence on doing just that which led me to this situation! Yes indeed. Because I was so eager to have a whole house to myself, I rented a rather more expensive place than I had needed to, and so I didn’t have enough money saved up to rapidly find another place to live when the deal fell through.

But further self-reflection shows that it was more than just a wish to have a house to myself. There was also an attachment, to use the Buddhist term. A kind of infatuation. Now those who have seen pictures of the old red house surrounded by green pastures and right by the river may think it was well worth an infatuation. It was a beautiful place indeed, but looking at myself as from a higher place, I see that I was attached to it also because of memories of my childhood.

While different in some ways, the house was of a similar age as the one I grew up in (or a little older), and even smelled a little similar. And living surrounded by farmland was also for the first time since I left home at the age of 15. So there was a certain sentimentality in my decision, one that is not uncommon in my generation, for many of us grew up in the countryside but moved to more urban environments later. As long as one is aware of this and accepts it without being controlled by it, there need not arise an attachment. But when I acted on feelings that were not understood, seeking to regain something that could not, an attachment arose.

One of the benefits of living closer to the Source is that the time between building karma and paying it back is shortened. Or so I have been told. In that case, I should rejoice, for I am definitely paying my karma debt from the attachment I had to a perishable house. Indeed, it has already perished. But as the Buddha said with his last words: “All things that are made of parts will fall apart. Strive diligently!” (Your translation may vary slightly.) So now the house that I was infatuated with has been utterly demolished, and instead I have shouting foreigners. It is certainly better to have one’s karma disposed of this way rather than building it into one’s soul through the entire life, and then have something far worse happen. Not that this may not still happen with some other part of my life. But we’re working on it.

Nor is this the first case of serious house karma payback:  The disastrous move from the original Chaos Node was even more dramatic. At that point I found an apartment for let that was so located that I would be walking each day past the house where Supergirl and her family had lived (back when she was younger). I had tons of happy memories from there, and this influenced my decision so that I started renting an apartment that was only half the size needed for all my stuff. OK, perhaps 60-70%, but I don’t think so. The Chaos Node had been filled to overflowing, as old pictures will demonstrate. Even though I carried a bag out of the house each workday for more than two months, there still was more than I could cram into the apartment and still have any hope of keeping it clean enough for a civilized human, much less tidy. Discovering this caused my supposed new landlord to have a minor breakdown, although we both escaped unharmed. I then had only a couple days to find a new place to live.

So my ability to learn from life’s lesson is so-so, it seems. A quote by the Norwegian church leader Elias Aslaksen comes to mind: “If a man does not use the opportunity to learn from a disaster, the faithful God will make sure to place him in more disasters.” In view of this, I think I have gotten away fairly cheaply. It is better to be kept awake by asylum seekers than by demons. I will seek to take advantage of this situation to reflect on myself and become free from the kind of attachments that brought me here. Then we shall see whether I can act more wisely next time, and also have the blessing of the Light in my choices.

Sims 3: Imaginary daycare

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Sim children at day care

I made the day care provider female because I forgot that in this game there is actually sexual equality, so men are allowed to be surrounded by children not their own. Don’t try this at home, kids.

If you wonder where I’ve been the last few days, the answer is I have a new favorite game, as I mentioned, Sims 3: Generations. (Actually The Sims 3 is the game, which you must have first, and Generations is an additional expansion pack.) But more specifically, I’ve been playing a home daycare provider. It’s one of the most fun things I can remember playing.

OK, this surprises even me. It seems rather out of character. Of course, my character in the game is not suited for this, since he is a loner, and gets a mood boost from being completely alone, and a negative mood from having a crowd around. (A crowd being more than two other people, it seems.)

So I made this woman who is family-oriented, nurturing, friendly, charismatic and good. (I’ve only ever used the last for my own character, and I’ve stopped doing that after some more self-reflection.) Still, the fact remains that I as the player of the game enjoy it greatly.

Day care is kind of fun. Each morning from Monday to Thursday  (not Friday for some reason?) people show up and dump toddlers on your floor.  You don’t need to go to work, you can run around in your underwear and make pancakes until the last minute. When the kids show up, you feed them and change their dirty diapers, play with them, cuddle them, teach them to walk and talk if you feel like it, or just watch them play with their toys. There are no stomach flues, nobody bites each other or pulls each other’s hair. That said, it is pretty hectic.  But then at sunset, the people show up again and whisk away the children, so you have the evening for yourself and can sleep all night.

It may not sound like fun – it does not really read like fun, I admit – but I really enjoy it. Being surrounded by kids is something I … well, I can’t say I miss it since I don’t really think about it normally, but it was something I enjoyed when I was young. In the Christian Church of Brunstad, there used to be lots and lots of children. I think there may still be more than average, but back then it was more family-centric than the Catholic Church. (That is also one reason why I could not fit in, as I would never have a family of my own.)

In the secular society of Norway, arguably the world’s second most feminist country after Sweden, men are watched carefully when they spend time with children, as it is assumed that they will try to have sex with them. There is a lot of writing in the newspapers when this happens, and sometimes when it is just suspected as well. Fathers are generally allowed to be alone with their own children, but once the parents break up, it is not unheard of that the mother argues for sole parental rights on the grounds that a man can’t be trusted around children.  Unfortunately with the sad state of humanity, this is probably often the case as well.

Anyway, in real life I am not going to quit my job as a software call center problem solver to re-educate myself for day care. I think most of my midlife “crisis” is over by now, and it seems to mostly have caused a new interest in books of timeless wisdom and metaphysics. But kids are kind of fun, in their own way. At least imaginary ones. Also, if computers could convey smell as realistically as they do sight and sound, I might have second thoughts about being surrounded by simulated toddlers!