Oh em gee

Oh my word, I feel compelled to write a blog full of complaints. I have many. Well, two at least, but that's plenty enough.

1.) That damn blog I keep going to that always annoys me. It annoys me that it annoys me. It annoys me that I go to it in the first place. I can get annoyed by the content, but I even more so by the grammar and spelling. I'm oh so tempted to correct it all and put it as a comment. But I know that the keeper of the blog tracks her visitors so I can't do that. Give me the strength to overlook stupidity. Now, I know I do my fair share of grammatical errors and quite creative spelling at times, but not in my native language. Have you no pride, woman?! Rhetorical question, of course you don't. Part of why I don't like you very much. Am I a snob? I must be.

2.) Dogs. I just don't understand them. I don't understand why people like them. They're seriously smelly. They have to go outside all the time. They make a mess! They need to eat at regular hours or they whine. They jump on stuff. It's the whining I really can't stand. The whining and the smell. Yes, I get the irony, I'm whining about them, and honestly, I could probably stand to take a shower. Difference is I will take a shower whereas dogs don't care. They're fine with being dirty. They're that stupid. Have they no pride?! Rhetorical question, of course they don't. Part of why I don't like them very much. Am I a snob? I must be.

Summer, how I hate you.

You're the fickle mistress of an entire people. They worship you as if you were a goddess, they wait for you, long for you, plan for you, celebrate your arrival. What do you offer in return? Scorching heat or pouring rain. Mosquitoes, wasps, peeling skin, naked children, flipflops with socks, closed hospitals, caravans tipping on bridges, ice cream stained asphalt and arguments in cars.

No, summer, I'm not charmed. No flowers can compensate the autoreplies I get from e-mailing the university. No heat can justify me in a bikini on a square. I hate you, detest you, loathe you. You're the barbed wire I have to crawl through to get to the air at the end of the tunnel. Autumn, I will embrace you this year in ways I never have before.

As a mistress you have twisted their heads, summer. They can't see you for what you are, you lying good for nothing whore.

The boy that didn't want to grow up

When I was a child with only two TV channels there used to be a cartoon about a man who didn't want to grow up. I think it was called Mannen som inte ville vara stor (The man that didn't want to be an adult) I tried googling it but didn't find anything about it. Instead I ended up on a bunch of crap blogs written by men who don't want to grow up. Amusing in itself I suppose. But anyway, they kind of illustrate what I'm about to illuminate, or well, comment on at least.

At the time I watched that cartoon I didn't understand it at all. Why wouldn't anyone want to grow up? Being an adult seemed great! You'd always get your way and you could buy what you wanted, decide what you'd eat and watch and when to be home and all that good stuff. Needless to say now I know better.

It's a sign of the time, being stuck in the middle generation. I do believe it's hard for a geneneration to claim their adulthood when the parentgeneration still conciders themselves to be somewhat young. They're most definatly overlapping now. My favorite example, Amelia Adamo thinks that the 60s is the new 30s. How can someone in their late 20's have anything to say about that? You can't rebel against something when they're basically trying to be you.

We can all individually rebel against our parents but we can't rebel against a part of the population. Anyway, this argument isn't leading anywhere, really, it's just facts. There are not as many little old ladies anymore, they're still buying expensive jeans and tanning in their 50s, so maybe I should just focus on why and perhaps even find something to blame.

Though I feel I should add that I don't blame them, if I had a chance to turn back time and remain myself at my best moments even when my body tells me those times are gone I would. Though that option is now being taken away from me. More power to those who claim the space that isn't theirs!

So, basically it must have something to do with health and for how long we can remain independent and the top generation. Even though the age for retiremnt here is 65 people live 30 or so years after that. That is a long time. Retirement doesn't mean you're going to sit in your chair and wait for death anymore. We're having kids at 45! The whole spectra of age has shifted due to the longlivity of the people in the rich west. Good healthcare, lack of disasters and wars make us safe and healthy.

Also it adds pressure. It's not ok to look and act your age. This goes with the post about beauty, really. If you look "old" it's your own fault as there's help out there to purchase. I silently wonder how many would have the old-lady-hairstyle and be happy with it if they weren't constantly fed the fountain of youth myth. So instead of sighing when I see them I should pity them for not being allowed to age gracefully.

I have a personal relationship with it, I feel harsh at times, but what am I to do when it's so ridicilous. Women in their 60's aren't as strong as those in their 20's and I had to point that out to someone in her late 50's about a week ago. The other side of the phone got quiet when I said "Well think about how the age 61 seemed to you when you were 28, the body breaks down eventually". I felt mean and coldhearted. But at the same time it's something I can say when it hasn't happened to me yet. Let me keep my youth and don't feed me your decay as I try really hard to not rub my unwrinkled hands in your face. I will get old myself, unless I get hit by a bus before that, but give me the chance to enjoy (as if I've ever enjoyed anything) every age I'm at without the double standard of being loyal to your body not bouncing as it once did.

