in the pond

(cross-posted from LJ)

Yesterday evening was the first time I could log into LJ in 3 days or so, and the forced hiatus really once again made me realize just how much LJ still means to me, in spite of being abandoned by the trend sensitive lazy petals of faceboob.

When I do my writing, I take breaks, and primarily LJ is my break reward. It's worked very well for me during countless projects over the years. So 3 days without it was an illuminating experience.
I'm sorry that Russian drone attacks may be the slow death to LJ (I hope not), but still, even with becoming unhip and with the issues it has in periods, using faceboob for my major breaks over these 3 days made me realize how much more primitive and less exciting the whole format is. I missed the heck out of LJ, and managed to be harassed by a Nietzsche-loving philosophy major idiot on Faceboob on top of it all. Hey, with Faceboob being what it is, I could even be really mean and post his real name if I wanted to.

I've read a fair amount of Nietzsche back in the day, and by that I do not mean all of Zarathustra and nothing else, I've read most of his aphorism and meditations, The Gay science, Beyond Good and Evil, Ecce Homo, Zarathustra of course, his texts on the Greeks and on his dispute with Wagner. Let's just say that I had a period in my life where I was intensely focused on certain reading. I still go back to Nietzsche (among other writers) from time to time. And I too, along with most young people at some point in their tunnel visioned focused educational reading experiences had that Aha-moment, where I thought I grasped his vision. (There is of course no proof of really having done so, no expert in the world could claim this, but most people do anyway, and this guy on faceboob certainly claimed it)

So, an old classmate of mine posted about appreciating Nietzsche more as an artist than philosopher, and how he was very often misunderstood by people who hadn't read him much at all, but had a knee-jerk reaction to him from reputation and snippet quotes.

I concurred, but also added that I could understand female readers going through N for the fist time and getting disenamored with him from certain passages. Me and him went back and forth a bit in an amiable fashion, talking about our impressions, me mentioning my mixed feelings when reading N as a young girl (mixed as in the true definition of the word, with real exhilaration and awe mixed with disappointment and frustration). And next, this douchebag on my classmate's friendslist butts in with a typical standard texbook philosophy major's tone, saying things like "okay, I'll bite" (as if I was even aware of his existence), wanting me to "prove things" and asking me for explanations on passages.

His first response sounded okay, as if it was an honest discussion, and I summarized a passage from my memory of "The Gay Science" that talks about Women and education and why it is no good (it sounds worse than it is, I understand N's reasoning on artificiality in that text, but it still has flaws in the very taxonomy he often dabbles with in genders and cultures and other groups, even when it is flattering), and provided one quote about older women being skeptics.

But then he started to creep me out in that familiar armchair way of philosophy majors when they think themselves superior and smelling blood. (oh reeeally, tell me more quotes and why they make you feel as you do, this promises to be awesome, blah blah). So, I got pissed.

I made him cry. Or the internet equivalent of it.

The way to make a philosophy major cry is to make him lose his shit and call you names (kind of like Godwin's law about losing an argument automatically by referring to Nazism) I refused to play his game and started asking him questions instead. He started claiming that "the burden of proof" was on me because I had a "thesis", I started analyzing his discussion style and explaining why he wasn't having an honest discussion, but rather a self constructed straw man that he was trying to give a hand job on his own (by claiming that I was "irked" by Nietzsche and having a "thesis" about my irritations - something I disproved easily enough by pointing to real quotations between me and my friend) I also gently pointed out that perhaps he couldn't dictate a "debate" that I hadn't even agreed to in the fist hand.

I then continued in a parallel thread to discuss Nietzsche with my friend (who was amused by the exchange), and gave him examples and explanations to the mixed feelings from my favorite Nietzsche texts.

