Sunday 6 June 1999

Outside, the rain is falling from a grey sky. Ominous thunder can occasionally be heard in the distance. The best laid plans of mice and men have failed again.

At 3 PM in the afternoon, I called Supergirl. She said it had been a while (which I personally tend to think after a week or two) and proceeded to tell me about the housewarming party, which had been quite a success: There were, like, 3 beer left from the large quantity of drinkables originally assembled. All in all, seems like everybody have had a good time and there was no serious damage.
After a while I mentioned that I'm going to be in Oslo some days this summer. (She will not, I'm sad to say, but the rest of the gang will be there at least one of the times.) I then proceeded to tell her about my new portable, which will let me check my e-mail and update my web pages while I am away. She sounded slightly interested, but it seems she thought it was expensive. I tried to explain that it was worth it because of the high capacity and stuff and stuff. This she accepted readily. I should have seen the rest of it coming.

Suffice to say, now I'm uninstalling my favorite programs from the minitower. Tomorrow or soon thereafter I will try to ship it to Supergirl's father, who will try to cram it into the car when he drives for Munich in two weeks. On the bright side, he generously offered to supply the monitor. (This one is nigh on 10 years old, and making it display all 3 primary colors at once is a mean feat even for me.) So, she gets the baby elephant machine, while I am stuck with the slightly effeminate portable. And she even laughed out loud. I'm well aware of her X-ray vision (she claims it's I who am transparent) but I didn't know she could use it at such a distance...

I could have got this right if I had been patient. Very patient. We are talking entire barking seasons of snail-like patience here. And I don't want to be patient. I have 3 Internet-capable PCs here and she has 0 - zero - there. That just ain't right. (Not to mention that we can't email each other.) I and my best friends use to share anything - certainly I would not like to have her stranded without a computer just because she happens to be dirt poor right now. You may get money when you grow older, but your time will never come back.

If she had truly loved me, she would have taken the laptop. Then again, if she had truly loved me, I would been scared shitless and quite possibly never talked to her again. I hate it when people love me. It burns. I love to be just friends. If that makes any sense at all.

And so darkness falls, very slowly, outside the Chaos Node. I've finally stripped the Baby Elephant of all my personality, leaving behind only the operating system, a free web browser and Word 97. I've browsed the disk repeatedly in a desperate hunt for those extremely embarassing files that are bound to be there after this machine has been my next of kin for a year and a half. Like those pictures that never even made it to the JPG diary, and those dreams and daydreams I jotted down in Notepad for later modification into my novels. It looks like I got them all, but history teaches us that you never get them all, whatever you're hunting down...

It feels strange. It feels like I'm moving. I look at my apartment and a part of me tells me that I'm moving out, though most of me is aware that it is not my body but my mind that is moving. It feels ... sentimental. Like leavetaking of a good friend. Like closing a chapter of my life. Suddenly. I've even moved out of the corner where I used to live (see picture above) and now I sit in front of the window, facing the world and the oh so slow fall of darkness.

In unrelated news, tonight I dreamt not once but twice that I visited a space station. In both cases the ascent was uncomfortable; and in the first dream the place was quite small and cramped, and the staff on the space station were arrogant, bordering on hostile, towards the group of mainly old pensioneers that were sightseeing (me among them).