No dating please, we are happy

There are some people who don’t like dating. Kazehaya-kun is not actually one of them, he is just waiting for the right girl, who is the one who thinks  he does not want anyone.  (Kimi ni Todoke is a highly recommended show btw, family friendly and edutaining.) I, on the other hand, actually don’t like dating and don’t want romance even if it were thrown after me. So what am I doing on a dating site?

I am pretty sure it was not a dating site when I joined it. It probably had another name as well, because according to Wikipedia this site was launched a month before City of Heroes, and the reason I signed up was a quiz related to the alpha version of CoH, which was changed pretty dramatically when I took part in its closed beta, more than a month before it officially opened.

Anyway, I have been hanging around since. It is free, after all, and they still have quizzes too. I have a profile there, explaining politely that I’m not looking for a date, or anything really. I must be looking cuter than in real life though, because occasionally a woman still picks me. It will probably just be more now that I have adjusted my income upward a bracket.  (It is the dollar that is sliding, if you must know. Thus my income, in Norwegian currency, can buy me more American books than before. The latest, currently in the mail, is The Transcendant Unity of Religions, by Frithjof Schuon. I probably won’t understand it for some years though.)

It is not that I don’t need humans. I need them to sell me groceries and the occasional book.  I just don’t need someone emotionally. I don’t have a human-shaped hole in my soul, and cannot remember a time I had. When I look inside, I see light, shining more and more brightly, from a tiny spark in the darkness to a roaring fire that grows from the inside and finally begins to engulf me.

Analects of Confusius, Book 2.
The Master said, “At fifteen, I had my mind bent on learning.
“At thirty, I stood firm.
“At forty, I had no doubts.
“At fifty, I knew the decrees of Heaven.
“At sixty, my ear was an obedient organ for the reception of truth.
“At seventy, I could follow what my heart desired, without transgressing what was right.”


I wish to become seventy too, and have a heart that does not desire transgression at all. My mother had it like that, or so she told me. “He who always wants what he should, always gets to do what he wants” she sometimes told me. This was how she had it. Yet her happiness was muted, it seems to me. Oh well. I will never know for sure. It is not my place to have an opinion on, anyway.

History tells us that Confusius had a mild-mannered wife who loved him, but he generally preferred to travel with his disciples instead. I am lucky to be in a position to not repeat that painful choice, which is good since I am not in a position to repeat his great work either.

Besides, as shown by my dreams over the last 35+ years, my sexual inclinations are of a somewhat Hobbesian nature (“nasty, brutish and short”), and I think we are all better off for me not actually sharing those with anyone. Besides, I have 19 nephews and nieces; my genes should just kick back and relax, leaving some space for the genetically inferior to reproduce for a little while more before the Itlands replace them the way our ancestors replaced the Neanderthals. ^_^

But I am probably going to be hanging out on that site for a while more, observing the fascinating species into which I was born, and looking for someone who has the kind of worries God would have, rather than the worries I myself had and which I have already found stupid in the past or will find stupid in the near future (if any).  And when I find such people, I will congratulate them; but I will not date them.

Memories of tomorrow

When something weird is going on, the best thing to do is ask somebody weird!  But I am not sure I have anybody weirder than myself to ask…

Can what we read tomorrow influence what we write today?

Yesterday I wrote an entry about how things had become better and better not just in America but most of the world. This morning, I got a mail from Questia, the online library, graciously allowing me to read for free a book by Sthephen Moore and Julian Simon, called It’s getting better all the time. The book details 100 ways in which the 20th century was a great improvement on all centuries past. From the little I have had time to read of it, it argues that this is indeed the best of times.

Now, it’s not like I did not know that already. Furthermore, the book is published by the Cato institute, with whom I am already on moderately friendly terms (as in, not mocking them on sight).

Still, the placement in time is vaguely disturbing, don’t you think? If I had published that essay today instead of yesterday, it would certainly have looked like the book was an inspiration, if not outright cause of my writing.

