Sunday 2 January 2000

Pic of the day: Here I am again. I may look slightly younger than last year, but basically nothing has changed. Inside I am the same guy, except that now I know it.

Tonight I slept for seven hours, finally. It felt good to not have an alarm clock waking me up. Then again, I woke up from a longish dream in which I was in business partnership with a guy with no business ethics. He would use the company money for his private pleasures, he would lie to business associates, and generally was a rotten apple as far as business was concerned. But he was charming enough otherwise. I've actually known a couple of these in real life; and so I started to suspect much earlier than he thought, that there was a cuckoo in the nest.

One of the cool concepts I picked up from Smith's Friends was "paradise life". For ease of thinking, Smith described three stages of christian life (though not all of them at least are exclusively christian). The carnal, soulish and spiritual. In the middle stage, you had the paradise life. Here, you have victory over those lusts of the flesh that are against the soul. You don't feel an overwhelming need to get severely drunk, have a fistfight or sex (depending on gender) with passing strangers, urinate in public places and beat up your kids. On the other hand, you don't feel an overwhelming need to sacrifice yourself, either. What you feel is the need to have a nice day. And another, and another. To break out of paradise upwards is really hard.

Today I was working with the January 1999 archive. It all started because I found that the year ago entry said January 1998. So I fixed this, and the links at the end, which by now was pointing into the wild blue. Then I did so for a few more days, until I got bored. And I read them. And I noticed that nothing has changed. I've lived another year and I am the same person. I still have strange dreams in the night, I'm still generally happy against the odds, and my male boss is still struggling to get my pay right. I still finish books by James Redfield and think they are fairly good to be New Age. And I still have the sniffles in January.

And so it dawned on me: I have been trapped in paradise. If an angel from on high (or an alien - who would know the difference anyway?) came down and gave me an elixir that let me live for a thousand years without aging ... then you would probably find me doing the same things a thousand years from now. Perhaps not exactly still playing Daggerfall and Civ2 (unless the potion works on computers too) but basically the equivalent in the year 3000.

The worst thing is that I do not know if I should be pleased or scared.

I went for a walk, and it was a mild sunny day in the middle of the winter in Norway. What? Quickly summoning up my knowledge of the laws of physics, I found that something strange was afoot. The sun is so low here that it should barely be able to compensate for the heat radiated off into space in the middle of the day. To keep it as mild as this, there must be a constant influx of warm air from the south. But the warm air should be cooled when it came this far north, and the water in it should condense, giving us clouds and rain. But there are only thin wisps of clouds right now. I can see how the majority of Norwegian politicians want to build two really big gas power stations on the west coast, significantly increasing our nation's output of greenhouse gases. If this is the greenhouse effect, nobody around here is going to complain.

Today I made a half ready made pasta meal (Pasta di Parma) as I was all out of cheese for my homemade meal. As I sat down and started to eat, Staffman called. From work, this time. I have no idea how he knows when I'm eating or sleeping. Perhaps it's just me who is eating and sleeping a lot. I can't believe all these people are so eager to work. Yesterday the third staffer was there too. Our boss, the administrative office leader, tends to come before the birds have woken. At least he doesn't work the weekends. Do these people love work, or do they just have a terrible life at home so they're happy to be out of the house? I notice that they are all married...