Monday 11 January 1999

Pic of the day: Screenshot from Daggerfall. The armor shoppe in the village of Longing, on a foggy spring day. This shop, btw, gives great prices. Longing also conveniently has a School of Julianos, a bank, a general store and 2 clothes shoppes. Wheee! The name of the store in picture, by the way, is Longing Mail...
Acid or no acid, I was home sick today. Isn't that unfair, that my head hurts and I feel generally miserable even though I did not drink alcohol in the weekend? I guess I should make up for it now ...

Actually there is a lot of research linking moderate alcohol consumption to better health, particularly as concerns the blood circulation. It may be more complicated than it sounds, of course: What other lifestyle traits do these people have in common? Moderate alcohol use is usually the hallmark of the upper middle classes, whereas the working classes tend to be more polarized into heavy drinkers vs no drinking at all. So, the jury should probably still be out on this one. Me, I have the added feature that my head hurts from even small amounts of wine or liquor. Quite a bit less than what would be needed to get drunk. (Of course, if I got sufficiently drunk, I would not notice my headache. Then again, I would not notice much else either, in which case it would be cheaper to just go to sleep.) It is a fairly light headache, not the splitting pain that many people experience the day after. I wonder if I am a kind of mutant, or an imperfect clone from outer space, or perhaps all of my family is like this only they either haven't tried or they have the good grace to keep silent about it.

I sometimes wonder, how do I know (as opposed to feel) that I live the best life I could live? There is no way I could try out all the alternative lifestyles, not even those who are physically possible. Some of them are mutually exclusive, and others would require me to have started earlier to get a true impression of them. And even for the rest, most are quite far from my current life. Chances are I'm going to die without a doctorate in anything at all, without having murdered anybody, and without having bought lots of drinks for a lonesome, dysfunctional chick in exchange for sexual favors. I seriously doubt that I shall regret any of these shortcomings on my deathbed, but then again, do other people regret that they didn't spend enough time in front of their computer?

(I sure hope I get a deathbed, that's like the exam of life isn't it? But no haste, by all means! I just think it would be such an anticlimax to just fall in front of a train or some such. Ideally I'd like to sit in an old folks' home, nodding in a chair, and remembering my life while waiting for the end. There's this great song about that, I have to find it, I think it's by Tolkien.)