Category Archives: slice of life

Loving bread too much

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My current definition of love is “liking so much that you are willing to sacrifice for”. Not perfect, but it covers the range from God to sex, drugs and rock n’roll. The more you love something or someone, the greater the sacrifices you are willing to make.

In the case of me and bread, the sacrifice (beyond the small expense) tends to be gut pain and having to stay within running distance from the bathroom for a while.

I don’t have gluten allergy: Pasta and wheat noodles are part of my near daily diet. I think what happens is that my digestion becomes upset when there is a large, sudden change in diet. The helpful gut bacteria have adapted to the usual food, and suddenly there is something else instead, so they leave in protest.

And modern bread is so good, it is hard to not go all out when I have it in house. Seriously, what happened to bread? It used to be boring, the same plain slice day after day, year after year. Now there are three or even five types of grain in a single bread, and often sesame, sunflower or flax seeds as well. Despite this complex recipe, the firmness and texture is nearly perfect, and stays that way for several days. Behold the great power of science! And not just behold it, I can actually taste it.

So it is all too easy to eat bread four times a day, and plenty of it. I suppose if I kept doing that, my body would get used to it. But then I might forget how good it really is. Now it is like food honeymoon each time…

Dentist check-up day

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Nothing exciting today. I had my twice-a-year check at the dentist. No holes this time either. Modern science is awesome, eh? I used to have holes all the time in the past, although only small ones. Perhaps toothpaste these days is more effective or something. It seems unlikely to come merely from me having eliminated meat from my diet. In fact I drink Pepsi Natural pretty much all workday. (It is called Pepsi Raw here, but it is the same thing.) With 10% sugar and high acidity it should do unspeakable harm to teeth, but they seem to be unaware of it.

Of course, even with no holes, I still have to pay. For some reason, here in Norway there is no dental insurance. Does not exist for adults. Not through work, not private, not through the state, which otherwise does all kinds of health insurance whether you like it or not. There is state-paid dental care for children, but they generally don’t appreciate it. I certainly didn’t, and avoided dentists for the next several years. Also, science simply was not very advanced at that age. Even if you went to the dentist, he would repair your teeth with metal, and they would continue to decay.

One thing they had in the past though: Cute female assistants. My current dentist has equipment that moves around on its own like the arms of Doctor Octopus, it sometimes seems. Very high-tech. Saves the cost of having cute women around. Although I wonder if their original role may not have been to make the male patients refrain from screaming and thrashing about…

Weather and numbers

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On the road home.

This month, the weather has been more or less normal for this time of the year. That is, what was normal for the last 20 years, not last winter, and not the beginning of this. The temperature has some days been above the freezing point, and even the cold nights have barely been below -10 degrees Celsius.

Let me say a few words about temperatures here.  The Celsius scale of temperatures has its zero at the freezing point of freshwater near sea level. Unlike, say, Fahrenheit which has zero at the temperature of a deep freezer or something.  Celsius also has the boiling point of water at 100 degrees. That means we have nice, small numbers for the temperatures that actual humans actually meet in everyday life.  In contrast, the Kelvin scale starts at the point of absolute zero, where not a molecule moves. This may be useful to a few scientists, but utterly irrelevant to the remaining 7 billion people or so.  Sometimes something really is such a stroke of genius that it cannot be improved on even if you desperately want to.

Take for instance the way we measure time, at least on a small scale.  The day and night are together 24 hours, a number that can be divided in a lot of ways but is still nice and small. At the time of the equinoxes, the day and night is each 12 hours, which is also the most divisible number anywhere near its range.  This makes it easy to think in hours. But it does not stop there.

Each hour is made up of 60 minues. This is another super-divisible number, by far the most slicable anywhere near it.  I believe we got this from the Babylonians, who again inherited it from the Sumerians, which is about as far as we can trace that root of our civilization. It is still unrivaled. There have been attempts to introduce a 100-minute hour, but it is just not as practical. Sure, it would be better for arithmetic, but in practice it is more useful to be able to divide the hour into nice chunks.

