Saturday 27 November 1999

Pic of the day: Shadows fall. You may already guess that this is not a hysterically funny diary page today, and you are right.

Oh no! This seems to be the end of the "justagirl" journal, one of my favorite reads and one of three I'm on a notify list for. (One of the other two is also gone.) This is just not fair. She stops writing because of some creature, who I at least don't know from Adam, but who has some kind of vendetta going on against her. This may or may not be because she won some diarist award, while this person is famous for not winning any and making a scene about it. I guess today's lesson is to never be so good that you are noticed.

This incident had me thinking about how come that I keep writing this stuff. It's been since last summer or so, though the archives only go back to Nov 1 last year. This is certainly breaking no records in the genre. But one thing you may not know unless you know me well: I rarely finish anything. As a child, I would avoid playing the last notes of a song before I ended for the day. I broke off my education before the last year of mercantile school, when I was the best in my class (or my school, for that matter, which was one of the better) and won some kind of prize (third prize, I think) in a nation-wide competition. I always start things (including dozens of novels) and I almost never finish anything. I guess I am not a very patient person. Or perhaps I am. Perhaps I don't mind going on and on, I just mind finishing.

Finishing reminds me of death. The final exam. If I accomplish everything I want in my life, I may just as well die. But then again, there's the current state of not finishing a single thing, that's a bit extreme too, don't you think? So ironically, the reason why I keep writing here every single day may be that I do not wish to finish it.

You may or may not have heard about the ferry disaster on Norway's west coast today, depending on whether you are Norwegian or not. By international standards is twenty lives not much, but we're a sparsely populated country. And it seems that these deaths were largely unnecessary. The high-speed katamaran ferry ran into an undersea cliff and the front was shattered. The crew told the passengers to not panic, and they did not. Until somewhere between half an hour and a hour later, when the ferry started to sink really fast. According to survivors, it was passengers who organized the evacuation, such as it was. However, they did not know how to activate the lifeboats. And the crew was nowhere to be found. (They seem to have jumped into the sea before the ferry sank. There were several people left standing on the ferry as it sank rapidly into the storm-whipped sea. Luckily, the ferries have life wests at every seat. It seems that almost all passengers had life wests on, but the sea is rather cold in Norway this time of the year, and you freeze to death in less than half an hour.

It is worth mentioning that the cliff was not marked, despite being close to a rather heavily trafficked route. After an earlier accident, money was set aside for raising a marker. However, as people forgot the problem, the money was used for other purposes. I would not be surprised if that happens again.

In somewhat brighter news, the landlord says that the shower should be ready to use again Wednesday or Thursday. The toilet is fixed, and the handwash too. At no extra cost to me, I'm happy to say. I think the old man had somehow imagined that after more than a decade, things would be the way they were when the house was built. Sooner or later he had to learn otherwise, I'm sorry to say. And he'll probably learn more in the future. But it's not like I've had a sledgehammer party here or anything. I just live here. And I do pay for it, fairly and squarely.