I wonder sometimes. The fact that we cannot remember the future, does that necessarily also imply that we cannot act on it subconsciously? I have given you several striking examples over the last ten years, such as the time I wandered into the computer shop and asked about an external hard disk hours before my existing disk suddenly died.  I noticed even as I was talking to the shop guy that I had no idea why I was there and doing what I did. Yesterday I felt a sudden surge of inspiration, but there was no external event that caused it.  Well, at least not until this morning.

I have said before that I view this similar to magnets and small iron objects. Usually the magnet will pull a needle toward it but will itself not be moved. But occasionally the magnet is on a tipping point and may be drawn toward a much smaller object by the same force.  Perhaps time is the same.

Of course, there could be other explanations that don’t defy common sense. For instance, maybe I took a particular interest in the book because I had just written about the same subject, whereas normally I would have thought “that looks vaguely interesting but I have other things to do” and quickly forgotten it. Yeah. That would explain it…

Except…

That first part of the entry which is not quite so upbeat?  Early this morning I received the following quote on Twitter: “Real gratitude must be expressed in a more positive way, by asking yourself what you can do to help others ~ Ryuho Okawa”.  Why do I get a tweet about that after I write about gratitude in that context for the first time in my journal?

No matter how you look at it, that entry would have made perfect sense if I had written it one day later. But I didn’t. Instead, life presents me with the inspiration for it the morning after I upload it. Pretty fascinating.

Living in wonderful times

Before jumping with joy, be sure to consider the furniture, so as not to worry your family.

I know not everyone is happy, and not everyone is growing happier. In America, literally millions of people are now out of work, and the country does not have a security net that catches all of these people. There are many who lie awake at night, filled with fear and worry.  Where will they get food? Where will they get medication they need? How will their children get an education now?

And yet, even in America, the vast majority of people are better off that they were twenty years ago.  If we compare to thirty years ago, when I was still young, the difference is really striking.  Even now, the economy is technically growing.  If most people even half-heartedly cared about each other, or at least pretended to when others saw them, it would not cost them much to help the poor.  In so far as there is a problem, it is a problem of extreme selfishness, or “narcissism” as it is called these days.

For the great number of people who live in wonderful times, who have more than they have ever had before, is it not even a little shameful to not help a friend or relative who has worked hard all their life and yet fallen on hard times?  Would not gratitude, if you knew what that was, make it bearable to give a little to charity or at least pay your taxes?

Make no mistake: We live in wonderful times. Many illnesses that could not be cured are now considered mostly harmless. Basic knowledge of healthy eating and exercise is everywhere, and there is less and less poison in the food. The air is cleaner than it was a generation ago, and the forests are growing all over the northern hemisphere.

Even many of the poor now have access to the Internet, and there is beautiful music available for free, and more books than you can read in a lifetime. Whether you are looking for entertainment, news or words of wisdom, there is more of it than you could possibly use. Thinking back to when I was a child, reading the phone book and dictionary to satisfy my curiosity, it is as if I wandered in a desert where you had to dig for drops of water, and now have come to a wide river of fresh water, so great that we cannot see the end of it. It is amazing, nothing less. And we can meet people from around the globe, share their thoughts and memories as friends.

Even while some of the rich countries struggle in some ways, most of the world is still growing rapidly richer.  Each year, millions in China and India are quietly rising from poverty into the life of the middle class, where they no longer have to worry about food and clothes and other necessities, but can begin to enjoy luxuries and hobbies that used to be reserved for the well off. Those who walked are biking, and those who road a bike are driving. Those who lived in a hovel have a small house, and children who used to work on the farm are going to school.  All over the world things are getting better, except for a few sad and war-torn places.

New windmills and solar panels are being put up every year, and improvements in industry make it possible to produce over 1% more with the same energy for each passing year. Low-energy light bulbs are quietly replacing older models, and the new LED lamps not only shine as brightly with a fraction of the energy, but also have the potential to last for decades or even centuries, if such a thing can be imagined. They have no parts that move or grow hot.

The world has never been as educated as today. Both in rich and less rich countries, the number of students is swelling.  Children start school at a younger age and stay longer. Now, that may be a mixed blessing with all the political propaganda being served at our colleges, but surely people are more knowledgeable than ever before.  The accumulation of knowledge from science is skyrocketing thanks to easier publishing and spreading of data. From the depths of the oceans to outer space where new Earth-like planets are being discovered, we are seeing what was invisible to a thousand generations before us.

