Category Archives: slice of life

Imaginary invisible friends day

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Chasing rainbows hand in hand with your invisible best friend. I assume the manga was made without knowledge of Calvin & Hobbes…

I got a head cold as soon as I was finished with the flu. Since you still shed flu virus for a couple days after you are fever-free, spraying virus like a garden sprinkler gone wild is a bad thing. I have become a walking biological weapon! Of mass destruction! Well, the fever has destroyed some of my mass at least, though I am now eating like a wild thing to get it back. What is worse is that the sick and elderly are more likely than the rich, trim and tan capitalists to take the bus with me, and the sick and elderly may lose more than just a little fat. They might lose their lives.  I am not risking that, and my boss luckily agrees with me.

So here I have been at home all day.  My selection of edibles is shrinking faster than I expected (yay for getting my appetite back though). I still have pasta for a few weeks of siege though. And my boss sent me chocolate, although it contains too much fat to eat all in one day (or even two).

In addition to eating, I have been watching yet another long anime series: Onmyou Taisenki. It is aimed at barely teenage boys, it seems, but since when has that stopped me? It is set in an alternate reality vaguely based on Chinese philosophy, where some people can form a contract with “shikigami”, literally “ritual gods”, animal spirits with magical powers that can exterminate demons. However, these days they mostly fight each other, as there is a civil war between them. One group is trying to make a profit in the demon realm, more or less. The other is trying to stop them.

The series is very similar to a roleplaying game, in that the characters search for new seals that give them new combat techniques, and grow stronger by defeating opponents (demons or each other).  The human characters don’t normally die when defeated, their contract is only broken and they lose all memories from after  the contract was formed. Not a capital punishment unless you are left in a place where you cannot find your way back to civilization.

I pondered why this series appealed to me as much as it did. In part I think it is because it is kind of cute and innocent.  The whole not killing people, even if you could, is like a throwback to a more innocent age. (It is actually from 2004, which was not really a much more innocent age.) But perhaps what most appealed to me was the intense friendship between the main character and his white tiger spirit who fights for him.  This is intentionally a main part of the story.

The main character is a young boy who lost his parents (that’s a long story in itself and is unraveled gradually) and he does not have many friends except the girl next door. When he has to form a contract with a spirit to protect his grandfather, he does not realize that he is gaining the best friend he has ever had. The loyalty the two start to feel for each other is touching.  Also, he can see the spirit even when it is not fighting (ordinary people can only see it when fighting).  So he spends a lot of time conversing with his invisible friend.

What is not to like about that? I do that all the time. ^_^

There was one thing I disliked though even in this theme. I have never really thought about it before, but I just realized that in all such stories where a seemingly unimpressive person is chosen by a spirit or goddess or angel or whatever, that person always has some hidden great power that eventually (or sometimes pretty quickly) shines forth.  And I realized that this had also been the case in some of my own writing.

So I made a reboot of my story from a couple years back, where a 6-dimensional being from outside the universe makes a pact with an ordinary teenage boy and becomes his amazing invisible friend. This time, the seemingly ordinary boy actually is an ordinary boy (except for being very much alone). And the only reason why he is chosen is “because I love you”.

Apart from that, I did not really do much of lasting value today. Eating, sleeping, playing City of Heroes, watching anime. Coughing up hairballs. Not much to write home about.

Dreams

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I woke up at an unusual time this morning, because I could not breathe normally through the goo in my bronchi. But this made it possible for me to capture the last dream sequence. Today’s hidden theme seems to be religion.

One part, mercifully short, was rather disturbing. It consisted of me walking around alone, screaming: KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL! over and over, clenching my fists and contorting my muscles in fury.  This is, unfortunately, something I recognize from moments of extreme frustration in my past. It is one of those things I really want to see gone from my life before I graduate to the (more) Real World. The dream made it clear that this kind of feeling is something I still can feel. I had almost forgotten that.

