The war of the self

As we speak, a legal statement was just being published in my face, on a very large platform. That platform is the messenger choice on instagram, and on facebook, and some other choices that come with it. Stuff like face recognition and such. I, for example, could not send a christmas greeting to my cousin Amy on instagram, due to some law that was right there in my face without further explanation. You can not send this message because of a new European Law. Really aggressive. 

 So I wondered. Who wrote that law? And why is this being published now? And like this? 

 And I used a search engine and found this quote in a BBC tec article on the net: „It also prohibits the interception or surveillance of communications and metadata without explicit consent from those involved.“ 

It‘s a new law about us online and it is litterally like the Nurenberg Charter that was written in 1945. It was a contract that banned experiments on people, be it their culture or otherwise, without their consent. This changed ethography and how experiments or obeservations of people are conducted today. I wonder if people are generally thinking about this? You can read the article here. 

If you disect it you‘ll see that there is a lot to think about. Facebook just changed it‘s „social security“ number, and the names of some divisions. It seems that they are desperatly trying to hold onto it‘s/our data. 

The question is, will some kind of a new European Legal War, start because of our personal data collections that have been going on for a decade or more? Could we possibly be better off by selling our data ourselves? Earn tokens. Like in an episode of Black Mirror. Or? 

How far does this European law pass? It has reached Iceland, that is for sure. I couldn‘t send my cousin Amy a greeting (good timing, christmas eve). You know this is serious don't you.

Some people in Europe are blocking a conversation between me and my cousin wich proves that they have the power to decide what we talk about wich brings us again to another big problem.

 And there are people, working a full time job, for Facebook obeing some kind of a modesty rule. No breasts, no breastfeeding, no bodys and such. So it litterally logs everything we say, all the nude pictures we try to send, and then they ban the stuff that isn‘t modest according to their modesty policy. Meanwhile, they, litterally offended little homies in every corner of the world, filing your secrets. Clever, right? Facebook is like a slippery eel. A drug lord called Loki. Dealing a strange potion. The world seems blinded by it‘s promise of a good identity, "fit in n'feel good" vibe, like in a Capimunist Disney World Denial (it‘s a new diagnosis CDWD), somehow not seeing it, or always forgiving it, because you love (or hate) what it does to your fragile self image. The kick you get from the approval of others. You love the likes and the hearts it gives to you. They up your dopamin levels. Dopeamine it's a great hormone that gives us a temporary good feeling. Like from running or dancing or... So you check in every day, every morning, every evening, over and over during the day. Same with Instagram. And you think that nothing happens ? Really?

We have been doing this for about fourteen or fifteen years now. We have part taken in a huge social identiy experiment, completely without knowing it. And just now, Google threw a cookie contract at me.

The painful feeling of rejection

There is a feeling that most of us are very afraid to face and work with. In fact I believe that this feeling might be the exact feeling that frightens most of us on the deepest kind of level. It is the painful feeling of rejection. 

To be rejected by someone or somebody you believe you belong with; a team, a friend, shool or work, someone you love, or someone you want to be loved or admired by. Or someone you trust... it is a deeply distressing feeling for most of us. 

Rejection can be shown in may different ways. „ghosting“ is one of them. Blocking. A letter. Being ignored etc. And sometimes people reject each other with infidelity and deception. The feeling of rejection is physical and it can hurt so so terribly that we ignore signals and signs of serious errors like untruthfulness and unreliability in others, in order not having to experience the actual reality of the rejection that this kind of behavior represents.

We often  tell our selves lies because we don't want to face the fact that someone is in fact rejecting us by speaking in the language of actions. The things they say and do dont match. We try to "explain" this away in order to avoid the messages spoken by actions, physical language and facial expressions and then we get stuck.

THE DARK SIDE

The darker side of the pain and hurt that follow the feeling of rejection, is that sometimes people can become addicted to it. It might seem strange, but to experience the rush of a feeling, followed by a burst of natural chemicals and hormones, so penetrating and splitting that it overtakes the entire chest can be a drug like no other. 

An emotionally infected relationship is often defined by this addiction to a certain kind of a love hurts rush, caused by emotions that set into action neurotransmitter signals that give this niche kind of high. Generally two people, stuck in a crazy limbo where one fears the rejection of the other. Under threat or by signs and symbols. A sick little twist.