Why is there not an epidemic outbreak of gratitude and joy all over the world? Sure, there are many happy people, and more are coming. But we live in an age of wonders, we live in times that the greatest dreamers could not dream of, times that few prophets dared hope would ever come.  How can we restrain our joy long enough to make it through our workday without breaking out in song and dance?  An age of freedom, an age of prosperity, an age of knowledge, an age of mobility, an age of connection, an age of arts.

If our ancestors had seen the way we live, in a vision, suddenly as they lifted their head and dried the sweat off their forehead… would it not look to them as if the High Spirits of Heaven had descended in glory, wielding powers beyond comprehension, to bless this age with miracles never before seen or heard of? Who among them could have seen us today and would not have fallen to their knees in awe and gratitude that the seed of their life would be allowed to live in such an age?

Please, wake up, even for a minute, and know that you have been allowed to live in wonderful times.

Carbohydrate gluttony

So good! Eating is a primal pleasure, and these days, when it is no longer regulated by religion, it is still held in check by social taboos and personal complexes.  But not for everyone, I guess…

A few hundred years ago, in the Middle Ages, gluttony was considered one of seven Deadly Sins: A transgression against God and natural order, so heinous that the sinner would go straight to Hell. Those who kept doing such things were thrown out of the church and shunned by good people.  I guess it is kind of like racism today. It is something you just don’t do if you care at all about your soul, or your reputation, or common decency.

Today, people rarely even say grace as they sit down with a double whopper cheese with fries. As in so many ways, objective measures have replaced the commandments of Heaven. Now, the commandment is “Thou Shalt Not Be Fat!”  In the modern mind, it is the life of the body rather than the soul that is in danger, but you still face the threat of excommunication – not from the Church, but from your circle of friends, or at least polite society. (Your friends will generally forgive you if you grow fat at roughly the same rate as they do.)

Now for the “carbohydrate” part. Regular readers may remember that humans really suck at making fat from carbohydrates (or “carbs” as they are known these days – sugars and starches). The only notable exception is fructose (as in “corn sugar”), which can be transformed into fat in the liver. This is a slow process though, and in practice the difference between the carbs rarely matters. Normally we all eat a mixture of carbs, fats and proteins.  In this situation, the body has the foresight to burn most carbs, which are hard to store in the body.  (It can be stored in the liver and muscles as glycogen, but only enough for about a day’s use. Fat, in contrast, can be stored for years.)

Basically, the more you shift the balance of your diet toward carbs, the more your body burns carbs and stores fat.  If you go the other way, eating almost only fat, the body can use fat as a substitute for sugar too. Even the brain can run on fat in a pinch, although it usually uses only sugar.  But during normal life, we burn carbs quickly and fat slowly.

Of course, not all of us are normal. I, for instance, fall ill if I eat more than tiny amounts of fat. But I can eat lots and lots of carbs with no ill effects, or at least none that I can discern. And I don’t become fat. If I eat more sugar than I need, I just burn it off harmlessly, at least as long as it is “real” sugar and not fructose. So unless you actually watch me work my way through the cola, candy and sweet desserts, there is nothing to betray my gluttony.

Today my conscience is pretty good, though. According to my pulse watch, I burned some 1060 calories (kcal in Europe) on shoveling snow and walking to the grocer’s.  That will take its SWEET time gaining back – carbs have only half as much energy as fat, and 1000 calories is quite noticeable: That’s half as much as an average woman burns in a whole day (24 hours). Imagine eating 12 hours’ worth of food extra, and having to avoid anything fatty. No cakes, nothing with cream, no sauces, only tiny specks of chocolate. Do you think you could do it?

Sick

We interrupt our metaphysical reflections to announce that I am sick. I became queasy during the night, but was too sleepy to act on it, and kept sleeping and dreaming queasy dreams until the alarm woke me at 7.

As usual with my nausea, I was unable to actually throw up, as my gag reflex is very poorly developed. Besides, what would it have helped? My stomach was surely empty after 10 hours without eating. Still, I tried, just to see if there was any blood.  I gave up though.

