Tuesday 8 June 1999

OK, now "the check is in the mail" as the saying goes. Tomorrow morning my old (recently new) computer should be in Oslo, ready for SKH to fetch. Or perhaps just as likely a young girl with a brand new driver's licence. *cheers*

It's been raining from the morning. This really clinched my decision to call for a taxi. It's bad enough that the computer is heavy. Well, not exactly heavy: It's light as a baby when you pick it up; it only gradually turns heavy as you carry the ungainly box along. After a few minutes it reminds more of an elephant, and I wonder how I got the great idea of trying to carry it. Thus it has been with my computers for years. So, walking for 15 minutes with the beast to get it on the bus was not a very attractive idea in the first place. In soaking rain it would have been even worse. I know this for sure, as you will soon understand.

So I called taxi. I don't have a car, haven't had in many years. Almost everyone here have one: People love cars, and the State has found this most useful. When you buy a new car, half the price is taxes. The gas (petrol) is ca $1 per liter, most of it taxes. Then there's road tax, plus mandatory insurance. That's before we even start to think about toll roads - the major cities are now ringed with toll booths, and Kristiansand counts as a major city in this one aspect.
Anyway, even if I had got a car for free and never drove an inch, I'd still pay more than I do for a couple cab fares a year. Highly recommended unless you need a car in your work.

It kept raining through the day. I knew that sooner or later I would have to walk down to the railway station with the baby elephant box. I waited and waited for a pause in the rain. I said to Marianne: "The only certain way to make the rain pause, is to go out and get yourself soaking wet. When you come back, it will stop raining for a while." But as closing time approached, the rain just kept hammering down on our supposed sun coast. So I finally Just Did It. Of course, I got (as The Weather Girls so profoundly put it) absolutely soaking wet. But at least, when I was well in of doors, the rain stopped for a while. It came back on before I got off the bus on my way home, this time with thunder and lightning too.

I came home, and after a while I cabled up the old PC, the Compaq I had before the Baby Elephant. It started with only one glitch, to my pleasant surprise. (I remembered it as recurrent.) Unsurprisingly, the color red is gone again. Even so, it is sort of functional. In fact, I'm writing this on it right now. To a floppy, though, so I can send it from the portable. The modem went with the other one.

One of the first things I noticed, was that there was an audio CD in it. It turned out to be the missed single, "Eternity" with Elisabeth Andreasson (or is it Andreassen now?). Anyway, suddenly I remembered when I had last played it. And as I clicked my way through the old computer, memories flooded me, one after another. I looked on the keyboard, where some of the keys were so worn that no hint remained of the original letter. (Luckily I touch type...) The old Windows backgrounds were windows on my life. The one with the X-man drawing was the latest. I tried to change to the one with a picture of me and "Supergirl" when we were a little younger, but unexpectedly tears filled my eyes and I just had to change it back. So much has changed in these last two years. I've grown a lot older fast. I suspected that, but not so much.

There were programs I had not used for quite a while. The offline message reader for BBSes that I used daily on YouthNet. I warned them early on that the BSS age would pass, and that Internet would swallow all. "Non profit net prophet" was my signature for a while. And here also was the job application that my friend Kristian wrote on my machine a few months before he died. Life goes on, until it ends.

If someone else were to look through the contents on my computer, I suppose it wouldn't tell them much. But to me, it's like moving back into an apartment I've lived in before. (Yes, this has actually happened to me.) In the case of my virtual apartment on my PC, it's a small and crowded one. It reminds me of when I left our farm 15 years old and was away for ten months. I came back and came into the house and it looked ... small. I remember the sadness in my mother's face when I mentioned that. (In those days, I would say anything that came to my mind.) In reality, of course, it was I who had grown. I wasn't fully grown till I was bordering on 19. And my soul still isn't fully grown. I wonder if it ever will be.

All the bridges are burning that we might have crossed
but I feel so close to everything that we've lost
We'll never have to lose it again...
(Leonard Cohen.)