Man, on the ground, below my office. Walking, slowly, towards one of the tables touched by the almost-sun of the early Norwegian autumn. He is carrying lunch, balancing a fork. Passing a couple of attractive, chatty young ladies. One of the girls laugh - not at him - enough to make his fine-tuned balancing act fall apart. The sound of a fork hitting the ground.
I can see his shoulders heave as he sighs.
Then he bends over - carefully considering the angle so that he will not have to reveal his bu... the crevice between his buttocks.. to the young ladies (not realizing that this instead reveals it to an entire building of lazy academics looking out of their office windows).
He picks up the fork and sighs again.
He wipes the fork off on his trousers, but it is evident that he cannot eat with it now that the young ladies have seen it touching the ground. (The three-second rule only applies when there are no potential hook-ups present.)
The man stumbles back the way he came from, wanting to throw a humorous comment in the young ladies' way as he passes, but feeling too self-conscious to do so. Instead he walks 50 meters or so, until he is out of sight for the people occupying the seating area. He is still unknowingly very visible to the academics in their stuffed offices.
He stands under a tree for the appropriate amount of time spent walking back inside to fetch a new fork. Then he returns to the table he first sought out.
When passing the young ladies he smiles at them, and one of them returns the smile with a promise of sorts.
There is hope, even for the lazy and socially awkward ones.
Showing posts with label phobias. Show all posts
Showing posts with label phobias. Show all posts
Friday, August 17, 2012
Friday, May 11, 2012
On social awkwardness (socwardness)
In reality - and this might be a shocker given all my quirks proudly displayed on this blog - I am a fairly socially adept person. No, really. My mom said so. (She did. Honestly.)
My mom is also socially adept, though, so it's okay. And you know how I know that she is right (and socially adept)? Because another socially adept person (me) said so. Word.
Huh. I got lost in one of my own digressions before even starting... But that set aside; digressions, parentheses, creative punctuation, giraffes and - hing yeah - the fact that someone found my blog the other day by searching for "ecard anti dance mom" (how'd THAT happen..?); all these things set aside, in real life I am a fairly normal, friendly, pleasant person with whom many people seem to enjoy a normal, friendly, pleasant conversation, be it of the "polite mingling"-variety or the more serious "what's the meaning of life?"-variety. I rock at small talk. I know how to hold a glass of wine in one hand, a canapé in the other, and somehow I still manage to find a free hand to shake hands (how many hands do I have? Party trick courtesy of the Norwegian foreign service, no doubt). I make friends easily, I have very few enemies (and then mostly carefully selected nemeses - everyone should have at least one), and when I choose to display it I can have a very winning smile. I am crisp (except when I try to use expressions like "crisp" that I clearly had to look up in Urban Dictionary before posting. And then I got stuck wondering why it's called "Urban Dictionary" and not "the Urban Dictionary", and then I started wondering if it was a Urban Dictionary thing to do to cut all "the's" and whether that won't get terribly confusing, and now I am trying so hard to be crisp or cool or whatever it's called these days that I long since punctured the above attempt at describing myself thus. Ah. Well, I was about to contradict myself anyway.)
Because.
Even though I'm mostly socially adept (sodept? Nah... I'm not crisp enough for that yet), I sometimes fail. And when I fail, I fail BIG time. Spectacularly. Think diving. Nine out of ten times I go in the water - not like a pro, but at least like an amateur that would like to consider his own diving skills appropriate for low-key competitions. Like the (or not "the") Annual Greendale Amateur Diving Championship (why, yes, Postman Pat might participate too, thankyouforasking). Only to find that the tenth time he goes in it's with a splash. A big one. An epic one. A gigantic belly flop which forever renders him (me? I got lost in my own metaphor) extremely aware that he is not only madly inferior to Postman Pat, but that he also has absolutely no business participating in any championships and that he preferable should never go near water ever again.
That's how awkward I can be on (the?) occasions that my social skills do fail.
Like today.
When they failed. Miserably so.
It all started well. I was on my way to work, not feeling terribly motivated by the fact that I had been forced to leave my warm, comfy bed to walk in grey, rainy-ish weather to go spend the day at the office where I will be teaching myself medieval history. Yeah. Motivation fail. Still, this isn't a huge derivation from normal mornings, so when I initiated this paragraph by saying "[i]t all started well" I wasn't lying. The above description is "well". It's not optimal, but "well". In the adverbial sense (--> better, best), not the "deep hole or shaft in the ground"-sense. Well.
I was interrupted in my somewhat gloomy well-ness, however, by a young lady.
Had I been a man, I presume this interruption would have been most welcome. The young lady in question was cute, friendly (crisp?), polite and when she spoke it was with an adorable accent. Charming, I'm sure.
I am not a man. I prefer that in any given conversation I am the cute, friendly (crisp?), polite one, even if my accent (when speaking Norwegian, at least) sadly is somewhat polished and boring (when speaking English, however, I probably have an accent so adorable bunnies fly out of my nose).