I had to skip work again.  I had only been there two days since the flu. Poor job! -_-  It does not have any economic consequences for me, since I live in Norway, but I feel bad about not being able to do anything at all.  I don’t think I could have worked even if I had brought the work laptop home, truth to tell. I was pretty foggy.

Over the next hours, the problems gradually moved further down the digestive tract. Around noon I was able to lie down without much pain, and slept for more than four hours. I woke from a long dream about two young women who were friends, one of them was a suicide bomber on her way to blow herself up in a church on Christmas, but after meeting her friend outside, she ran away and managed to reach a deserted place before her timed bomb went off. I did not feel like staying in bed after that.

I still did not feel like I wanted to eat or drink ever again, but that did not last. Over the course of the evening, I refilled my stomach, with no apparent ill effects. Of course, there were no apparent ill effects last night when I went to bed either, so let’s wait and see.  One thing I avoided today was bread. There can go months without bread (although I eat pasta), but lately I have eaten bread for almost every meal.  I have a delicious oats-mixed bread at home, and one with sunflower seeds at work.  I have been eating them with jam and thoroughly enjoying it. It’s been so long, after all.

Perhaps I should try to be more gradual when I change my diet. Or perhaps it was some kind of freak accident. Or perhaps something I don’t yet know. There are bound to be such things. I am still only 52, after all. How much can I possibly understand about human life?  I just recently came to this world.

Confusing thoughts

Books will do this to you, although mostly when they fall on your head from the top shelf.

Today on the bus, reading Karen Armstrong’s The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions, I went through the fairly slim part about Kong Qiu, or Confusius as he somewhat confusingly is known in English. I rather hoped for a more complete treatment. But then Ryuho Okawa thinks Confusius is one of the most awesome people who have lived in the last 5000 years, perhaps the greatest after himself (the Buddha) and Jesus Christ. By avoiding an outright religious angle with gods, Heaven, afterlife etc, Confusius’ philosophy was able to last for thousands of years without being twisted by sects trying to conform it to their own fantasies. Religious people tend to abandon logic way too easily for Okawa’s tastes, or even mine for that matter.

Well, it was short, but it was sweet. Armstrong certainly seems to share the admiration for Confusius, but her book has a sweeping range, trying to sum up the whole Axial Age from China to Greece. That is a huge project. I am sure she could have written a book about Confusius if she had the time. I would not mind buying it, I think.

Not that I am saying Armstrong is one of my top authorities on religious matters.  But she is an accomplished scholar and writes an engaging prose. For a grand overview such as this book about the Axial Age, one could do worse. And I think she is particularly well suited for writing about a man who himself did not consider religion “out of this world”, but rather taught a transformation or refinement of the soul through making everyday life a kind of sacred ritual.

Note to self: Read up more on Confusius, if given the chance.  I am not planning to become his student or anything, but a few thousand words more about one of the greatest thinkers of history may be worth the time.

As better men than I have pointed out, the greatest men of history are so rare that one would be considered amazingly lucky to ever meet 1 of them. But in books, we can meet them by the dozen. That’s some superpower!

Back to work

Today I considered myself healthy enough to go back to work. Actually I did not have a fever the last two days, but I was pickled in head cold and shedding virus like there was no tomorrow. Since flu virus continue to infect for a couple days after you’re fever free, that was bad.

This morning, just in time, the head cold was gone. So I got up early (for me) and went to work, staying there for 8 hours.

Tonight I got a cold sore on my tongue, which I suppose makes sense, given that I’ve actually had a cold, and a flu before that. But usually they arise from lack of sleep. I guess I did sleep an hour or too less than I should last night, so that may contribute too.

On the other hand, I have been eating like crazy all day. All kinds of things that I have not tasted for a while since I was caught unaware without extra fresh food.  Yogurt, bread with jam, cola, two cups of chocolate milk pudding. I kind of missed yogurt after it ran out during the weekend. It is usually a big part of my diet.

Anyway, I should be in bed now if I am to get up as early again tomorrow.

Oh, and the cold returned today, not deep freezer cold, but powdery snow cold. It was mild while I stayed indoors sick, first changing last night.  It really looks like I am some kind of main character, does it not?  Perhaps it looks like that to everyone, we only have unlikely things happen to us in different ways depending on who we are. It makes sense to me, that we are all main characters. At least if we look around a bit with childlike curiosity. Who has heard of a child who is not a main character?

