Chapter 18: From the sick bed

So. Excepting the visits to the kitchen for breakfast and lunch, I haven’t left my bed today. My colleague came to work with a cough yesterday and since we are stuck in a small, dusty archive together, she infected me too. My muscles ache and my throat is sore. Right now, she isn’t my favourite person. I don’t do this being sick business well.

So I feel that it’s just my right to lie here in bed feeling sorry for myself and catch up on all the TV shows that I haven’t had time to watch these last few months. Nice in a way, but really, not at all nice in all the others. I was supposed to drive my dad’s wife to the airport today, to get some practice. Tomorrow I’m supposed to have a small goodbye party. Now I won’t be able to bake the carrot cake and hazelnut meringue cake and the chocolate and orange ice cream cake. So, even if I get well enough to receive my guests tomorrow, I won’t have any cake to offer them and what’s the point in that? A party is not a party without a cake. That’s my philosophy. I might just as well call it off right now.

- – -

Later: I ventured out to the post office to get my driver’s license though. The actual card. I look slightly dim in the picture. But I guess that’s just as it should be. One shouldn’t look good on driving licenses and ID cards and in passports. And really, considering how I feel at the moment, the picture might be accurate. Dim. Just wanting for someone to feel sorry for me and go buy me pizza with four kinds of cheese. Please.

Chapter 17: When I was five, I got bitten by a monkey

The first time I went abroad, I was three months old. Dad, mom and me were going to Karpathos, Greece, and I slept all the way on the flight there. A year later, we went again. That’s when I learned to love olives.

When I was five, we went to Zimbabwe. My mom was working with Zimbabwe then, and just before we landed I claimed that I saw a giraffe being chased by a lion through the airplane window. I might have been a child with a lively imagination, but later, when we drove south from Harare to Cape Town, we went through a national park and I yet again claimed to see an animal. This time, it was an elephant in a bush. The adults in the car didn’t believe me. My dad thought that since I was listening to Astrid Lindgren stories in my walkman, I couldn’t possibly be able to see animals at the same time. But I insisted, so finally they drove back. And there it was. A huge African elephant, eating away at an entire bush.

We also visited Victoria Falls during that trip. A group of small monkeys lived outside our hotel, and one afternoon I got some bread crums to give to them. They were cute and happy for my bread, but when they had taken everything, there was one monkey that wanted more. He must have thought that I still had some bread in my hand, because he grabbed it and bit my finger. He was probably as chocked as I was of the drops of blood that started flowing. I got it cleaned and it didn’t get infected or anything, but still I sometimes think that I caught something from the monkey that day. A subtle monkey disease that sometimes takes hold of me and makes me do strange and crazy things. It’s nice to have something to blame when people look at me strangely.

And that’s how my childhood continued. With a mom who worked for the Swedish international development agency and a dad who was a travel journalist until I was 17, I got used to traveling as other kids get used to visiting their grandparents on holidays. At 9, we went to South Africa and Botswana and parts of my journal became the first of my writings to be published in a newspaper, included in a piece dad wrote about traveling with children. Later, parts of my journal was included in pieces from France, Italy, Vietnam, Norway, Iceland and New York. And at 11, I lived with my mom in Tanzania for a little more than a year, uprooting my sense of home even more.

So maybe it isn’t that strange, this impulse that I have. When I don’t know what to do, I go traveling. That I automatically think of strange and foreign places when I feel the need for clarity and inspiration. And that it comes naturally to me to write about my experiences on the road. Because, when you think about it, that’s how I was raised.

Chapter 16: Me, Natalia and the TV shows

The first six months after high school graduation were tough. I had no idea of where I was going and since no one wanted to hire me, I just spent my time at the library, taking long walks or just letting the days pass me by.

It was during this period that I discovered the TV shows. I hadn’t watched that much television before, what with my days being spent in school and at the stables and my evenings spent studying, reading or surfing on the internet. But now I suddenly had oceans of time and one Saturday I just happened upon the first season of Gilmore Girls. I was alone in my father’s huge apartment with a fever, and Lorelai’s and Rory’s quick and witty dialogue seemed like the perfect cure.

Soon I had finished all the seven seasons and went on to other stuff. By mid-fall, I was watching Grey’s Anatomy, House, Ally McBeal, Scrubs, Sex and the City, Six Feet Under, Heros and Entourage. I could spend entire days in bed with my computer watching the shows, not even bothering getting up to get food.

