Category Archives: slice of life

Mundane day

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Panties! So, what does this have to do with my day? Read and find out!

So, what am I doing here in the 3-dimensional world on Earth?

Well, remember that business trip I made this spring? As is the custom around here, I sent a travel bill to my employer (not sure what these are called in English, as I don’t travel abroad), to get my money back. This was supposedly confirmed today, so I will probably get the money back this summer.  It was not a lot of money but hey, it’s not like I enjoy traveling, let’s punish them by making them pay.  ^_^

Actually I haven’t asked my employer to cover my travel expenses usually, because I am lazy.  Filling in those forms are extra work and I already have food. But I did it this time.

***

It rained a few drops.  That’s pretty much all it has done this spring. After the snow melted, the ground was of course wet, but that is quite a while ago.  Now it is really dry. A forest fire further west in the province (very safe distance, not even smoke smell here) is now under control, but the whole of southern Norway is like tinder. Anyone throws away a lit cigarette and FWHOOM! Hopefully nobody does that around here.

It never rains in southern California, according to the famous song, but it rarely rains in southern Norway either, surprisingly. The exception is the summer vacation. It usually rains then.  And also somewhat in the fall. But overall there aren’t many days without sunshine here. I enjoy overcast days because I can read all the way on the bus (without getting migraine, which I get only from reading in sunshine). But sunny days are nice too, they make the other people happy, the 99.999% who don’t get their migraine from reading in sunlight.  So that is good too.

OK, I really should rein in that Pollyanna act.

***

I got up an hour and a half early thanks to a bee again. They naturally seek to the window, which is rather close to my face. There is a colony of them outside on that side of the house, so they are fairly common visitors at this time of the year. Perhaps I should turn the bed and take the chance that they don’t actively seek out a human to sting. Or perhaps I should just use the second bedroom.  Although the dead bumblebee on the floor there does not convince me.

***

City of Heroes is down today as they are merging the North American and European server list.  Not the actual servers, but the accounts:  European players will now get access to the American servers as well, and the other way around. There were more American servers than European, so this is especially a gift to their European players.

I have played on the American servers except for a few months, even though I live in Europe. To be honest, the choice was largely for cultural reasons. I found the American community to be more polite and competent, strange as this may sound. I blame the fact that in Europe, superhero comics are considered “for kids”, while in the USA, it is perfectly normal and acceptable for fully employed family fathers (and even some mothers) to read them.

In fact, there is supposedly a new movie out over in the States about Thor, based on the comic rather than directly on the original Norse Myth. I am somewhat acquainted with both, but not enough to steal the movie on Pirate Bay.

***

Speaking of which, Norwegian copyright law is to be tightened a bit again, I read in the IT news today. I am not sure whether this means that I can not stream my music to my friends any longer. What little I have heard is of a more technical nature, that the law will make it easier to find and prosecute illegal file sharing.

That is a bit of, as we say here in Norway, “closing the barn door after the horse has left”.  In this case, it is more like closing the barn door several years after the horse left and while it is about to die from old age.  BitTorrent, the superior file sharing protocol, used to take up more than 3/4 of the Internet bandwidth. The latest numbers are 8%. These days, it is streaming that is in.  America has Hulu for TV (I think) and Pandora and Rhapsody for music. Europe has Spotify for music, and increasing also the Norwegian Wimp is expanding abroad. I don’t think we have legal TV streaming, but seriously, who would want to watch European TV anyway? Instead, you should watch Crunchyroll, which streams Japanese anime. I have tried it, and it is pretty good.

(We are coming to the panties soon, I promise.)

If your teen boy discovers Crunchyroll, make sure to bring him water at least once a day until he recovers.  Resistance will gradually build up, but it may take some weeks.

It does however contain some decidedly non-Republican titles. Not porn exactly, but there could be panties and excessive bounciness in some titles. The Japanese don’t really understand Judeo-Christian sexual morality. Or perhaps they just don’t care.  Or perhaps they are almost immune to panties because of the short skirts that Japanese girls wear in real life too.