Honestly I feel judged, belittled and headpetted by my parentgeneration. You're old, accept it. (When you start calling your own age the new XX's you're just in denial) Bones are going to break, hair is going to change colour, you're going to be tired, angry, worn out. It's perfectly normal. Don't make the mistake of worrying about the wrong things, and don't plan funerals just yet. There has to be a middle way.

Remember, as long as you keep the younger adults children in your eyes you can't expect us to carry your burdens and clean up after your childish mistakes.

Anyway to go back to the 60's being the new 30's. You can't take one age out of the whole spectra. See if that was to be true I'd be a toddler. So be careful, you don't want to incapacitate everyone that happens to be born after you because of your own fear of death. Every generation makes its own mistakes. Just like mother cat walks away from her litter we need a bigger gap between generations. Only now it seems that the children need to walk away from their parents because we share too much space.

An example of that is how the younger are beginning to leave Facebook now when their parents are finding their way there. We need privacy, some things shouldn't be shared between parents and children while in some aspects we should share everything with those who love us the most.

I don't even want to find my brother online which is why I blog in English under a penname and remain quiet when he talks about the communites he's a member of when I realize we go the same places. Hopefully I'll never run into my mother online, even now when she's finally coming to the conclusion there are still things out there she needs to learn, and I know she'll get all excited and make the mistake of joining them all.

Either way, that cartoon was made by people from my parentgeneration. That should have been my first clue to that I'll be kept a child forever so that they can still feel young. I'm not making an apology, the king is dead long live the king!

Wordchoke

I rarely have the problem of not having anything to say, instead, I often find myself stumbling over words because so many of them want to come out at once and they end up in a mess and without any sense. This happens when I take notes as well. I want to take notes of singificance, but they get twirled into my own ideas and the questions raised. Even though I don't concidider "I feel" a point in an argument I'm sure there are times where I want to resort to it. Not because I'm actually out of arguments, but because the whole concept is pissing me off and I feel unheard and belittled. See, there I went! But there has to be something behind that. Why do certain opinions raise feelings and others don't?

I can feel strongly for some things, but they basically boil down to one thing - injustice. The hate flares up in me and I become spiteful and pitiful. I can apply this to a lot of areas, but I have the core opinion that things should be somewhat fair and if we all tried to make things a bit more even the world would be a better place. What we concider right and wrong isn't as much our opinion as we'd like to think, it often has more to do with social structures and the ever feared tradition. I might not hate violence and war with such a passion had I ever faced it and felt my survival depended on my ability to defend myself. It's fairly easy being a pacifist in Sweden. There's so much pride and identity involved in military services and I do understand it's not as easy as saying "Lay down your weapons and embrace" as it's all part of a bigger system.

But isn't it true, at some level at least, that if no country had an army it would be harder to justify the building of one? If we were to just stop there'd naturally be economic consequences as those in the business of strategically killing others for their own benefit would be unemployed, but maybe a better world would emerge. I've been called naive, and yes I can see the point, but giving up the security blanket or violence would also include a reevaluation of possessions, freedom of belief and speech.

As I stated before I understand that what be believe is a product of factors surrounding us at the point in time where we formed our opinions, so what I'd like to happen is for those factors to be positive. I'm not naive enough (sorry) to think this would happen overnight, nor am I proclaiming a complete union of the world, what I'm simply asking for is an open mind and a basic respect for others.

We can't undo the mistakes of the past generations so it'd be a hard task to let go of a lot of the anger, but little by little as the injustices fade into a historic past we could begin to bridge the gaps. People should be about the same no matter where they are, we all have the basic needs, as explained by Abraham Maslow and that stairthing. Though, I don't agree completely (do I ever) as I wouldn't put safety as being more basic than love and belonging. But then again, that might be easy for me to say. Perhaps I should conduct a survey among homeless people and ask them what they'd rather want, a place to live or to be loved.

But it is in the second step we run into problems, especially if it clatches with the very top of beliefs, and we go completely off track if we forget the part of respect. I personally think that respect should be included in love. We can't love everyone, but we should strive to respect all. It's hard to deliberatly injure someone you respect. Respect needs to be earned however, and part of that is taking responsibility, so as long as we try to shift blame there can be no proper respect. Take reponsibility for your own actions and apologize when and apology is needed and your counterpart won't feel as unheard and belittled and can grow into a confident and secure person/nation/area/group, without the need to hurt someone physically.