The guy blew a fuse and told me that "I did a disservice to my gender" and (insert random list of negative traits, such as being coy for instance), and by behaving the way I had, I had also PROVEN Nietzsche's theses about women (which this dude had initially claimed were *not* truly negative, so the contradictions in his statements reached epic proportions here)

Basically he lost his shit in the last rant, and proved that while Nietzsche may not in fact have been a real misogynist (which I had never claimed), just like he wasn't ever a proto-Nazi (he was actually very anti-German), the dude on facebook spewed a bona fide misogynist rant, which in philosophy major debate-land is the same as crying, pissing your pants and accusing someone of being a Nazi.

I sweetly answered that whatever I had done, I at least hadn't called him by a list of negative traits, and said that I hoped this made it clear that I had never wanted any form of debate with him.

I felt dirty and exhilarated and tired for a second. Cross my heart, I usually walk away from shit like this. Countless times I've done it. I *like* discussing with my friends, and something in my discussions seems to tempt random asshats to butt in uninvited. I usually ignore it, but my absence from LJ made me bored and frustrated on my break, and thus sordid drama took place.

And this was actually rather intelligent for Faceboob, believe it or not.

Someone on a LJ friends flist said the other day that what makes LJ exceptional is the phenomena of friends, friendslocking, threaded conversations, communities, and the ability to show off links and videos and pictures in the same post all at once.
And I agree, this makes LJ unique, to this day no other forum has figures out the brilliance of these traits put together.

I'll stay here until it drops. But I'll start cross posting on Dreamwidth more, in case the Russian cyber terrorists bomb LJ. I will always post here first though.
I also hope that G+ will, in spite of recent controversy with aliases, give Faceboob a good run for it, so that I can, as I plan, just shift to G+ and do my limited social networking there, with a much smaller and more selective group of "friends" over there.

If it's one thing faceboob was good for, it is to show which individuals you have any ties to still and who your relationship is stone dead with, and I will really use that knowledge on G+. I'm already careful with my invites there and who I add to circles.

Hit me up in a private message if you are on Dreamwidth and want to be friends, or if you plan on some G+ activity in the future. I'll always stay on LJ, but if we're bombed for long periods here, alternatives that aren't faceboob are good to have. I like my friendslist on LJ fiercely.

Last week There was a morning where a thick mist wrapped the whole town and lasted well into the early day. Before 8 a.m. you wouldn't have seen Jack the Ripper until he was right next to you, closer to lunch it was still lingering, just slightly softening the gray contours of this fall day.

The view from the balcony of the house I currently live in, in the morning


My faculty is surrounded by a park, called "The English Park" on one side and the old graveyard on the other side. This is part of The English Park, on my way to class.

( pictures around my school and some musings )

Last Saturday I went to Stockholm with two friends and we played tourists in our own country and had a great day taking pictures, visiting lots of small obscure stores and taking nice coffee breaks in coffee shops with medieval vaults. I haven't spent a full day with A and M in ages, and we had a great train ride both to and from Stockholm, talking about cats and old tv shows and everything in between, and then strolling under umbrellas in the rain over the cobblestones of Old Town, dashing into stores to look at silly antiques, books and crafts.
My chest was filled with love and my tummy with dinner and a giant piece of coconut cake when the day was done.

( Old Town Stockholm )

Most people know how to differentiate between religiousness and spirituality, for instance, being religious doesn't necessarily mean that a person is spiritual, they can live after certain rules and dogmas, having long ago decided that there is a certain god, and the rules they fancy this god has created should be followed and beyond that they don't contemplate the matter very much, they just continue to live their life in their material reality.

Counter to this there are spiritual people who contemplate esoteric matters and communicate with the spiritual side of the world regularly, but don't subscribe to places of worship, dogmas, rules or other religious practice. And then of course there are people who are both religious and spiritual and people who are neither.

When it comes to goodness, being good or less selfish, whatever traits that classically have defined goodness, it is by most people agreed that there are religious people who lack goodness, they are often considered fanatics or dogma-drones. It is also fairly commonly understood that certain religious people can be good, they are then often described as having "true faith" or being god touched. Atheists and agnostics (i.e. the two groups that don't spend much time with either religious matter or spiritual matters) are in general, except by the most dogmatic of religious bigots, considered to have equal capacity for good and evil, depending on personality, choices, disposition, etc. But I have found that when it comes to spirituality, this trait is more often than any of the other 3 groups (religious, atheist and agnostic) associated with goodness. It seems to me that many people have some form of precognition that a person who's interested in spiritual matters without embellishing him/herself with an established faith should have a special capacity for compassion and seeing the soul in people, places and things, as well as being less inclined toward various expressions of human hierarchy, and this is where the myth begins.