I assume that a lot of actions that we take are subconsiosuly driven by the level of satisfaction presented by the award. I belive that we are driven very badly by the addiction to acceptance from others. Vanity if you will. The little red heart and the happy blue like button make us so happy that we are being held down by the measurements we take to avoid being rejeced, or not getting enough likes or attention. It is scary to a degree.

... refused, sent away, not invited, turned down, passed, outlawed, isolated, disapproved of and therefore rejected. Divorced, fired, dispensed... 

How bad does it feel?

A middle class slave to the payroll who claims she has no time to join The New Arts Activist Society

Tonight my friend told met that she didn't have any time to join an arts society club. She said that people who stay on the payroll, working for the man, have no time to do things like that. And then she sighed. 

She has been very tired recently. I think it's because she needs some new energy. She's going through the mid-life crisis too. Last year was full of self doubt for her and still is, in a way. Going through the mid-life thing is a big deal for a lot of people. A lot of them get a divorce and take up hobbies. Some become more happy after. Others really regret it, particularly when they have been dating someone 15 years younger for two years and find out that they can't really party that much, or that they really didn't wish for any more kids. 

Play a role, express yourself, rule the payroll

I once saw an interview with an old Swedish film director. It was about him as an artist. He said that the thing he regretted the most was not expressing himself the way he really wanted to. 

In her heart my friend is authentically an artist, but she is also a married woman and a mother of two.  She is successful in her creative field but I believe she needs another outlet because she is torn between the role of the middle class woman, who slaves on the payroll on goes to soccer matches, and an artist who once ran and sometimes *roamed* free in foreign cities. She needs to express herself more. More chaotically. Less middle-classy. 

She randomly becomes very frustrated because of the patriarchy and sometimes she thinks that the world is coming to an end and that we should all hoard stuff and have chickens and bunkers. She hates it how middle-aged women become "invisible" as she describes it. She has also fantasised about having a big pink vagina fountain in her garden, that pees and squirts and does different variations of spurts. I understand her on so many levels but let's face it. Something needs to be done about this. Otherwise she might go into the classic middle age, middle-class crash landing. 

I think I won't have to convince her much to join the New Arts Activist Society. It would be something in the spirit of the Dada Movement. As long as there is fun involved she's likely to last. We used to arrange and host lot's of weird and fun parties in the nineties. And we were both DJs. And lot's of other things. 

We should never be slaves to a suppressing payroll or any enforced roll for that matter. Don't be a bug, stuck on a bed, Kafka told us that slavery sucks. So here is the manifesto. The message. Loud and clear!

Don't let the social contract of the middle class suppress you.
Don't let the heteronormative suppress you.
Don't let their assumptions and expectations get you down.
Don't let The Man you are working for suppress you.
Make your own money.
Fuck the Patriarchy! 

Long live the New Arts Activist Society!

#feelingpumped #naas #m.ar.s

To write

My friends keep telling me to write more

Not to write more, but to tell stories from my head. I am always writing interviews anyway but they are a different kind of writing. It's documenting through someone else. 

To write is obviously a skill like any other. A set of skills. 

A chef is what comes to mind when I think of a comparable skill that is more commonly appreciated. The chaos of nature has created an infinite source of raw material for the chef to choose from. His or her job is to prepare the raw materials, combine them together, work them, put them on a plate and serve the neat outcome to the hungry (or curious) person at the table - and this is exactly what a writer does. Any kind of writer. 

A plumber or a specialist in linoleum laying might read this and become insulted that I didn't use them as an example for a  that compares to a writer but the difference is super clear. Writers and chefs have living things to choose from when it comes to work material while carpenters, bricklayers, plumbers and shipbuilders can count on their logs, rocks, pipes and metal. 

This is not to say that the raw material of a writer has no reliability to it. That is people and their behaviour. People seem to behave and move in ways that can very often be predicted, and sometimes even relied upon. Particularly people in groups and over a long span of time. These descriptions are best to be read in the Bible, the Saga of Njál (Brennu-Njáls saga) or Snorra Edda. 

