Emotions seem to be on standby here:
Wake up, shower, eat, study, walk, class, eat, study, lecture, walk, eat, study, sleep.
That’s it.
Emotionally on standby.
Academically on full throttle.
Is it bad? I don’t know, ’cause there’s not really any time to wonder.
Eros Ramazzotti, great pasta dishes, horrible white wine, David Hume, early Christian rant, Kumar without Harold, WHSmith, eBay regret, lots of laundry, new credit card, Danish crime tv-series, Ryanair tickets, parents coming, essays, free drinks, translating for Simon Hix.
And a great quote from a friend of mine explains an often-encountered state of mind. It doesn’t really translate very well but I can give it a try:
“…när man bara vill tillbaka till ett cabin party och vara sådär lagom ciderfull.”
(“…when you just want to be back at a cabin party being, like, lagom drunk from cider.”)
Running faster than my legs can take me
Shouting louder than my lungs allow me
I find myself to be a rather rational person. I’m self-disciplined. But I’m also obsessed with reciprocating people contacting me. I guess that’s a fancy way of saying that I spend way too much time on Facebook and checking emails… Which is pretty unwise if you ask me. So, the point is that I found this awesome little program that blocks specified sites at specified times. I’m liberated!
Blood dripped on Aristotle, a lot of blood. I was expecting the dreaded syncope, but it had mercy with me for once. My teacher had as well. A good dude, him. All I had to suffer from was vertigo and a failed attempt (thanks to the blood!) to account for why man is a political animal. He’s a bloody animal, or at least I was…
“The rapture of vertigo
And letting go
Me myself I was never sure
Was it the liquor
Or was it my soul?”
Yay! Things are going my way these days:
1. I finished my first serious assignment six days in advance.
2. I received the confirmation of my degree transfer, meaning official bye-bye to Skinner, Gaddis, and Trachtenberg and good-day to Voorhoeve, Nozick, and Nagel.
3. I secured a place on the LSE100 pilot course, Thinking as a Social Scientist.
4. I landed a big speaker for the Scandinavian Society to come in January.
5. I got my first article in the student newspaper published, and people seemed to like it.
6. I met a lot of new UWC people, and nice UWC people I knew but had never really spoken with.
So, I got my first article in our student newspaper, The Beaver, published today:
http://thebeaveronline.co.uk/2009/10/27/just-spliffing/
I still remember that day in early August 2007 when I was not more than a few days from moving to Norway. It was peculiar. Why did I suddenly want to give everything up for an in many ways uncertain future? I used to be the lame kid who didn’t want to go for the week-trips with school, who couldn’t sleep with the lights off in fear of the dark, all that stuff overprotected kids suffer from, albeit I don’t feel I was overprotected. I probably was. Maybe just protected. In a good sense. I think. But again, why did I, the least adventurous leave? Possibly because I was caught in an educational system which breeds mediocrity. I was fed up. With Danish über-envy, schadenfreude, and laxity. Intolerance. Conservative narrow-mindedness.
Norway was a safe haven in all those respects. No envy. Schadenfreude, a bit, but it was alright. I partook in that as well. Laxity? Only in its best form. Some intolerance, but “fucking miles away” from back home. And anywhere else I have ever been. When I was in Switzerland this summer, it was everywhere. In Denmark it’s everywhere. Here in the UK it’s everywhere (Nick Griffin, anyone?). Conservative narrow-mindedness is more or less equal to intolerance, I suppose.
But then again, Norway was a safe haven. Not the real world. A construct. Like a social experiment without the anthropologists on the sideline (although I was never sure whether Alistair had been ‘observing vultures’ in the Kalahari or whether that was an apocalyptic lie-of-the-century covering up evil laboratory projects with idealistic, bipolar UWC students as the guinea pigs). It’s deeply ironic. There was really nothing to worry about, but we worried so much. I did, at least. Actually, there were things to worry about. Abstracts like our future, whether we really were social outcasts or (to quote Clement Kjersgaard) “the élite” , stupid but inevitable power struggles in EACs and in general, emails that shouldn’t have been sent, things that shouldn’t have been done, things I would have given up everything for had they happened, all that.