Perhaps I'm just kidding myself. Maybe the human race doesn't deserve what's best for them and maybe we don't really want to listen to be others to be heard ourselves, at the same time as we have two ears and only one mouth. "I hear what you're saying, but I don't agree and I have no intrest in discussing it any further".

E-mail

Question via email: "Why are you posting random rubbish at the speed of light on your blog this morning?"

Answer via blogpost: "Why are you clicking update at the speed of light on my blog this morning?"

Additional comment: "Don't you hate when someone answers a question with a question?"

What a wonderful world this could be,,,

...that is, if more things were the way I want them, or at least in close to a way I want them. There are a few things in this world that I find annoying. I'm presenting some to you, you know, just to be annoying.
- Bloggers who are passive aggressive and tries to provoke a reaction in someone else by tossing around their "point of view" and commonly ending it with "you know who you are".
- Self pitying blogposts. Boohoo, poor little you. I don't want to read about your misery. I have my own. Boohoo, poor little me.
- Bloggers that consistently use abbreviations of names of the people in their lives, such as being married to "K", having a best friend called "P" and two children named "R" and "T". You're probably on to something there, if you don't want to write their full names, due to respect, or privacy or whatever, you probably shouldn't be writing about them at all. Hm, can we agree on that? K, thanks.
- Blogs with musical backgrounds. How bloody annoying is that? My goodness. I much prefer to choose my own music and not have my ears blasted out by some jingle that really belongs on a cellphone from 1998.
- Pictures-of-yourself-blogs. Heh, sorry, I don't really want to see pictures of you doing all kinds of things that shouldn't be shown in public. Will someome please think of the children?! Even worse in this category is pictures of the plates of food before dinner. Why even blog about what you eat? Or wear for that matter. I should print some "Oh dear, I don't care" stickers and hand out.
- The fact that I read these blogs annoys me.
- The add on favors. You know what they are. You agree to pick something up at the store, or give someone a lift, and it turns into, a "oh while you're at it, would you please paint my house, massage my back, kiss my ass, make me dinner, solve all of life's mysteries, dye your hair so you're more attractive, take the dogs out and fill my car up with gas?"
- The fact that I let people add favors on to favors I'm already doing them.
- The fact that I add favors myself.
- 80's and 90's sitcoms and sitcoms with a middle aged men with narcessistic complex issues as the main character. It's simply not funny. Not funny. Well, it's kind of funny when they fall down and/or get kicked in the balls, I just wish they weren't faking it.
- Timing. It annoys me how I always manage to be either too early or too late, never just on time. Like right now. I started writing this because it was just a bit too long before I had to get going so I decided to start a post. Now I've spent way too much time looking up that picture up there that doesn't fully illustrate my point anyway, and typing random stuff that won't improve anyone's life at all, but I have to finish, so I'll be late. Seriously, it really is annoying.
- All my friends going places and I'm stuck doing the same thing.
- When people generalize.
- When I generalize.
- Pointless status updates on Facebook. Same goes there as for the blogs. I don't really care about what you ate for dinner, or will eat for dinner, or that you need to tinkle.
- The endless Farmville and Zoopark or whatever updates on Facebook in my status scroll.
- The amount of documentaries I manage to catch on TV every week.

Due to that whole being late stuff, I have to stop. It also annoys me that I have to go, I had so much more to complain about!

Gah!

If I come across another blog about a parent blogging about their child's miracles, or see another status update about what somebody's child is doing I'm going to vomit. Don't get me wrong, I can understand you're proud of your offspring, but seriously, people have been having babies as long as there world has had human beings.

I like to find interesting blogs that aren't too selfabsorbed and selfanalytical, but rather culture observing and questioning. That calls on people with agile minds to relieve my boredom and slentriant way of being, sort of like a recepie where someone sticks a frozen hotdog in a meatloaf. Anecdotes about kids doesn't do it as the full background of thoughts. Misunderstand me correctly, if the child does something fun, by all means share, but does the world really need to know what colour poop it had this morning? And then, taking on the bigger perspective, isn't this taking away from the children themselves? What if the child grows up to never want to share a personal detail online, ever? That choice has already been taken away. So, please, show your children some respect and assume that it will have some integrity later in life.

As a whole it seems that blogs and websites are becoming more streamlined, perhpas it's just that my intrests vary and I'm too lazy to find new watering holes. So, could someone please make something in any shape or form that takes a little from a lot and skips all the stuff I'm not really that interested in?

Indivuals aren't that interesting unless you actually know them and what's going on in their lives, stranger's kids aren't that interesting either, unless you love them and care for them, books are interesting, observations and conclusions are interesting, so are movies to an extent, history, sure. Turtles wearing backpacks and skipping on lilly pads - sure win.