The dream really drove home the point that I had not fully repented this horror and the mindset that leads to it. And so, after I got up and took my bronchidilation medicine, I sat down and recalled the cases I could remember of this behavior, shining the white light of Christ on it, that it may be forgiven and transformed, and that in the future I shall not accumulate anger in my heart till it blooms like that, but react to it early. Whenever anger arises, it is a sign that the heart is too proud, having desires and expectations that were not realistic.  Well, repentance is optional of course. I mean, a non-religious person would not do that. Some might even enjoy it.  There is a horrible strength in such rage. My Viking ancestors probably made the most of it.  I have from childhood had some of that temper, unlike my mother and my saintly brother.

In the other dream I aimlessly waited at a bus stop, not knowing when the next bus to Mandal would come.  (It would not – turns out it was a place which has no direct buses to Mandal.) A young girl – barely teenager – kept chatting to me. I found it weird and pretended to ignore her. She was talking about all kinds of random superficial things, like neurotypicals do when they try to be friendly.  But I thought it was just weird and did not want to be seen being friendly with a severely underage kid I did not know. People here in Norway will think you are a child molester if you do that, unfortunately.  It wasn’t like that when I grew up, I think it is one of the things we have imported with American culture. Or perhaps it is Continental, I am not sure.

When I walked away, she shouted after me something like “Jesus won’t like you behaving like that!”, which may well be true. But the impression I got was that she was chatting to random strangers because she thought Jesus wanted people to do that. In my dream, I held the opposite impression, remembering Jesus’ teaching that “a human shall make account for every useless word on Judgment Day”.

Waking up, I am not sure that trying to be friendly is actually useless! Jesus also taught us that friends is something we can actually get with us to the next world and should be bought when possible. I will probably still avoid talking to kids and very young teens alone though…

In my dream, I now wandered lost in the suburbs for a while. I ended up inside a house and told the couple there that I only needed to find the exit. The wife said this happened all too often recently.  As I was leaving, my cell phone rang (still in the dream). It was an old friend from my time with The Christian Church (the one I linked to yesterday). He wanted urgent answer to some technical question about bonds. At first, being totally unprepared, I was about to reject his question, saying that I did not know what he was talking about. But then, by thinking logically, I saw that the answer was quite clear, so I gave it to him.

Then I woke up because I could not breathe well, so I went downstairs to use my inhalator and to cough up ick. And here I am now.

“How can I keep from singing?”

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Of course, not everyone feels the need to keep from singing… It has its place, but not ALL THE TIME!

No, not “how can I keep from sinning” – that is a very good question too, but in that case I should point you to the experts, The Christian Church. “Christianity – more than forgiveness of sin.”

When it comes to singing, however, perhaps you recognize the title. There is a traditional song with this title: “How can I keep from singing?” Here is a link to it in my record collection, for as long as it works. For the time being, you can also find numerous versions on YouTube.

There is also the more practical question: How can I actually keep from singing?  Like today, when my fever is down to around 38C again (100.4 Imperial degrees). My throat is still a bit sore, after coughing up multicolored goo in the morning and a bit onward. But my heart is filled with song and running over as usual.  This is pretty much how it is if I don’t concentrate on anything else.  (Uh, does this mean that this is who I really am? I am really a singer? I doubt that…)

Mostly it is a problem at work though. Most of my work is fairly routine (as I don’t have the licenses nor the knowledge to do much else) so I can don’t need to think hard. That’s exactly when I tend to begin singing. Not good to do at work. We do have offices, but they are not that soundproof!  Besides, there is the practical problem that if I actually sing much, my throat becomes sore, since I don’t talk usually.

So at work I sometimes play something like LifeFlow’s Optimal Learning (also from my CD collection). It helps me concentrate and it takes my brain off the songs it otherwise might run through. If I played actual music, it would just add fuel to the fire.  Well, sufficiently complex classical music works too.  I’ve used Bach a few times.

