Friday 5 September 2008

Pic of the day: The dentist has even gotten rid of the cute assistants that used to be around when I was young. Perhaps they all got married off. Or perhaps they were not profitable enough.

Dentist and money

Monday I had my half-yearly appointment with the dentist, who took X-rays and studied my teeth in bright light. He found three small holes, two of them so small that he did not see them on the X-rays and overlooked them at first. Today I returned and had them fixed. This was mostly painless. Luckily I did not have a head cold, so breathing was not as much of a problem as it sometimes is.

The two visits set me back a bit over kr 2500, or nearly $500. That's not a noticeable expense to me these days. It would have been at various times in my past, but not right now. Even though I earn little by Norwegian standards, I also have relatively small expenses.

I actually haven't advanced in my career for 20 years or so. I have completely changed what I do, and the official name of my job has changed at some point, and there is a small annual pay rise that all of us get without evaluation. I think it is annual, perhaps it is every other year, but no less at least. Those who are members of a labor union have jobs with more important-sounding names and some more pay than I, even when they do the same thing. I don't have a problem with that. I would not want to earn more money by threatening to not do my job, but they generally also take their job very seriously. I don't take many things in this world seriously. As Søren Kierkegaard said: The problem with people is that they take too many things seriously. Death is serious. (And love, I would add, but I am not sure whether Kierkegaard knew that.)

Paying $500 to the dentist is certainly not on the level of death or love in my world. Obviously this would have been different if I was actually poor: $10 is a lot of money when you don't have it, as an old friend of mine would say. He was alive during the war, I think. He certainly knew a lot more about not having ten dollars than I ever did.

Even when I was some years younger than now, I had some pretty strange money leaks: I would go out and eat dinner at a restaurant, even when alone, sometimes. Not every day of course, but from time to time. I would buy pizza pretty much every workday. (Not necessarily a bad idea - pizza is surprisingly healthy.) And I would have these cravings to buy something. That's how I got the hundreds of CDs, and heaps of clothes, and much more. And the 100+ computer games I threw away when I moved. And my own weight a couple times over in comic books. And, and, and.

***

Spore, the computer game of guided evolution, was out today, at least here in Norway. You start with a single-celled organism and guide it through the various stages of biological and later cultural evolution, until you have your own galaxy-spanning civilization. The creature you end up with does not necessarily resemble humans or even any animal on Earth - that depends on what choices you make during its evolution.

Or so I've heard. I wandered into Gamezone, but the LORD spake unto me: "Dude, you don't have time for that!" Or perhaps that was the voice of reason, I sometimes have a hard time telling them apart. I don't always do what the LORD says, unfortunately, but I've learned by bitter experience that He has a pretty good knowledge of computer games. I blame it on all the people who say "God, this game is so fun!" or "Jesus Christ, this game sucks!" I am not entirely sure why people do this, but if the LORD monitors incoming calls as meticulously as I think, he won't even need to use his omniscience to have a pretty clear grasp on what games to recommend...

What is the world coming to, when I don't even buy one of the best computer games in history the day it comes out?

I also saw a promising game for the PSP (now that's a rare sight), "radiant mythology". Japanese RPG, described by one reviewer as "like a massively multiplayer roleplaying game, without the online part". That sounds exactly like what I would like. Building characters up by doing repetitive quests. Ooh, I feel the urge to start City of Heroes right away. Anyway, I still haven't bought Radiant Mythology, although I consider securing one before it disappears. Probably not though. (Also I know myself well enough to realize that I am a sucker for anything named "radiant", "luminous" or otherwise related to the Light. Unfortunately, in real life the Light cannot be bought with money, or at least not with money alone.

I haven't even bought a replacement for my old bedroom computer. (And it got that name in my old apartment - it is well past its warranty and then some.) Instead, I ended up hooking up the Dell laptop where the screen goes black after a couple minutes. The problem is with the monitor, evidently, because when I hook it up to the LCD monitor on my table, it works like a charm.

I may still buy a new desktop if Apartment Life runs too slowly on the Multicom quad-core. If so, I may have to go to the dentist again: The last two times I bought a computer, I broke a tooth. I may feel like I can afford both now (and I can, easily) but I may feel differently next summer when my job disappears. (Although I can't get fired, I may prefer to move rather than take what they offer me. But that's still very much up in the air.)