Wednesday 1 December 1999

Pic of the day: Reading Scientific American. Yet another issue! I particularly found the article about the Grameen Bank interesting. The reproductive behavior of slaving ants was fascinating too. But am I reading too much of this and too few romance novels?

OK, let me first say that I wrote a long entry for today. But when the time came to upload it, my gut feeling screamed for me to stop it. My gut feeling did not give any clear reason for this, however. But for starters, I'll erase any reference to the world AIDS day, since I don't know spit about it. I mean, yes, I am a library. But I don't really know anything, like the people who have AIDS, or whose kids have AIDS, or neighbors, or coworkers ... in short, a lot of you. I only know with my forehead, not with my spine. Go read someone who really knows, and I'll stick with something I know, for once in my fleeting little life.

My gut feeling is nodding in the background, here. Sounds like I got one thing right, then.

I was still at home in the morning, and still sleepy, when the radio blared out some bouncy song from the 60es. "Congratulations" was the title, though to my half listening ears the singer was congratulating himself more than anything else. And suddenly I almost choked on some phrase. "...when she said she couldn't live without me" or some such. I'm pretty sure that was the content of it. And I went like "eeewww!" with shock and disgust. Who is sick enough to congratulate himself on another persons co-dependency?

A while after I got stable Internet access at home, I played text based online games called MUDs. In fact, I spent way too much money on that one summer and it cost me enough to impact my standard of living in other ways for a while. It was great fun, though. This was real-time role playing, in which we played various fictional characters in a quasi-medieval magical world. I like roleplaying games. (You may already have noticed this.) Since many of the characters are played by other humans, you get very real interaction. I had not expected it to be this real, though.

I played one such fictional character, which fictionally had a fictional relationship with another fictional character played by another real human. In fact, they were even fictionally married and had fictional sex. (Seeing as there is no way to verify the age of anyone over the Net, I made sure to not teach anyone anything new or detailed.) This is all fun and games until someone loses an eye. Or a mind. In this case, the player of the other character started to bug me for my real name, adress, phone. I politely declined to divulge this information, as I felt this was not what I came for. The other player went all melodramatic and how life did not have any meaning any more and to end it all and stuff. I don't know if that happened, as I left the game.

Sometimes I wonder why it has to be like this. Why one must lay aside reason and a big chunk of sanity itself to enter into the kingdom of earthly love. Not to go all Vulcan on you, but I feel that I am reason to a pretty high degree. With all respect for my gut feeling, I simply cannot make myself revert to a bunnylike state for the sake of "love" (the falling-in type).

Take the whole "love at first sight" thing for instance. Now I wish I could say anything about this without downright insulting someone. (I guess this could be hard to do, with the spatial proximity to "bunnylike" in the previous paragraph. Ahem.) What I try to say is that some of us think that it is more worthwhile to enter into a deeper, more intimate relationship when you know someone's attitudes and behavior. That the size, shape and color of someone's body parts or the way they move can simply not convey the information that really would be useful in the long haul.

All this, of course, is sort of negated by the fact that I'm not, like, getting any. Or even really trying to. I haven't even kissed anyone for well over a decade. I still think that, in theory, bright people should sit down and talk together and devise a strategy to bring their combined genes into a future that is most certainly going to need them. But that's not the way it works, obviously. This could of course be because there are no really bright people of the appropriate gender. Or it could just be that for some reason this idea is not as smart as it looks to me...