Friday before last week’s one, Tina wanted to stay over at my place after a party she had been to, so I met up with her downtown. I had just gotten kinda sick and wasn’t in the best of shapes, but I managed anyway. A small price to pay for such a nice company anyway. I probably should have written something sooner, as I don’t really remember what we did that day, but I imagine it wasn’t far from the usual stuff. She left on Saturday, but asked to come back on Sunday, which I gladly said yes to. I started getting sicker and sicker however, so I don’t think I was much fun to be with. I think I mostly stayed in bed while she played WoW on my computer. She stayed over for two days, which was really nice, I love just being with her doing everyday type of stuff. I haven’t felt this sick in years, my immune system must be under maintenance or something. Right now most of the previous symptoms seems to have dissipated, the only thing left is this weird constant side stitch type of feeling. The only position I can sleep in is straight on my back, any other position and I feel a pain in my side, which also happens when I take a really deep breath. No idea what that’s about, oh well.

Gotten quite strong feelings for Tina, but it feels rather one-sided and useless at the moment, trying to stay hopeful.

I feel a sore throat coming on again, and am not looking forward to it escalating into something worse. Nothing much else going on in my life at the moment (surprise, surprise). I finally got around to trying out Final Fantasy VII, which I’ve wanted to do forever. Whenever I’ve tried downloading the PC version there’s always been some issues about getting it to work properly under Windows XP, and I always ended up giving up on it. This time however, I decided to just download the Playstation version and play it in a Playstation emulator, and yay for that! Really loving it so far, a bit surprised how similiar it actually is to FF6 (one of my all-time favorite console games). Also a bit surprised to find out that Sephiroth is not a complete douchebag, which I always had the impression of him being. Well, besides killing basically everybody and everything in his way, I felt mostly sorry for him when the flashback of him and Cloud occured. Still waiting for a moment sad enough to make me cry like the ghost train scene in FF6 though! I don’t doubt that one will come, considering how well written and thought-of the Final Fantasy stuff is.

The last few days has been spent doing the occasional 2-3hr hiking trip — it’s great to live in a city where you can take the subway for 15mins to find yourself surrounded by complete wilderness. I think I must have been inspired from watching Man vs. Wild, a newly discovered show for me. If you haven’t seen it, it’s basically a documentary series about this badass guy named Bear Grylls, who puts himself in the middle of nowhere all over the world with no provisions, and he then shows you how to survive and get to civilization so you can be rescued.

I’ve also started re-watching Star Trek: The Original Series, I had completely forgotten how good it was (though The Next Generation is my favorite). I had also forgotten how incredibly campy it actually is — not a bad thing.

Epp pasted a picture in #across of a celebrity a couple of days ago and asked if anyone knew who it was. I vaguely remembered her from somewhere, and after a while I remembered she looked an awful lot like Buffy’s little sister, and indeed it was. Which again reminded me that I never really watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer properly before, I’ve only seen an occasional episode or two from the TV when it’s been on in the background. So I decided to give it a try since I’m bored out of my mind these days, and it’s been fun to watch so far.

When I haven’t been hiking or watching series, I’ve most likely been playing old console games through emulators. I just downloaded complete sets of all games for Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64, Gameboy, Gameboy Advance and Genesis, together with a nice program to launch the games from, called QuickPlay. It’s been a lot of fun now that I have a controller to play with, I’ve always had to use a keyboard before. The games that’s seen the most action so far has been Banjo Kazooie, Super Mario 64 and Paper Mario for the N64, along with Metroid Fusion and Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow for Gameboy Advance. Fun fun fun.

Earlier today I woke up with a slight sore throat.

Well now my sore throat has escalated into a fucking full fledged virus attack or something. Not only has my sore throat turned into some kind of deep throat nightmare, but now I also have a hovering headache. Painkillers are doing absolutely nothing. My nose isn’t runny, but it just… ugh, hurts. Pressing my fingers on the sides of my nose bridge sort of alleviates the pain, but it doesn’t last long. My joints are killing me, especially my back, shoulders and knees. Worst of all is the cold sweating, god I hate that feeling. My whole body just feels frail, it’s like I could just fall into a coma any minute; which I would gladly welcome at this point, at least I could just sleep through all the pain.