The young interruptive lady asked me for directions.
I hate directions.
Well (again in the above clarified sense of the word), I don't hate them. I find them difficult to take, and to give. Especially when we're talking about geographical directions. I have a terrible sense of direction. I managed to get lost in Washington, D.C. once (a city where the streets in one direction are numbered, and the streets in the other direction are alphabetized). I also managed to get lost in Skotterud, Eidskog, Norway once - a place so tiny you probably haven't even heard of it. That's right! That tiny! Once I got lost I followed a pidgeon for three blocks. I was still lost.
Thus, asking me for directions is not exactly your best strategy if you are the one who is lost. Asking me for directions when I am gloomy (if well), sleepy and probably slightly hormonal, is an even poorer strategy. The young lady of the charming accent did not know this, of course. (How could she? She did not know anything. Not even the way.)
I realize that the build-up here implies that I somehow exploded all over the poor girl and put her in tears on the first train back to Charmingaccentville. The build-up is misleading. Yes, I was gloomy, but no, I am not explode-all-over-stranger-prone. Besides, if you look back you'll realize that there also is a build-up to a detailed account of my social awkwardness. In fact, the build-up to that is much clearer, and forms a more coherent direction for this post. You only wanted the build-up to be for something more thrilling, like an explosion, because that would make for a more exciting tale! I'm sorry, but if you want exciting tales, you better go read someone else's blog.
So. There.
I did not explode. But I faced a terrible dilemma. Should I help this cute, friendly (I'm officially giving up crisp), polite and adorably accented young lady; or should I pretend to be a deaf, Chinese tourist genetically modified to look like a native, which would both explain why I could not hear, understand OR help her?
I chose the golden middle. I decided to "help" her.
In all fairness, the directions she asked were not complicated. She wanted to get to the University Campus. I believe I have mentioned this (several times) before, but for clarity's sake: I work at the university. On campus. I was headed for work. I was clearly going the same way as she was.
Now, a normal person - for instance me on most days - would say that to the young lady. "I work at the university, and I am going there now. Follow me, and I'll show you."
I didn't say that.
After all, it would be a good five to seven minutes before we reached campus. I would have to make polite conversation with this person for five to seven minutes. Or, if failing to make conversation, I would have to tolerate five to seven minutes walking next to a stranger without speaking at all.
This is where my brain on most days would have jumped to wine-glass-and-canapé-mode and handled the situation by asking her unimportant questions like "so, what are you doing at the university?" or "did you catch the last episode of Mad Men?" (the latter would be stupid, though, because I'm two seasons behind. No spoilers!).
Today, however, the only thing my brain could do was set of a red warning lamp, saying "DANGER, DANGER, UNWANTED SOCIAL INTERACTION MIGHT OCCUR!!!"
I smiled awkwardly. Then I pointed in the general direction she (and I) should be headed, saying something about keeping straight ahead over the hill, and then she'd see it (which might or might not be true. I had never checked). And then I left.
That's right. We were going to the same place, but instead of telling her so, I went another way.
My way was the right way. Hers was... not wrong, per se. But slightly less right.
Happy that I had solved the awkward situation in such a speedy manner, I continued walking my regular route. I had sent her a few blocks east of me. (Due to my aforementioned poor sense of direction I have no idea if it actually is east, but it serves to bring clarity to the narrative, so I'm keeping it [and not, Digression's forbid, checking it. That would be - reasearch. Dude!].) My theory was that she would walk (in accordance with my vague pointing) about two blocks north (again, for the sake of the narrative), and then turn west. If she had done do, at an appropriate speed, I would have been able to walk my two blocks north sufficiently far west of her (and then turning further west) to avoiding seeing her, ever, again.
My theory, not unlike my social skills, failed.
As I was about to turn west (the whole east-west-north-thingie is confusing me. I'm sorry if it was helping you, but I am inventing a new direction for the sake of un-confusing myself. Deal with it.) - as I was about to turn uppity, whom other did I see but the young lady with an adorable accent and issues with picking the right type of people to give her dictections. Whom other? A famous sports journalist, that's who(m). But the right thereafter I saw the young lady too.
At this, my social skills performed one small effort before crumbling into dust. They waved at the young lady. Oh, Digressions, I was beackoning her closer. My hand in some evil conspiracy with my terminal social skills were trying to help the poor girl.
By then it must have been rather obvious to her that I was, indeed, going the same direction as she. Still, I was the only person about (the sport journalist having disappeared by then), and she was still lost (due to the fact that the last person she'd asked for directions only had replied with vague finger pointing...). So she ran to me (again, had I been a man, this might have been a rather welcome situation. I am still not a man).
"Soooo," I said, stretching the oooo in an attempt to come up with an excuse as to why I had been reluctant to actually offer helpful help. "What part of campus are you going to? You see, there is an upper part, and then a lower part..."