***

Speaking of things God hate: Eating SHRIMPS. (Actually they are icky.  But they also happen to be very much not kosher, for those concerned about that.)

I went to the largest supermarket in the city. They had more than half a dozen different brands of shrimp salad, including at least 3 shrimp & egg salads. But not one single egg salad without shrimp. Not one!

Anyway, it is past bedtime and the bees will probably be up early.

Where peaceful waters flow

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It’s getting hard to find a place to go
Where peaceful waters flow…

Or so Chris de Burgh says, in his beautiful song. But for me, that place to go is right at hand, day after day.  And as is my custom on Saturdays (since I have not yet started keeping the Sabbath, despite reading some pretty convincing texts lately about its overflowing goodness), I took a walk to the shop and back, half an hour or so each way. The first part of the walk took me past sights like this, then green fields and pastures. I live in the countryside, even if it is less than ten minutes by car from the nearest town. In midsummer, the river sees a lot of small boats going up and down, but this early my companions are the occasional bird and, probably, fish.

I had my pulse watch on, and noticed that my pulse was quite slow in the beginning. This varies a bit from day to day, but if it is much higher than normal I will know that I harbor some infection that is likely to break out later. Today, however, it almost seemed like the opposite was true, that I was healthier than normal. Just walking fast, my heart rate stayed below the moderate exercise zone (117-133 BPM, as calculated by my pulse watch based on my age and weight).  I had to run a little now and then to stay in the zone. That is rare.  Well, there is no arguing with nature!

After around 25 minutes this way, the body changes gears. It always does at this point. The exact time may vary from person to person, but I am led to believe that it is rarely more than half an hour. At this point, what happens internally is that the body starts burning more fat rather than sugar.  We have only a limited storage of sugar (free-floating and in the form of glycogen in muscles and liver mostly), but fat is both more plentiful (even on me) and more concentrated energy. It is far more complicated to use, though.  As a result, the body needs more oxygen and produces more heat.  Breathing and heart rate both increase.  So after that, I could walk more normally without my watch beeping at me.

Naturally, in light of recent events, I thought a little about the pros and cons of having a body. I am quite impressed with this body and it should not surprise you that I hope to keep it for a long time yet. I am not a fan of spiritism, so I expect the blog to end at the very latest when my body does!  Hopefully that will still be a long time off.

I am however more at ease now than in the past with the fact that this body and this life are temporary. Death may be the end of a whole lot of things, but not all. And, I believe, not of the most important. My will to free your mind and bring you happiness will remain after me, spreading like rings in water. And where I will be, I may or may not watch it; it does not matter. I have to do what I can in this life to plant the seeds that will grow into trees and bear fruit for the future.

And if you don’t know by now, you never will:
Only love can find the door.
If you could see it now, it’s in your hand.
Only love can reach the shore, forever more…
Where peaceful waters flow.
-Chris de Burgh, Where Peaceful Waters Flow. (YouTube)

Personal health challenge

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I have got a doctor appointment for June 10. I expect this to be only the beginning.

Since January or early February my bladder has been shrinking. As late as last year, I could sleep as long as I wanted on weekends. Now, even though I go to the bathroom last thing before sleep, I can rarely sleep 7 hours before I have to get up and urinate again. Sometimes closer to 5 hours. This is not natural. It is like I have aged two decades in five months.

So yeah, I have to assume I have my first cancer. I suppose it could be some kind of hernia putting pressure on the bladder. One thing I am pretty sure it is not, diabetes. I don’t urinate significantly more, or I would have noticed it. Will still check blood sugar too, just to eliminate.
If it is prostate cancer, it should be fairly easy to diagnose and the prognosis is generally good. I don’t have typical prostate symptoms though. The pressure is less than in my youth, but it is far from stop & go. It really seems more like some outside pressure on the bladder itself.

Or I may just be more sensitive, possibly. I can’t say I have seen any general symptoms of cancer spreading, like unnatural weight loss or fatigue. So it seems too early to panic. I will make sure to inform you of any panic if it becomes relevant.

In any case, I should probably not enter into any new long term commitments, financial or otherwise, until this is checked out.

