My advisor later said not to worry about it, 
although "the people here will be paying you salary one day." Geee, thanks. Eventually I turned in a really long essay on the 21st and I could finally not worry about stuff. Until the 25th when I just had to go to the lab to save my plants from horrible torturous death by drought. I wish all problems could be solved with watering. My computer, however, really wishes I don't try this in practice.
Recently my monitor died. It started flickering and turned itself off a couple of times. Until one time it didn't turn on anymore. Me and Erkki had matching monitors before and now we got new matching monitors. That's when things really got weird. Erkki's monitor works like a charm but my monitor likes to surprise me with special effects. 
There I am just browsing and minding my own business when my monitor suddenly produces a mysterious light blue shadow. It appears to the right of every line of text, every dark area of a menu. It appears in the browser, in the image processing software, on the desktop and even on the start menu. It's everywhere! Then I open another browser window and it disappears, then I open a new tab it's there again. Then I open a third tab and suddenly the new tab looks clear but the rest of the screen still looks weird. I didn't even know this sort of problems were possible. 
I have tried uninstalling and re-installing video card drivers and I tried some sort of ATI tweaking tool. Now it's not as bad as before but the image is still corrupt whenever it feels like it.Speaking of corrupt, one very influential Estonian politician Edgar Savisaar got caught asking money (1.5 million euros) from Russian Railways President Vladimir Yakunin.
Savisaar is the kind of man that has no morals and who is as undemocratic as his power allows him. As the mayor of Estonia's capital Tallinn he uses city funding to publish his own propaganda newspaper and a TV channel. Not only is it dishonest to the taxpayer, but it's also totally creepy that he's getting away with it. Estonia's counterintelligence declassified their findings of secret fundings and now he's in a big scandal which might just be the end of his career. I'm afraid he'll just buy his way out with money, favors and outright lies (e.g. he announced he was working WITH Estonia's counterintelligence all along). Whatever happens in the future, Savisaar is certainly in a pickle now and this is one guy who's misfortune gives me much joy. 
Actually it's not even misfortune since he was the one who was going to sell out his power in Estonia out of his own free will. It's karma!Good karma, bad karma. For Estonians and also for me, that's just a saying. People rarely believe in resurrection. We mostly believe that people collect their karma dept during their lifetime. Bad things happen to bad people and good things happen to... well, Estonians believe that good things only happen to BAD people. Anyone with any sort of financial comfort is a "crook, liar and a thief". So I suppose everyone in Estonia are bad people.
That doesn't sound quite right. Nearly everyone I know are such good people...Karma is nice though. I think I could easily be a Buddhist if they weren't such pacifists. And if they didn't meditate so much and if they didn't worship Buddha statues and if they didn't believe that rocks have souls and if they ate MEAT! Or perhaps I could be a Hindu - everything is allowed there if you find the right religious group. Except, again, I don't really believe in universal resurrection and that's not so negotiable. This religion thing really is tough.
A few days ago I went to the bookstore to buy a good theory book about Spiritualism. You know what I found out? Surprise-surprise: Spiritualism is the religion of the Dumb. Spiritualism books are mostly in large print. They contain "wisdom" not much worse from TV-shop commercials for energizing bracelets. There was a book about haunted places - probably all just hoax and publicity for "haunted hotels". There were books about reading minds (along with instructions), reading palms, interpreting tarot cards, doing white magic, black magic, dowsing, etc. 
Even the most promising books about the spirit world ended up containing stupid self-help sort of advice for a cleaner spirit and quick tips to unleash your supernatural side. That's not my kind of Spiritualism. My beliefs are pretty basic - there's a higher intelligence God, but it's not the sort of authority figure that in most religions. I mean, if God has ultimate power and ultimate wisdom, why would he micromanage everything people do. He already knows if those people are going to do the right thing and what would have to happen so that the right choices are guaranteed. The sort of micromanaging that organized religions enforce kind of defeat the purpose of free will. I also think people have souls and I think those souls persist even after the person dies. I don't know how long they persist, perhaps just a few hours before they become part of something else. I think there's a shared unconscious level where people communicate without words and I think it's even in places with no other people. That would explain why people get a vibe from other people as well as different places and also why people sometimes just know when they are being watched.
But maybe human mind is simply designed to imagine that there is something or someone out there that people can't explain. Someone who decides who's living a good life and who isn't, or who's naughty or nice. Someone who is all-knowing and remembers all the people individually. That sounds so familiar... Someone who is everywhere at the same time... Mhh... SANTA is god!!!!!!
Someone should build the Church of Santa. Or is that what malls are for?
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