2007-05-06 He pushed them...

'Come to the edge,' he said.
They said, 'We are afraid.'
'Come to the edge,' he said.
They came. He pushed them...
and they flew.

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Today I had this summer's first ice cream: stracciatella and chocolate. Yummy!

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How come that the more exciting something is, the more it costs? For example: Climbing is quite fun, and all it takes is a harness, a pair of shoes, a rope and a few carabiners. You can get the whole stuff for much less than 100 €. Now, scuba diving is definitely more exciting, and you definitely need to pay a lot more money, too. That's because you need goggles, a suit, a jacket, an air tank, a regulator, fins and maybe stuff like a lamp and a compass. All in all 800 € if you're lucky. The most exciting thing I can imagine right now would be skydiving. So I searched the web and found out that scuba diving isn't that expensive after all... You wouldn't believe what a simple parachute costs (and I won't tell you because I forgot after I recovered from the shock), and you also need some other gear. Getting a plane up there isn't cheap, either. Maybe it's my preterm midlife crisis, but I want to do it. I already found a club close to my place (if 50 km is close) and they offer training lessons in May and July. From this month's bonus money I'm going to buy a diving suit, but if June is going well, I'll try skydiving in July. Hell yeah.

The poem above hasn't got anything to do with my skydiving plans, by the way. First time I saw it was back at the university in the foreword of a PhD thesis, where it referred to the experiences of a PhD student. Nice correlation, anyway.

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I completely forgot to blog about my highschool dream, and in hindsight, it wasn't really spectacular. I was dreaming that I had to do my final highschool year all over again. Having all the knowledge and experience of a 27 year old and doing highschool just didn't go together well. And worst of all, I forgot most of the highschool stuff! Math, physics and computer science were not a problem (except for the boredom, maybe), but German and Geography for example were excruciating. I didn't like these subjects the first time, so I wasn't thrilled to study all that useless shit a second time. Luckily, I awoke before it started to annoy me too much...

Or maybe I didn't. Maybe I only forgot that I experienced it all before. Maybe I graduated, studied and got a job in a dream that I'm unable to wake up from. That would be a new twist to this "are you really real" obsession of mine. What if I'm so sound asleep that no slap in the face can wake me up? Good bye Fightclub, hello Matrix...

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I don't know just yet what I think of people that do their smileys the other way round: (-: instead of :-). It's unconventional, which is not bad per se, but it interrupts the reading flow. And I don't like people that do everything slightly different than anybody else, just for the fun of it.

Talking about smileys, here are my two favorite:
:-D* that's somebody who laughs so hard that he doesn't notice the five legged spider crawling up his neck.
\m/ >.< \m/ that's just "ROCK ON!": two hands and a pair of scrunched eyes.

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I can't believe it took me the length of a complete Beatles album to write this!