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I did something yesterday that I haven't done for years.

I bought a CD.

in fact, I bought a pop CD.

I bought the english Shakira album.

that woman rocks. a sort of brighteyed, shapely, bellydancing multilingual prodigy. mariah carey meets madonna meets alanis morisette and the rest of the pop bitches... but with bellydancing genes...

mm-hm.

shame she can't sing english. her english songs are codswallop. but you've gotta give it to her: it's her fourth recording language...

heee hee hehehehehe.

stuff like this really forms my opinion about the masses.

man, I'm fed up with angry me at the moment.

update. I'm in Tromsø, the "paris of the north", for a conference on 'Sami research ethics'. (ha ha ha). midnight sun wreaks havoc with my fragile nocturnal sleep cycle, leaving me an even angrier and less pleasant creature than usual these days.

most people at the conference probably think I'm autistic or on drugs, as in RL I tend to keep quiet rather than be unnecessarily rude to anyone. and after 1 hour of sleep last night (you try sleeping with yr body clock on tilt...) there have only been intermittent moments in the course of the day where my inner life has resembled that of a human being.

particularly, when one spends 12 hours, with 20 minute breaks every 90 minutes, listening to the mutual ego masturbation of a school of small northern academic pondlife pretending to be sharks.

at least, in bigger universities you get people who masturbate with flair, and a certain craftsmanship. performance. here it's the onanistic intelligentsia equivalent of the missionary position, performed by a 90 year old man on a brain dead woman in a hospital bed.

it makes you cringe, basically.

"sami science is like down's syndrome science...". quoth the director of political science at one of norway's four big universities.

it's bad enough as it is. if you knew what this meant and implied in context, you'd sit there like I did, today. slackjawed & speechless.

happily it turns out the guy was just a tactless clueless moron, not a sami eugenicist... but still. this corner of the world is pretty, but nevertheless a sort of intellectual combination of Madagascar, Siberia and nameless-town-in-a-western. a fragile, stunted ecology of mind.

and to think I'm volunteering to spend six months here in a couple of years... I feel like I'm drafting myself...

<snip>

I've got ringside seats at your deathbed, God. and I'm bringing popcorn. now die slowly and agonizingly, you old motherfucker.

ok, I'm not angry with God anymore.

I don't like him, and if I met him at a dinner party angry words might be exchanged.

but unless I do, I suppose we'll just learn to coexist. life is too short to waste on fighting nasty omnipotent ghosts nourished by the faith of billions of believers.

a year ago my father was pestering me to study in America. now even he keeps quiet about it.

in fact, we share our critiques over American foreign policy over morning cups of coffee and the evening news.

that is perhaps the one tangible improvement in my quality of life that this whole American mobililisation [rabble-rousing] has engendered.

but then you have to factor this against the fact that I now live in dread of the 'Novus Ordo Seclorum'.

all in all I'd rather argue with my father, than have to sit and watch the slouching rise of the blundering, righteous behemoth in the western sky.

geek entry. in a seizure of escapism I've secured the original Baldur's Gate game for myself. between working on the final draft of my research proposal and trekking across Europe in a car, I now spend my days leading a poor little 2/2 chaotic neutral half-elven fighter-cleric into certain death time after time. the little digital nugget of heroism has no conception of 'superior odds', and therefore dies with alarming frequency.

this is probably because my game reflexes were honed on the sequel, where my first character ended up a nigh-indestructible 31-level paladin with 22 strength, total spell immunity, negative thac0 and -12 armor class. let those who have ears hear. god created the angels first, too. thus, the sadistic pleasure of watching my stupid little mass of pixels die, destroyed by the unjust and impossible expectations of its creator.

I think this explains a few things. He is happy when we succeed, but most of the time there is a base streak of contempt. "ha, you can't fly? PATHETIC!!!".

baldur's gate I is a religious metaphor. playing it can be construed as a meditation on divinity.