Posted 7/19/2001 by Beorn
Hello, I must be going.

Don't let mr Death to the right scare you, he's only there to remind us that everything changes and dies - all the time. At best, this blog will change, at worst it will die, and if it dies and I forget to tell you, well, consider yourself told now.

First of all I'm getting a job, a real one. Real, as opposed to what I've been doing for the last 12 months, which I might write a pretty angry political essay about one day if I decided to pretend such a thing would matter. Doesn't, but FYI: Since last August I've been a civil worker, which is the alternative to norwegian military service. Civil service is based on the nifty idea that when the enemy walks in, and the fools who chose military service are all dead or captured, the new administration is going to require a lot of fully trained, non-violent xerox and coffee-making expertise. Which is, not coincidentally, how most civil workers spend their service.

Ok, so I don't know how much my conscience really objects to the military any more, (I certainly felt out of place with the anarcho-socialist dreamers who showed up at our quarterly gatherings), but I really did believe in these things when the issue was settled a few years ago. So, after college, having watched the second best minds of my generation run off to high-paying IT consultant jobs, I was shipped to the Oslo city government, for a year in tech support and long, long hours of doing absolutely nothing.

Sounds great? No. Would have been hell, hadn't I had the web, and suprisingly even that got boring soon enough. I had to invent my own temporary profession: Blog Writer. My word per minute ratio is very low, and having the daily pressure of finding something to blog gave my day purpose.

Those empty hours are gone, and this blogs original purpose with them.

Also, with the perspective of one and a half months inactivity, I look back on much of what I've written here with a deep sense of embarassment. Don't worry, after 6 years of writing online, I've learned to ignore that feeling, and resist the temptation to delete. The words are there, forever, and they speak for themselves, no more and no less.

But the blog will, must, change-or-die, along with my life, which has been through some odd turns lately, and is scheduled for even more.

Of course, it's not like anyone cares. In terms of readers I've worked myself up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty, and I still get most of my hits from that awful AOL search engine, which insists that Threepwood '01 is a haven of naked newsreaders and vagina closeup pictures. But this was expected, (the few hits, I mean, not the fascinating search queries), and I care even less about reaching the masses with my wisdom now than I did five months ago. I just like standing on a soapbox, that's all.

I always wanted to kill this blog with a HAL quote, (guess which one), but I guess that'll just have to wait until things settle, and I decide what to do with it. Waiting is, etc. etc.