Muscle memory

Many crafts find their way into the muscle memory of the woman or man who work on their craft. A good seamstress can create wonders, not to mention those who work with ceramics and tiles. They do their detailed jobs flawlessly and move on a focused, but fast pace. 

Drivers, bodyguards and waiters have a super fascinating skillset. I guess exactly the same skillset that people need when they are on a soccer field, navigating a crowd while keeping your eye on a target. 

My skills, pace and how many times I hit the back button on the keyboard depends on how much sleep and caffeine I've had. For the past year I've had the routine of drinking one cup of coffee per day. Maybe I should increase my caffeine intake and go to bed earlier.  Could be an idea. The eternal search for balance. 

My pace on the keyboard right now is a little below normal but that's ok. When I used to write journals my handwriting was often slow so that it could be more readable. It also gave me a little buffer on the sentences. Go slower, think it over. 

Writing with hand can be more interesting than writing on a keyboard because sometimes you can spot your mood by the way you write. This is very clear to me in the journals I wrote from I was circa nineteen to twenty three. Sometimes my handwriting was wild. Sometimes calm. Same things on my mind, most of the time, just different intensity, the rise and fall of different emotions used to vary. 

Anyway

I used to write a lot of poetry at that time. Publish some, even read one on TV, but mostly we read them out loud for listeners at poetry nights held at clubs, bars and cafés. I read my stuff with a lot of other people who now do this as a main job, publish books by numbers.

I often feel guilty that I didn't continue on this artistic path and became a blue collar journalist instead. Mixing jobs. Writing about lipsticks. Creating a popular website about lipsticks and art. Getting by as a single mom. But hey. Maybe I'm not ready? Maybe I'll never be ready? Maybe I have too many stories to tell and when I think about it get's overwhelming?

I am just going use this blog until I make further decisions A revival of an old blog is a good place to start. Like a chef experiencing with his food skills in the kitchen of a kindergarten. Yeah! I'm King I'd say in the spirit of Kanye. 

I can start by telling you a story that will appear in another blogpost.

The structure of The Ozark

Recently I have been watching a tv series called The Ozarks. For years friends have been pressing on me to watch it, and I even know a guy who wrote some of it, but for some reason I didn't get myself to turn it on until very recently. I instantly got hooked as my friends had predicted.

I am fashinated by how those different classes of people operate together and how quickly their very complex problems escalate and how fast they can solve them, each in their own way. The mean guys are also some of the most disgusting that I have seen. The FBI cop and Ruth’s redneck dad. Ruth is probably my favorite although I hope she won't become too tame in the next episodes.

The huge power roles played by middle aged women in the series is cool for obvious feminist reasons and the writers have all the archetypical elements under control. Buddy the mentor, Darlene the evil witch, whatshisface the evil father, and the gay redneck dad who became his sons ghost mentor (I cant remember their names). And then of course the Romeo and Juliet element in it. The love affair between Charlotte and Wyatt. Uptown girl and downtown boy etc.etc. I have just finished the second series and now it’s time to begin the third one. It would be in my nerdian spirit to write recaps in the next few days.

Later!


The sound of silence

 The sound of silence comes when you allow every single muscle in your body to relax

The habit of shutting down the computer after using it

I remember in the late in the 90's when people had it as a rule, to shut every software down and then finally the computer itself after using it. Some even disconnected from the router or unplugged the internet cord.

Did you do that and do you think it is a habit we should pick up again?

This invisible history and it´s non objective reality

Until recently I didn't quite realise what a big role a certain search engine company has played in my life. I remember when it first started it was a rebellious answer to another established computer company that had, for a long time, sold their own software as a neccesary part of the computer. They were dominant on the market. 

The new search engine was supposed to be cool with a weird name and you could also have email and lots of gigabite storage for free. It seemed like a better option than hotmail so you moved over and soon everyone did. Then they started slowly sending out all kinds of products. Like a free image editor with lots of online storage for photos. And a map. And later a full blown visual map of almost every house, in every city, in every corner of the world.  Now they also have a tv channel. And zoom like software, and a contact storage with calendar planning, reminders and all sorts of other things that I seem to use every day. 