I guess this is a lengthy way for me to say that to be spiritual doesn't in any way mean that a person is good, just that the person believes in a spiritual reality, no more, no less. If we assume that there is such a spiritual reality upon which a spiritual person relies to draw wisdom, power, faith and other things from, then there is no guarantee that this person actually is particularly "chosen" to do so. I don't necessarily mean to say that the ability to gain insights or signals from a spiritual reality would be a completely random matter, but the personality traits upon which such a "selection" would be based, certainly wouldn't be goodness, or for that matter wisdom. I have found a few criteria that seem to be common qualities essential for a person to feel that they are getting any insight in a spiritual reality, but these qualities would seem pretty mundane in comparison to such already mentioned traits as goodness, bravery or wisdom. This is of course not to say that a spiritual person can't be a truly good person as well, rather that goodness is not dependent on their spirituality, but by how they make use of their spirituality, and those choices are completely dependent on their goodness/bravery/wisdom etc.

The first two things I silently ask when I see someone who seems to be on a spiritual quest are: "what do they do with their spirituality?" and "how do they relate what they do to their fellow spiritual seekers?". I think a lot can be answered by just observing the outcome of these two questions.

..if you post youtube links and "free market" think tank articles dressed up as "research" in your mission to discourage universal health care. And yet I post fact check links that show that the material is skewed or taken out of context at best, or outright lying at worst. The level of fear and stupidity is reaching maximum density in political communities in the US.

..if you're a woman who claim that you get along with men better and don't ever analyze your own motives for why that is. These type of girls are mostly, with the rare exception, predictable and, I'm sorry to say, fairly clueless.

...if you're a bureaucrat and sport a lazy brain. Bureaucracy can be a beautiful thing, but when it's lazy it becomes the fictional product of Franz Kafka, and my name becomes Josef K.

...if you're the type of individual who say that you need to "think about yourself and not so much about other people". This usually means that you in reality rarely think about other things than your own arse, and your own arse probably take up a lot of your brain capacity.

...if you're a nerd and claim that girls don't read comics or roleplay or whathaveyou, because girls don't go to conventions as much as guys and dispose themselves to sweaty sexist dipshits.

...if you are a fan of the PUA culture or take part of it.

One week in Sweden, one week of errands and fixing, sporadic internet, many cats (pictures will come later), surreal academic endeavors (last word on this topic isn't said yet), surreal meetings with people from the past, two assholes, one who's just married to one and the rest were all nice encounters. I've started re-watching Babylon 5 on my little portable dvd player late at night when work and social play is done, and it's nice, very nostalgic and still enjoyable in spite of silly moments.

Computer labs with hairy cats at northernveil's and pierson's this afternoon and hanging with hairless cats later, parties and people for a bit, but also a lot of calm a lot of loss and some disappointment. A more explicit and perhaps filtered post may come on a LJ near you in the future.

I'm a little numb or stunned or something these days. It's slowly hitting home that I might have to spend most of fall semester 09 and half of spring semester 2010 in Sweden in order to get the academic title I want. My old professor whom I talked to about this in May was too optimistic and wrong, he thought according to the old system, but all main European universities have reformatted themselves recently, according to what they call "The Bologna system" and so, there are lots of us stuck between the two systems and we have to bite the bullet.

I don't like it, it's way more than I bargained for. Two months in Sweden was okay, but this is not. I'll miss the Geek and my family and my life in the US, it really feels like putting my life on hold for 7-8 months, and on top of that I might actually experience problems with regards to where I could live during these months. I have some good friends with whom I can live during fall, but I'm not sure what to do mid January through March next year. We'll see what happens, I'll go to an academic counselor and talk about my options and what can be done to shorten the time in Sweden, if anything.