EDIT: I'd also like to add that I have a tendency to end up on way too many political blogs, so if you share intrests with me, it seems you're either a mother who reads while your child sleeps or a political activist. I hope that doesn't say too much about me.

It's no good but that's ok

There's this tendency I have, to look at things from a different perspective which in extension makes me rather pretentious, not use the term stuck up. But I'm not. I just lack the attentionspan and intrest in pitiful issues. I concern myself with the compliexity rather than a straight forward answer, often, once you look at a problem from different angles it turns out you had the answer all the time, you just didn't look at it the right way.

The practical concequences of this is that when you talk to me I might seem aloof and uninterested, and with that comes intimidating. That always suprises me a bit, I try to listen, and then tell you what it is that I hear from an idealistic perspective. You're babbling uncontrolably, I see that you lack structure, and if you seem uncomfortable with that I try to help you find a structure, if you seem happy with it, I try to encourage you to hold on to the float. I can't do that if you're snowed in on the detail of that your bookcase is too far to the left. It's a sifting function, I'm a tool for you to pour unfiltered words through and hopefully I can help you come up with a plan or an explaination in the other end.

At the same time it demands something too. You have to have the mental ability to hear what I'm saying when I reply, and you have to have the ability to move on. I've seen plenty of good people being too stuck in the past. Moving on creates an identity crisis, not in all a very vast one, but unless you understand that moving on changes you, you're not a fixed being, and accepting what you become can be difficult. It's not even sure that you even like the person you're transforming into.

We all identify ourselves with different pin pointed areas in ourselves. Things that don't require much power of thought. When meeting new people, what do they usually ask? Those questions are indicators of what we judge people by, your age, your marital status, your housing arrangement. When you're a child it's fairly easy, "what's your favorite colour, your favorite toy, your favorite game?" the older we get and the more life didn't turn out as simple as we had hoped every answer to the question of "how old are you, what do you do, are you married, do you have children?" also reflect a choice we made, or a choice we weren't allowed to make and the answers can become full of guilt and drowned dreams. Even though we're asked the same thing! Compare, how do you react to a 17 year old that's 8 months pregnant to a 37 year old that's 8 months along. Are they similar people, are they able to share the same experiance?

Conditions change, and our idea of ourselves should change accordingly. With everything external being transient it's even more important to know who you are in your core, who you are when you can't answer the polite questions asked. You should be able to identify yourself without measurable indicators. Who's the director without the job? Who's the housewife without the family? Who's the 90 year old without an age?

So, basically, if you define your identity less by these external easy to tell factors, and see who you are without them, the transition from one group to another won't be so difficult. Not even the argumen of "when I look in the mirror I don't recognize myself" holds up as you age, you always look slightly different, you experianced it when you went through puberty as well, didn't you? The expectation can't be to be stagnant, but always evolving and changing. And that the only thing constant is change is hardly a new concept.

What I'm trying to get at is that when it feels like the whole world is collapsing around you and you can't use the same indicators to shape an identity, please remember that those things never added to who you were in the first place.

International women's day

First a couple of sentences about Victoria Benedictsson. I was given the task to make my own literary canon. An impossible one as I found myself getting tied up in perspectives, but I lovingly remembered the first time I read Ur Mörkret, a sad yet perfectly composed story about a girl being brought up by her father and how she eventually came to detest her own gender simply because she couldn't live up to a male ideal. It's hard to be forgiven for being born a woman.

Then, today is also International women's day. Not the day for international women, but a day to remember that the fight for equality is very much still fought, every day still. So I mentioned it to an American friend, that appearantly never heard of it. That's a disgrace. In the sexual revolution the US was on top, women's rights were a big deal, women's camps and conferences, last time I heard about this part in modern history is when I listened to the P3 documentary about the history of female orgasm (if you know Swedish you can download it here) All I can think to ask is, what happened?! International women's day was always a big thing in school, as was UN day, and I grew up in the least gender equal part of Sweden, it still is by the way, it was in the news today, even.

Maybe it doesn't even matter what happened, it just reminds me that the world is hardly ready for the post feminism era. Either way I wish all women would get the chance to do with their lives as they please and don't feel forced to bleed on their wedding night. The idea of hymen is just another myth to control women's bodies, and deprive them of the human right to be their own masters. A woman's body is never quite her own, is it? There's always someone having an opinion on how it should look and what she should do with it. Again, that's why we need this day to begin with.

Me, me, me

Some things I've learned today taking quizzes on Facebook; In a previous life I owned a bordello, stupidity pisses me off, my inner crazy bitch is Sylvia Plath and my soulmate is Johnny Depp. It's all very self indulgent. The person that matters the most to ourselves is in fact oneself. I remember taking quizzes in the teen magazines as well, the difference is that places like Facebook allow us to broadcast our result and with that making us seem rather witty and important. Do I honestly think my Facebook friends care about who I was in a previous life? No, not really. Do I think the people who actually care about me would get a laugh out of it? Possibly.

