Cogs can think.

Yesterday eve, as I was driving home from Amsterdam after seeing Transformers, I popped Bruce Springsteen’s Greatest Hits album into my car’s CD player. When it reached “Better Days”, I remembered how this song used to, like, help me through the rougher patches during my mom’s illness.

Now a life of leisure and a pirate’s treasure
Don’t make much for tragedy
But it’s a sad man my friend who’s livin’ in his own skin
And can’t stand the company
Every fool’s got a reason to feelin’ sorry for himself
And turn his heart to stone
Tonight this fool’s halfway to heaven and just a mile outta hell
And I feel like I’m comin’ home

These are better days baby
There’s better days shining through
These are better days
Better days with a girl like you

All this, of course, after I fantasised about my Micra being a Transformer. He’d She’d be called “Micron”, and have an eternal minority complex.

I stayed in little-boy-mode a little too long.

It’s so satisfying to see my mother act al happy when Shenna’s around. Shenna is the daughter of Jolanda, one of my mother’s best friends. Me mum met Jolanda at a sort of support group for breast cancer patients, and ever since, they’ve been very close. Jolanda is much younger than my mother, and, as you have figured out by now, mother of one daughter. I guess Shenna is about 3 or 4 years old.

Both me mum and me dad start radiating when they talk about Shenna, and I can certainly understand why. I’m not that much into kids (they’re manageable alone, but when in groups, it’s just chaos and pandemonium, and I like ordnung), but Shenna is such a happy toddler. It’s contagious.

Other than that, my mother gave birth to three boys. No daughters. They’re not disappointed with that, but when I got older, my father teased me a lot about how they in fact wanted a girl (I’m their third and last child). I can see how Shenna kind of fills that gap sufficiently until the grandchildren arrive.

And since those won’t sprout from my two brothers, that task is up to me. Heaven forbid the day.

On the news today they showed this nun from France who will apparantly play an important role in the whole process of turning ex-Pope John Something II (or whatever he’s called in English) into a saint. She claims to have been healed of Parkinson’s disease thanks to the ex-Pope.

Right.

I whish to apply my parents’ cat Roza for sainthood. We got her for my mother when she was very ill of cancer in 2005, as ‘bezigheidstherapie’ (Google that) for the lonely days my mother faced because she could not go to work due to al the chemo and radiationcrap burning in her veins. Anyway, my mother survived the cancer, and now I attribute it all to our beloved Roza.

I’ll take Saint Roza’s day with that, please. I hope it’s a Monday.

The bond between me and my brothers (better put: between the world/reality/everything and my brothers) has never been all that good. Maybe when we were very young, but all the shit that happened after that kind of obscures my view on my pre-teenage years.

Anyway, because of who and what my brothers were, I always tried extremely hard at being totally unlike them. This meant general things like in fact going to school, not picking up smoking, not terrorising the rest of the family, not stealing from my parents and brothers, not going to juvenile mental institutions prison, you know, the whole nine yards. Being a teenager in one of the richest countries with one of the best schooling systems in the world, with the best parents you can ever wish for, in a fairly wealthy and very loving family is, like, hard.

I also avoided very specific things. For years, I tried me very best to steer away from the music my brothers would listen to. Now, when it comes to my oldest brother, that’s not very difficult, but when it comes to my middle brother, that was kind of actually difficult. He has a very, very, very decent taste in music. Still, I never even glanced at the bands or artists he listened to, because in my fragile little mind (yeah right) I had constructed this warped idea that not listening to the same music would somehow help me in my life-long ambition of not becoming like my brothers.

Not too long ago, I broke this nonsense thought by diving into the world of The Cardigans, which, as regular readers of my blog (do they exist?) will know, was a fairly big success. Today, I did the same thing. I bought Bjork’s “Postal”, and I’m loving it. As I love the 10E worth of Jelly Beans I bought.

There goes the relative safety of my teenage mind.

Sometimes, a certain subject comes up among my friends and I which always presents me with a huge dilemma. Even though the dilemma is 3945730495 years in the future, it’s still quite important to me.