My best option is still to do all this in Sweden, but had I lived in Sweden I wouldn't do it, since my degree is far beyond good enough to get work there. Here in the states it's gonna help to get an internationally recognized title however, and it's gonna help a lot - even though my degree is already better the the MA's from the library colleges here.

I might miss a lot of things about Sweden, but that doesn't mean that I want to spend months and months in limbo there, without actually living there. And it's gonna cost money, all this really is like putting life on a hold, and in a time where I feel I don't have any time for such pauses.

Summer has been spent with a couple of different jobs and by working on an ecological farm which my family is shareholder in. Weird to work with vegetable patches again, since I swore off ever having a garden again when I was a late teen. (I grew up with a big garden and many fruit trees and berry bushes, belonging to a rickety old house and it all took so much maintenance, it sort of colored my childhood in certain ways.)
Anyways, the ecological veggies have been tasty, although I discovered that the only and first food allergy I've ever had, is to turnips!

I'm trying to drag myself up by my bootstraps a bit and not be so disappointed and morose about how my current situation has turned out, but it's going slow and I fear more setbacks when in Sweden. I'll be taking some work with me there, and I think I can be in the US most of December and I'll visit in mid October (for the Geek's mom's birthday), but bittersweet exile it is.

For the record let it be said that I've deleted several parts of this entry, in which I dwell on the things I've given up on in life, but they are part of the glum stuff that my head is made of currently, and this academic exile kind of represent the last nail in that coffin. I'm not sure it's true that it is, but it feels like it.

The Geek and I are okay, we'll plow through this, we've handled harder things together, but something in me is a bit weary of life plans never coming together in spite of efforts.

On top of all this, I've been reading articles and links about the Pittsburgh women murderer and gym shooter George Sodini (thanks for good linkage creactivity), and how he was affected by the Pick Up Artist (PUA) culture. It brings me back to the beginning of last year, when I was debating a lot with masculinists and anti feminists on Swedish debate forums like Passagen. One of the most skilled and outspoken debaters there was a guy calling himself RealMX who claimed that The Game was the most important book in modern times (no irony!), and he held long argumentative rants about why it was so..and yet it became abundantly clear that the guys who were interested in pick up artist games had a few things in common (including this guy). They sensed women as much much different from men, to the point where it almost (and definitively in some cases) created a female contra humanity view on gender polarity. And also, the guys ruled by PUA games were claimed to be "nice guys" wanting to shred their "nicety" which, according to PUA myth was the reason for not getting women. Basically this article about the nice guy syndrome sums up what I thought and think pretty neatly. It still sucks to be right, and to have been right from the very beginning about these tendencies, because the world and the internet is full of masculinist guys in this very moment spewing their anger against anyone daring to criticize the PUA culture and what comes out of it.

I don't know abut others, but my life has never been straight forward, it has always been filled with doubt, hesitations and analysis from many possible angles. A friend once told me that all these things came from being an impulsive and emotional nature at heart, and from being trained at a very young age that these were lesser qualities to have, and since I was also considered fairly intelligent, a close male relative once compared me to a noble metal that was at the same time impure. (he was Polish, and the Poles are prone to categorizing, romanticizing their taxonomy and then trying to excuse it all by a patina of logic, in this process it's probably important to remember that what came first was a knee jerk emotional bias, which started the whole damn thing)

Anyway, I'm always partially ashamed of being slow and introspective when it comes to the big things, the things in which you should be clear and cut cleanly and swiftly with a sharp blade.

It can take me such time to realize why I feel or think a certain way...and it scares me that there may be people out there who are so fast. So very fast, and yet still make the right decisions.

I think a life crisis is just like that when it comes with years, not with particular triggers or blatant happenings. We discover what our subconscious didn't want us to discover, or we see things from angles that we didn't see before and it can be a really heavy experience.

