Saturday 6 May 2000

Pic of the day: All the birds are singing in the sky, now that the spring is in the air...

It's not just me! I have proof! See, today I took the bus to Tangvall to receive an important letter at the post office. (It contained the password to the Net Bank, yay!) Anyway, I took bus 41, which is supposed to go directly to Tangvall and from there to Kristiansand and the Southlands Center. However, as we came to the crossroads between Åros, Høllen and Tangvall, there was this young woman walking in the general direction of Høllen. And so our (male, foreign) bus driver drove to Høllen first instead. I don't even think he was aware of it. Heh.

If car accidents only killed the driver, I suspect the difference between male and female life expectancy would increase further...

On my way back, I thought about women, of course. And miracles, but let us limit this a bit here. Why are women the center of society? I have already long ago noticed that magazines for a female audience are full of ads and articles about clothes for women; but when you get your hands on a magazine for a male audience, you won't find lots of stuff about clothes for men. No, you find lots of stuff with women (though not necessarily with clothes). Blah. How are we supposed to keep updated? But the women have it all. Clothes, food, family. What are we, walking reproductive organs? At best we are allowed to have a career, so we can attract and feed a female. Blah.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not lobbying for the classical Iron Age society in which women stayed at home and bore children and kept their mouth shut while the men made all the decision. And let's face it, this was probably just an illusion even then. A man has better make the decisions that his woman wants, unless he likes to sleep with a dead fish.

At one point I had two scientific magazines lying around: One was Psychology Today, with an article about playfulness. The other was "American Scientist" (or some such, obviously a competitor to Scientific American) with an article about the domestication of canines. And suddenly this horrible suspicion struck me. That the rapid evolution of our species is not a random event of evolution, or even a direct unmediated Act of God. No, we are being domesticated by the women. They have been secretly working on this project for all these millenia, and they won't give up until the boys are born with a white star in their forehead, the ultimate mark of domestication...

The weather here is warm and sunny, but not yet too hot to saunter about outdoors. I took a walk through the woods, and as I returned home, I had a long uphill walk which took some time. I saw two butterflies who danced around each other in the air, then separated and flew in two different directions. I followed one of them with my eyes for a long while, where it fluttered around on its own.

(Foreigners, did you know this? Butterflies are called "sommerfugl" in Norwegian, which means "summer bird". I think that's more poetic than butterfly, which sounds like something you find in your food if not stored properly...)

But when I passed, the two butterflies had somehow again found each other and were dancing together in the air, before they once more fluttered off in different directions.

Got a postcard from London today! It's from SuperWoman. She likes it there.