Kids, or no kids?

You see, I see it as a duty to continue the family lineage; in fact, since my parents won’t be able to rely on my two brothers for grandchildren, the task kind of rests on my shoulders. I’m saying “kind of” because my parents have never in their lives even so much as hinted at wanting grandchildren. Nor would they ever even apply the smallest bit of pressure on me.

However, in all honesty, I don’t like the idea of putting children in the world we live in today. We already destroyed our environment, we have driven many animals to extinction, we have committed the most horrendous crimes (the holocaust, slavery, the atom bombs on Japan, etc.), you name it; how am I supposed to raise an innocent child in world like this?

Even on a national level things worry me. Right-wing extremists like Geert Wilders are busy destroying everything that made my country great. Do I really want to bring up my son or daughter in a country which lost its most defining characteristic (tolerance)?

Difficult issue, this. I value traditions, I value lineage; but I also have to think about what’s in the best interest of my hypothetical offspring. Luckily, this decision won’t have to be made in the coming 600 years.

But still.

Sometimes, a day comes along that is just so good, you can hardly believe you’re actually living it.

Today, my mother had a photographic check up of her remaining breast. Comparing it to the previous, ‘cancer-less’ photo, they found nothing. This means that the doctors are 95% sure that my mother is ‘clean’. The remaining 5% will be investigated in the coming week (a careful examination of the photo). After having so many setbacks in 2005, getting the phonecall from my mother that all was ok just brings instant tears to my eyes. Fcuk manliness, I cry when I get news like this.

I am so happy. Seriously. You cannot imagine how news like this feels.

And to make the day even better, my digital TV kit arrived today. I now have television via DVB-T to my brand-new 17″ widescreen HDTV, which Geeks.com sent me for review (expect it next Monday). And to top it off, the Vista review kit from Microsoft NL arrived today, containing 32bit and 64bit copies of Windows Vista Ultimate (expect a review on a low-end desktop soon).

I love days like this.

DCA is an odourless, colourless, inexpensive, relatively non-toxic, small molecule. And researchers at the University of Alberta believe it may soon be used as an effective treatment for many forms of cancer.

One molecule that restores the body’s own cell self-destruct mechanism, a mechanism which is normally disabled in cancer cells. The molecule has already destroyed human cancer cells in lines grown in laboratory cultures, and even in human tumors grown in rats.

If this harmless molecule proves to be The One Cure against cancer (and right now, it looks like it, as even brain cancer is hypothesised to be affected by it), this will be one of the biggest medical discoveries in human history.

One problem though:

However, as DCA is not patented, Michelakis is concerned that it may be difficult to find funding from private investors to test DCA in clinical trials. He is grateful for the support he has already received from publicly funded agencies, such as the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR), and he is hopeful such support will continue and allow him to conduct clinical trials of DCA on cancer patients.

Seriously. I’ll do anything to keep funding for this going.

I just saw on the news that the French just banned smoking from public spaces and workplaces. We Dutch did that a few years ago, and it never made any form fo sense to me.

You know, these days, you’d almost start smoking just to piss off all the anti smoking people. I mean, really.

Anyway, where I work, we had a really good system when it came to smoking: the smokers just took their break after the non-smokers, with the rule that the outside door and the windows were open. For decades, this system worked just fine, nobodoy really complained. And it was like this in many company cantines. Banning smoking or other measures should be taken by the companies themselves. The cantine at my job is the property of the owners of the shop where I work; it is their responsibility to take care of the smoking issue, not the government’s.

A very disturbing consequence of this ban is that even old men and women in elderly homes were forced to quit smoking (it’s a workplace alright for nurses); there were numerous stories of 90 year old men and women who had to give up one of their last pleasures in life, just because some suits up in The Hague had decided so. I was outraged by this.

These people served our country for almost a century, and this is how you treat them?

The next step the government wants to take is banning smoking from restaurants, pubs, and the likes. This pisses me off even more; the smell of cigarettes is a smell which belongs in a pub, it adds to the atmosphere of the pub. Removing that, and you’d come home with fresh smelling clothes. Why on earth would you want that?