The seconds? They correspond approximately to the heartbeat of a grown man at rest.  And from there on we have these super-divisible units all the way up to the length of the day.  Some things just can’t be improved on. Or if they can, it takes a genius the likes of which the world does not see every millennium.

The months, on the other hand, need work. It is bad enough that the year is not 360 days, we can blame God for that. I suppose certain other things took priority, like not having the planet overheating.  (To have the same length of day but only 360 days, we would have to circle the sun a little closer.) Now, this I can live with. But the Romans messed things up further by robbing February to add to other months they liked better.  I guess it is a bit late to reverse that?

For instance, we just had 31 days in December, and now we have 31 days in January as well! Is that really necessary? I would be perfectly willing to have 29 days in February if I could get by with only 30 in January.  Well, anyway, as I said, it’s a bit late now. But if we colonize Mars, we should definitely do better.  Of course, Mars does not have a slow moon like ours at all, so the concept of months (originally derived from “moon”) may not apply.

The moon certainly applies here. I have noticed that the weather is almost always clear during the full moon here on Norway’s south coast.  But right now there is barely any moon at all here. Your moon may vary, as may your weather. I read that near the North Pole, the sea is two degrees warmer than it has been for the last 2000 years. (They can measure this by the sediments.) Two degrees Celsius, that is. Of course.

What the Hell am I doing?

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“What do you think about this amount?” -I think it is eerily similar to my amount of superhero comics before I left the original Chaos Node.

I stopped by my comic book dealer (who also happens to be the used book store in Kristiansand). I fetched the two issues of Savage Dragon that were lying for me, and asked him to discontinue my subscription. I have quit the other comic book series as they closed down (and usually came back with a different name and different artists, but without me buying them). But this Larsen fellow just keeps ticking like the energizer bunny, it seems. So I gave up and told the shop to just cut it.

“I no longer see the point in reading about people bashing their heads with cars” I explained. “You should have realized that long ago” said the shopkeeper. “Why didn’t you read something more edifying?”

Why the Hell not? thought I, and as always when I use that phrase, I mean it in its religious sense. The shopkeeper continued talking about a local soccer hero who recently died at a fairly old age, and was praised by the local newspaper for soccer being his life until the very last. “Running after a ball is natural when you are a small kid, as long as it is just one of several games you play. But even then, something is wrong if soccer is all you play. And to keep being hung up on this for the rest of your life??”

Indeed. If some other person had been forced to spend his whole life doing nothing but soccer, seeing nothing but soccer, talking about nothing but soccer, wouldn’t he be in Hell? Not because soccer is omg so wrong, but because of the confinement and the stagnation – being essentially trapped in a small corner of a normal childhood for the rest of the life.

Ever since I read Ryuho Okawa’s view of Hell as something humans create rather than something God creates for them, it has seemed obvious to me that people are not actually thrown screaming and protesting into Hell by  hard-faced angels on the command of an angry God. Rather, Hell is something we gravitate toward. There is, so to speak, a mutual attraction between the sinner and his Hell.  Just recently I saw Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz imply something similar in his book The Thirteen Petalled Rose, and a quote from Jennifer Upton’s Dark Way to Paradise about Dante’s Divine Comedy also implying the same thing. Perhaps I am just selectively reading people who tell me what I want to hear, although this is a bit strange when I have not heard about them before. In any case, back to my comic books.

The difference between me and the soccer hero, apart from me not being a hero at all, is that I have only been partially imprisoned in a corner of my childhood.  I have tried to think about this. I have spent thousands on superhero comic books during my adult life, until my late 40es. Why the Hell did it not fall away before? It is after all not a biological urge… one can understand single men who buy porn (although I would think a couple porn mags should be enough for a lifetime, I mean, how many fetishes does one person have? – but what do I know.) Or even women who buy cook books. The body has its urges. But the urge to have cars thrown on you by angry supervillains is probably not one of them.

Looking back, I wonder if this did not start fading away around the time I wrote the series of gray entries about The Next Big Thing. At this point, I saw superhero comics as a symbol, an upwelling from the collective subconscious of the expectation that a new type of human was about to replace ordinary humanity. While the real “human version 3” will probably not be able to fly by willpower or shoot energy beams for their eyes, their thinking will be as far removed from that of current humans as superpowers would be from our physical abilities.

