Saturday 25 December 2004

Pic of the day: "No matter who I play with, I'm constantly thinking about you..." Is it love? Is it hate? Or is it something else again, something that gifted children feel when they meet another of their kind?

Go friends

It isn't every day (or week, or month) that I get a phone call. But before we come that far, I slept till two in the afternoon, nine hours. I had long weird dreams at the end. In one I befriended a small girl, using some of my magic for her benefit. Eventually she had to take a plane to Africa. In the next, I was with my friend "SuperWoman", the one I used to spend every Christmas with for many years (as mentioned yesterday). Both of these dreams were of course very decent, mostly I tried to figure out how to use my powers for their benefit. She was also going to travel somewhere far away soon. The parallel to the first dream was pretty clear.

After I woke up, I was starting to get a little hungry. My digestion is working a bit faster this weekend, but not enough to be a serious problem. Strange, it is not as if I am eating more than usual. Perhaps it comes from reading my archives, which are all filled with heaps and heaps of food each day. Yes, this is a time of the years when I am usually stuffing myself. Nor am I alone in that. For that matter it may be good that I am no longer celebrating Xmas, as I really don't need to gain any more weight...

The snow was falling, first very gently but then more heavily. It can't be much below the freezing point, the snow was almost wet. Still, a white Christmas! I am sure lots of people have hoped for that, perhaps even prayed. Me, I am already too old to like snow. I think of it now as something to be shuffled, not something to bask in. Oh well. Time catches up with us all, eh?

***

My DSL is still down. I wrote a little on my latest novel, then relaxed playing Morrowind and watching anime. I cannot play Morrowind all day, because it is harder on the hand than the online games I usually play. So I broke it up with episodes of Hikaru no Go, the anime about a boy who loves playing the strategy board game Go. It is quite a good game too, far simpler in its rules than chess but far more demanding in its strategies. I can easily believe that someone would not become perfect in it even after 1000 years.

The anime is of course not solely about the board game. The interaction between the characters drives the story, especially the cute rivals Touya and Shindou, two young boys who are really good. One of them is tutored by his father, Japan's most prominent Go player; the other by a 1000 year old ghost that only he can see. It is a strange anime: It is not a comedy, there is next to no romance, no magic except the presence of the ghost – he has no powers except being invisible – and definitely no science fiction. It is squarely set in a Japan so similar to our own that only the names of the country's leading Go players are different. All places and historical events are as usual. It is really hard to explain why this is so fascinating even to us who will never make a really great Go player. But I can say that this is the anime that to me established rivalry as a valid relationship independent from love and hate but of similar strength and exclusivity. I think it was my LiveJournal friend Petronia who used the expression "fall in rivalry". That's pretty good. That's what these boys do: They fall in rivalry and it changes their lives.

***

While I was starting a new episode of the anime, the phone chimed. Even though it is only an arm's reach away, I had time to wonder if someone in my family was dead. I told you, I really don't get telephones often! Not anymore after I reserved myself against telephone sales in the national reservation registry. It was however nothing that bad. It was my until recently best friend, the "SuperWoman". Yes, the one I wrote about yesterday and dreamed about this morning. We talked for about an hour while she was driving home from Christmas with her family, now on her way to pick up her boyfriend and then home. (They live in the same small town, although not together yet, it seems.) As I had hoped, she seems more into this love thing than when they started dating. She better have kids sometime or the world is losing out on some really good genes. I encourage it as best I can, of course.

I was fairly thoroughly informed about the rest of the family, and of course I inquired particularly about the Great Earth Mother. She seems to have some guy in sights who is not too bad. It's OK, it's not like I had a chance anyway. ^_^* She is also someone whose genes need to be preserved. On the other hand, SW and I agreed heartily that there is something wrong with paying the ultimate losers of society to breed, those who lack any other skills than that. In her profession as a doctor, she gets to see the effects it has on children to grow up as a third generation of paid loser. It is evidently not a pretty sight.

Unsurprisingly, our talk eventually turned to spiritual matters. I recommended her to get a Bible in a modern English translation. She grew up in a very active Christian congregation and I believe that if she reads the Bible in the elderly Norwegian speech they used there, she will not be able to see what it says. She will see her parents and uncles and preachers, but not Jesus. I myself have sometimes read an English translation, looking for some expression and not found it. Not because I don't know where it is, but because at that spot in the English translation there is something else. Usually similar, but not exactly the same. Oh, the basics are the same. God (or Gods) still created Heaven and Earth, and Jesus still was raised from the dead. But a lot of the more poetic parts are really different, such as the Psalms and Proverbs.

I explained that much of what we consider Christianity is actually luggage the Church picked up through the middle ages, such as the idea of demons manning the fires of Hell torturing people. Logically, it should be the people torturing the demons, since the demons are the more evil of the two. The Bible however has none of the those scenarios, just a generic mention of a fire for the Devil and his angels and people going there as well when they didn't realize that what they did to his smallest ones, they did to him. The whole pitchfork stuff was added later, during the dark ages and onward. (Actually some parts, such as replacing the Sabbath with the Sunday, was added even earlier, around the time Christianity became the imperial religion of Rome.) This is why we need to discard the whole bundle and read it anew to really allow ourselves to have an opinion at all. Otherwise you are evaluating pearls that are in the stomach of a swine. Depending on how much you like pork, you could still be happy, but it is still wrong.

But while we discussed this, she got so into the topic that she took a wrong turn. Luckily not of the crash-inducing type, but I think it was more like she forgot to pick up her boyfriend. I don't want to have that effect on women, you know, so I made excuses to end our conversation. Still, it was a very pleasant Christmas gift. She may raise children and grandchildren with this guy, and I may dream mostly about another girl now, but I will still always love her as a friend and treasure every hour we spent together in the innocence of youth.