Sunday 16 July 2000

Pic of the day: Yet another picture from the wild and varied nature just outside my home. No wonder I love to live here.

Lazy day

First of all, I slept till ca 10:30. First time in I don't remember how long, that I actually got eight hours of sleep. Probably a bit more too, I don't remember when I went to bed. I remember that I was terribly sleepy, though. I had managed to stay awake by reading Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, but eventually I resigned and staggered to bed.

One of the nice things about living so alone, is that I can stay up as long as I need or want. But I am not exempt from the laws of nature - sooner or later I must sleep, or bad things will happen. Ironically, my mind is a night owl but my body is not. I'm at my peak around noon, typically. As the night progresses, my nose and throat start to clog as if from a hay fever. Later, my throat may actually grow sore, and my stomach and guts start to churn. By the time I cannot stay awake any longer, I often feel pretty bad. It beats waking up in the middle of the night, though.

***

Did hardly anything worthwhile today. Well, I made my own dinner at least. I remembered to cook a bit less than I'm used to; I did not feel too hungry. I eat gradually less, it seems, and no one else is worried by that. I'm still far from skinny. In fact, I still have some of my old trousers lying around just in case I'll ever fit into those again. I was quite alive by then, so it's a safe bet that I don't really need all of my current mass. Then again, it's not drastic the other way either.

Heh. That reminds me. I sat on the bus the other day and could hardly help hearing a couple who were talking quite clearly nearby. They talked about someone I don't know, and how this guy was fat and just sat and complained while eating snacks and drinking beer. It was quite clear that they had no pity for him at all. Nor did they seem to notice the rather overweight lady sitting on the seat in front of them and getting bathed in their opinions. I cast a glance at the couple, and noticed that the man - who did most of the talking - had a rather visible hanging tummy himself. Heh. Life ...

Anyway, as I was saying, I didn't do much except make my own dinner. Wrote a long e-mail, though. And took a walk. Oh yes. I took a walk, with my tiny little minidisc player. I had a disc that I made when the player was quite new. That would be two years ago, I guess? Or is that three? Long long time ago. Before MP3 was an alternative, at least. The disc was marked "Helonia". That's because it contained mostly the music I listened to when I wrote on one of my favorite unfinished books. Seeing as "Helonia" is actually a real word, sort of, I guess it's a good thing I never finished it. Heh.

Anyway, the disc contained exclusively songs by Chris de Burgh (mostly) and Enya. Both of them Irish, I think. Enya's "The Celts" (from a BBC series, unless I misremember) is fabulous walking music, did you know that? Hmm. I know there was one more song from that CD which I did listen to at the time, and which was not on the disc. "The sun in the stream" I think it was called. You see, the whole story was largely inspired by the music. This was often the case until a couple years ago. Now I tend to write in silence. I'm still not sure if that is an improvement, but it does save time. I tended to write at half speed, my attention divided.

Listening to the music, the story came back to me in fairly great detail. Funny enough, the novel actually started off as a spin-off from another novel (which I never finished, either - I guess there is some part of me that believes it is bad luck to actually finish anything). The first novel was a rather standard "alternate worlds" SF novel, in which the main character visits various parallel Earths. I love that kind of stories and since there were just too few, I wrote my own. One place in that story, the main character found some comic books from one of the alternate worlds interesting. One of them contained the second story ...

Yeah, I know. You can start to see why I don't get anything done. Much less "have a life", as people call it when they do the things they enjoy and I don't.

***

OK, I've been reading Harry Potter. At least that's pretty mainstream. I hear they've sold millions of the book. In hardcover, I assume, since that is what goes out first. Mine is certainly hard enough. A bit big, but hey, there's a lot of reading in it. I suspect that the part in the beginning was the inspiration for the dream I had this morning. No magic, that I remember, but I dreamt that I was visiting a medium large family with more boys than girls. No one I know in real life, though, and I've never seen the house or the car. Funny how I sometimes seem to live completely different lives in my dreams. As if I'm somehow intercepting other people's dreams, which would make sense to them.

Oh, and I've played Master of Magic. And I've written a GameJournal entry about it, too. It is as nerdy as it gets. Then again, today was a thoroughly nerdy day, and a lazy one too. I even planned to write down two chapters I have in my head for my own current unfinished novel, but I played Master of Magic instead. Not sure how great a loss that is to my readership. :)

Anyway, that's it for today. It's fluff all the way down.