By offering this information, I really hoped she would read between the lines and hear what I wanted her to hear:
"I would have offered to walk you there, naturally, but since you failed to specify where on campus you were going, I could only assume that you were going somewhere else than me. Which makes my reaction not socially awkward, but rather rational and understandable."
"I'm going to the library," she said.
"Ah." ("Darn, right in the middle, then. Yeah, well, I'm still going to a completely different part of campus than you, and it still makes sense to me, at least, why I didn't show you the way. Even if my office is located in the building right next to the library...")
We walked. In the dreaded silence. I tried a few "uhm, yeah, well, it's not easy knowing the way if you don't know the way, hum-di-dum" but by then the effort was pretty futile. She knew I'd been trying to get out of walking with her, and thus she wasn't up to making the situation any easier on me.
At the earliest possible moment I went for the finger-pointing strategy again ("It's that big black building you see far, far behind all those other buildings over there...") and she speeded up to avoid further embarassment on both our parts. Just to make sure to stick to my "story" (you know, the one I hoped she'd read between the lines), I took a detour and walked for a while in the opposite direction from where I was going. I hoped to never see her again.
I saw her again two blocks later.
I had deliberately been walking the wrong direction, sloooooowly, to make absolutely sure that she would have passed the intersection between my detour path and the uppity-headed path. But no. She passed it at the exact time I was headed there.
In total mortification, now, I snuck back, hid (literally HID) behind the biology building, wondering how long I could stand there before she'd find me. Or before someone else might find me terribly weird.
In the end I decided that neither would be very long. So I walked - again in the opposite direction from where I actually was going - to the Physics building cafeteria. Where I decided to spend a few extra minutes buying a salad (for lunch), and a cup of coffee (for immediately).
As I swiped my card I remembered that I was running low on funds. So low, in fact, that my purchase got denied. I had to humiliate myself and ask the lunch lady to charge only the coffee. Fortunately, I had (just) enough for the that. Which I needed (immediately). And then I put the salad back.
Basically, by then my social awkwardness (yes, at least, as crisp as crisp gets: socwardness) had made me wish I could just sink into a well (of the "deep hole or shaft in the ground"-sense) that would magically appear before me. No such thing happened.
Karma. I guess.
My mom is also socially adept, though, so it's okay. And you know how I know that she is right (and socially adept)? Because another socially adept person (me) said so. Word.
Huh. I got lost in one of my own digressions before even starting... But that set aside; digressions, parentheses, creative punctuation, giraffes and - hing yeah - the fact that someone found my blog the other day by searching for "ecard anti dance mom" (how'd THAT happen..?); all these things set aside, in real life I am a fairly normal, friendly, pleasant person with whom many people seem to enjoy a normal, friendly, pleasant conversation, be it of the "polite mingling"-variety or the more serious "what's the meaning of life?"-variety. I rock at small talk. I know how to hold a glass of wine in one hand, a canapé in the other, and somehow I still manage to find a free hand to shake hands (how many hands do I have? Party trick courtesy of the Norwegian foreign service, no doubt). I make friends easily, I have very few enemies (and then mostly carefully selected nemeses - everyone should have at least one), and when I choose to display it I can have a very winning smile. I am crisp (except when I try to use expressions like "crisp" that I clearly had to look up in Urban Dictionary before posting. And then I got stuck wondering why it's called "Urban Dictionary" and not "the Urban Dictionary", and then I started wondering if it was a Urban Dictionary thing to do to cut all "the's" and whether that won't get terribly confusing, and now I am trying so hard to be crisp or cool or whatever it's called these days that I long since punctured the above attempt at describing myself thus. Ah. Well, I was about to contradict myself anyway.)
Because.
Even though I'm mostly socially adept (sodept? Nah... I'm not crisp enough for that yet), I sometimes fail. And when I fail, I fail BIG time. Spectacularly. Think diving. Nine out of ten times I go in the water - not like a pro, but at least like an amateur that would like to consider his own diving skills appropriate for low-key competitions. Like the (or not "the") Annual Greendale Amateur Diving Championship (why, yes, Postman Pat might participate too, thankyouforasking). Only to find that the tenth time he goes in it's with a splash. A big one. An epic one. A gigantic belly flop which forever renders him (me? I got lost in my own metaphor) extremely aware that he is not only madly inferior to Postman Pat, but that he also has absolutely no business participating in any championships and that he preferable should never go near water ever again.
That's how awkward I can be on (the?) occasions that my social skills do fail.
Like today.
When they failed. Miserably so.
