North Sea: thoughts
I’m on holiday. While you might think ‘during a holiday’ is a great time to write on a travel blog, if I understand correctly a major point of holidaying is to relieve oneself of obligations for a bit. And so if blogging is too expected a part of travel, then it would seem to be impermissable. Which would be fine. Except that if blogging is also a part of a Beeminder that one did not turn off in time and which is now red, then blogging would seem to be required, making it especially impermissable. Yet also required.
Luckily, I do not adhere to rigid notions of correct holidaying. (At least not arbitrarily rigid, at least this time, per holidaying standards worked out earlier today…) But in compromise, here is some blogging that satisfies Beeminder and also my whimsical desires: a list of random thoughts I had lately, including ones that are half-formed, and also ones that I thought because they are true facts that I read on the internet.
Can you know things without simultaneously being aware that they are not some specific alternative things? For instance, can I understand that I have brown hair without at some level conceiving of hair potentially being a different color? If you are very familiar with the experience of being in your own mind, but have never noticed how other people differ, do you know yourself? In one way but not another? How are they related? Or do you only know yourself by knowing what you are not?
Can you direct your behavior well without ever seeing more than one option at each juncture? Where ‘you’ is something like ‘your conscious intentions’.
Okonomiyaki is delicious, and I forgot that it existed. Ditto for Szechuan food.
I sometimes notice a tendency to find things that happened in my childhood to be basically fine (though potentially awful in ways), while things that I only found out about later to be potentially deeply wrong in some way that is not really available to things I grew up with. Also, sometimes I feel like the universe is deeply okay in some way that is not related to questions of whether it contains a bunch of torture for instance. I wonder if these are related, and the latter happens when I feel like I come from the universe and belong here.
There were a string of church burnings associated with the early Norwegian black metal scene. An earlier version of this church, originally built in 1150, was the first to go. The musician who is suspected of doing it put a photo of the burned church remains on the front of a later album.