Feeling sadness

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Something strange happened yesterday. I woke up half past five in the morning from the buzzing of a bee in the window near me. These critters have some modest amount of poison and it sounded pretty desperate, so I found it prudent to get away. I got up and went down in the living room, where I put on my headphones and played LifeFlow 1 for 40 minutes.

LifeFlow is a series of brainwave entrainment tracks, and the names of the main tracks are their frequency in Hertz. The 1 Hz track is the deepest in the series, corresponding to deep dreamless sleep. What I usually use is the 2 Hz track, which has a much less disturbing soundscape, vaguely water-themed, whereas number 1 has the sound of whales and possibly some other marine mammals and a few other underwater sounds. It sounds spooky, to put it bluntly, and several people have complained about this on the Project Meditation forums. I however see the point in making this track more disturbing: It is quite hard to stay awake when your brain starts to synchronize at a frequency usually used in deep, dreamless sleep.

Be that as it may, I am not built to get up at this time. While I at least mostly stayed awake through the 40 minutes, I watched random hallucinations behind my closed eyes much of the time, shapes that arose and stayed for a while before disappearing again. This may be normal for humans for all I know, but it is very rare for me. Especially these days, and especially when the images are just meaningless shapes and not women. But actually very rare anyway. So seeing this long parade of random images was weird enough in itself. It was only the beginning though.

When the track ended and I opened my eyes again, I felt a profound feeling of sadness. It was not associated with any person or event or memory. It was just a pure feeling of sadness or perhaps regret or loss.

I suppose the ghost whale sound could have some part in it, but probably not. For one thing, the unpleasant sound these creatures add to the otherwise decent soundscape can actually be said to have lessened my regret over having eaten whale beef in my late teens. The whales are considered more or less saints and sages by the New Age community, but I dare say that their utterances on this recording make them sound edible indeed and not particularly worthy of preservation either. Your ears may vary.

Another clue is that I still feel some degree of that sadness two days and one night later. It is not as strong as it was when it started, but it keeps running in the background much of the time, so that I can be aware of it when I so decide. This fits better with the theory I immediately thought of when I noticed it.

You see, I have written repeatedly in these pages about my immunity to sadness. That I can feel joy, and sometimes fear, but rarely ever sadness. That is not something one would normally miss and want back (I did have it earlier in my adult life), but it is kind of weird for it to be so completely absent. What I think is that perhaps the new connections created in my brain during the entrainment may have unlocked the feeling that was somehow locked away at an earlier point in my life.

It could be a coincidence, of course. Or some spiritual attack, or help, depending on the outcome. If someone keeps going on and on about their happiness, especially someone who has several friends who experience deep sadness, it is only natural if they occasionally quietly wish for me to feel it too. And it is not like I have been praying to God to never experience sadness or anything. It is just something I have noticed, not something I have desired strongly or – I think – taken pride in. Though I suppose it could seem that way, that I have preened exceedingly about it.

Be that as it may, it is not of an intensity that makes me weep or anything. In a sense I actually find it fascinating, even enriching in the short term. If it lasts for the duration of my life I may change my opinion, I suppose. But in any case it is not like I am unable to feel joy.

I certainly felt like whining with joy for a little while this afternoon when I realized that Amazon.com had taken in a new Okawa book: The Moment of Truth, a brand new book from only weeks ago, based on his lectures in Brazil recently. I should not be so excited about books by a man who thinks he is God from Venus, but the thing is that he writes like a god. More exactly like Hermes, the god of speed, given that Master Okawa has published some 700 books by now (!), about one per week last year alone, earning him a place in Guinness Book of Records. And what is more disturbing is that they are generally quite well written. I would not lie if I said, if I could write even one book in my lifetime and it was half as good as the average Okawa book, I would be able to die with a smile, knowing that I had made a significant contribution to the world. But I haven’t, so I can’t. At least not yet.

Of course, some suspicion is in order when someone claims to be God from Venus. Even if he can go entire books without bringing it up. But that does not change that he writes an awesome prose that I hope to get closer to. He practices what he preaches, that you have not truly understood something until you can explain it in common words that even a child can understand. I have a long way to go in the childish writing department, as I am sure you have noticed!