It all started well. I was on my way to work, not feeling terribly motivated by the fact that I had been forced to leave my warm, comfy bed to walk in grey, rainy-ish weather to go spend the day at the office where I will be teaching myself medieval history. Yeah. Motivation fail. Still, this isn't a huge derivation from normal mornings, so when I initiated this paragraph by saying "[i]t all started well" I wasn't lying. The above description is "well". It's not optimal, but "well". In the adverbial sense (--> better, best), not the "deep hole or shaft in the ground"-sense. Well.
I was interrupted in my somewhat gloomy well-ness, however, by a young lady.
Had I been a man, I presume this interruption would have been most welcome. The young lady in question was cute, friendly (crisp?), polite and when she spoke it was with an adorable accent. Charming, I'm sure.
I am not a man. I prefer that in any given conversation I am the cute, friendly (crisp?), polite one, even if my accent (when speaking Norwegian, at least) sadly is somewhat polished and boring (when speaking English, however, I probably have an accent so adorable bunnies fly out of my nose).
The young interruptive lady asked me for directions.
I hate directions.
Well (again in the above clarified sense of the word), I don't hate them. I find them difficult to take, and to give. Especially when we're talking about geographical directions. I have a terrible sense of direction. I managed to get lost in Washington, D.C. once (a city where the streets in one direction are numbered, and the streets in the other direction are alphabetized). I also managed to get lost in Skotterud, Eidskog, Norway once - a place so tiny you probably haven't even heard of it. That's right! That tiny! Once I got lost I followed a pidgeon for three blocks. I was still lost.
Thus, asking me for directions is not exactly your best strategy if you are the one who is lost. Asking me for directions when I am gloomy (if well), sleepy and probably slightly hormonal, is an even poorer strategy. The young lady of the charming accent did not know this, of course. (How could she? She did not know anything. Not even the way.)
I realize that the build-up here implies that I somehow exploded all over the poor girl and put her in tears on the first train back to Charmingaccentville. The build-up is misleading. Yes, I was gloomy, but no, I am not explode-all-over-stranger-prone. Besides, if you look back you'll realize that there also is a build-up to a detailed account of my social awkwardness. In fact, the build-up to that is much clearer, and forms a more coherent direction for this post. You only wanted the build-up to be for something more thrilling, like an explosion, because that would make for a more exciting tale! I'm sorry, but if you want exciting tales, you better go read someone else's blog.
So. There.
I did not explode. But I faced a terrible dilemma. Should I help this cute, friendly (I'm officially giving up crisp), polite and adorably accented young lady; or should I pretend to be a deaf, Chinese tourist genetically modified to look like a native, which would both explain why I could not hear, understand OR help her?
I chose the golden middle. I decided to "help" her.
In all fairness, the directions she asked were not complicated. She wanted to get to the University Campus. I believe I have mentioned this (several times) before, but for clarity's sake: I work at the university. On campus. I was headed for work. I was clearly going the same way as she was.
Now, a normal person - for instance me on most days - would say that to the young lady. "I work at the university, and I am going there now. Follow me, and I'll show you."
I didn't say that.
After all, it would be a good five to seven minutes before we reached campus. I would have to make polite conversation with this person for five to seven minutes. Or, if failing to make conversation, I would have to tolerate five to seven minutes walking next to a stranger without speaking at all.
This is where my brain on most days would have jumped to wine-glass-and-canapé-mode and handled the situation by asking her unimportant questions like "so, what are you doing at the university?" or "did you catch the last episode of Mad Men?" (the latter would be stupid, though, because I'm two seasons behind. No spoilers!).
Today, however, the only thing my brain could do was set of a red warning lamp, saying "DANGER, DANGER, UNWANTED SOCIAL INTERACTION MIGHT OCCUR!!!"
I smiled awkwardly. Then I pointed in the general direction she (and I) should be headed, saying something about keeping straight ahead over the hill, and then she'd see it (which might or might not be true. I had never checked). And then I left.
That's right. We were going to the same place, but instead of telling her so, I went another way.
My way was the right way. Hers was... not wrong, per se. But slightly less right.
Happy that I had solved the awkward situation in such a speedy manner, I continued walking my regular route. I had sent her a few blocks east of me. (Due to my aforementioned poor sense of direction I have no idea if it actually is east, but it serves to bring clarity to the narrative, so I'm keeping it [and not, Digression's forbid, checking it. That would be - reasearch. Dude!].) My theory was that she would walk (in accordance with my vague pointing) about two blocks north (again, for the sake of the narrative), and then turn west. If she had done do, at an appropriate speed, I would have been able to walk my two blocks north sufficiently far west of her (and then turning further west) to avoiding seeing her, ever, again.
My theory, not unlike my social skills, failed.
As I was about to turn west (the whole east-west-north-thingie is confusing me. I'm sorry if it was helping you, but I am inventing a new direction for the sake of un-confusing myself. Deal with it.) - as I was about to turn uppity, whom other did I see but the young lady with an adorable accent and issues with picking the right type of people to give her dictections. Whom other? A famous sports journalist, that's who(m). But the right thereafter I saw the young lady too.