It’s hypothetical nonsense more than mere reflection to ask myself whether I would like to do it again. I’m in a different world now. Completely. It’s a good world; better than I thought. Much better. But I don’t really know… I’m possibly happier than I was 99 % of the time in Norway, but still, to me it’s not about being happy, it’s simply making sense out of things. Perhaps now it’s in a more academic form, there it was a social one. People here, whom I don’t even want to call real-world people, are ‘better humans’ than I thought they would be. Not all of them. Most. And it’s so so interesting here academically. But then again… The hour-long conversations on the island about people we despised and loved, or how to take over the world. Ciders on the E-building pier. På-effing-flukt. World Today. Student Council meetings that made me fucking furious, Student Council weekends that were wholly hilarious. Strange people from strange places.
That taught me about the world.
With all it encompasses, moderation is seen as a virtue. It seems, though, that I moderate what should not be and do not what should be.
I moderate Sun,
I moderate Zeal,/LOVE :(
I moderate schedules.
I should moderate ferments. I shouldn’t moderate that which makes me content, however, and it seems everything that makes me content is supervised and tried rationed although it cannot be rationed. If I have my good music and my good meals, my good knowledge and my good emotions, I am tranquil. I have nothing against bad emotions; I don’t see them as bad, just different. Right now I cannot recall the last time they existed. It leads to a sort of superficiality which I despise, you know – being blissfully alive, but I suppose it would be too spoilt to complain. Arghhhhh!
It is indeed really rather strange that, in these first weeks where everything is rosy, restless, and reckless, the topics I’ve been dealing with in my course are death, death, and death. Socrates’ unsuccessful apology and Epicurus’ fearlessness of death, to name a few. And I love it. It’s such a fundamental question that I can’t believe I haven’t spent serious time considering it (apart from those near-suicidal pre-winter days in the wilderness of Norway that don’t count anyway, as it was half in desperation, half out of irrationality).
Brandon Bethancourt, above, seems to also have thought of the issue. I’m going to Alaska in winter, at least for a night.
I’m in London.
The nearest tube station is Angel, which has Western Europe’s longest escalator.
I have an American roomie.
I lost my boarding pass in the airport.
I also lost my voice, though it’s slowly returning.
I was seconds away from missing my plane.
There’s a pictogram next to the tap in the room saying ‘Not for drinking’.
I’m in the 21st century, yet I still have a land-line phone.
There’s a poster in front of my desk saying ‘Meningitis and septicaemia kill’. What a nice welcome!
It’s surprisingly dead here now, but tomorrow’s the official move-in day so that’s probably why.
I’ll update in detail later.
Never have I felt my existence being as pointless as it is these current days. Thank god, or… Well, thank destiny, or… Well, thank myself for the fact these days are on retreat.
Actually I do simple things at times. I stalk people on facebook. I also study Italian grammar. I find new music. I also try to read books, but it fails miserably. Perhaps it’s because I discovered my reading list for university; an absolute farce: it’s around as long as the accumulated list of ‘things I want to do’, which I keep partially on my notebook (the laptop) and partially in my notebook (the old-fashioned type). Wow, I can’t believe I’m living in the age of The Dying Notebook and Its Homonymous Successor. I think I should write a book about that. It’s such a catchy title. It fits my meta-pretentiousness as well. Perhaps a monochrome short film is better than a book? Too bad I sold my video camera when I realised the Von Trier in the making was dead long before he was born. And, by wanting to write the aforementioned book I just added another item to my list of things I want to do. Seems it’s going to take over the university’s reading list in length.
I always used to get a terrible stomach ache when I lost some money or I bought something I never used, bought something that broke the second after, or turned out not to turn out as I expected. If a café would charge a pound too much by mistake. I know, it’s ridiculous.
Inexplicably, that isn’t the case anymore. And, it’s impossible for me to explain how relieving that is. It’s crazy, and it’s great.