Having 39C in fever, as I had yesterday and the day before, works too. I am not surprised. The body still influences the soul a lot. But obviously the soul influences the body a lot too.  For instance, influencing it to sing…

The flu, or something

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I got up early today, wanting to take the early commute bus. But I did not feel quite sure about it:  I had a low-grade head cold lately, moving to the throat, but last night it settled in the bronchi. It stayed there through the night, so I had to wake up a few times to cough to clear them. My coworker had been sneezing a lot so I assumed I had gotten his cold. Well, it may be a bit more than that. I now officially have a fever, although still a moderate one. The headache and the pain in muscles and joints are very flu-like. There is a B influenza going the rounds, generally considered a weaker strain but one many of us don’t have immunity toward. Or so say the news.

As it happened, I got a box from Amazon.com in the mail yesterday. It contained two books by James V. Schall, and are somewhat ironically named “Liberal Learning” and “Another Sort of Learning“.  Actually none of them is Liberal in the political sense of the word: Schall is actually a Jesuit, and his idea of a liberal education is a synthesis of the classical Greco-Roman culture and the great philosophers of Christianity, such as St Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. Oh, and P.G. Wodehouse.

The small book, or even pamphlet, Liberal Learning, is also available online if you don’t want to support the printing of such books, or simply want to reduce your carbon footprint without eating less, traveling less, or in any other way restraining your greed. ^_^

So when I found myself staying home from work today, I thought this was a great opportunity to read some Schall. But as my temperature went up, my brainpower went down. So perhaps not the most ideal conditions to be introduced to stacks of heavy tomes…

Right now, I have 39.3C (102.7F) in fever. This should be pretty much ideal for the body, although I do have a headache now. Unfortunately the temperature is still rising, although very slowly.  It may not be a good idea to sleep for 8 hours while my fever is still rising:  By the time my normal sleep is over, I may have too much fever to wake up.  So I’ll try to sleep in shorter durations, so I can cool myself off if I get too weak.

Of course, it is far from certain that the temperature will continue to rise. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Delta waves and dreams

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Things not to say in public if you are an exchange student living in the same house as a classmate of the opposite sex, part n of (n++): “All right! We’re going to do it tonight too!” -even if you are actually referring to playing computer games, which I can certainly understand.

I went to bed later than I had hoped for, and was wide awake, because of the New Year weekend. But luckily I have moved a used stereo into my bedroom. In it I have a CD with brainwave entrainment tracks (LifeFlow from Project Meditation). With my trusty remote control at hand, I set LifeFlow 2 to repeat and laid back on three pillows.

LifeFlow 2 is, as the name implies, 2 Hz. This is in the delta band, corresponding to the brainwaves of deep dreamless sleep. But inducing sleep is not necessary. Rather, by entraining the brain at this level, it will reap some of the benefits of deep sleep, even if you are awake. Obviously you need to not concentrate very hard on solving problems, and you must avoid the primal emotions such as fear, anger and lust which have the power to block the entrainment.  If you just stare at the ceiling, that is fine. It is originally meant to be used with meditation, but this time we want the option of going to sleep when that becomes convenient.

This also came to pass, after a while. I don’t know about you, but for me, knowing that I don’t NEED to sleep is likely to make me more sleepy!

I’ve done this stunt before a few times, and usually I wake up just a little after something like an hour, or perhaps an hour and a half, which is one full sleep cycle.  I just turn off the stereo and go back to sleep. This time, however, it must have been something like 3-4 hours. I assume the brain did not stay in delta all the time – there is a natural cycle to these things and it probably does its best to run its course – but it probably stayed down there longer than usual.

That would certainly explain the extremely vivid dreams I had for the rest of the morning. The most prosaic of these was eating chocolate for breakfast. Even in my dream I did limit myself and stop before I was full, but it was still more than I could safely have eaten in real life and not become sick.