So I pray that what I read may not harm me but rather help me. That is pretty much what I pray about food too. And I habitually add a prayer that I may also be of help and not harm to others. After all, that is what matters. What we feel does not matter so much as what we do. But of course what we feel tends to influence what we do. I certainly expect that for myself. I am still that much human, and I know it. Hopefully with my newfound ability to feel sadness, I will now be able to understand others a little more than I did before.

***

Oh, and happy birthday if you happen to read this. I wish you could be as happy as I have been, since you deserve it so much more. It is strange how fate has sent us down so different paths, from where we once started together.

Pictures of a spring day

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These trees are kind of ordinary around here, but I like them anyway, especially with this sky as backdrop. It was a good sky for photography today.

By the way, larger versions of all pictures except the second are available on request, until either I or my hard disk cease to function. Just in case you want to use them for workspace background (“wallpaper”) on your computer or something. I know I do that sometimes with my pictures.

These flowers grow by the shed. The old couple who lived here before must have planted them, I guess, unless they are even older. They are still hanging on, even though the people who once loved them are gone.

This picture is actually of the hedge, such as it is, that separates this property from one of the neighbors. The flowers there however are basically local wildflowers; perhaps they were planted there or perhaps they just spread there on their own.

This tree is actually on the neighbor’s property, but by the old road along the river. This road is not being maintained anymore, but still exists out of habit. This was supposedly the main road to the house until sometime in the late 1960es. When I was a child, people were still using this road every day, I guess. I wonder if they stopped to look at the trees?

The white “stars” on the ground are wildflowers again. The yellowish green color of the tree comes from the new leaves, which are still folding out, like a butterfly’s wings that have not yet got their final color.

After the sun had set but before the daylight faded, an uncommon calm fell on the river, transforming it into a mirror. Or so I thought, when I took these two pictures. Only after I opened them, did I notice:  The reflection in the water is subtly different. Not distorted or fuzzy, but… different.  As if taken at a slightly different time.

Can you see it here? The trees seem darker, and the cloud formations are different, as if the river showed another time or a parallel world rather than a simple mirror image.

There is a saying that “you can not go into the same river twice”, and this refers subtly to the river of time. Even if you come to the same place and the river looks the same, it is not the same water. And so it is with us all. Form and content do not quite change at the same pace as time passes over us.

I hope you enjoyed the ordinary beauty of this place.  To some of you, this may be as exotic as a desert or jungle is to me. If so, feel free to grab the pictures as long as you don’t sell them.

Wrist and everyday magic

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Fly into that world you’ve been waiting for forever!

As promised, I got some more to do at work. The last two days I have been doing some data entry, which is a good job for me since I am pretty resistant to boredom. Unfortunately the first day in particular was really hard on my wrist, because I had to mouse a lot.

My wrists are damaged for life, something I wrote (and dictated) about years ago, it is still scattered through my archives. I thought for sure at one point that I would end up disabled. (Not an economic disaster here in Norway, but not very compatible with my current aspiration of giving back to society.) Meditation and exercise have restored my arm to the point where I don’t notice the problem in daily life; I can even type fairly large amounts of text. But if I have to use a mouse more than a little, such as I did at work now (or playing Daggerfall), the arm soon begins to hurt. And not only while I am mousing – until it heals itself, even typing causes some pain.

No longer completely stupid to such things, I spaced the work out, stretched, and took breaks. Today I also slept away the entire evening from before sunset to midnight, which also helps a good deal. I can still feel the pain, but I can live with this level of it. This particular job is almost finished anyway. I will probably add a few more lines tomorrow, and that’s it.

And of course, at home I have Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11. I can only speak a few minutes at a time, since my voice is also damaged permanently. (The joys of growing old!) But if I can speak a few minutes and type a few minutes, and then do something else for a while, I can repeat this until I have written what I wanted.

