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2003-05-12 - 8:47 p.m. 'The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.' - Carl Gustav Jung 1) While looking into a bathroom mirror, she concluded that she could not possibly love another girl. Her six-month relationship with her classmate would have to end the following day, latest. She would start collecting signatures from scout campfires, and affect a rigid composure down bus aisles past groups of boys, with a countenance so haughty it was in delicious danger of collapsing into giggles. Thus she defined for herself what being bisexual meant: it was not simply the ability to be at two extreme ends of a pendulum's swing. It was, rather, the exhilaration of that mid-point, where the golden bob is travelling at maximum velocity. That freedom to change her mind in a split-second, cross over to the other side, her conscience a flash of blurry light. 2) Demolition works in the city were now carried out with explosives, which created illusions of buildings being consumed from the inside, caving in to their own dereliction. The wrecking ball was too illustrative an instrument. It was absurd for anyone to think that a 4500 kg globe of steel would lose its momentum the moment it touched the side of a building, and swing back to its original position. By choosing implosion over visible motion, the city's planners hoped to reduce the tragic dimensions of urban renewal. For in truth, all tragedy has at its core a motion that is inevitable, no better exemplified than the fact that each wrecking ball has to complete the fateful, and ultimately fatal, arc of its oscillation. 3) In the literature of hauntings, there is always one story about the children's playground, where a swing moves seemingly of its own accord. Apart from the fear of an invisible presence sitting on the swing, there is another one, more sinister--a person standing in the swing's path will not know if he or she is facing the phantom's front, or back. 4) He swung a locket in front of her eyes, inspired by a scene in a black-and-white foreign film once, where a man managed to hypnotise a woman into complete submission through the act of waving a pocket watch in front of her enraptured face. His current subject, however, became irritated, swatted a hand at the locket and frowned. Undeterred, he placed the locket in front of her face again, droning as before, 'you are feeling sleepy...sleepy,' obviously still under the spell that the movie had cast on him. 5) Opening the glass door to the little closet of the grandfather's clock, she put her hand on the brass lyre pendulum to still it. She looked around to see if there was anything that moved, and realised almost immediately that her eyes were moving. She walked out of the antique shop, dismayed, and still believing that somewhere out there is the master clock which controls all of time, and which would freeze the world if she but placed a finger to interrupt its machinery.
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