By detecting my behaviour and desisions this search engine company must have gained deep insight into so many things that I have done and thougth about through out the years. the people I have met and all the places I have been at. It´s like turbo psycholgyst on mental steroids who has observed you for years.

Let´s visualise apps as objects

I sometimes visualise a person, like a touristy type, standing somewere totally surrounded with all the stuff you find on your smartphone. Let's start

A record player
A radio
A camera
A few clocks
A calendar
A phone book
Some letter paper and lots of envelopes
Bank books and credit cards
Some pinball games
A remote control
A tracing device
A synthesiser with lots, lots of instrumental sounds
A dj deck
A visual board
A note book
A video camera
Sound editing device
A calculator
A compass
Parking meters
Airplane tickets
Facial recocnition device
Live video broadcasting device
A guitar tuner
A scale
A step counter
Lots of books
Some security cameras
Lots of videotapes
An enourmous collection of photoalbums
Morse coding device

and the list goes on

The cultural growth, that has been going on in cyberspace since the search engine company with the cool name and it's older sibling, the Fruit, finally took over, has been too overwhelming to describe.

What we have now is a very big non objective reality (or maybe singulary objective reality since it's all in one device), that affects and/or controls our behaviour to a small or a large degree.
It gives you something to think about.

The protocol

It's so weird to find this blog that has been here just resting passively for years. Since 2009. And to suddenly write on it like I did back in 2002, when blogs were an anonymous fun thing to do on the internet. Since the point of blogging was partly to enjoy the freedom of anonymity, bloggers hardly went by their real names. I had my own blog nick (not to be revealed) and I made a few friends. For example Siggi Siggi Bang Bang  https://siggisiggibangbang.com and https://badmeanton.blogspot.com. Bad and Mean later became my friends in the real world and so did Siggi amongst other good people. Unfortunalty most of the url.s are gone into the wires. 

When I first started blogging I was working nightshifts at a senior home and during those shifts I made double money by writing free lance articles. I used the hours of just sitting there, attending every other hour to dying old people, and wrote in-between. Both on a weblog, that I believed wan anonymous diary of thought, and articles that I signed with my own name. 

I liked writing blogs much better but it turned out that not everyone did and I wasn't quite as anonymous as I thought. My boss at the senior home said that I was way too frank in my writings and that I had crossed some line. A line that I apparently hadn't noticed. She said that my blog from work was too much but I should definitely keep on writing, and the way she said it told me that she honestly liked it but she wasn't supposed to. She had to follow a protocol. 

Someone had sent her the link and it didn't take her long to figure out the scene and the players. Some relatives had complained. 

The thing I did was to describe the atmosphere and the people at the senior home the way I saw it. 

There was this schizophrenic man who walked around the hallways talking to himself while intensely smoking the Winston cigarettes that we gave to him, three at a time, every three hours. He reacted clearly to air pressure and became sleepy and depressed when it was heavily clouded, stormy and rainy outside and sometimes he would get angry and shout. Normally close to his next load of Winstons. 
There was also a tiny woman who only ate white food (fish and milk for example) and wanted her feet moisturised with yellow Aloe Vera Banana-boat gel every six hours. She was the entitled type. Queen.

My strangest interaction with all the strangeness at this senior home was with a 96 year old man who had a brain tumor. The kind that added the very exact amount of pressure on his brain to change his personality to a new degree of weirdness.
He came sleepwalking down the hallway at 03:00 in his pyjamas. This you could always count on. His slippers made a very distinct wooly slipper sound as he dragged his drowsy feet on the floor.
I sat by the computer and did my thing until the sound of his slippers reached a certain volume. Then I knew that he was about ten meters behind me and therefore the right time for me to stand up and guide him back to his room. This was a silent boring routine but he broke it the night he asked me if I would be kind and hold his cock for a while. My first reaction was to laugh but I repressed my reaction, kept the cool and stayed silent and pro as we walked on and when I closed the door behind he went back to his bed with his wife. 

The troubling paradigm

Most people in the west have this idea, or the paradigm of The Great Chain of Being deeply rooted in their minds. On the hard disc if you will. It's based on a hierarcy:

Fish and creatures of the sea are at the bottom, insects and plants are at first and second base, then birds, then mammals, then different kinds of mammals. Apes, then different kinds of primates, humans... different kinds of humans like savage, barbarian, noble savage and finally civilised. And on top of that whole thing reigns a male creature, Mr. God Almighty, the White Wonderful Man, The Ultimate Supreme Being of all beings.