So as long as I remained ignorant, I remained enslaved. Reading superhero comics was in a certain sense a meaningful impulse, diverted into a symbolic form that is not exactly counterproductive, but unproductive.

In a similar way, I believe, the attraction of computer games is that they allow us to quickly do what we feel we want to be doing but cannot. In my case, guiding people to prosperity, peace of mind and lasting happiness (The Sims 2 and 3), or protecting the innocent from evil (City of Heroes). Unless I learn how to actually do these things in real life, I will probably remain attracted to these games until I die… and quite possibly beyond.

That is a chilling thought, right? But now you have to excuse me, the Double XP Weekend has begun in City of Heroes. It is time for Bright Hand of the Sun to protect his fellow heroes from the forces of Darkness!

Notes to self?

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Texting and mailing someone else is a normal way of communication, but what about mailing yourself?  Not quite normal, I suspect.

A few months ago, I dreamed that I spent some time with an online friend (who I have never met in the flesh).  During the time we spent together, he several times wrote something on a small handheld device.  He explained casually that these were messages to himself.  Evidently he also checked the messages from himself regularly – my impression is that he did this at the same time he wrote new ones, several times an hour.

In waking life, I am the one who mails myself.  But I don’t do it often.  Sometimes I send a message from my work account to my private Gmail account to remind myself of something I should do at home, rather than keep thinking of it through the workday.  Which would probably not be enough, since I tend to forget work when I walk out the door. Besides, it would distract me while I was there.  So better to send a mail to my home self.  Occasionally it is the other way around. And today I sent a mail to myself from my smart phone on the bus.  I sent it from the Gmail account to the Chaosnode.net account, which also shows up in my inbox after some minutes.

But I do this a few times a month at most, not a few times an hour. Perhaps I should do it more, though.

In a manner of speaking, some of the entries here are notes to myself. I write a few private ones, and there are some drafts I don’t seem to ever get around to publishing, so I guess those are exclusively notes to myself. But even those I share with others may also be of interest for my future self, if any. At least many of my past entries have been of interest to my later self.

And yet the main reason I switched to WordPress was that reading my past entries started eating up my time.  There was like 10 past entries for each day, and I had gotten into the habit of reading them all. At this point, reading my past entries took more time than writing a new one. Sometimes much of the evening. Now I only rarely see them at all. That may be a bit little again.

And there is even a religious dimension to this. In Christianity (and presumably Judaism) there is an exhortation in the Psalms to not forget God’s acts of kindness toward us.  That is easy to forget in our personal life.  For instance, when I have some kind of sickness or pain or disturbance of the body, I think about it; but once that disappears, I forget that it was ever there, unless I have written it down, and unless it was a huge disturbance in my life.

For instance, today I have some tenderness and pain in the skin on my right foot. (There is no visible swelling or discoloration though.) While talking to God, I mentioned this but added that there was no need to do anything spectacular, if it was as harmless as it seemed.  “But if it were to go away, I’d be grateful… wait, no. I probably wouldn’t.  I would probably forget the whole thing, unless there is some way for me to remind my future self of it.”

Memories of tomorrow

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When something weird is going on, the best thing to do is ask somebody weird!  But I am not sure I have anybody weirder than myself to ask…

Can what we read tomorrow influence what we write today?

Yesterday I wrote an entry about how things had become better and better not just in America but most of the world. This morning, I got a mail from Questia, the online library, graciously allowing me to read for free a book by Sthephen Moore and Julian Simon, called It’s getting better all the time. The book details 100 ways in which the 20th century was a great improvement on all centuries past. From the little I have had time to read of it, it argues that this is indeed the best of times.

Now, it’s not like I did not know that already. Furthermore, the book is published by the Cato institute, with whom I am already on moderately friendly terms (as in, not mocking them on sight).

Still, the placement in time is vaguely disturbing, don’t you think? If I had published that essay today instead of yesterday, it would certainly have looked like the book was an inspiration, if not outright cause of my writing.

