Sunday 25 June 2000

Pic of the day: Hunting dust bunnies! Yes, in order to impress my female readers (especially from Texas) I'm here squashing dust bunnies who have assembled under the less moved pieces of furniture. Some day I guess I should invest in a vacuum cleaner. (I bought one on a flea market once, but it sucked.)

(Important message: If you find the above picture exciting, you need to marry someone as soon as possible! Don't be too picky!)

Relations

Slept in today. Or rather, I woke up around the usual time, and fell asleep again after listening to an old song on the radio. The song was about a young woman who died an untimely death and her boyfriend (I think) who then went insane. I was very sleepy so I did not get the story behind it. The tune was beautiful, though.

I woke up from a short but vivid dream. In the dream, I was back on Fossheim, the farm where I was born. I was surprised to see a really big camping car come driving uphill to our house. Particularly since it was driving sideways and on the grassy field, not on the road. And it was the hugest camping car I'd ever seen. As I went outdoors, there came a camping car again, this time more normal. The car door opened, and my cousin Magni came out. I greeted her warmly, and she acknowledged it, but seemed distracted. I followed her and found her brother and her mother, who must have come in the big car. I was surprised at seeing my aunt, as she must be pretty close to 80 by now. Not that she looked that old in the dream. As I met her, I woke up.

***

I remember shockingly little from my childhood, except what I read in books during that time. Only scattered images remain, and some stories that I either told myself or was told about what happened. But I know that often during the summers, my aunt and her family would come all the way from the south coast and spend part of their holiday with us. The aunt was my mother's older sister, and they were very close in age. Perhaps not so close in other ways - my aunt was the academic type, and became a teacher. So was her husband, which may explain the summer holiday thing. They had a son and a daughter, both older than me. The entire bunch of them were quite polite and had a well developed sense of humor (though not to the same level as my father and brothers). Their arrival was always welcome, at least to me. And they usually brought some readable stuff too, at the very least weeklies.

The daughter was only a couple years older than me, and really cute in my humble opinion. Now I always liked girls in general, and nice girls in particular. But I do remember thinking that if I had been a girl, this was how I would have looked like. Factor in the extremely high opinion I had of myself at the time, and you will see that this was the highest praise I could bestow on a female! :)

Later when I moved out at the tender age of 15, I were to hang out with these folks on a daily basis for a while. Except the son, who had already gone somewhere else. I think they really got fed up with me, because I was abnormally childish for my age. Not just immature - boys of 15 are almost without exception immature - but really childish. Still, they managed to stay polite most of the time until I found other points of reference in my exile...

I have no idea why I would suddenly dream of them now, decades later. I have not had much contact with them since. I guess I'm too ashamed of who I was at the time... They were among the last who knew me while I was still fully human.

***

The last couple of days I've thought about phoning my best friend, the SuperWoman. For some reason, I have not been able to make myself send her e-mail, as we had planned. I even tried to phone her but neither she nor her roomies were at home. Today she phoned me and told me that her modem was fried for the last weeks. We talked a bit, and then we checked the price of airline tickets on Monday and Wednesday, as she had wanted to be in a funeral of a relative. But that's simply not feasible with a cost of kr 12900 (nearly $1500). She's a poor student, and even for me that's a whole month's pay after tax. (Not that she would have let me pay that even if I had wanted to. And I don't, either. It's not like one of her parents has passed on, or something.)

I'll be more than happy to provide her with a modem, though, if her student friends can't find one or fix her old. Being without a modem for weeks on end seems like prison to me, but she stands up quite well. Then again, she is SuperWoman. :)

Among other things, we discussed the strange fact that the genes of the father is most active at the start of life, while the genes from the mother grows dominant later. I had hoped that she could supplement the information I have on this, but no dice. I also mentioned the Scientific American theme issue about aging. "Yeah, you want to grow old" she quipped. As if that was not the obvious thing to want, considering the alternative. I certainly am not concerned about leaving a pretty corpse, and I said so. We agreed that keeping a reasonable part of one's wits is essential, though. Her poor grandmother had not been so lucky. I guess that can scare a young person.

And anyway, it was nice hearing her voice again. She'll be home in August, which by her reckoning is really soon now. By my reckoning, it is in the far future, by which time anything may have happened. Entire civilization will have risen and fallen by then ...