At this, my social skills performed one small effort before crumbling into dust. They waved at the young lady. Oh, Digressions, I was beackoning her closer. My hand in some evil conspiracy with my terminal social skills were trying to help the poor girl.
By then it must have been rather obvious to her that I was, indeed, going the same direction as she. Still, I was the only person about (the sport journalist having disappeared by then), and she was still lost (due to the fact that the last person she'd asked for directions only had replied with vague finger pointing...). So she ran to me (again, had I been a man, this might have been a rather welcome situation. I am still not a man).
"Soooo," I said, stretching the oooo in an attempt to come up with an excuse as to why I had been reluctant to actually offer helpful help. "What part of campus are you going to? You see, there is an upper part, and then a lower part..."
By offering this information, I really hoped she would read between the lines and hear what I wanted her to hear:
"I would have offered to walk you there, naturally, but since you failed to specify where on campus you were going, I could only assume that you were going somewhere else than me. Which makes my reaction not socially awkward, but rather rational and understandable."
"I'm going to the library," she said.
"Ah." ("Darn, right in the middle, then. Yeah, well, I'm still going to a completely different part of campus than you, and it still makes sense to me, at least, why I didn't show you the way. Even if my office is located in the building right next to the library...")
We walked. In the dreaded silence. I tried a few "uhm, yeah, well, it's not easy knowing the way if you don't know the way, hum-di-dum" but by then the effort was pretty futile. She knew I'd been trying to get out of walking with her, and thus she wasn't up to making the situation any easier on me.
At the earliest possible moment I went for the finger-pointing strategy again ("It's that big black building you see far, far behind all those other buildings over there...") and she speeded up to avoid further embarassment on both our parts. Just to make sure to stick to my "story" (you know, the one I hoped she'd read between the lines), I took a detour and walked for a while in the opposite direction from where I was going. I hoped to never see her again.
I saw her again two blocks later.
I had deliberately been walking the wrong direction, sloooooowly, to make absolutely sure that she would have passed the intersection between my detour path and the uppity-headed path. But no. She passed it at the exact time I was headed there.
In total mortification, now, I snuck back, hid (literally HID) behind the biology building, wondering how long I could stand there before she'd find me. Or before someone else might find me terribly weird.
In the end I decided that neither would be very long. So I walked - again in the opposite direction from where I actually was going - to the Physics building cafeteria. Where I decided to spend a few extra minutes buying a salad (for lunch), and a cup of coffee (for immediately).
As I swiped my card I remembered that I was running low on funds. So low, in fact, that my purchase got denied. I had to humiliate myself and ask the lunch lady to charge only the coffee. Fortunately, I had (just) enough for the that. Which I needed (immediately). And then I put the salad back.
Basically, by then my social awkwardness (yes, at least, as crisp as crisp gets: socwardness) had made me wish I could just sink into a well (of the "deep hole or shaft in the ground"-sense) that would magically appear before me. No such thing happened.
Karma. I guess.
Friday, April 13, 2012
On stream of unconsciousness
"Not to be confused with stream of consciousness." Though it is rather confusing. I am confusing. And confused. Now the music stopped. Now I started it again. But one of my ear plugs are broken. The set is broken. It's mono. That is not related to the music stopping (again!), because my speakers are stereo or no-o-at-all, alternatively. I got an invitation yesterday. I already rsvp-ed.
I think it's lunch time but I feel like having breakfast. Second breakfast. I already had one. But I think I was asleep. I think I still am.
It's like this: I could have coffee. But I already did. Besides, quote from a fridge magnet in the coffee place I visited today (the guy working there is real nice, by the way, but you can't go there too often, because then he'll start making you "the regular", and then you feel obliged to always have that and always come there. I can't be tied down like that) - quote (with picture - piquote?)
Except I have no energy. Maybe this is a dream? In which case I'd like to not wake up. I probably need the sleep. Besides I'm not doing stupid things. Yes. That. I'm not doing them. That's stupid. Blinds. The blinds are stupid. And automatic. Like the blinds in front of my eyes. I should eat. Lunchfast. Breakunch. Brunch. Second breakfast. I'm not that found of LOTR, actually. But I do like a good second breakfast. Don't tell my friends I said that. The first thing. About the rings. I like rings. But it's difficult for me to wear them, because my fingers vary greatly in size according to my general body temperature, which also varies, apparently.
Paragraph.
One more.
Interesteling playlist. I didn't make it. I borrowed it from an old coworker. It's very nice, but I am very sleepy. I don't normally talk in my sleep. As far as I know, I don't have any parasomnias. Unless you count that I turn into a blabbering maniac when in lack of sleep. But you shouldn't. Count it. It doesn't fall under the right definition- I forgot full stop- Paragraph-
Foods and animals are really random.
And shampoo.