That smell reminds you of the great evening you had.

Anti-smoking people should stop their whining and just accept that there are people who enjoy a smoke in this world. Anti-smoking people should worry about the things that are really a danger to the world: fossil fuels, intolerance, hunger, war, Paris Hilton.

It’s kind of odd to see anti-smoking people having no problems breathing the highly toxic fumes of cars, yet have a problem when someone 10 metres away lights up a cigarette.

Do I smoke? No.

My Christmas and new year’s were really good ones.

It all started Friday evening, 22nd December; right after my statistics exam, I went to Renaatje where she cooked me a good dinner. We had a film evening planned in the brand new cinema in Schagen; we went to Perfume (a really good film, by the way, albeit a bit strange). Synchronously, Felicia went to the same film with a friend of hers in The Hague, so we txt msg’d each other our thoughts about it. After the film, back in my car, Renate gave me her two gifts for my birthday: two Tim Burton films on DVD (Corpse Bride and Big Fish), my favourite director. I hadn’t even seen Big Fish yet, so I was really happy with my gifts.

Christmas went by pretty smoothly, not at all unrelated to the fact that Christmas simply got a whole lot better without my brother(s) attending. My parents sure can cook, as I already knew, and this time was no exception.

After Christmas I had to work every day until new year’s (except Sunday of course), but they flew by like rockets. I spent the Saturday eve at my parents’, since they had friends of ours over from England for the weekend; they are really nice people. They had not seen my new house yet, so they came over on the 31st; they really liked what I’d done to the place (the biggest compliment someone can give me).

New year’s eve itself was spent at home, since I simply was not in the mood to go to Amsterdam. I had a few invitations, but I could not choose between them (all very good friends), and other than that, public transport is a mess on 1st January, and I did not like the prospect of driving all the way to Amsterdam and back those two days. I listened to the Top2000, and at about 11:30 I went to my parents’ house to spend the last few minutes of the year there. Drank a few glasses of champagne, and went home at about 2am. Txt msg’ing with Felicia, I went to sleep at around 3 or 4, very satisfied with 2006.

And now it’s back to working again. Sad, but true. Only a few days left, and then my vacation starts.

Every culture has its own way of celebrating new year’s; even here in the west, each country has its own nuances. Where some prefer to look at what’s coming in 2007, Dutch people generally tend to look back and reflect on 2006.

For me, 2006 actually was a Very Good Year ™. First and foremost, all the various check-ups me mum got concerning her breast cancer were ok; doctors have not found a thing, meaning all the chemo and radiation therapy caught on. This is the single biggest reason why 2006 was a Very Good Year.

The second reason is of course the fact that I moved out of my parents’ into my own house, which took months to actually get ready to live in; as always, I had my mind set on a few very tricky things, as I wanted my doors/windowsills to be red (and anyone with a bit of experience in painting knows that means painting the same white door thee to four times), and of course the fact I wanted a wooden floor, and nothing else.

But now that I’m all settled, everybody just has to congratulate me with a very pretty house. It breathes me, weird colour choices, the walls filled with film posters, a huge glass desk and two humongous couches leaving no room for a dinner table; you name it.

The biggest kick is that I basically did everything by myself. Renate helped with tearing down the old wallpaper, and my dad helped with the final layer of paint on the doors (this is a very meticulous task), but doing the walls, laying the wooden floor; I all did it by myself. This insistence on doing it alone may have made evrything take longer, but I don’t care. This is now truly my house, and I will tear anyone apart who dares to lay a finger on it.

The third reason this was a Very Good Year are all my friends. I have so many good friends who are honest with and about me; mushy as it sounds, it’s a treasure.

The fourth reason is of course Twiek Lucifer Damien, my cat. Twiek is his name when he is relaxed and peaceful, Lucifer Damien when he has one of his many attacks of evilness (about four times a day).

It was a Very Good Year. What will 2007 bring? I can make a few wild guesses, but I’ll keep those to myself, okay?

Have a great new year’s, everybody, and take care of the things important to you.