There are so many things I would like to write, but the recent torrent of energy seems to be drying up eventually.  Or perhaps it is just because it is the end of the workweek, and I have been alone at work these last two days while the rest of our section from all across the country have been at a conference.  I should too, but I don’t trust my health for that right now.

Luckily my boss and her boss again were quite accepting of my situation.  They probably think I am disabled in my head, as is usually the case with people having health problems here in Norway, at least when you cannot tell at a glance that they are missing body parts or some such. To a certain degree it is true for me as well, since the damage to my body comes from decades of anal-retentive behavior.

So, I was not at the conference, but I was at work.  It is not so bad.  I used to hate my work. I don’t do that anymore, but I just recently realized that I have kept hating it a little out of habit. This is a tale worth telling, maybe I will proceed to do that in the future or the past.  But today some other good thing happened.

I have received a mail from Telenor, and their customer contact (salesman) Glenn Høyland, which was the one I wrote about on August 31. He seems to have managed to convince the invoice people that no, I should not pay for a new phone number, and no, I am not paying off any hardware as part of my subscription.  A new phone bill, roughly half the original, should be on its way here.  Hopefully before the old one is due on September 10.

So not only did the guy not set out to swindle me,  he has actually worked tirelessly on my behalf.  This goes to show how important it is to listen to the voice in your head that says “Judge not, lest ye be judged” and “Whosoever is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment”.  So in this case the villain turns out to be the hero, and the hero the villain.  Amazing plot twists! Although I cannot take credit for this one, quite the opposite, I have to take the blame. Or as the on-line comic Evil Inc once explained:

“Heroes take responsibility. Villains CLAIM responsibility.”

Go straight to Hell, don’t pass GO… (from The Laws of Eternity)

My aim in writing this is to increase your happiness.  Or failing that, your amusement!

On Friday, when I came home from work, there was a bill in my (physical) mailbox. This was from my new cell phone service provider. A month or so ago when I bought the HTC Hero (long may it live), I did so at Telehuset, since they were the ones who had it. I’m pretty pragmatic like that, even though I generally hold Telenor in low regard. It used to be a telephone monopoly here in Norway, originally a branch of the state administration, and it has never quite managed to shake that attitude completely. So I was surprised when the salesperson told me that I could actually get a cheaper monthly plan from Telenor than from the second-largest phone company, Netcom. I have never heard of Telenor being cheaper than anyone at anything ever, but hey, as long as we live we can repent. That is how I see the world. So, after carefully asking the salesman about the details, I changed to Telenor.

Unsurprisingly, the bill was somewhat higher than the salesman had projected. Surprisingly, it was well over twice as much. Out of the three parts the amount consisted on, not a single one was right, and they were all too high.

Now, I am a reasonable and tolerant person. And I certainly could afford the amount. Data traffic is amazingly cheap these days, compared with just a couple years ago, not to mention even further back. So it is not a matter of money. It is a matter of lying bastards lying to honest people. I thought to myself, this guy is probably doing this whenever he thinks he can get away with it. He will lie to your face repeatedly without blinking, without conscience, unaware that he is GOING TO HELL for his crimes. I better warn him. Come to think of it, it is probably something he has been instructed to do by his superior. No doubt they will deny it all in court, where I am going to meet them; they will lie under oath and thus ensure that they too are GOING TO HELL to learn their lesson. I really shouldn’t take them that far, tempting them to swear false oaths, but for the sake of the thousands they are swindling who don’t have the confidence to stand up against the big business, someone has to do it! As a Very Important Person, the task falls to me. But first, I should post their crime all over the web to warn everyone.

“You might want to sleep on this” said God. Or whoever my invisible friend is. “You can talk to them on Monday. Then you will find out whether they really are unrepentant liars.” So, since I have other hobbies too, I decided to not start my campaign FOR GREAT JUSTICE right away but wait till today.

So today I took a little time off from work and went to Telehuset again. In my mind, I started planning my great speech. “You don’t need to do that” said God. “Have you not read in the Scripture that it will be given you in the same moment what you shall speak?” “But someone has to be the champion of the poor!” “Perhaps they just accidentally punched a wrong code when registering the purchase” proposed God. Sure that could happen – I have punched a lot of data in my life – but perhaps they really were crooks. So while I did not prepare my speech, I just quietly made a mental note of various good ideas that happened to fly by.

Given my previous conversations with God (or whoever it is), the outcome is pretty much given at this point. The salesman remembered everything and instantly agreed that this was a clerical error that he would get to within the hour, and please to wait for the new bill. I never got to use any of my good points, much less warn him of the dangers of Hell and how I would see them all in court. Oh well.