I wonder sometimes. The fact that we cannot remember the future, does that necessarily also imply that we cannot act on it subconsciously? I have given you several striking examples over the last ten years, such as the time I wandered into the computer shop and asked about an external hard disk hours before my existing disk suddenly died.  I noticed even as I was talking to the shop guy that I had no idea why I was there and doing what I did. Yesterday I felt a sudden surge of inspiration, but there was no external event that caused it.  Well, at least not until this morning.

I have said before that I view this similar to magnets and small iron objects. Usually the magnet will pull a needle toward it but will itself not be moved. But occasionally the magnet is on a tipping point and may be drawn toward a much smaller object by the same force.  Perhaps time is the same.

Of course, there could be other explanations that don’t defy common sense. For instance, maybe I took a particular interest in the book because I had just written about the same subject, whereas normally I would have thought “that looks vaguely interesting but I have other things to do” and quickly forgotten it. Yeah. That would explain it…

Except…

That first part of the entry which is not quite so upbeat?  Early this morning I received the following quote on Twitter: “Real gratitude must be expressed in a more positive way, by asking yourself what you can do to help others ~ Ryuho Okawa”.  Why do I get a tweet about that after I write about gratitude in that context for the first time in my journal?

No matter how you look at it, that entry would have made perfect sense if I had written it one day later. But I didn’t. Instead, life presents me with the inspiration for it the morning after I upload it. Pretty fascinating.

Sick

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We interrupt our metaphysical reflections to announce that I am sick. I became queasy during the night, but was too sleepy to act on it, and kept sleeping and dreaming queasy dreams until the alarm woke me at 7.

As usual with my nausea, I was unable to actually throw up, as my gag reflex is very poorly developed. Besides, what would it have helped? My stomach was surely empty after 10 hours without eating. Still, I tried, just to see if there was any blood.  I gave up though.

I had to skip work again.  I had only been there two days since the flu. Poor job! -_-  It does not have any economic consequences for me, since I live in Norway, but I feel bad about not being able to do anything at all.  I don’t think I could have worked even if I had brought the work laptop home, truth to tell. I was pretty foggy.

Over the next hours, the problems gradually moved further down the digestive tract. Around noon I was able to lie down without much pain, and slept for more than four hours. I woke from a long dream about two young women who were friends, one of them was a suicide bomber on her way to blow herself up in a church on Christmas, but after meeting her friend outside, she ran away and managed to reach a deserted place before her timed bomb went off. I did not feel like staying in bed after that.

I still did not feel like I wanted to eat or drink ever again, but that did not last. Over the course of the evening, I refilled my stomach, with no apparent ill effects. Of course, there were no apparent ill effects last night when I went to bed either, so let’s wait and see.  One thing I avoided today was bread. There can go months without bread (although I eat pasta), but lately I have eaten bread for almost every meal.  I have a delicious oats-mixed bread at home, and one with sunflower seeds at work.  I have been eating them with jam and thoroughly enjoying it. It’s been so long, after all.

Perhaps I should try to be more gradual when I change my diet. Or perhaps it was some kind of freak accident. Or perhaps something I don’t yet know. There are bound to be such things. I am still only 52, after all. How much can I possibly understand about human life?  I just recently came to this world.

Confusing thoughts

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Books will do this to you, although mostly when they fall on your head from the top shelf.

Today on the bus, reading Karen Armstrong’s The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions, I went through the fairly slim part about Kong Qiu, or Confusius as he somewhat confusingly is known in English. I rather hoped for a more complete treatment. But then Ryuho Okawa thinks Confusius is one of the most awesome people who have lived in the last 5000 years, perhaps the greatest after himself (the Buddha) and Jesus Christ. By avoiding an outright religious angle with gods, Heaven, afterlife etc, Confusius’ philosophy was able to last for thousands of years without being twisted by sects trying to conform it to their own fantasies. Religious people tend to abandon logic way too easily for Okawa’s tastes, or even mine for that matter.