The next dream, however, was extremely complex and more lifelike than life, in a manner of speaking. I guess my brain had to catch up on REM sleep, which is the opposite pole from deep dreamless delta-sleep.  In my dream I lived in a large apartment in a city house with my little daughter, Danielle, who was a bit crazy.  I had to hide the cheese when she was eating, because if she saw cheese she would freak out and get hysterical.

Despite being just an apartment, the place was big. It was spread on two floors, with the upper floor holding mostly storage rooms of various kinds but also a home office where my computer was connected to the Internet through the military’s intranet, which I had to log on every time I was to use it.  It was possible to get into my apartment through at least two different entrances, one on each floor.  This bothered me since we were in the middle of town, where burglars were sure to be doing their thing.

Well, other people’s imaginary homes are not very interesting. The interesting part is that when I woke up, I had to look around and convince myself that no, I did not live in that place, I lived in this place.  It had been that vivid. That is pretty exceptional for me, and of course I “blame” the brainwave entrainment.

And that was that, really. As usual, my friends can stream the tracks from my music collection when it is up, with reduced quality. To buy the real thing you should go to Project Meditation. (Warning: Background sound.)

Oh, and I woke before the clock, wide awake, and stayed that way through the workday.

A visit of spring

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There used to be about a foot of snow on that table.

After some two months in the deep freezer, with only the occasional day of “normal” winter temperatures and only hours above the freezing point, the weather has changed. It is now the third day I enjoy temperatures of up to +5C for much of the day, and last night did not fall below freezing at all. This was not such a great convenience as you might think for those who were sending up fireworks (a common tradition here in Norway, even on farms). The wind was literally howling at times, so they were probably still chilled to the bone. But I was not, for I stayed indoors.

This morning I came down and it was still above +18C in my home office, even though the heat pump had been off for like 7 hours. Like spring and fall, the place heats with just the many computers that run here day and night. I’ve turned on the heat pump now though, and am now heating the living room with it as well. It will probably be only for one day, though: The temperature is now down to +3C outside.

Still, it was nice to be out of the freezer.  I did not actually believe the weather forecasts, mainly because they have been saying this a lot. Their models are probably based on normal weather, which used to hover around the freezing point from December to sometime in March. The deep freeze of last winter and this are abnormal on the south coast, though this kind of weather is common in the interior and eastern Scandinavia.

Since the forecasts usually fail (and even now it was more like a broken clock being right twice a day), there is no knowing how long it will last. I intend to enjoy it with a vengeance.  I have the doors between my study, the hall and the living room all open, for the first time this winter. ^_^

Aoki Densetsu Shoot!

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The moment of transition. From man to legend. Spoilers ahoy!

I came by accident across the anime Aoki Densetsu Shoot (Blue Legend Shoot) and when I heard the beginning of the opening song, I knew that it would be good. It is very rare that the opening (and, slightly less important, the ending) song does not give off a “vibe” about the anime.  If it is spooky, angry or disharmonious, you can be sure that the anime is also aiming at people who treasure such feelings. The Japanese are quite good at matching such things, I have seen only a very few exceptions to this.

(One notable strangeness though: Indecent comedies, which are popular in Japan, often have very cheerful and upbeat songs without any lurid overtones. They are simply happy. I guess the Japanese don’t have the same guilt as most westerners about sexuality – it just takes on the color of its context. But this topic is non-existent in Aoki Densetsu Shoot. There is some low-key romance, as is common in sports anime, but it is very very chaste.)

I have watched 20 episodes over the last few days, and am glad I did. It is quite old, from 1993, and you can kind of see this. It must have been a fairly high-end production at the time, I guess, but because they did not have computer assistance in the production back then, they had to use certain shortcuts to make the desired effects, and the resolution is simply lower than today. It is quite well drawn though.

