Tuesday 27 February 2001

Pic of the day: Found this cute candle of my totem animal!

Sometimes I wish ...

I thought about it today, because some people really enjoy a hot dog. I used to like them. Hey, I used to love them. Sometimes I wish I could still eat a hot dog and enjoy it. But you see, for some obscure reason my digestion doesn't handle hot dogs well. (Or indeed most kinds of sausages.) That's not so strange, really ... I understand they are loaded with animal fat, and I don't take that well. Light knows what other dubious things go into those sausages. The short of it is, I've become sick from hot dogs so often that now it's almost a reflex. I'd probably get sick even if it was perfectly healthy, just out of habit.

When I was younger, I was sick sometimes, but I had no idea why. It was just one of those things that happend, like thunderstorms on a nice summer day. I ate my hot dogs and enjoyed them without thinking. Later I got sick, but that was another thing. I was ignorant. Sometimes I wish I could still eat hot dogs that way. Sometimes I wish I was still ignorant.

Mostly not, though.

***

When I was a small boy, my grandmother would take me to church. There was church service every third Sunday in the next village, that was as close as we got. There was where people went when they died, too. Outside the church were their stones, and I guess I supposed my stone would be there too some day, with the rest of the family. Heh. But I did not go with my grandma to see the stones, or to hear the strange stories of the priest. My favorite part was the singing. (Actually I liked the prayers too.) There wasn't all that much singing at home. My mother couldn't and wouldn't sing. My father would sometimes sing when he was working, strange songs that made no sense to me. But in church, everybody was singing. And I too, and boy did I have lungs back then.

My grandmother often used to give me a little bit of chocolate when they started to sing. It would be another twenty years or so before I got the hint, and then it was a bit late. I continued to sing my merry way through school and later the rather informal meetings of Smith's Friends, the pious christian group. They're certainly not big on ritual, compared to your average church, but there was always much singing. And of course, I would sing at home and when walking around.

As the years passed by, it gradually dawned on me that I was singing terribly. I would be a random number of notes above or below the rest of the people, and the best I could hope for was to keep that distance reasonably constant instead of varying it in the middle of a verse. Even if I listen to instruments, or even my own voice recorded, there is no way I can manage to attune my output to the input. There is simply no connection, like a bridge taken by the flood and never rebuilt. I sing kind of decently when alone and without any music, but that's it. Singing together with other people is bound to be a striking disharmony every time. But I didn't know that.

I've said this before, but I really miss singing more than sex. (Probably because I did a lot of singing before I discovered that I failed miserably, unlike sex.) Sometimes I still wish I could sing like I did before. Sometimes I wish I was still ignorant.

Mostly not, though.

***

I've liked girls for as long as I can remember. I was just a preschooler when my family teased me with the neighbor girl, asking if we were sweethearts. I felt quite happy about that, and proud too I think. I had a pretty clear idea that if I survived childhood (not an obvious thing at the time) I would eventually meet a fantastic woman and love her all my days, just like my father. Later I met more people and most of them were married, but they were not cooperating in the way I saw my parents did. I made up my mind that I would acquire unusual skills and knowledge that could complement the skills and knowledge of my future wife, because there was no need for us both to know and do the same things. Yes, I really did think like that.

That's quite an irony, that my wife is one of the reasons why I am the person I am today. Since I have never been married and never will. It took a long time of fear and neurosis to acknowledge for myself that I was never going to have a normal family and live a normal life. But when I eventually embraced it, I felt a freedom and a safety that showed me that, for some reason, this was the way to go.

Sometimes I wish that I could still convince myself that I was falling in love, that my human heart would overcome my cynical mind, and that True Love was waiting for me somewhere in the future. Sometimes I wish I was still that ignorant.

Mostly not, though.