I can't even call it selfishness, when it's more self fascination. It's almost as if we should be suprised about the results of them, some stranger composing them, like an all mighty god telling us who we are, identifying our cores based on what colours we like, which music we listen to, what TV shows we watch and so on and so forth. As if everyone cares so much about us that they know us better than we could ever know ourselves. A camera sweeping over my face as my eyes sparkle in the special on TV about my wonderful life, all the grand things I've done and how I changed the world. Or when I accept my award, my gorgeous dress the flashes going off to capture a bit of me, the audicene applauding until the palms of their hands turn red. All good daydreams, and the Internet makes it possible.

Thing is, and this is something I've brought up before, when everyone's special, noone's special. Also, and again subject of an older blog post, with all the possibilities of the Internet, in all the ways we could become wiser we focus on the topic we love the most - ourselves. From time to time I do a Google image search with "self portrait" and giggle at the results. This, my friends, is how we want the world to remember us, as quirky different people, an ocean of individuals all trying to peak and be better, prettier, sexier, witter and more googleable. What you need to remember is that when everyone's selfish, noone cares about you either.

Stupid is as stupid do do

I'm generally quite an easy going person, I'd like to think I'm open minded, accepting and all that other good stuff, but the older I get the more I'm realizing there's one thing I have trouble overlooking, and that is stupidity. It's ok to be a bit dim, you can't help how your brain is built, and it's impossible to know everything, in some contexts I'm utterly stupid myself, but if I don't know something or if I'm confused I generally keep my mouth shut.

My latest outburst is after reading comments on an article, surely I can understand why people are upset, but I cannot understand why they reason the way they do, taking two unrelated events and blaming one on the other. How does that even work? It reminds me of when they raised the price of a product and a customer said "The bastards can raise the price of the newspaper, but they're not raising the pensions are they?". I tried really hard to not laugh at her. How can a private profit driving company possibly have anything to do with pensions? I wish this was only a one time event, but it seems to be a common thing.

In a university class, in 2010, with no sense of sarcasm and irony someone asked if the way the swedish counties hand out money to their different departments had any relation to how much money bank directors make. This time I did roll my eyes, not so that the asker could see, of course. But it makes me wonder, is the public this uneducated? Or are they that used to blaming something they can't quite picture?

Why is it so hard to learn simple reasoning? I'm fully aware that I risk coming off as a stuck up bitch in this, and there's a possibility you're right, but must stupid people speak? Do they understand how stupid they seem? And first and foremost how can we expect a good world if they're that stupid - can they make informed decisions when it comes to things such as voting? I'm getting honestly concerned, rather than listening to the sales pitches of the political parties I do my own research, not only about their values but about the numbers they present, the events they discuss to deem their arguments validated or not. This makes me the stupid one in it, I assumed everyone did this to form an opinion.

Actually none of this even has to do with intelligence, it has to do with education and learning. I hope that everyone's able to learn, at least up to a certain level, it's when you need to apply that knowledge that the difference really shows. Ask yourself, are you able to theorize and work with ideals, rather than swimming in the shallow pool? Do you ask yourself "why?" more often than you say "they say that"? Without understanding the why we can't understand anything at all. So what I need to figure out are the following. Why does stupidity bother me? Why isn't the bigger perspective seen as interesting? And why must stupid people speak in my presence?

So much for cultivated beings

For the 50+ years the UN has had peacekeepers out in the world it's been going on, sexual relations between the soldiers and the people they're set to protect. Last year Swedes were sent home for this very reason. Even though they know it's not allowed they do it, still.

I have one main question, and then some following: Why are you such horny fucks? Can you not hold it until you get home, or are you so rejected by your natives that you feel like you reached heaven when poor women are available? Nevermind world peace as long as I get laid, is that an idea the UN should stand for? Of course not. Are all inhibitions tossed out the window when put in the heart of darkness? Perhaps Joseph Conrad was on to something. The consequenses don't seem to be enough of an issue to stop the behaviour.

In Kongo Kinshasa the very center of the mission is to keep the women safe. Rape is just a war strategy, one that won't be met with guns. It's using women from two different angles. Getting them to do what you want with money or a dream of a better life somewhere else, or planting the seeds of militia in the wombs of thirteen year olds, the victims are still women. Not in one of the world's most poor countries, but the poorest country.

In lack of better alternatives we rely on help organizations as well as the UN to do the right thing, but when the good guys are breaking the rules, what can we put our faith in? And first and foremost, who will fend for those who can't fend for themselves?