Whenever someone says "think of something random!" I think of shampoo. Which of course makes it not random at all. Random very rarely is random. Panda. Not random at all. You might think it is. But you would be wrong. Do pandas drink coffee? Probably not. Probably because they are so busy with eating bamboo and not procreate. I sometimes mix up the words procreate and procrastinate.
The curtains here are ugly. They are meant to be decorative, since the blinds take care of light regulation. But the curtains don't decorate. They undecorate. Dedecorate. Disdecorate. "Go, won't you?" I said that. And I meant it. But for entirely different reasons. ...it would be the first time.
Airplane. Swallowed by a cloud. Chewed and spit out again on the other side. The cloud didn't like the taste of metal. The passengers never knew what almost hit (or, rather, digested) them.
It's not really so that random is funny because it is random.
Fridge.
Not random.
Not funny.
But still possible to laugh at, if in the right state of mind. "Arms racing is a state of mind" vs "Arms racing is intense military competition" vs "Arms racing inevitably leads to war". The latter is wrong. Cold War case in point. Besides/ monocausal explanations to excuse personal blame for what later was to be known as the First World War (they didn't know that in the beginning, though, which is a more valid excuse)/
</fedora>
Teh food. I nneedd to go downstairs. Knife. Not of the slaughtering kind. But to eat. With. By. For. Over. Under. Around. Of. There are more. It's not important.
I'll be right back.
It took three minutes. I brought my key but forgot to lock the door.
Jack Malone is actually not the same man,
as,
he,
once was.
His wife left, or so he told everyone. In reality? He knows exactly where to find her. Six feet under a pile of dung. He planted a rosebush on top of it, to cover the smell. The rosebush has thorns.
Jack Malone is not the kind of man,
you,
want,
to get too close to.
As a narrator, then, you assign him a name, to create some distance. To keep yourself out of his head.
But Jack's name isn't Jack. And as you admit that, you feel him creeping into your head after all, speading his darkness through your veins and arteries, like a bottle of ink streaming (unconsciously) into every crease in a wooden floor, after having broken upon impact. From a desk. You are the desk. You are the floor. You are the ink. You. You are the narrator.
You thought it was me. You thought I was the one facing the problem. But you were wrong. Jack infuses you, now,
It's all very obvious. The cards are dealt. The chess board set. With the instructions in a foreign language. Someone draws a gun. Then colours it pink with half-broken crayons.
I have to go. I'm awake now. Asleep. Almost. Always. After all.
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
On spiders
Itsy, bitsy spider...
I'm almost 100% certain that I lost a few readers on the title of this post, and a few more on the three first words. People with arachnophobia (fear of spiders) are among the most outspoken of phobics (is that a word? Should it be? I think so, but I always think so... Maybe I should check... Ha! It IS a word, and it even means what I thought it did!).
The other day a coworker of mine was telling (or acting out, actually - it's kind of slow in the bookshop during the summer...) about how she had killed a spider by use of an entire bottle of detergent, fifteen plastic bags and her roomate's slipper... When I teasingly tapped her shoulder directly thereafter, she nearly fainted because she thought it was a spider. I also have a friend who is so afraid of spiders, that one time she was house-sitting she did not go into the bathroom for a whole week because she had spotted a spider in there... (Before you ask - yes, the house does have two bathrooms. I do believe she used the other one)
Why, then, since I know the topic of spiders makes so many people uncomfortable, do I still choose to write a blog post about it? Well, I didn't exactly. I wrote a post about something else entirely, but I wrote it over at the Burrow Blog... So you'll have to scoot over there and check it out!
(For the record, the blog post over there is slightly spider related, but no worries - I am fairly sure I won't cause any nightmares. Not about spiders, at least...)
I'm almost 100% certain that I lost a few readers on the title of this post, and a few more on the three first words. People with arachnophobia (fear of spiders) are among the most outspoken of phobics (is that a word? Should it be? I think so, but I always think so... Maybe I should check... Ha! It IS a word, and it even means what I thought it did!).
Why, then, since I know the topic of spiders makes so many people uncomfortable, do I still choose to write a blog post about it? Well, I didn't exactly. I wrote a post about something else entirely, but I wrote it over at the Burrow Blog... So you'll have to scoot over there and check it out!
(For the record, the blog post over there is slightly spider related, but no worries - I am fairly sure I won't cause any nightmares. Not about spiders, at least...)
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
On nine things I would rather do than write my thesis
To say that the work on my thesis has not been flowing easy these last few weeks months would be like saying that climbing Mount Everest is “a bit of a hike”. It’s like every fibre of my body is working against me whenever I try to make any sort of progress. If I try to open the document entitled “Chapter Five (Or How I Lost The Will To Live)”, my toes rebel and pull out the plug to the computer. If I open any of my reference books, my eyes automatically shut, making it very hard to read anything at all. If I put my fingers to the keyboard, my elbows start twisting uncontrollably, causing perfectly sensible sentences such as “The Palestinian refugee problem remained a difficult challenge for the US authorities” to turn into nonsense: “The Oskedumuqn fureeg odrnep enraimed s fiddiclut xakkenge fro the IS arothotititties.”
