Sunday 10 October 1999

Pic of the day: OK, I may still be the most real of us, but my Daggerfall character is better looking, right? An, these are my readers. They are used to seeing strange things here, off and on.

Now for something truly strange. I cooked my own spaghetti as usual, and added a little bit of salt. Seltin, to be more exact, a special salt that contains about half potassium salt. Now, despite this being a more balanced salt, I did not want too much of it. I am not a halophile, a salt lover. So I just sprinkled a little of it in my hand and from there into the cooking-pot. It was less than half a teaspoon, probably not a third. I cooked it all until it was finished, and served with herbal spice and riven cheese and olive oil, as usual. It tasted salt.

Well, there is quite a bit of salt in cheese, and I used more cheese than usual. But really. It tasted salty. Not so bad that I could not eat it (especially since I was hungry by now), but quite noticeable. And the taste of salt remained in my mouth after the meal. I drank some water, and I still felt the taste of salt. As if my salt tastebuds had somehow been switched on and irrationally refused to shut down. It was rather disconcerting.

Another strange (though not important) thing happened. The phone rang. Sitting next to it, I took it. I presented myself, and nobody said anything. After a while I put the receiver back down. And soon the phone rang again. This repeated itself and at the third or fourth occurence I informed the silent party that they had called the wrong number.

Now, I rarely get any phone calls. I am not a phone man. I recalled that last time my best friend and her brother had called, they had experienced some strange distortion on the phone line at first. So I turned on my mobile phone, which is usually turned off. (I use it very rarely.) Sure enough, after a few minutes SKH called. He wondered if and where I had the monitor that I had intended to send to Superwoman along with the computer. I explained that I had intended to buy a new one, since the old does only display two (primary) colors, and even that only when the cable is bent just so. We had talked about this before, and he had given her his monitor instead. Now this was forgotten, and he missed the monitor, as he was about to let another member of his extended family borrow his computer. Too bad.

Perhaps not so strange: I exited the roleplaying game Daggerfall, and found that it took a little time for me to adjust to the real world. The things I saw around me looked vaguely ... strange? As usual, it took only a short time, and it's not like I doubted my identity or anything. But there was this brief period of transition, a light haziness. Makes me wonder what will happen when the next generation of computer games come out. I ought to write a novel about that - in fact I have a few attempts in the air - but I guess somebody has already been there and done that, probably in English.

Perhaps it is a good thing the game isn't more realistic, after all.

I took a walk today, in the softest of rain, little more than mist. I listened to love songs and happy music on my minidisc. While walking uphill, I was surprised that I wasn't more out of breath. Somehow I feel older and more fragile. I had forgotten that I was only 40. Isn't that a strange thing to forget?