Seriously, people: If you are able to speak something reasonably close to standard English, and have your own computer, and don’t live in abject poverty, get a quality microphone and Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11. It is ridiculously good, and it gets better every day you use it. I admit that I find it hard to use for some types of writing, because I have spent two generations of human lifetime thinking with my fingers. But for the 99.99% of humans who talk habitually anyway, this thing is like science fiction. Seriously, people, it’s like something out of Star Trek.

Check some of the demonstrations available online, for instance on YouTube. It really works like that. They’re not faking it. I still have some problems with my Norwegian accent, which is not one of those supported. But the program keeps adjusting, every time I use it it gets a little better. And so do I, probably. I don’t use it regularly, but when my wrist acts up, I remember it again, and become impressed all over again.

It is awesome to live in the Age of Wonders. Here’s an unrelated quote but with the same perspective from my friend Tsaiko:
“Who cares about flying cars?
The future is technology that lets me hold 1500 books in my hands. I HAVE A KINDLE.”

(Actually, I don’t have a Kindle myself, as I prefer to read my books on a high-resolution smartphone. But that does nothing to reduce my awe that I was really allowed to live to see an age where everyday items are virtually indistinguishable from magic.)

Dream – avatar of justice

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This morning, I had a dream. It was mostly hellish, but it took an unexpected turn at the end.

The dream took place in a small town, where things took a turn for the worse. Bad things started to happen. People died. Eventually it became clear that a criminal syndicate was killing people off. One of their own tried to betray them and stop them, but was killed. However, he had managed to alert me.

Toward the end, death machines were running in the streets, guns on wheels, shooting everyone who had not fled. I am not sure whether they were robots or remote controlled, but they drove through the streets killing people.

The leader of the criminal syndicate was a Lex Luthor type. Perhaps it was just his personality. The place did not otherwise give off a DC Comics feel. The criminals were all gathered in a building while their death machines roamed the streets. That’s where I came and confronted them in their lair. They wanted to kill me too, of course, but they were not in my league. I pronounced my sentence on them: I would swap the dead and the living. They would die, those they had killed would be resurrected.

OK, I assure you that this is not the order of magnitude I usually operate on, even in my dreams. My only excuse for the resurrection part is that I dreamed this on Easter Day morning. Even in my dreams, I don’t usually aspire to resurrecting other people, certainly not hundreds of them.

There is some variation in how much magic I can use in my dream, but it normally lies within a certain boundary. If I use too much, I wake up extremely tired, even more sleepy than when I went to bed. And if I do something too spectacular in one go, I wake up gasping for breath and my heart hammering in my chest. Like the time I blew up a hill, or the time I tried to teleport someone backward in time. Usually I can teleport myself 2-3 times in one dream before I am exhausted. This time, while I did not actually get around to resurrecting people, I teleported the whole building, a piece of the street and a neighboring building to Antarctica. That’s normally out of my league. Evidently my dreams have been upgraded or something.

(It bears mention that I was not Magnus Itland in this dream. As is often or even usually the case, I had a completely different body, life history, name and memories, but the same spirit.)

So anyway, there was some disturbance and the Luthor type, the boss, killed several of the others with an improvised grand cudgel type of weapon, before they put him down.  I woke up so I did not see them all die, nor did I see the townies resurrected.

***

I have seen people as different as Ryuho Okawa and Philip Sherrard (Orthodox Christian philosopher) say that our dreams are a hint of our afterlife. Sherrard says that after our physical body dies, we will continue to inhabit the (inner) world we inhabited while we lived. Okawa says that upon death, dreams and waking life will be switched around, so that our dreams will seem to be our real world, and the world will seem like a dream.  People who have happy dreams about being together with friends are likely to have a happy afterlife being together with friends, because they have a life-content of love. People who dream about hate and fear and enemies are likely to have a hellish afterlife, because this is the content of their soul.

I reserve judgment on this theory.  Somehow I find it hard to believe that I will be a godlike avatar of justice in my afterlife…

Spring leaves

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What? Spring leaves? But it has barely even arrived here yet!