The anime is about a high school soccer team. Ironically, soccer is something I have had particularly little interest in.  I grew up in a village on the west coast of Norway, and as in all such villages, soccer was the most important thing in a boy’s life until he discovered sex. For some, probably afterwards too. While Norwegians have valued sports highly since the Viking age if not before, and have many excellent players in several sports considering the sparse population, soccer has the broadest appeal. There may for all I know be only one Norwegian who is not interested in it, though more realistically there may be a few hundred. I don’t know. I knew a couple elderly Christian mystics who professed no interest in soccer, but I think they are dead now. That leaves me, I guess. Until this anime, I did not know what the offside rule was. (But I did know the name, so there is some contamination…)

In any case, the anime is nominally about soccer, but really about people and their dedication to their highest aspiration. This is something that has begun to interest me more lately.

The first 20 episodes are about the team under the leadership of Kubo. Having spent three years in Germany, he returns to find that Japanese soccer is too rigid. He wants to play “fun soccer” where each player uses his strength and where cooperation is built on trust, not on hierarchy and planning. He finds little understanding for this in Japan, but eventually gathers a small team of high schoolers who follow his path. Most of them look up to him as a prodigy or genius. But the truth, as with so many a genius, is that his skill comes from deep love and relentless training.

Tragedy strikes in episode 19. Kubo has not told his teammates that he has leukemia, and during an important match he does something unreasonable if not impossible: Taking the ball from the home goal, past all 11 players of the opposing team, into their goal. Â At the moment of his greatest triumph, his body gives up, and he dies just as he is being declared a legend.

It is indeed few people who become a legend while alive, though it does happen. More become legends after their death. And for some, it happens at the same time. This is typically martyrs, and I guess Kubo is one of them, in a manner of speaking.

I have to agree with his best friends that dying for soccer is stupid. But because they all know and share his love for soccer, they could understand him. The main character of the anime, the freshman Toshi, saw this duality: Kubo was “a godlike person”, but at the same time he was just like them, a high schooler who just loved soccer more than everything.

Having an important character die during the series seems to be pretty common in sports anime, or perhaps I just happen across those for some obscure reason. The other two sports anime that I have found worth watching were about baseball, and both of them had a main character die during the anime. There is probably some very Japanese reason for this. Or, as I said, perhaps I somehow mysteriously am pulled toward these. Even if I have never seen them before or even read the reviews, perhaps the voice in my heart are picking them out for me. Although I kind of doubt that. Or at least not much more than it picks out my Pepsi. Who knows. If life is like a dream, who is the dreamer?

Back into the freezer

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Oh yes, it is winter.

A little slice of life here! After all, life is good to have too. ^_^

Although when you put things in the deep freezer, it is in order to stop all life processes, such as bacteria or fungi, and even the natural chemical reactions in organic matter. The recommended temperature for a deep freezer is -18C, or just below zero F.

This morning, it was -19C. It bottomed out at -20C around noon. Luckily I work indoors. But seriously! It’s like, you expect to see frozen mammoths littering the roadside, and rampaging 20 feet tall snowmen battling your city’s superheroes… OK, so the 20 feet snowmen are in City of Heroes, but it kind of fits the atmosphere.  It certainly does not seem to fit THIS Earth. The usual temperature here on Norway’s south coast used to be around -5 in the last half of December, but for some years until recently we began having green winter until well into January. And even in February, having -20C here on the south coast was rare if it even happened.

I admit that you don’t really have a guarantee of warm weather when you settle in Scandinavia. Sure, the combination of the Gulf stream, the Icelandic upwelling and a fairly steady wind from the west (thanks to the Coriolis effect) makes mild winters pretty likely here, unlike Alaska, which is not so far north of here. But it is not like there haven’t been colder winters throughout history. Just not in my lifetime, or the lifetime of my parents. But there was one 94 years ago. So two since people started measuring temperatures around here. I am sure there were many more during the Maunder Minimum. (A couple generations around the year 1700, when the big rivers of Europe were frozen, and even some of the straits.)