On the rare occasions that my body does not rebel against me, my mind does. I stare at the screen for hours, looking pensive and concentrated, I am sure, but in reality I am shouting at the top of my lungs (but you know, inside me) “I DON’T WANNA, I DON’T WANNA!”. I really, really don’t. I want to go outside in the (for once) lovely weather. I want to read a good, fiction book. I want to procrastibake.
Basically, I want to do anything but write my thesis. So I came up with the following list:
The ten things I would least like to do right now (10 being the best of the worst):
10) Pull my nails out one by one.
9) Shave my head by use of the teeth of a (live) great white shark.
8) Sky dive into a (live) volcano.
7) Eat Roquefort cheese.
6) Eat Roquefort cheese with a topping of salmonella.
5) Eat Roquefort cheese with a topping of salmonella while reading the Twilight books.
4) Stick needles into my eyeballs.
3) Practice self-dismemberment.
2) Touch a (living or dead) snake.
1) Write my thesis.
So there you have it. I really don't want to write that thesis. But I kinda have to. I have given myself until I leave for work this afternoon to finish the crappiest draft in history (in fact, it is so crappy that there will be written Master's theses about it in the future). In the meantime I have banned myself from the blogosphere. I will pull the internet chord if I have to! If you see me around at all today, PLEASE KICK ME OUT! (When I return from work tonight, though, hopefully a free woman, I will have no kicking, please...)
In the meantime, though, why don't you check out another fabultastic post at Burrowers, Books & Balderdash?
On the rare occasions that my body does not rebel against me, my mind does. I stare at the screen for hours, looking pensive and concentrated, I am sure, but in reality I am shouting at the top of my lungs (but you know, inside me) “I DON’T WANNA, I DON’T WANNA!”. I really, really don’t. I want to go outside in the (for once) lovely weather. I want to read a good, fiction book. I want to procrastibake.
Basically, I want to do anything but write my thesis. So I came up with the following list:
The ten things I would least like to do right now (10 being the best of the worst):
10) Pull my nails out one by one.
9) Shave my head by use of the teeth of a (live) great white shark.
8) Sky dive into a (live) volcano.
7) Eat Roquefort cheese.
6) Eat Roquefort cheese with a topping of salmonella.
5) Eat Roquefort cheese with a topping of salmonella while reading the Twilight books.
4) Stick needles into my eyeballs.
3) Practice self-dismemberment.
2) Touch a (living or dead) snake.
1) Write my thesis.
So there you have it. I really don't want to write that thesis. But I kinda have to. I have given myself until I leave for work this afternoon to finish the crappiest draft in history (in fact, it is so crappy that there will be written Master's theses about it in the future). In the meantime I have banned myself from the blogosphere. I will pull the internet chord if I have to! If you see me around at all today, PLEASE KICK ME OUT! (When I return from work tonight, though, hopefully a free woman, I will have no kicking, please...)
In the meantime, though, why don't you check out another fabultastic post at Burrowers, Books & Balderdash?
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
On snakes (*shudder*)
Whenever I am asked what my greatest phobia is, one of two things will happen: if the person asking looks like he/she is in possession of snakes and a reason to torture me, I’ll answer “bunnies!” or some such nonsense. If the person who asks does not look like he/she has any reasons or means to torture me, however, I will truthfully reply that my one and only fully fletched phobia is ophiophobia – the fear of snakes. I am not happy about flying, but that is a discomfort, not a phobia. I am not thriving in heights, but again, it hasn’t yet caused me to panic in public. Spiders? I don’t love them, but if forced to choose between having tarantulas crawling all over me and touching a snake, I’m seriously considering the former the best alternative.
You might think my fear of snakes irrational, especially considering I live in a country where we barely have any, but I can assure you I have my reasons. I once was very nearly killed by a snake. True story.
It was the first week I lived in Japan, and I was out walking with the other Norwegian student at my university. The campus was located in scenic surroundings (you know, if your idea of “scenic” means rice fields and forests), and there were several short hike routes in the area. We had been walking for maybe half an hour when we came to a small creek. There was a nice, little bridge crossing the creek, and as we crossed it we saw something moving in the water some five meters below. Slowly gliding across the creek was a GIGANTIC, yellow snake. In my mind it was at least 20 meters long, but I have been informed that it most likely was about one and a half meter. Still, BIG snake!