***

It is kind of amusing to watch myself. Instructive too.  It really does not take more than this for me to go into battle-porcupine mode, save for the voice of God, or perhaps the voice of reason, I have a hard time telling those two apart.

Modern psychology has found that humans have “hot” and “cold” states of mind. When basic emotions are activated, we enter a hot state, and our priorities are completely different from in the “cold” rational frame of mind. In fact, another person in the same hot state of mind can predict our behavior better than we did in the cold state of mind.

These states need not be about anger or even lust.  Most adults will be able to name some amount of money for which they are willing to eat a living earthworm, but very few of them actually go through with it when it wriggles in their hand. Of course, those who do can probably earn a decent amount of money by taking part in psychological research. But for most people, it is as if a module of their psyche is conveniently switched out and replaced by another when they come in such situations.  Kind of like how computers swap memory with blocks on the hard disk, we swap pieces of our conscious self with one from the subconscious.

Kofuku-no-Kagaku have a slightly different explanation.  They believe that stray spirits of the dead are reaching out from hell to bond with people who have not brushed and flossed their mind regularly.  Then on occasions favorable to them, the spirits take over control of the body for a while to ease their own pain.  A spirit from the Hell of Strife for instance will try to get you into a fight, and so on.

I guess this is a bit like “does the sun rise or does the earth rotate”.  I can certainly see how it may look to the casual observer as if an angry person is possessed by a completely different personality.  People sometimes even say it afterwards: “I don’t know what possessed me”, “I was not myself”, “I would never do that”.  Those who speak like that are probably wrong though: No matter whether they have supernatural assistance or an upwelling from their subconscious, it would not have happened unless there was some door in their mind that opens into dark rooms.

Or at least there is in me, which is why I have to practice  self-reflection and listen to the voice from Above, wherever that is.

A vast expanse of lush, green grass is a beautiful sight when you are a tourist; not so much when you are a tenant with a manual lawnmower in need of sharpening.

Today was neither rain nor thunder, even a little sun. So after I came home from work and ate half a liter of yogurt, I went out to mow lawn again.  After a couple minutes the landlord arrived unannounced, with his uncle (?), mother and grandmother.  They were, they told me, just looking at the shed and carport and such, to see what they could throw away.

That is ominous. When you start clearing out the shed, it means you are planning to sell the house.  Given how many houses the family already has, this is not really surprising, but it is a letdown for me. I love this place and I hate moving.  Oh well.  I should start throwing away more things myself, to prepare for my next move, I guess.  But hopefully it is still some way off.  The “pigsty project” has been hibernating through the summer, and I have only thrown away actual garbage.  It is time to start getting rid of the two crates of comics that I was absolutely sure I would read again but have not blown the dust off since I came here three years ago, at which time I had not looked at them for some years either. Also,  shirts missing buttons.  Also, trousers with visible holes. Yes, I can wear them at home.  But you only need one pair of trousers at home where no one sees them, because, obviously, no one will see that you have only one pair when no one sees them.

Anyway!  Since these people were hanging around, I mowed harder and longer than I do on an average day.  I try to do some each day, as a kind of exercise, except when the weather forbids it.  This summer there has been more days with some rain than usual, which I deeply appreciate.  But it also means the lawns get a bit furry even by my standards.  The landlord and family prefer them with crewcut at the most.  And I suspect lawns are very important to them, since the house is surrounded by such vast expanses of the stuff.  Thus, to forestall an immediate eviction caused by contempt for the court of lawn, I worked hard for half an hour, and was drenched in sweat.

(Normally I don’t care what people think about me, but these are not people, they are my continued living at this nice place. Besides, usually I don’t need to care what people think because God sees me. But God loves grass, as evidenced by how much he has created of it and how he makes it grow; the landlord family hates grass. So usual rules do not apply.)

The thing to do when drenched in sweat is to take clothes off and take a bath, in that order. However, in the interval between “clothes off” and “take a bath”, the doorbell rang.  This was the landlord’s family wanting to give me a message.  I reasoned, however, that they would probably not want to do so while I was naked, so I put on some clothes, at which point they were about to drive away.

Usually people do just that, drive away after ringing my doorbell.  This is not because people like to prank me by ringing my bell and running. It is because in 2 out of 3 times (or so) people ring the bell when I am either asleep, bathing or on the porcelain throne.  This is out of proportion to the time I spend doing these things.  It is as if the doorbell has some kind of indicator light that I can’t see, signaling to those outside that I am not in a position to answer.  Except it is reversed so that they mainly ring it when I am otherwise occupied.