I’m moving to London partially because of its amazing cultural scene. Ironic it is, then, that one of my absolute favourite artists Emil Jensen is touring Sweden right after I leave for the Isles. Oh well, I can’t get everything I want, can I?
Some tasters for those who are unfamiliar with the Southern Swede:
Especially the middle track is extremely appropriate in these post-UWC times… Youtube him for more brilliant recordings.
If God existed, I would have been envious of his creative abilities. Instead, I’m simply in a state of annoyance. One of my most profound internal conflicts is between creating and observing. That’s why when I read, for instance, I end up reading two pages and glance (hah! Such silly irony) over the woods or fields or sea, initiating thoughts of what I could invent or create. I like reading, but I prefer writing. On the other hand, I love listening to music, but I can’t play anything. I blame my parents for not having forced me to play the piano as a little boy. In a pathetic attempt to make up for it, I tried making music on the computer. It requires too much effort and time for it to be worth it. In addition, I like looking at photographs, but I never took up photography.
I still rather create than observe, though. Just too bad the only thing I’m currently able to create is text. Or am I?
I have, for a long time, criticised Danish journalists for being unable to research, analyse, spell, write, and simply deliver satisfactory news. Today it was underlined again, as a little incompetent idiot called Lise Brix tries to ridicule the fact that almost half of the Danish population does not know the date of the upcoming elections for the European Parliament (link). One thing she lacks, however, is either: 1) the extreme inconvenience it is to read through her articles prior to publishing them, or 2) the inability to perform simple vital tasks such as breathing, eating, and thinking. Especially the latter.
The problem is that she doesn’t even get the date right herself. Yes. Lise Brix, who should be happy that her parents gave her such a short name so that she might be able to spell it, writes the 7th of July instead of June. I’m not saying this isn’t a typo, but even if it is she still deserves to be put in the stocks. Nothing less. Add to the typo or lack of brain activity her bad use of Danish language and you have the average journalist today. An embarrassment.
(…and Firefox crashes when I try to insert a picture.)
Despite all the grief and sorrow faced the last two days, which feels like years or lifetimes, there have also been positive experiences already. When on the central train station in Copenhagen, I met drunk people at 8am in McDonalds, cracking jokes and being happy. I also loved when strangers sent me nods and happy faces because they saw my graduation hat – people back home haven’t graduated yet, so I guess it was a sort of remarkable sight. In fact, this was one of the things I was fearing the most about re-entering the ‘real world’ – not being able to greet people in the morning or at the grocer’s. That’s why it was such a great relief to see that there are some people out there, who actually bother to care about strangers. All this reminds me of the Dawkins documentary about The Selfish Gene, and with my rather cynic world view, a reciprocal smile from a stranger can seriously make my day.
However! The seemlingly endless focus and fixation on all these reality shows, the weather forecast, and so on, has made me feel a bit alienated. I don’t know what to do about this, and I will be thinking hard the next period of time of how to approach it. I guess hoping for a UWC-like world is too much, but hopefully I will find many people with the same feelings as me next year. I really hope I will.
I got home, and I am done with UWC. It is over. I never thought this day would reach me, and I certainly never thought of how to approach it either. Maybe that’s why I feel oh so helpless right now, not knowing what to do and what not to do. I really need the people to come soon for my party; but there’s more than a week to go.
Most of all, however, I miss one person in particular. Most of my best friends will come for my party, so I’ll see them there. Or later during the break. One’s missing, though. And I am not in the position to cope with that right now whatsoever. She brought more joy during these last two months than any other person has ever brought to me in such a short span of time. Unbelievably amazing. Thank you for making that possible. I will be thinking of you every single hour and minute, and try to work out a way for this to work out. Because I want it to.
There are things in life that matter more than an exam or a grade, and I have learnt how to appreciate those things better in the last two months. In fact, the last two months have brought me moments and experiences that I’ll never forget. Never. I don’t know if they will be surpassed, and in fact there are a lot of things I don’t know. More than I know.