There are certain films and books I come back to when I feel at odds in this particular way, I guess there is a whole collection. They are just there to kickstart certain thoughts or emotions..I could give you a list, probably more impressive than Sense and Sensibility or Persuasion by Austen, but Austen can really take the short cut into this swamp for me.

In Austen stories there are these long silences, in which nothing happens, in which all the pauses are meaningful and in which choices are extremely important and often set in stone once they've been made, so in the rare occasion where a character is given a second chance, it is gently climactic. And everyone and their dog is analyzing everybody's feelings, except the bad guys. That's actually what sets bad and good guys apart in Austen stories, the bad guys never analyze, they just gossip and tend to their own urges without a second thought. And they are swift, their decisions are always very swift, have you noticed that when reading or watching Austen?

Austen's stories always divide people by certain lines, the women for instance, are mostly young with flowing hair and full cheeks, and then you become a matron with one of those white bubbly indoor lady-caps. Children do not count and aren't very interesting in these stories, but the spinsters are, even though there are very few of them and they eventually also get married in the end. The spinsters however, are always portrayed in a thoughtful and many layered way..lingering around thirty, having made many sacrifices and had such abundance of time to think and analyze what went wrong, why and in what way.
The men can be interesting too, except that they are not vulnerable to age in the same way as the women are. They too, often carry lots of emotional baggage with them which is not explained or revealed until pretty far into the novel, which in retrospect explains why they were odd or rude or whathaveyou.

I don't know why I came back to Jane Austen today. It's been a few years I suppose, and I have piles of new, interesting stuff to read or watch, but Austen it was. I've been quite a bit under the weather the whole week, which hasn't been easy while hiking with kids in the foothills.
It was also enlightening to quest-lead a group that was fairly functional and talented, it taught me that in spite of that, I'm still not sure this job is for me in the long run.

There are so many things I should like with the work, and I do truly respect and like the vision of the company...but in the end I'm left feeling pretty hollow and hesitant.

I can do the acting, I can do the paperwork (and lord knows there is plenty), I can do the camp leader bossy thing, I can do the security thing, I can do the physical thing, I can do the role playing rules, I like kids in general...but in the end...I dunnow.

I'm trying to figure it out, maybe the simple truth is that I'm a sissy or something.
One thing that struck me as interesting the other day though, was that I find the pauses in the job, the hardest to endure. The times where I have to pretend camp spirit, where I feel I should be peppy and energetic with kids and adults while not quest leading. It made me understand why I find acting on the stage easier than this.

We'll see what happens. This post is unfocused and maudlin and truly makes me nostalgic for the old days of LJ..when I felt I could write these without shame. Still, for the love of LJ, which I will never leave, unless it's shut down for apocalyptic reasons, I'll start posting in F minor again in this shack.

This time of year I miss Sweden and Uppsala in particular. On the last night of April they light the bonfire over there and sing songs to welcome spring. Regardless of this particular night, I miss the old mounds and my walking paths around there.
2 years ago I wrote a poem inspired by the place, and just felt like editing it, so I did. Feel free to ignore.


The Old Mounds

These relaxed hills could fool you now
But time was when bearded men hung horses
From the oaks and the vale was brimming
with boats crossing for the graves of nobility,
the Viking queen’s chest filled with beaten silver
paid for the stone saints looking down
on wanderers from the eastern mound.

There is a birch glade on the lower grounds
where midsummer and midwinter curious
things happen. Once at 4 a.m. this badger
caught me by surprise – a wild animal
suddenly forming a human expression
he turned on me but I bridled him
with his name and saddled him with mine
swinging a thistle whip

we took a ride down the runestone road
where the Walpurgis bonfire is lit.
By the blackwood stave temple
we stopped to look
at the church-verger's collapsing shack
an abandoned servant’s
solstice offering

I LOVE SWEDEN!

The Naked Crisp Bread Dance can be read about in English here and viewed below. Things I particularly love: the thick dialects the guys sport, the music medley they dance to, that the judges all voted "yes", that they use genuine crisp bread rounds from the north of Sweden and that the audience chanted "ONE MORE TIME" in Swedish after the dance.

I miss home...