Saturday 25 March 2000

Pic of the day: Portrait of me, in fittingly abnormal colors.

I woke up a quarter to six in the morning, and got up. Normally I would have tried to sleep a bit longer, though my mind was already wide awake. Normally as on workdays. Because I have found that I can stay alert at work for about as many hours as I have slept at night. This means that if I try to get away with only 6 hours of sleep, I will become very sleepy well before the end of the day. This would not be a great problem if I could just sleep ten or even five minutes undisturbed, with my head on my arms on my table. This recharges me for the rest of the workday and then some. But my unofficial work description is being on beck and call. At any moment, any one of my coworkers or bosses may call me or burst into the room. So I have to stick with sleeping at night.

But today is Saturday. There is nothing now that can drain my energy and make me sleepy in the middle of the day. Because I am at home and here I do only fun things. I read e-mails and news and other people's diaries. I play computer games. I make my own dinner and eat it. Stuff like that. Fun, fun, fun. I cannot imagine that pensioneers will be bored until they start to lose limbs or eyes or such things. Then again, I have never been really old so I don't know how it feels. But if it feels like not having to go to work, then I fervently hope that I shall live to such an age. Work sucks. Play is fun.

So anyway, after an hour or two I drank a glass of chocolate milk. I knew that I would probably get sick, and half an hour or so later I did get sick, though I did not throw up. If I eat or drink more than ca 100 milliliter for breakfast, I am likely to get sick. This bites, since morning is the time of day that I am most hungry. Later in the morning the capacity to eat gradually increases, until at lunch I can easily eat a whole meal (such as a McFeast burger and a medium milkshake, or two slices of pizza, or one large serving of spaghetti). Then my apetite gradually recedes, until in the evening I will only eat a small yoghurt now and then, or a few pieces of chocolate, or a glass of chocolate milk.

Shortly after 9 in the morning I put on my shoes and heavy jacket and walked down the hill and across the bridge, up the hill and over to the local small grocery store. After buying lots of yoghurt and some other stuff, I walked the same way home. Not having a car means that I have a good excuse to get some fresh air and have that old blood pump doing what it does best. Of course I could get the same health benefits from making out on the lawn, but more about that later.

In my electronic inbox, I found a mail from one of the faithful readers who have stuck with me despite the deep dark secrets of my past and the recent boring laundry list entries. This reader referred to my entry on Thursday where, among other things, I met my oldest brother again. I said there that my brother reminded me of what I might have been if I had been a normal human. The mail asked me in which ways I was not a human being? Well, this is a topic close to my heart, and so I decided to while away an entry on that.

It goes beyond not having a wife or children or a house or a car or a television or a career ambition. In fact, I would say that all of these are connected and depend on the first, the wife. (As a christian, albeit a heretic, I do not hold the institution of concubinage in high regard, so it's basically wife or nothing. Well, it is basically nothing. More about that presently.) Mind you, I have nothing against wives. Some of my best friends are wives. But with a wife comes the rest of normalcy: The car and the house and the TV and the child and the long hours of working overtime to pay for it all, and no time to play computer games and take unhurried walks and contemplate the wonders of the universe and the fate of humanity and how to create world peace and the perfect Daggerfall character. Basically, with a wife I would be barred from living my own life as if I were already dead, and instead running to live out the dreams of another. Thank you, but I prefer to remain alive until my body dies.

Oh, there are certainly abnormal women out there. Though I doubt that any of those would want me. And I doubt I would want them, either. Because to normal abnormal people, being normal is the ideal and they feel lacking in some way because they fall short of it. There are people who are even less social than I am, but often they are lonely in their aloneness. Hello! That remind me of one of my Sims that I played this past week. He was so terribly lonely that when the guests arrived, he broke down and cried in self-pity instead of going to greet them. Hint, hint: That's not the way to win friends and influence people.

Similarly, there are people who want sex but don't get any. That's just too bad. But it's not quite reason for despair. It might be reason to do something active, if they consider it so important. But really, I can't see that it is quite serious. AIDS is serious. A broken spine is serious. But not getting any? Perhaps I should order my own tombstone. I still have that credit card, you know. "Here lies Magnus Itland, 1958-20XX, dead from lack of sex."

But really, I don't consider my non-normality to be simply a lack of family (and family values). I think it goes deeper. Certainly I have the basic instincts in common with other humans, and indeed most mammals. But outside that, there is a difference in the structure of the psyche.

Normally, the sense of self extends from the sense of body, in more or less concentric layers. After idenfitication with the body comes identification with family, work, house, ethnicity and/or religion, friends and interest groups, ever more remote from the center of the soul. And certainly I also am addicted to having a body. I cannot imagine life without some kind of body. But I can imagine a life without this particular body. In fact, I do so many a night.

In my nightly dreams I often have quite different bodies. For instance yesterday night, when I dreamt about going to a mission high school on a tropical island, I did not have my current body. Rather I had the body of an athletic youngster (which I have never been, as my friends and family will know). This is not a record, far from it. Sometimes I have had the dreambody of a woman, or two bodies at the same time (though only for a short time), or even a non-humanoid alien body.

The same attitude reflects itself in my waking hours. When playing roleplaying games or writing a novel, I do not necessarily create characters that closely resemble myself. Sometimes I do, sometimes it's far from it. If it was possible to trade in bodies and get new and better, I would be near the front of the line to do so. (Though usually I am quite satisfied with this body. It has held up surprisingly well, given the rather tough time it had as a kid.)

And it grows worse from here. I've taken a bit of flak for the way I relate to my birth family. People seem to be unable to believe that I genuinely like my parents and brothers and still don't want to be where they are. So? Years of experience shows that there is very little I can contribute with by being physically present. It's not like I could help them with the farm work or something. I'd just eat more than I worked, like I did in years gone by. No thanks. If they want to talk with me, they know where I am. But I don't see an inherent connection between friendship, or even love, and physical proximity. The same goes for my best friend, that wonderful young woman I use to write about. She lives in a different country most of the year, and it doesn't really hurt, even though I love her approximately like myself. I like to be where she is, I like to see her and listen to her. I would gladly have been by her side every day. But she neither needs nor wants that much Magnus, and I can't say it surprises me. I, on the other hand, can't get enough of me, and so I have my own company any day of the week.

Well, this is far too long already. Nobody ordered a book. I could write more, and if I stay alive, there will probably be more. If not, I doubt I die from lack of human company in any of its forms. More likely I may end my days by choking to death on my cheese-covered spaghetti. I've had two of these meals just today. That's not exactly normal, you know.