This image really, seriously affected Europe in the middle ages,and obviously for some ages before and after that, as in for example the Greek mythologies where the white bearded Zeus, ruled from the top of mount Olympus, as close to heaven as one could get.

The church, those layers of existence and the messages from the almighty father, inspired hundreds of thousands of men to exploit and convince others, that they defined as barbarian, witch, slave, or anywhere lower in the great chain of being  that they were „less than good“ and should therefore carrie the burden of a of shame.  The different things that were supposed to make you feel shameful were published in the book and the book was translated and published by white Europeans who had a full time job representing „The Ultimate Supreme Being“. Priests to be exact and later many different kinds of officials. All men, apart from one or two queens. 

The great paradigm

Although Darwin was a self proclaimed agnostic, he probably didn't have another sorting system, or paradigm, grid, map... than to sort creatures into categories that ranged from unimportant to important. From wild to tamed. From dark to white. From underdeveloped to developed. Chaos to order. The idea didn't exist in his head because the world hadn't come any further at the time. Our minds didn't work on those things yet. It was all still pretty two dimensional. 

Darwin was a white guy, who had important conversations with other white guys who also went around the world to explore and "discover" animals, cultures and people. And those guys came up with theories about the survival of the fittest, being on top of the food chain and racial cleanliness. All while exploiting Africa, Asia and America, enslaving „savages“ in the name of their patriarchal values and christian views on how we should act. 

The unfair deal is that all of this is still going on just in a slightly different form. The white bells of the patriarchy don't ring from church (dick)towers anymore. They ring from the phones in top floor offices in tall skyscrapers in Dallas, Dubai and London. The white panorama offices on the umpth floors. High up, - closer to God than the rest of us... or so they think.

Cyclothymia, the seasons and a week in the life of a troubled teen

The strange and fun thing about the crazy version of me is, that it is bordered somewhere between me being creative, bored and impatient to the point that I peak in some odd situation that I got myself into and then fall down like a phoenix on fire. And then I want to sleep it out. Obviously.

For me this feeling can't be a diagnosis because it is the only reality that I know, and in fact the only stable undertone in the patterns of my behaviour, when I seriously think about it. Cyclothymia is natural and healthy for a lot of people because for them it is like driving down a familiar road, almost on muscle memory. It rides with the weather and the seasons. It reacts to light and temperature. It has a rhythm. It is a force of nature, like the seasons.

Way up north

I have this theory that for the people of Iceland, light depression and light hypomania (or pitch dark in some cases) are a natural psychological state, which is no wonder. During the dark months of the winter, the body produces mass amounts of melatonin so you become sleepy, drowsy and monotonous to the point of depression.

Meanwhile it is windy, black and stormy outside and you have to battle a snowstorm to get your car door open, and still be in pure denial that it is actually challenging, and sometimes horrible, to live on this fucking island. You are like that “Everything is fine” meme where a smiling dog with a cup of tea sits at a table in a house on fire.  Everything is fine because you have a big bowl of snacks, a variety of anti depressants and a Netflix account.

And to the extreme opposite, during the bright months of spring and summer, the body and the brain experience a blitzkrieg of INTENSE daylight „therapy“ (for some much unwanted) that pumps them up and makes them want to go out and DO things>

Go fishing, barbecuing, arrange huge soccer matches for kids (a torture for introverted parents), go camping, go to cottages, hold weddings, paint roofs, build fortresses called “pallur” around their houses, buy icecream and go to the swimming pool. Get crazy drunk downtown and eat a hot dog that might make you regret it an hour later, go to a party with random people and make new friends, have accidental sex with someone you've just met and stay awake until 12:00 the next day because you have no idea that it’s actually morning because it’s light 24/7 anyway. The sunlight hurts the brain and you are dehydrated but you keep going anyway. Your phone is on 2%. The ocean is calm. You can see the reflection of the mountain in it. Everything is bright blue and intensely yellow, like the intro in the Teletubbies.