Now, as mentioned the snake was pretty far away and not actually in any position (or inclination, I’ve been told, though I am not entirely convinced of this) to hurt us. However, just seeing that rubbery thing wind its way across that creek made me so terrified I nearly suffered a heart attack. I froze completely, and I had no idea how to move my legs in order to get across the bridge and worse, continue walking in the area I now realized was snake infested. Basically, I was prepared to stay right there forever, regardless if that would mean I would eventually starve to death. This would probably have made me a bit of a local attraction – the Westerner Who Died of Fear would have brought some much needed tourist cash to the prefecture of Akita. The Japanese have a thing for morbid attractions (like The Waterfall Where Most People Kill Themselves Each Year, or the Natural Disasters Amusement Park – yes, I’ve been to both).
But back to the snake. What finally convinced me to move was the logic of my friend who told me that if I remained at that location the snake might come back, and that the quick walk through the forest after all was a small price to pay in order to get back to our guaranteed snake-free dorm, where there was food and beds and where I would not become Japan’s fourth most visited tourist attraction (the third is Disneyland). My friend also told me that the snake was “cute”, “harmless” and probably “minding its own business without even noticing us”. Needless to say, none of these arguments sounded particularly convincing in my ears.
In the end we got back to campus without any further snake encounters. I did hear noises from the grass and bushes as we passed; but this might just have been the wind, or a bird, or a snake thinking we looked too pale for his liking. Either way we were not eaten that day (or any other day, for that matter, even though there were a couple of times I am fairly certain we had a close call).
I wanted to know, though, if I should just be afraid of this snake because it was a snake, or because it was a dangerous snake. Thus I googled “snakes in Japan”. If you live in Norway that can be scary enough, but if you’re a Norwegian exchange student in Japan – googling the snaky scariness that surrounds you is just asking for trouble. I nearly scared myself to death learning of all the long, short, green, orange, poisonous or just plain evil snakes there were in the country I had just travelled to, where I had to stay for at least another four months. I never found the snake we had seen, though. I looked through a number of images to try to identify it (but since I covered my eyes with my hand the most of the time, it isn’t exactly very surprising that I didn’t see any snakes that looked like the one that nearly killed me).
As you can see, my phobia is not irrational at all.
You might think my fear of snakes irrational, especially considering I live in a country where we barely have any, but I can assure you I have my reasons. I once was very nearly killed by a snake. True story.
It was the first week I lived in Japan, and I was out walking with the other Norwegian student at my university. The campus was located in scenic surroundings (you know, if your idea of “scenic” means rice fields and forests), and there were several short hike routes in the area. We had been walking for maybe half an hour when we came to a small creek. There was a nice, little bridge crossing the creek, and as we crossed it we saw something moving in the water some five meters below. Slowly gliding across the creek was a GIGANTIC, yellow snake. In my mind it was at least 20 meters long, but I have been informed that it most likely was about one and a half meter. Still, BIG snake!
Now, as mentioned the snake was pretty far away and not actually in any position (or inclination, I’ve been told, though I am not entirely convinced of this) to hurt us. However, just seeing that rubbery thing wind its way across that creek made me so terrified I nearly suffered a heart attack. I froze completely, and I had no idea how to move my legs in order to get across the bridge and worse, continue walking in the area I now realized was snake infested. Basically, I was prepared to stay right there forever, regardless if that would mean I would eventually starve to death. This would probably have made me a bit of a local attraction – the Westerner Who Died of Fear would have brought some much needed tourist cash to the prefecture of Akita. The Japanese have a thing for morbid attractions (like The Waterfall Where Most People Kill Themselves Each Year, or the Natural Disasters Amusement Park – yes, I’ve been to both).
But back to the snake. What finally convinced me to move was the logic of my friend who told me that if I remained at that location the snake might come back, and that the quick walk through the forest after all was a small price to pay in order to get back to our guaranteed snake-free dorm, where there was food and beds and where I would not become Japan’s fourth most visited tourist attraction (the third is Disneyland). My friend also told me that the snake was “cute”, “harmless” and probably “minding its own business without even noticing us”. Needless to say, none of these arguments sounded particularly convincing in my ears.
In the end we got back to campus without any further snake encounters. I did hear noises from the grass and bushes as we passed; but this might just have been the wind, or a bird, or a snake thinking we looked too pale for his liking. Either way we were not eaten that day (or any other day, for that matter, even though there were a couple of times I am fairly certain we had a close call).
I wanted to know, though, if I should just be afraid of this snake because it was a snake, or because it was a dangerous snake. Thus I googled “snakes in Japan”. If you live in Norway that can be scary enough, but if you’re a Norwegian exchange student in Japan – googling the snaky scariness that surrounds you is just asking for trouble. I nearly scared myself to death learning of all the long, short, green, orange, poisonous or just plain evil snakes there were in the country I had just travelled to, where I had to stay for at least another four months. I never found the snake we had seen, though. I looked through a number of images to try to identify it (but since I covered my eyes with my hand the most of the time, it isn’t exactly very surprising that I didn’t see any snakes that looked like the one that nearly killed me).
As you can see, my phobia is not irrational at all.
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