Not always though.  My old Christian friend who comes over a few times a year to pray with me and borrow my scientific magazines, somehow he manages to get through.  Likewise the kids selling lotteries for local clubs. At least sometimes.  I guess sometimes they may be among those who give up before I open.  Hard to say, since I can’t see them either. And of course there are probably some ringing when I am at work as well, possibly when I’m out on a walk.  Overall, I must be pretty hard to find. At least if you think a minute is an ocean of time to wait.  In which case, don’t come to me and ask why time flies so fast and where did the years go. The years went while you were driving like a speed maniac from house to house, ringing the door bells and running away faster than I could button my trousers.

Slice of life today.  Even though I’ve dated this toward the end of the 20th, I could not possibly have updated it then, because this night I had unplugged my computer and modem earlier in the night.  There was a crazy thunderstorm or two.

I am not sure exactly whether this was the same thunder I walked through in the city after work, but if so, it had moved pretty slowly from there to here, and picked up a lot more electricity.  It was bad enough in the city actually.  I honestly hesitated to go out in the rapid succession of lightning, but I had already had a longer day than usual at work.

I had to go to work earlier than I usually do, because this was the day when we would get instructed in the new phone queue system, with practical exercise.  I learn fairly easily, but in things like this, nothing can replace on-site, hands-on training.  So I got up earlier than usual, had less time for myself before haring off to work, and was there longer.  It was already late afternoon; if I were to wait an hour just because I was afraid to be struck by lightning, it would be evening.  So I walked through a mostly deserted city while the rain was pouring cats and dogs and the lightnings flew back and forth above me like heavenly electrical badminton.

This was just a warm-up for the night’s light show, it turned out.  I was peacefully using my computer when it started after dark.  I thought I heard something, so I went to the front door to check.  I did not open that door.  It has a translucent part, nothing you can see any shapes through, little more than whether it is night or day outside.  At this point, it should have been night. It was not.  It was a flickering, pulsating daylight.  And the sound of water coming down with an intensity I doubt I get in my shower.

Needless to say, I soon shut down and unplugged the home office and took out the phone contact.  Then I went to the living room, stood in the middle of the dark room and watched.  The lightning bolts followed each other so closely there was no time for darkness to return between them.  The sky was an electric pulsating white that seemed to come from all directions.  I can only think of one time before I have seen the like, and then only possibly.  It was during an exam in high school.  But this was in the night, and therefore even more impressive.

Luckily the mobile phone / handheld computer worked just fine, at least for data traffic.  I am not sure it would be wise to talk in it.  Or at least not listen.

The thunderstorm had passed when I went to bed, but the power tripped off once after that, and I was not sure whether there would be more of them.  So I went to bed early, still with my computers and network unplugged.

Before this had happened, however, I had downloaded two e-books. This was around the peak of my Okawa mania (I’d already ordered several of his books from Amazon, more about them later if I live and learn)  but then I found that two of them were available as e-books for a very comfortable price from ebookmall.com. So I bought and downloaded them, and put them on my iPaq. These were The Laws of the Sun and The Laws of Eternity, two of this three most famous books.  For some reason the middle book of the trilogy was not there, The Golden Laws. I’ve ordered it in print from Amazon though, but e-books are more practical.  They take up no space, the reader is small and unobtrusive, they are searchable, and I can jump straight to highlights if I reread them.  I usually don’t reread anything, but then again I don’t usually re-watch movies and I saw The Laws of Eternity at least three times.

The Laws of the Sun is a pretty weird book.  Parts of it reads like the setting for a sci-fi role playing game, with detailed information about a number of continents that supposedly rose from the ocean and fell back over the last million years, and their civilizations. Not to mention the various levels of Heaven and the souls who live there, and how this relates to life on Earth.  But at least Heaven is not scientifically disproved.  Actually, the celestial part largely agrees with my own intuition, which was why he caught my interest in the first place.

Also, there is the small thing about the author being the Buddha reborn (which, I am pretty sure, is blasphemy to Buddhists, since Nirvana is supposed to be the final dissolution, the end of the circle of rebirth.  For some reason Buddhists are fed up with being reincarnated and want OUT of it. At least Theravada Buddhists.  I am not sure why they think it is a bad thing, honestly.  It is like eternal life except you don’t remember it.  And let’s face it, if you lived for a billion years, how much would you remember even if you did not die?)

But in between the sci-fi part and the seeming blasphemy, there is a lot of profound spiritual stuff that fits right in with what I have accumulated through life on that front. It is really confusing in a way.  If he’s just some crazy guy or Japan’s answer to Scientology, where does he have the good stuff from?

But if I ever find that out, it will probably not be in a slice of life entry.  Probably. With my life, even slices can be pretty weird.