Different

“Is it a crime to be different from others?”  Not really, but it may be less of a super saintly virtue than I sometimes like to think.

Gallup called and wondered whether I was going to complete the big book of surveys they had sent me. I had wondered that too, but decided at that time not to. It was unnecessary big, but what made me stop was the assumptions.

If someone was to ask you: “Have you stopped slashing your neighbor’s tires? Yes or no?” – you would not want to answer such a question.  The questions in this book are not so morally repugnant, but they are equally nonsensical. There are pages (this is literally a book) with questions regarding TV programs, which I have for the most part not heard of. I don’t have a TV, never had. That really cuts down on the relevance of these questions, but there is no “I don’t watch TV” box to tick, not for each question and certainly not to skip the whole section.

And then we come to automobile and the same thing repeats. There is a wealth of questions related in this way and that way to the car. There is no “I don’t care” box. Would it cost that much to design a thick book of surveys in such a way that one could skip irrelevant things?

Then there are vacations. My vacation, as regular readers may know, is to take November off and write 50 000 words of fiction, the National Novel Writing Month project. Needless to say, none of the questions apply to that. I would think vacations may not even be a human right, but they sure are not a human obligation!

To know truth; to love beauty; to will virtue; these are human obligations. But nobody seems interested in surveying these things.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I have my worldly interests too. Entirely too much of that really.  But even then these are too obscure to interest Gallup.  Yes, I play online games on the PC. That’s 1 ticky box. As if the kind of person who plays Age of Conan has much in common with the person who plays the ancient board game of Go at the International Go Server.

I was thinking that it would be a good thing to get the message across, that not everyone is the imaginary “common people”. But there is no way to get the message across. It is not something Gallup’s customers want to know. So I am telling it here instead.

Of course, my voluntary simplicity may come across as slightly less impressive if you had actually seen me writing this surrounded by 3 active computers,  plus a couple more computers and backup disks in reserve…

Imaginary invisible friends day

Chasing rainbows hand in hand with your invisible best friend. I assume the manga was made without knowledge of Calvin & Hobbes…

I got a head cold as soon as I was finished with the flu. Since you still shed flu virus for a couple days after you are fever-free, spraying virus like a garden sprinkler gone wild is a bad thing. I have become a walking biological weapon! Of mass destruction! Well, the fever has destroyed some of my mass at least, though I am now eating like a wild thing to get it back. What is worse is that the sick and elderly are more likely than the rich, trim and tan capitalists to take the bus with me, and the sick and elderly may lose more than just a little fat. They might lose their lives.  I am not risking that, and my boss luckily agrees with me.

So here I have been at home all day.  My selection of edibles is shrinking faster than I expected (yay for getting my appetite back though). I still have pasta for a few weeks of siege though. And my boss sent me chocolate, although it contains too much fat to eat all in one day (or even two).

In addition to eating, I have been watching yet another long anime series: Onmyou Taisenki. It is aimed at barely teenage boys, it seems, but since when has that stopped me? It is set in an alternate reality vaguely based on Chinese philosophy, where some people can form a contract with “shikigami”, literally “ritual gods”, animal spirits with magical powers that can exterminate demons. However, these days they mostly fight each other, as there is a civil war between them. One group is trying to make a profit in the demon realm, more or less. The other is trying to stop them.

The series is very similar to a roleplaying game, in that the characters search for new seals that give them new combat techniques, and grow stronger by defeating opponents (demons or each other).  The human characters don’t normally die when defeated, their contract is only broken and they lose all memories from after  the contract was formed. Not a capital punishment unless you are left in a place where you cannot find your way back to civilization.

I pondered why this series appealed to me as much as it did. In part I think it is because it is kind of cute and innocent.  The whole not killing people, even if you could, is like a throwback to a more innocent age. (It is actually from 2004, which was not really a much more innocent age.) But perhaps what most appealed to me was the intense friendship between the main character and his white tiger spirit who fights for him.  This is intentionally a main part of the story.