Mondays

Sometimes it get’s way too much and you just want to stay inside, but you can’t because you start feeling guilty about not being OUT IN THE SUN. As the days get warmer, The People of Iceland want you to go outside. It’s a demand, an obligatory duty from everyone around you, national peer pressure.

-Kva! Ætlaru bara að vera inni í sólinni? Það er fimmtán stiga hiti! Drífðu þig út maður!

Translates: If you belong to this nation, you must go outside!

1980-1984

When I was around ten or twelve, I really enjoyed staying inside when it was super sunny outside. I just liked chilling on the brown leather couch and watch spectacles of dust, from the fuzzy brown floor-carpet, float weightlessly in sun-rays that broke their way through the dark curtains. The dust looked like an infinite galaxy in the sun-rays. I disappeared and became just as weightless as the dust. I vanished and it felt good.

Sundays

I also used to enjoy napping or zoning out to the sounds from small airplanes on Sundays. On calm, sunny weekends they were very predictable, because in Iceland, everyone does the same things at the same time. That went for the hobby pilots too. I also listened to music with headphones. I loved that enough for another chapter. 

Saturdays

Late at night on Saturdays and Fridays, and probably on other nights as well, I used to break into cars. I was still a tween. The area below the block of flats where I lived was full of car repair shops and there were lot’s of unlocked cars there. All kinds. Big and small. Me, along with some other kids, used to go straight for the glove compartments and nick whatever was in there. Normally we found coins and cigarettes. Sometimes porn mags. It was a competition. Who got the best stash that night. 

Fridays

Another crime I used to commit as a kid was stealing AA batteries in food stores. They used to be overpriced, like proper razor blades are today, but easy to nick from bigger shops. I then took the batterie pack to a smaller shop, where they were sold from behind the counter, and told the assistant that I had bought the wrong ones, but since my mom had already bought the right ones, I wanted to exchange the batteries for a pack of Viceroys. What a criminal! I was 14.

Thursdays

During a period, that lasted for a few weeks in my life, I used to go home after school to sniff glue and watch VHS recordings of music videos with my girlfriends. There were like five of us and we did this when our parents were at work. We also used to hyperventilate, choke each other by the neck and pass out for a few seconds. Top class entertainment and a cheap and easy way to get high.

Wednesdays 

Take the bus downtown after school, go to the arcade, play Pacman and Galaxy, go on a shoplifting raid down the main street, come back to the arcade with expensive suits and pilot jackets, „sell“ the goods to the twenty year old guys behind the counter and get coins for the game machines instead. We did this regularly.

Tuesdays

Go to school, go through hell. Run home like a fugitive. Read and watch films.

Mondays

Go to school, go through hell. Run from the bullies. Run home like a fugitive.

The past few months, day's and weeks have been weird to say the least. The emotional level of uncertainty and need for structure has reached a new climax. Covid with all of it's crazy rules. Back back and forth and forth... And then 2021. A new year and suddenly a new horizon. Surprisingly christmas went really well and the numbers of infected went down. The rules almost went back to normal, for a short while, and then suddenly here is an earthquake for you. Enjoy it. Pretty big. 

Things fell down from the shelves in the town of Grindavík, closest to the origins of the quake. A road ripped open. Kitchen cabinets fell from a wall.

One earthquake is fine. I'm used to that, everyone has experienced them but these ones went on for three weeks. They just came randomly and shook the earth. It's so crazy. The earth is the only thing in the world that we think we can think upon as solid. When you go out on the sea you expect the waves and billows. Big bumps. But the earth. You made a deal with it. It's supposed to stay put. When it doesn't the situation can become sort of traumatising. 

I felt sea sickness to begin with for about ten days. Then that stopped and I stopped feeling the earthquakes even though they were many a day. I only felt the last big one before the volcano eruption. And yes. Now there is an active volcano blowing close to the airport and gas is in the air (John Paul Young. 1978).

And as of today, the covid cases are increasing, the government considers/or has decided to open the borders up again for citizens of the UKandUSA. And as for me. I'm just trying to focus on studying anthropology with the effort of a brain that is a bit overworked from ignoring this sci-fi like weirdness around me. 

Later!