Until recently, it was assumed that the Maunder Minimum affected all the world. But this has been cast in doubt recently, just in time for the current low-sunspot period. It may have seemed like the world was freezing because western Europe pretty much was the world at the time, it being a low tide for the few other civilizations still around, like China.  Scientists predicted a couple years or so ago that the new sunspot minimum would mainly affect western Europe, and it looks like they were right. It seems to be business as usual elsewhere.

It is pretty much business as usual here too, only more expensive. But if something happens to the power grid, then may the Light help us all. Well, I have the wood stove and candles, I could probably stay alive for a few weeks with careful planning. But sometimes I just stop and think about how vulnerable we have made ourselves and our grand civilization. As everything become more and more advanced and abstract and specialized, how long will it last until civilization collapses from want of a nail?

At least I won’t need a freezer for some days, it seems.

Oh, and the snow you see in that picture? It cost me 700 calories (kcal in European) to clear it all away. ^_^

Islands of dreams

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“To be connected with the whole world, doesn’t it sound like a dream?” Or, in the words of Jean-Paul Sartre: “Hell is other people.” One girl’s dream is another man’s hell! What are my dreams? And what is my dream? Not the same thing…

Due to the cold, perhaps, I woke up a couple times before the alarm, even though I had slept too little the night before. (Not a dramatic insomnia, I just did not get my timing right.) Thanks to this waking up, I remember the two last dreams of the night.

In the first dream, I was going to college. But it was a college run by my current employer, and had experts from the various teams and departments teach their specialties to us who were studying there. That way, if I managed to learn, I would be able to to solve many of the problems as soon as I got them, rather than sending them on to people who were already overworked. (This is actually, if not realistic, at least giving me a hint of something. I should talk about this with my boss. Obviously not a college, but some way of sharing skills across teams. If no one else, then I at least am willing to study with the other teams, because I cannot continue being this clueless when others are working as hard as they can and still falling behind!) Anyway, the details are restricted by my non-disclosure agreement. I woke up just as I realized that I would not have to apply to get my old job back after I graduated! ^_^

I fell asleep again, after putting on the second space heater by my bed. (Yes, it is that cold. It is that or wearing outdoors clothes in bed. We are talking deep freezer here.)

My second dream was much crazier. It was about a young woman who decided to dive into the ocean from the ceiling of the atmosphere. That would presumably be the ionosphere in real life, but in my dream there was an actual ceiling over the atmosphere! Otherwise it was kind of realistic though. Obviously she did not dive in just a swimsuit from that height, but in a kind of re-entry capsule, in the shape (though not size!) of a short pencil, its sharp end down. It seemed like a hopeless thing even so, but I was just a disembodied witness. Needless to say, we did not find her or her capsule.

I woke up again, but briefly fell asleep once more and in the dreamworld some 30 days had passed. I read in an online newspaper that the capsule had just recently been found. Obviously the young woman was dead, but the scientists were optimistic that they would find enough data to say for sure whether she died before or after hitting the water. So it was not all in vain. It might be useful to others in the future of space travel (except the ones who are dead…) and anyway, it is science. Learning something new is always valuable.

The article also mentioned that she had a baby daughter, a few months old, for whom she had evidently left a message. I don’t think the message was disclosed, but I would not have cared anyway. I was just thinking about how you just don’t risk your life when you have a baby, it is just wrong. (Although on waking up again, I realized that there is probably no other time in your life you are more inclined to jump from the ionosphere…)

Anyway, that was my dreams tonight. In eerily related news, during my reading of Voyage of the Dawn Treader, I came to the part where they arrived at the Island of Darkness. Spoilers ahoy, obviously!

***

In the novel, this island is also known as the Island of Dreams. The crew picks up a man fleeing from the island. He tells them that it is a place where dreams become real. They start out thinking that this would be a good thing. Dreams come true? That is a very positive phrase, after all. But then he explains that he means real dreams, not daydreams. And suddenly they row for their lives. (Although in the end, they are able to escape only with the help of Aslan in disguise. This Aslan fellow sure is something!)