Welcome to a new semester at the university

One might think that the stress of seminars, presentations, exams and finals are the biggest issues while being a student at a university. I beg to differ, the real test is to reactivate your migrated student account, find your classes in a list, find the literature list and in which hall registration is. If you manage to do that without your bloodpressure exploding, or head imploding or your soul becoming a pittoresque illusion of lollipops and candydrops fallen in a pool of stinging jellyfish you're pretty much ready for the carpooling lane on a busy highway. They don't really need applications do they? Just a general link where you have to navigate a website bigger than the Chinese black market for counterfeit sportsgoods. Those who actually manage to show up for the registration in the right room, on the right day, at the right time, with the right books and with your (semi)sanity intact should get automatic As.

A post in the honor of this shoe

This is the most horrible shoe I have ever seen. For several reasons. I don't understand the whole peeptoe boot thing, yet I should say, I might catch on later. It just seems strange to me, if your ankles are really cold while you're wearing sandals, why not put on some pants? Instead of covering it up with boots I mean. I don't know about you, but it doesn't happen to me that often that I think "Oh my my toes are so hot and my calves are oh so cold". Again, I apologize if that's just me.

Then, I also hate animal prints. No offense to anyone, but animal prints just scream tacky and tasteless. Now if that's the look you're going for, by all means, do wear these shoes. Or anything else that makes me want to barf, like leopard print or tiger print. Though I will confess to one of my fashion sins here; I did at one point have a pair of boots with cowprint. I was trying to make fun of the whole animal print style but as usual noone understood my irony and it ended by a series of compliments from 70 year old women with faux furs. That is another thing I detest. Fur. Don't wear it. Poor animals.

The third bit is the too many colours thing. It's got pink, it's got silver, it's got black and it's got white. Too much. It looks like the zebra print was taken at random. Like the designer thought "hm, what fabric do I have left over from that Halloween party? Oh lookie! Zebra! Great! I'll glue it to these horrid sandals! That's bound to sell!" Needless to say it just produced something that gets mocked in my blog. Good job designer!

Moving on to the shape of the heel. The height of the heel. Ugh. Typical girl dress up style for when you're not sure if you can pull it off, and if you decide to wear that height heels. Yeah, you're right, you shouldn't wear heels. Don't be ashamed of your height! Stretch! Be proud! Be proud enough to not wear a heel like that. Thank you.

Lastly, the straps. They're ugly. Plain and simple.

Now, I'd really love to know who buys these shoes. I'm looking forward to seeing someone walk down the street with them. I'm actually concidering buying them, but knowing how that other of my sarcastic fashionevents went, I don't think it'd be a good idea...

Reruns, part three

Originally posted on May 11 2009

I hate rugs

In general rugs are so f-ing ugly. I mean seriously ugly! and also in general can't match their curtains or furniture with this ugly f-ck rug. It's a disgrace. Oh my god I'm boiling even thinking about it.

What's the purpose of rugs anyway? Do they have one? Besides from being ugly I mean. The patters are, once more in general, hideous. I can't stand it.

I've had rugs. Chosen very carefully. One was creme coloured with circular patterns. It was kinda hot. Another one was pink with white dots. It was kinda hot too. I think that a rug should be spiffy enough to hang on the wall as a piece of art. Wish more people would keep that in mind so I wouldn't have to get all torn up by the state of their homes.

I don't have any rugs in the house now. Not even in the bathroom. I don't see the point. I have floors right?

If you feel offended by this, and if you're looking at your rug thinking I'm wrong. By golly, you're ONE OF THOSE, one of those people with no taste. Not my fault. I bet you have ugly shoes too.

Reruns, part one

(Originally posted August 12 2009)

What became of it

When Internet had it's big breakthrough of becoming mainstream in the mid 90's or so we were all lured here for different reasons, information, politics, nudity, communication, whatever. But what has the 21st century done with this goldrush? The focus has shifted to the users. It's all about US. (Or as I'd like to think ME, ME, ME)

You don't have to write well to be something big online. You don't have to tell the story about your trip. A fast update on Twitter such as "I'm on a train" is enough. A waterout of language if you wish. The focus on text was an issue when I was in high school and we were getting some rather basic information about how to use the Internet. It was discrimiating to those who didn't read an/or write well.

Well that has been taken care of for sure! There's no room for any length it seems. It's all statusmessages and small updates, you don't really learn much of anything, do you? I would have thought these short messages would have become way more popular earlier on when we paid by the minute for the time we spent online. Well, maybe that still holds as a lot of people seem to twitter and facebook through the browser on their phones.

But who are we kidding, really? WIth the endless possibilites of a masscommunication tool we are stuck updating people about sitting on a train, having breakfast, or going to the cornerstore for milk. Does anyone care? I don't. I don't care about different things online than I do offline. If you don't have anything of weight to tell me I don't want to hear it.