</end whine>

Oh well, it’s not the end of the world. I just hope it passes quickly. Any recommended remedies?

First scarification on left ankle, 8 months old. Second scarification on right ankle, 5 weeks old.

Just a quick progress report. Yesterday I had the pleasure of peeling of the scabs, which is easily the best part about the whole scarification process, it is such a satisfactory feeling.

Ever since I did my first one back in July (link) I’ve been wanting to do more. After careful consideration (read: my laziness ceased) I finally came up with an idea or two about what I could do for my next one. The one that particularly stuck in my mind after a while was this really basic idea about doing a couple of angled lines positioned in a row. So on Tuesday I decided to perform another self scarification, this time on my inner right ankle.

A week or two ago I ordered a few scalpels to aid in my (the then not thought of) procedure, as I had previously used a box cutter for my first scarification. It worked pretty well considering, but it wasn’t exactly the most optimal tool to use. After receiving them it didn’t take long before I got the urge to use them, and so I did.

I started off by trying to find something to clean my skin with. With the lack of any disinfectives, I resorted to the ghetto solution of a miniature bottle of Absolut vodka. I wasn’t really sure whether or not regular vodka would be of any use at all, I know it’s not exactly rubbing alcohol or anything like that, but it was what I had. A wikipedia search reveals alcohol has disinfective properties starting at 18% and peaking at 70%, so I figured it couldn’t hurt either way (feel free to correct me if this is absolutely useless). Not that I really think there was much point to it to begin with, although the scalpels are sterile it all boils down to the lowest common denominator, and I’m pretty sure there were some contact with other unclean surfaces or objects during the procedure anyway. Oh well, that’s the charm with do-it-yourself things isn’t it?

After I rubbed my the skin on my ankle clean (if you want to call it that), I took my trusty marker out and tried to draw up a few lines on my ankle with the help of a ruler to get them straight. After being somewhat satisfied with the alignment, I unsheated the scalpel and proceeded to do the cutting. I was quickly reminded of how wonderful adrenaline rushes are, as cliché as it may sound, you truly feel alive in those moments. The blood rushed to the surface of my skin, making it hard to judge the length and debth of the cuts, but I think I prevailed through it all with a nice result. The cuts aren’t quite equal, but it was never really in any way intended to be perfect, so I’m happy with the outcome.

Of course I had to take pictures, so here they are, in chronological order, with the last picture being taken 2 days after the initial cutting.

Finally there is actually some snow around this winter. The streets has been snow covered for well over a week now, which is a good sign I guess. It’s sad how the snow used to come here in November and lasted long into March and April, and now we’re lucky if we get snow in January and that it lasts a month or two. *Kicks global warming in the nuts*.

One thing I love about living in Oslo (it’s the capital of Norway, in case you’re geographically challenged), is that even when it’s the biggest city in the country, two thirds of the area is actually protected forests, hills and lakes. You only need to take one of several subway lines to their end stops, and within 5 minutes of walking you are in the wild forest. These lasts days I’ve been doing exactly that, taken the subway to its last stop and walked around a bit in the forest and all the way home again. So far I’ve only gone on some simple 2-3 hour long trips, but I think I’ll start trying for some longer ones the next week. I’d love to buy some cheap GPS so I can get into the whole geocaching thing, it seems like a nice way to get in shape, get out, and have some fun at the same time. They are ridiculously expensive though, *sigh*.

This whole being healthy thing is being severely hindered by the fact that it’s my birthday today and that I’m stuffing myself full of chocolate cake, pizza and beer though. Anyway, some random pictures from my last walk. Winter is by far my favorite time of the year, it’s nature at its most beautiful in my opinion.

I admit it. I LOVE Big Macs. You can tell me about how dry, greasy or crappy they are endlessly, you can rave about how the best burger in the world is from Uncle Jebediah’s Steakhouse, I don’t care. Big Macs are my favorite burgers in the world.

Specifically, they are best when you order them plain, without any shitty salad, tomatoes and dressing on them, just the buns and the meat. You then take it apart layer for layer, and put a 3×3 row of fries between each single layer. Enjoy!

Illustration for the hard of learning provided.

It’s been about 3½ months since I did it now, here’s the current result. There’s still not much change, the scars have flattened and widened a bit, but it will take several months more before it will even begin to fade I think.