Wednesday 20 December 2000

Pic of the day: Me, the orange shorthair.

Preparations

Most people prepare for the holidays now. I prepare for the trip to visit the Super family. Today is washing day, washing trousers and shirts. Hopefully they should be dry by tomorrow afternoon when the train goes for Oslo.

I was in the city today, even though I did not work. I had to cut my hair. Well, actually I did not have to. It did not irritate me in any way. In fact, my favorite lenght is about a week longer than it was today, it was just now coming into its own. But Superwoman likes it to be short. A couple years ago, she chased me out to have it cut on Christmas eve, which is not a simple thing to accomplish. Luckily I did get it done, eventually. I don't want to risk that again this year. There is no accounting for tastes, especially in women! :)

Now of course Superwoman does not really own my body - wives do that, Best Friends do not - but I wish her to be happy with my hair. Even though she obviously could not care less about what I think of her hair, which was strikingly beautiful when it was long. Oh well. I never said that she loves me the way I love her. It's not a "tit for tat" relationship. It is not really a "tit" relationship at all, come to think of it.

***

I wrote some deep stuff here about how in the past you could not afford to love people who did not contribute to the survival of your genes and stuff, since life then was nasty and brutish and short. I deleted it. Who am I to write about love? I know less and less about it for every passing year, or so it seems.

***

Digestion is another matter. Mine seems to have adopted the "punctuated equilibrium" model rather than gradual progress. This evening it is being punctuated. Hopefully a measure of equilibrium will be in place for the travel tomorrow.

On my back, the outer bandages have eventually come off, despite my attempts to keep them as long as possible. There still remain smaller compresses on the actual wounds, one in particular soaked through with blood. But it seems to have coagulated long ago, so it does not seep into my shirt. Goody. Now I hope this one time is enough, that they find the spot to be benign. That's out of my hands by now, however, and I don't give it much thought. If they have to go back and strip 1 cm more in every direction, it'll be something worth writing about.

There's enormous amounts of money being channeled into medical research these days, particularly in the USA as I understand but also some here in Europe and in Israel. It may be that my generation will have treatments that came too late for my mother. (Yes, she is still alive as far as I hear, and still slowly dying.) Despite the leaps and bounds of science (OK, snail-like crawl is more like it) the old rule still applies: An ounce of prevention is better than a pound of treatment.

***

On a slightly lighter note - not that this says much - I mentioned the online game Planetarion the other day. The 72 hours of newbie protection ends tomorrow sometime, and I have flashes of childhood memories about being at the mercy of the big boys. A mercy that is not always there. I am digging in, making an attack on me a too costly experience compared to what they can get out of it. I guess childhood experiences really do shape us ...

But the "pass it on" chain of bullying can be broken. Even in games, I play nice. Try to build up instead of tearing down. I find that even in role playing games, I am unable to play an evil role convincingly. That's sort of ironic because I obviously know a bit about evil, about the pleasure of crushing and humiliating the weak. I learned about it when I was a child, at school.

I guess that's why one of the most defining moments in my life was the day when I sat in my grandparents' rocking chair back home on the farm and read the small tract by Elias Aslaksen about the way to handle it. And in the course of less than an hour, I came to understand that we need not mechanically pass on the bad things that are being done to us. This is the true meaning of free will: That we can choose what to do, regardless of what is being done to us. But boy is that easy to forget. I thought that I would never ever forget it, but I sometimes did.

In my dream, my transformation into a porcupine halted somewhere inbetween man and animal. I just now looked it up and saw that I had that dream while I was visiting the same place that I'm preparing to go tomorrow. In the dream, I know that worried me, the lack of completeness. But perhaps there is some hope in it, too.

(Incidentally, I had not yet found the free online comic Kevin & Kell when I had that porcupine dream. It's funny how similar the character Lindesfarne is, apart from the gender of course. Sometimes I have felt like this, too... Sometimes things happen which you are not prepared for.)