So this made me think of what Ryuho Okawa wrote, that you can get an idea of your afterlife by observing your dreams. He also says that the Other World is a world where dreams are real and reality is like a dream – they switch places, basically. The afterlife is not of the body, but of the soul and mind only. The soul will gravitate toward that which resonates with its content. If my soul is filled with love for others and hope of seeing them happy, then it will surely gravitate toward that kind of scene eventually, not just in the afterlife but during our last years on Earth as well. If however it is filled with suspicion or envy or grudges, it will seek out such places both in our dreams and later when it moves freely.

This certainly sounds logical, although I am not sure whether it is theo-logical. But if we think about it, who is going to Heaven if I am not a person who would like it there?  If I go to Heaven and hate seeing happy people, won’t Heaven be Hell? They should be swarming all over the place, after all. If I become transformed in death so that I wake up not hating people, is it really me, or haven’t the real me died and been utterly destroyed (“fear him who can destroy both body and soul, yeah verily”) and some other guy gone to Heaven instead? It is not much help if he has my name if he has a different soul.

So. There may be something to it. But! Our dreams, don’t they reflect our past more than our future? If they are beginning to change – and it seems they are – is it not the newest me who counts? Think of that robber on the cross, I am not sure he slept too well during his last days on Earth, but I think he slept much better after his death, knowing that he would wake up to be with Jesus in Paradise.

I myself is still a bit nervous, but I am no longer convinced that I unavoidably will go to Hell. There is still some Hell in me, but I don’t feel at home there the same way as before. I am no longer so quick to think “I’m going to take you bastards with me to Hell” if I feel threatened. But it may still be much, much too early for me to say: “I’m taking you bastard with me to Paradise!” like my hero.   Perhaps one day… Yeah. In my dreams.

The missing questions

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Today, some institute called me to ask about my sleep habits. I had gotten a letter in the mail some days ago that I was one of the random people they would interview. I suppose without the official seals you would be reluctant to answer that kind of questions to strangers, about sleep and health.

What amused me was that, judging from my answers, I belong to the happy lucky minority who don’t have sleep problems at all. I am not constantly tired, I don’t lie awake for long after I go to bed and I don’t wake up earlier than I want. I don’t even feel tired after lunch all days, though it happens. (I usually do nap on the bus home though, but I am not sure that is considered a problem, perhaps quite the opposite.)

What they did not ask was what time I slept. I have Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome, so I would have been in serious trouble if I did not have an employer who lets me go to work at 10.  Before I got such an agreement, I was sick about half the time. So basically in today’s society I am severely limited in what jobs I can take, due to the DSLS. But they never asked about that, and there was no time where I could add information that was not in the questionnaire.

This is kind of typical, because I am kind of not typical. For instance, I recently got a consumer survey, which I try to complete. But it assumes that you have a TV, for instance. There is no ticky box for “don’t watch TV”, so I have to just make up answers. I’ve run into the same thing about the car. Nobody dares assume that you’re heterosexual in today’s society, but it is perfectly comme il faut to assume that you must necessarily drive a car and watch TV.  Well, it is no biggie for me, since I’ve chosen my lifestyle, but I suppose if I were blind it would kind of tick me off to meet these assumptions again and again. Then again, if I were blind I would be limited to phone interviews. Not that these are any better.

Sometimes I make up my mind to write about the things that make me different from most people, but I usually forget about it pretty soon. This is mostly because I feel that I am the normal one and the rest are weird. When I play The Sims 2 or 3, my sims don’t have television, not because I want them to be like me but because I tend to forget that television exists or at least that anyone would want to use it. In Sims 3, which is the more realistic of them, I tend to also forget romance. It’s not like their days aren’t full already. And so are mine.