It’s Friday. I’m sitting by myself, putting together the college newspaper at my college when I’m suddenly struck by an overwhelming boredom. Overwhelming boredom often strikes me when I have been sitting in front of a computer for more than two hours. Doing serious stuff, that is. Games, on the other hand, I can play for hours.

Anyway, I start sending SMS messages with my cellular hoping that this might entertain me for a while. I have a little chat with one of my sisters, send a few messages to a girl that broke up with her boyfriend around Christmas and still hasn’t stopped crying over him, and a message or two to a third girl. During this message exchange I get to know that the third girl is going to start working in a bakery to pay off her student loan. Having told me about her plans for the future, she ask me about my plans for the future. My plans for the future?

But I don’t have any plans for the future, damn it! My only plan for the future was to get done with the newspaper so that I could walk home and get something to eat. Should one have a plan for ones future? Is it wrong not to have plans? I usually only plan for a week or so at the time. And that is not much of a future. Since I realized I didn’t have any real plans and my future was pretty blurry, to put it that way, my messed up mind started to come up with all kinds of scenarios.

I’m 21 years old. Statistically that would give me about 50 years left to live. If I’m not struck by lighting or eating by tigers at the zoo, that is. But because I usually go inside during thunderstorms and I seldom visit zoos with tigers, let’s say that I will live for another 50 years. That’s a lot of time! But I sleep much. About eight hours a day. 8x365x50 = 146000 hours. That’s about 6083 days or 17 years. I will be asleep 17 of those 50 years. But that still gives me about 34 years awake. What the heck should I do for 34 years?

When I was in the army, I had what I hope might have been a glimpse into my own future. I was lying in my bed when I sort of passed out for a few seconds. I saw myself (or an older me) walking out of a building in a major city, which I think was a sound studio of some kind. I get into a black painted car and head for the freeway. The radio is playing that sort of soft and warm music you want to listen to when you are driving in the rain (did I mention it started to rain when I entered the freeway? Well, it did). Then I was just driving for about an hour, floating with the traffic and listening to the warm voice of the talk show host. I leave the city and enter a neighborhood with a lot of beach houses, much like the one Wesley Snipes (a darned good actor by the way) has in “The Fan”. One of these beach houses is apparently mine, because I take a left turn and stop the car outside one of them. I lock my car and get inside. After grabbing something to drink from the refrigerator I head upstairs. When I get upstairs, I can see right out on the balcony about 6-7 meters in front of me. There is a woman standing there, leaning on to the railing with her back against me. She is wearing a short summer dress, and she looks so beautiful. A little shorter than me and maybe a bit skinny, but what the heck. I go over to her and lay my hands around her, she turns around and just before I see her face… I wake up.

This could sound like the first 5 minutes of some really bad porn. Or it might just be the result of a messed up mind going haywire. But if this is what my future is going to look like, I must to say I’m looking forward to it. (I have always wanted my future to consist mostly of bad porn. No, I’m just kidding…)

A while back one of my room mates, Terje (head over to the Photos section of you want to know what he looks like), and I started this discussion over what we might be doing in 10 years. We are both computer engineer students and nice people, and we agreed that nice computer engineers probably would get nice jobs with nice salaries. We also agreed that it would be very hard to predict what would happen in the future, so we decided not to try to figure it out, just think a bit about what we wanted it to be like.

Terje hoped that he would get a job he liked with a steady income - like most people, I guess. He is sort of a UK freak (he is going to London soon, so If you see him tell him I said hi). I guess he kind of wanted to end up in the UK, but I can’t remember him actually saying that. And he hoped that, if things worked out fine with his girlfriend, Tanya (who I have no pictures of in the Photos section yet, but I probably will one day if I’m able to sneak up on her with the camera), they would still be together. Tanya’s father is actually from the UK (someone who knows her, please correct me if I’m wrong) so I guess Terje’s UK fetish is kicking in all the time.

Having listened to Terje’s hopes for the future, I decided that my glimpse into the future (see above) was good enough for me. But since I thought the whole scene with the sound studio, beach house and very good looking woman sounded a little silly at the time, I pretended I was watching the telly and was not interested in future hopes anymore. But Terje, if you are reading this (but you are probably not), look above for my future hopes.

Then my other room mate, Hallvard (also in the Photos section), entered the living room (also in the Photos section) and we asked him for his future plans. He said something like “I really don’t want to care about my future yet. It’s too damn hard to predict”. And I think he has a very good point there. Let’s not wear out too many brain cells thinking about the future - it’s too damn hard to predict anyway.

Then I went back to finishing the newspaper. Which actually turned out to be a very good one.