No, leaves as in leaf. Small, light green, but definitely leafy. There have been some flowers already, they seem to be in more of a hurry than the leaves. Can’t wait to spread pollen, you know. But this bush actually has leaves. And it is not alone. Yesterday on my way home from work I saw whole trees beginning to green, further up in the valley where there is more sun.

And further up in the hills I saw small heaps of snow still, in the shadows. Spring is a weird and varied thing here in Norway. And beautiful, but it is not easy to convey that beauty in a photo, because it depends on all the other things around. This bush was special because the other trees and bushes around were still dark. It was the first.  We tend to remember our firsts, and our lasts if we know. Each of the two has its own poignant beauty, that a lens cannot catch but only the heart.

The last comic

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The picture and title were coincidental, if such a thing exists. I had actually given notice of unsubscription two issues earlier, as is standard here.

Today I fetched my two last issues of Savage Dragon, the last comic book I have subscribed to. This particular series seems to just go on and on, so I eventually had to unsubscribe to it. The others that I have subscribed to have stopped or gone on hiatus or changed in some other way so that I just had to not subscribe to their new incarnation, if any.

To be honest, I have not had much interest in this for the last couple years at least. But when I lived in the original Chaos Node apartment, I had quite probably more than my own weight in comics, most of them superhero comics. I gave away most of them when I moved from there to Chaosnodeland, but kept a couple barely crates of my favorite comics.  Of these, I had read about a dozen again when I moved anew four years later, so I winnowed a little more.  I still haven’t read them since. I suppose I should give them away while I still can. I am not sure how long the used-book store will hang on.  Or I could burn them, but that would release CO2 into the atmosphere.

That part of my life is over, somewhat belatedly.

That said, I still play City of Heroes. At least for now.

Work

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My job is not secret in the “secret agent” sense, but we are asked to not tell on the Internet where we work, or use the work computers to post on the Internet. As if I would! Even my father and my brothers don’t know exactly where I work.

(Yes, you guys who like to post on social sites from work: All large workplaces have their own IP addresses, so the admins (at the very least) can trace back to see where you post from. And the network admin at your workplace can see what you are doing with their computer network as well.)

Anyway, when I talk about work, it will only be in the most generic sense. And in the generic sense, I just the other day asked my boss to find more work for me. I have held only 90% work hours for about a decade now, but even then I have felt that there is little suitable work.  I can physically not speak more than a few minutes a day, so that excludes working phone support.  (We do generally give various IT related support to a large organization.) I cannot travel easily, either. So that limits what I can do somewhat.  My boss is however confident that she can find more work for me without inventing anything unnecessary. In other words, I want to work more so others can go home with a good conscience, rather than having to sit an hour or two extra each day.

So starting May, I will try to work full hours. Obviously it also pays a little more, but that is not my motivation. Despite the high rent, I am doing well enough. And I don’t expect 10%, reduced with around 1/3 in tax, to noticeably affect my budget. I guess if a man can buy a new smartphone every year and a half, he is pretty well off by global standards.  Of course, here in the zeroeth world, people are constantly driven by raging desires for things that cost money. I keep getting amazed and amused by the things people think they need, and the self-made desperation by which they seek what is actually mere luxury.

The reason why I want to work more is that work is love. Not having an ordinary family life, work is my main way of giving back my love to the world, the society and the civilization without which I could not even today survive for long, and on which I was a parasite for so long.  Almost everything I am, is in some way a gift from other people. Even the words with which we think are formed by poets and farmers and mothers singing to their children (and occasionally by carpenters when they hit their thumb) over thousands of years.

Even in the unlikely case that I should manage to pay off my debt to the world in my lifetime, I should still try to help people, because it is the right thing to do. Never mind that giving happiness to others is the fastest way to become happy ourselves. I am usually happy already.

I would definitely work even if I got the same pay without it. Well, unless I could find a more effective way to help people. But I am not gifted with social skills, so having other people find ways for me to help is not only easier, it is probably more effective.

Here in Norway, there are actually people who could get MORE money if they did not work.  The unemployment and disability pensions are so generous to people with children, that if they take a low-paying job, they will have less money for their family. And some of them still take the job. Now that is worthy of respect. Although their kids may think differently.