The main character is a young boy who lost his parents (that’s a long story in itself and is unraveled gradually) and he does not have many friends except the girl next door. When he has to form a contract with a spirit to protect his grandfather, he does not realize that he is gaining the best friend he has ever had. The loyalty the two start to feel for each other is touching.  Also, he can see the spirit even when it is not fighting (ordinary people can only see it when fighting).  So he spends a lot of time conversing with his invisible friend.

What is not to like about that? I do that all the time. ^_^

There was one thing I disliked though even in this theme. I have never really thought about it before, but I just realized that in all such stories where a seemingly unimpressive person is chosen by a spirit or goddess or angel or whatever, that person always has some hidden great power that eventually (or sometimes pretty quickly) shines forth.  And I realized that this had also been the case in some of my own writing.

So I made a reboot of my story from a couple years back, where a 6-dimensional being from outside the universe makes a pact with an ordinary teenage boy and becomes his amazing invisible friend. This time, the seemingly ordinary boy actually is an ordinary boy (except for being very much alone). And the only reason why he is chosen is “because I love you”.

Apart from that, I did not really do much of lasting value today. Eating, sleeping, playing City of Heroes, watching anime. Coughing up hairballs. Not much to write home about.

Dreams

I woke up at an unusual time this morning, because I could not breathe normally through the goo in my bronchi. But this made it possible for me to capture the last dream sequence. Today’s hidden theme seems to be religion.

One part, mercifully short, was rather disturbing. It consisted of me walking around alone, screaming: KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL! over and over, clenching my fists and contorting my muscles in fury.  This is, unfortunately, something I recognize from moments of extreme frustration in my past. It is one of those things I really want to see gone from my life before I graduate to the (more) Real World. The dream made it clear that this kind of feeling is something I still can feel. I had almost forgotten that.

The dream really drove home the point that I had not fully repented this horror and the mindset that leads to it. And so, after I got up and took my bronchidilation medicine, I sat down and recalled the cases I could remember of this behavior, shining the white light of Christ on it, that it may be forgiven and transformed, and that in the future I shall not accumulate anger in my heart till it blooms like that, but react to it early. Whenever anger arises, it is a sign that the heart is too proud, having desires and expectations that were not realistic.  Well, repentance is optional of course. I mean, a non-religious person would not do that. Some might even enjoy it.  There is a horrible strength in such rage. My Viking ancestors probably made the most of it.  I have from childhood had some of that temper, unlike my mother and my saintly brother.

In the other dream I aimlessly waited at a bus stop, not knowing when the next bus to Mandal would come.  (It would not – turns out it was a place which has no direct buses to Mandal.) A young girl – barely teenager – kept chatting to me. I found it weird and pretended to ignore her. She was talking about all kinds of random superficial things, like neurotypicals do when they try to be friendly.  But I thought it was just weird and did not want to be seen being friendly with a severely underage kid I did not know. People here in Norway will think you are a child molester if you do that, unfortunately.  It wasn’t like that when I grew up, I think it is one of the things we have imported with American culture. Or perhaps it is Continental, I am not sure.

When I walked away, she shouted after me something like “Jesus won’t like you behaving like that!”, which may well be true. But the impression I got was that she was chatting to random strangers because she thought Jesus wanted people to do that. In my dream, I held the opposite impression, remembering Jesus’ teaching that “a human shall make account for every useless word on Judgment Day”.

Waking up, I am not sure that trying to be friendly is actually useless! Jesus also taught us that friends is something we can actually get with us to the next world and should be bought when possible. I will probably still avoid talking to kids and very young teens alone though…

In my dream, I now wandered lost in the suburbs for a while. I ended up inside a house and told the couple there that I only needed to find the exit. The wife said this happened all too often recently.  As I was leaving, my cell phone rang (still in the dream). It was an old friend from my time with The Christian Church (the one I linked to yesterday). He wanted urgent answer to some technical question about bonds. At first, being totally unprepared, I was about to reject his question, saying that I did not know what he was talking about. But then, by thinking logically, I saw that the answer was quite clear, so I gave it to him.

Then I woke up because I could not breathe well, so I went downstairs to use my inhalator and to cough up ick. And here I am now.