Well, it was short, but it was sweet. Armstrong certainly seems to share the admiration for Confusius, but her book has a sweeping range, trying to sum up the whole Axial Age from China to Greece. That is a huge project. I am sure she could have written a book about Confusius if she had the time. I would not mind buying it, I think.

Not that I am saying Armstrong is one of my top authorities on religious matters.  But she is an accomplished scholar and writes an engaging prose. For a grand overview such as this book about the Axial Age, one could do worse. And I think she is particularly well suited for writing about a man who himself did not consider religion “out of this world”, but rather taught a transformation or refinement of the soul through making everyday life a kind of sacred ritual.

Note to self: Read up more on Confusius, if given the chance.  I am not planning to become his student or anything, but a few thousand words more about one of the greatest thinkers of history may be worth the time.

As better men than I have pointed out, the greatest men of history are so rare that one would be considered amazingly lucky to ever meet 1 of them. But in books, we can meet them by the dozen. That’s some superpower!

Back to work

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Today I considered myself healthy enough to go back to work. Actually I did not have a fever the last two days, but I was pickled in head cold and shedding virus like there was no tomorrow. Since flu virus continue to infect for a couple days after you’re fever free, that was bad.

This morning, just in time, the head cold was gone. So I got up early (for me) and went to work, staying there for 8 hours.

Tonight I got a cold sore on my tongue, which I suppose makes sense, given that I’ve actually had a cold, and a flu before that. But usually they arise from lack of sleep. I guess I did sleep an hour or too less than I should last night, so that may contribute too.

On the other hand, I have been eating like crazy all day. All kinds of things that I have not tasted for a while since I was caught unaware without extra fresh food.  Yogurt, bread with jam, cola, two cups of chocolate milk pudding. I kind of missed yogurt after it ran out during the weekend. It is usually a big part of my diet.

Anyway, I should be in bed now if I am to get up as early again tomorrow.

Oh, and the cold returned today, not deep freezer cold, but powdery snow cold. It was mild while I stayed indoors sick, first changing last night.  It really looks like I am some kind of main character, does it not?  Perhaps it looks like that to everyone, we only have unlikely things happen to us in different ways depending on who we are. It makes sense to me, that we are all main characters. At least if we look around a bit with childlike curiosity. Who has heard of a child who is not a main character?

Different

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“Is it a crime to be different from others?”  Not really, but it may be less of a super saintly virtue than I sometimes like to think.

Gallup called and wondered whether I was going to complete the big book of surveys they had sent me. I had wondered that too, but decided at that time not to. It was unnecessary big, but what made me stop was the assumptions.

If someone was to ask you: “Have you stopped slashing your neighbor’s tires? Yes or no?” – you would not want to answer such a question.  The questions in this book are not so morally repugnant, but they are equally nonsensical. There are pages (this is literally a book) with questions regarding TV programs, which I have for the most part not heard of. I don’t have a TV, never had. That really cuts down on the relevance of these questions, but there is no “I don’t watch TV” box to tick, not for each question and certainly not to skip the whole section.

And then we come to automobile and the same thing repeats. There is a wealth of questions related in this way and that way to the car. There is no “I don’t care” box. Would it cost that much to design a thick book of surveys in such a way that one could skip irrelevant things?

Then there are vacations. My vacation, as regular readers may know, is to take November off and write 50 000 words of fiction, the National Novel Writing Month project. Needless to say, none of the questions apply to that. I would think vacations may not even be a human right, but they sure are not a human obligation!

To know truth; to love beauty; to will virtue; these are human obligations. But nobody seems interested in surveying these things.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I have my worldly interests too. Entirely too much of that really.  But even then these are too obscure to interest Gallup.  Yes, I play online games on the PC. That’s 1 ticky box. As if the kind of person who plays Age of Conan has much in common with the person who plays the ancient board game of Go at the International Go Server.

I was thinking that it would be a good thing to get the message across, that not everyone is the imaginary “common people”. But there is no way to get the message across. It is not something Gallup’s customers want to know. So I am telling it here instead.

Of course, my voluntary simplicity may come across as slightly less impressive if you had actually seen me writing this surrounded by 3 active computers,  plus a couple more computers and backup disks in reserve…