We upload videos of ourselves to YouTube and update strangers on our bathroom habits. I'm ashamed. I do it too. I want to be noticed in a medium everyone has access to. (Not everyone, but you know what I mean) I want to be heard, embraced and accepted. Though I'm fighting the same issues here as I do offline. My thoughts are too swirly, I prefer to call it trail of thoughts rather than a train of thoughts as a trail can lead you anywhere but a train has a set destination. Can you tell I just read an update about someone being on a train?

I like reading wellwritten posts that get my head going. So much for being an intellectual snob huh? If I can't be a snob where we had endless possibilites I might have to reinvent myself, so here we go.

What are you doing right now?
Waiting

Well, congratulations.

In accordance to tradition I decided to clean my house for Christmas. The full works, washing, dusting, but mainly washing throws, blankets and such to get rid of cat hair. The drain in the laundry room was a bit clogged. No big deal. I'll fix it. Yes. I'll fix it. Three buckets of water later, I try again. How do I manage to make it worse by trying to fix it? Five buckets of water later, it must work. Well it doesn't. I'm cold. I'm wet. The house is still messy and the day is pretty much gone. Let's try again! And this time, I get down on your hands and knees and curse. Turn on the water and whine a little. Stomp around in the puddles, thinking "this could have been fun had it not been so pathetically annoying". While I'm trying to keep a cat off my back, quite literally, I scoop up the water, for the mess I've made is way beyond mopping. Oh no! The mopbucket! Water, water, everywhere water, under the shower, under the washing machine, the bucket floats by. I feel as if I'm in that poem I wrote while sitting in a guest house, the one about flying sofas and tigers.

I...just...can't...get...the...tool...far...enough...in. So I bend, I push, I grunt, I pout, I go back to the cursing. Pull some nasty goo out while I hear drip, trip, stomp, swoosh. Hello cat. A happy cat, in the misery made up from water spills and tiled floors (I should say "Thank you God for giving me tiled floors") I sigh and put the cat on top of the washing machine. I can, yes I can, hear him giggling at me. I go back to scooping water off the floor, feeling my heart sinking lower, but I will be damned to be beaten by a drain. It must work, somehow. My stubborness is mighter than my intelligence. Much mightier. So I struggle more. Try even harder, always with the same result.

I can feel the rest of the house bending in over me, the boxes, the curtains, the dishes in the sink, the piles of laundry that brought me to this in the first place, the burnt out candles, the expired milk, the dried in coffee stains, the bottles I ment to recycle, everything at once and by that I'm close to tears. It's not the drain, it's not the mess in the house, it's not the agony of having to have a nice holiday, it's my own shortcomings and trying to accept that I can't do anything I set my heart to.

I can make sense of abstract problems, but I simply cannot fix a clogged drain. (I can cure cancer, I can climb mountains) I can relate Derrida to Almqvist, but I cannot fix a clogged drain. I can avoid answering the phone for weeks, I can write a story about a lactose intolerant mouse, but I cannot fix a clogged drain. I can memorize all of In i öknen ("He clung to me like the drowning") I can train a cat to sit before dinner, I can train it to fetch, but I cannot fix a clogged drain.

I've been beaten at last. My Akilles heal. Who'd have know it'd take a drain to do it? So congratulations, world, you finally beat me.

Guns and ammunition

By now, it should be clear where I stand on all issues including weapons in general, war and armies and all things associated with it. But as it happens, one of my favorite albums of all time is called Vapen och ammunition. Guess what that is in English. I'll get you a cookie if you get it right, I'll get you one and I'll eat it myself.

What the issue at hand really happens to be is my lack of effective words to curse with. I don't believe in God either, so all those are just out, I don't find them offensive at all. All that stuff about fucking your mother. Well, that's not offensive either. She didn't become a mother without fucking, so I don't really see what the big deal is. Your own mother probably is a bit offensive though. That's the kind of complication I need. But, incest, that's just so obviously wrong from an evolutionary point of view that's not even worth mentioning.

It's about the same with terms referring to body parts. Aren't the bodies the very things that define us? What can be offensive about that? Example. Dickhead. Aren't most men quite fond of their dicks and in particular their dickheads?

So if the basis of cursing is to be offensive, shouldn't it be personalized? Or are words offensive because they're curse words? You'd probably have to pick one side or the other. But, words also evolve and change, the perfect example is the Swedish word kärring, first it simply meant someone you hold dear, as in darling, and now it means bitch. So how does it happen? And what kind of shift of values can we see in the bigger perspective? The value of women, in this example? I doubt that. Maybe it's revolving motion.

Either way, that wasn't what I was trying to say. (Just try to focus kärring) Maybe, we should try to find out what offends those you know the most. Or write it down on a neat little post it and hand it to new acuquaintances, so they know what to say if they feel the need to make you angry. For me, it'd go something like "Hi, I'm Molly, I'm mostly offended by unnecessary violence and weapons. If you want to offend me say 'bomb you Molly' or 'shoot this Molly' or how about 'Why don't you go join the army?'"

Fragments of an association game

Irony, writer unable to write. Solution, none in sight. Sight, something about seeing. Seeing, unclear. Unclear means grumbled. Like the waters on the east coast. Seaweeds chasing legs. Sun too bright. Blinded, blindfolded, tied up, captivated. Swept away. Swept of feet. Fall. Fall is over. Winter now. Cold. Fall. Classes in the fall. An ad that said Art and culturetrips spring and fall - Rome, Paris Provance and English castles and gardens. www.kwkulturresor.se. Something misspelled, but not in the translation. Misplaced. Disgrace. About those dogs. A horrid scene. Was the movie as good as the book? Can't remember. Always better in the head. A tune stuck, playing over and over. Memories on repeat, shuffle button activated. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Laughter randomly shuffled. Wake up laughing. A deer the size of a mouse. A bite electrocuting. It was funny. Wake up laughing. Wake up laughing.

Irony, writer unable to laugh. The funniest clowns. Tears of clowns. Rainbowed tears. Pink popcorn? Like pink cottoncandy. Purple's a fruit. Yellow is a colour. Twenty years ago. The climate change. Unable to change. No change in the pocket. Pocket leaking. Catching a fish. Keep it in a bucket. Those seaweeds, like hands. Clinging to like drowning. Selfcritical drowning. Wash up. Wash out. Wiped away.

Click, click, click labels. Label me. Then I'd know.

This about bosses and employees

Every now and then I come across an article like this about types of employees. I've seen plenty regarding bosses as well, so it's equal slander. Yet, no matter the actual topic of the article the comments are filled with employees telling stories about their bosses and how they themselves'd do the job so much better. If I was basing my knowledge about managers/bosses/whatevers only on the comments to such articles I'd think that they were all psychopaths.

Am I a pshychopath? Do employees realize that a boss has to take everyone into concideration? And not only everyone but everything. Availability of the employees to fit peak seasons and hours, the aspect of making everything run smoothly. And then there's the thing about sometimes feeling like you're running a daycare. Constant gossiping, people who don't like each other, people who love each other too much. Stealing, being late, leaving early, private phonecalls during business hours. Sick leave, vacation time. It's a puzzle where someone's going to feel taken advantage of. I made it easy and made myself the one taken advantage off. Days off were granted just because I didn't feel like listening to the whining. I picked up things undone because discussing it would have taken longer than simply doing it myself. I know it was wrong of me to do so, but some just had a tendency to not-work-themselves-out-of-a-job.

Now, I musn't forget to say that I've had excellent employees as well. Those who manage to work as a team, preform their tasks with, not always accuracy, but with excellent intentions. I didn't mind mistakes. Rather they try and fail a little bit than not try at all. With them things had a way of working out. That's what I always liked, smooth sailing and an easy going attitude. They were rewarded for their efforts, good moods and flexibility. So it is possible for a boss to like employees.

I really don't see what the big deal is. I've been an employee too, I didn't pop out my mother being a boss, and surely some people aren't great leaders, not saying I was one either, sometimes I just wish that more employees understood that a boss needs a wider perspective than the single employee. If the office has one window, not all can sit by it. If the business is up and running on Midsummer, someone is going to have to be there. It's as simple as that. And as far as doing personal things when you're at work. I'm torn. I've done it, but basically as an employee you're paid to do a job, and especially if you're hourly, you're supposed to be working during those hours, not talk on the phone or ponder the meaning of life. You get paid for your time, the company is buying that time. The company doesn't own you, but it does own the minutes you're there. You'd like to get paid for what you do right? I'm sure the company wants to get what they're paying for as well.

It's easy to focus on your own aggrieved position, maybe it's hard to see that another 32 people are quite pleased with the situation. If you find yourself in that place often, perhaps it's simply time for you to either change jobs or change your attitude towards your job. The boss isn't automatically the bad guy just because s/he's the boss.

It's about people really. You're not more likely to get along with someone at work that you wouldn't get along with outside of work. I guarantee you, your boss does care about you, at least a little bit, for the sake of being human but s/he doesn't really care about your personal life any more than you do about his or hers.

Personally I don't see what's so hard about showing up and doing what you're supposed to do. Trust me, I'll never be a boss again. Whiny employees who don't know how good they really have it is one of my biggest pet peeves. When all is said and done about school I hope I'll eventually get a job, and I'll be good and do as asked and not worry about the bigger picture anymore.