Well, that went on for a couple of months. Then I got fed up with myself, got out of bed and applied to university. That spring I studied philosophy and since then I have been just as busy as before high school graduation. But still I get those lulls, those Sundays when I can’t seem to move an inch out of bed. That’s when I fall back into my old habit and watch episode after episode until the Sunday is gone and the week starts anew. A part of me feels that I’m wasting my time, that I should go outside instead, meet people, live a little. But another part of me is just too exhausted from all the studying and working and caring that I can’t be bothered. Some months, the other part wins every time.

And really, who can blame me, when there are so many great shows? How I Met Your Mother and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Downton Abbey and Community and The Good Wife and Lark Rise to Cranford and The Big Bang Theory and Greek. I just can’t seem to stop watching Grey’s Anatomy and during my weaker moments I even enjoy Supernatural. They create a brake in a chaotic life and oh, how I need that sometimes.

But my little TV show addiction hasn’t only led to me being asocial. It has also given me one of my very best friends. During that depressing period after graduation, I for some reason stayed in touch with one particular friend from high school. Natalia. Most of my other friends from high school I lost contact with, but her I kept texting and one day she invited me to drink tea at her house. We hadn’t been really close before, but that first cup of tea at her kitchen table led to more tea drinking sessions and when I think back on that fall, those moments at her kitchen table are a few of the only positive memories that I have. And one thing that we talked about, one of the things that made us discover our similarities in taste and humour, was when we both realised our shared passion for TV shows. Zach Braff was our hero and our guilty pleasure was the BBC miniseries made from Jane Austen novels and other costume dramas. I got her to start watching Bones, and then when she moved to Bolivia for two years and I went to visit her, we spent entire nights watching pirate copies of Scrubs and Bones in the guest house by the river, eating artichoke and huge, elbaborate fruit plates and drinking papaya and banana milkshakes and Amarula.

So, since Natalia came home from Bolivia about a year ago, we have started this tradition. Saturday nights or Sunday afternoons with TV shows. I cook or bake a cake and she brings crisps or ice cream and then we watch. We have seen the two seasons of Pushing Daisies, a few episodes of True Blood, the first season of Game of Thrones and the last few seasons of Bones, of course. If it’s Saturday, she sometimes spends the night and then we make American pancakes for breakfast and watch some more.

And it’s such a liberating feeling, to have someone to share with. Even if hours pass without us uttering a single word except for the bare minimum (“pass me the chocolate sauce”), there is another kind of trust being built during these TV show marathons. We are sharing our need to be asocial, to get some time off from the chaos that is life and go on vacation into other, imagined universes. There is comfort in doing this together. And when we are done for the day, we get up from the couch, stretch our stiff backs and take the dishes out to the kitchen. We have shared a secret. Now our batteries are re-loaded and we are ready to face the world again.

Those TV show marathons with Natalia are among the things that I will miss the most when I’m away.

Chapter 15: Pause

Monday night: On the verge of tears. What have I been thinking? How could I ever imagine that I can leave, go away, stand on my own two feet on the other side of an ocean and half a continent?

It’s only the jitters. Or that’s atleast what I tell myself.

Chapter 14: My thing about Facebook

For one who writes a blog as personal as mine, an internet community such as Facebook shouldn’t be a big deal. I started my career as a citizen of the internet at the tender age of 12, when I became ZebraGirl @ Lunarstorm, a Swedish internet community. There, I kept a journal, wrote to my friends and had some really strange conversations with strangers. And from there I guess my internet identity started to grow, through several other internet communities and the blog that I started at 18, until Facebook came like a tsunami over the world and more or less destroyed all the competition.

I was 19 when I joined Facebook, and to start with I found it really practical. It had so many extra features, and since it was international, I could reconnect with some of the friends that I had outside of Sweden aswell. Especially during my travels in South America, I used Facebook alot – to upload photos, write to my friends and stay in touch with all the new people that I met on the road. A few of them I have actually been able to contact now, thanks to Facebook, so that I have couches to sleep on both in Portland and San Francisco this summer. Used as an extended address book, Facebook is an amazing tool.

But it’s the new developments with Facebook that have come with the introduction of smartphones that I find uncomfortable. Maybe I’m just scared and conservative and don’t understand the thing because I don’t have a smartphone. But people seem to live their lives through Facebook, updating their profiles with everything, photos and music and ideas and opinions and it’s kind of like high school, this showing off, and that automatically leads to me feeling inadequate.

Someone told me once that she envied and respected my integrity. For a reader of this blog that might sound strange, since I reveal just about anything about myself here. But for me it’s not the same thing. Here, I strive for some kind of artistic quality. I know that that sounds pretentious, and I’m not saying that I succeed with it – but it’s a goal. I haven’t totally lost hope yet of one day being able to call myself a writer, but to end up there I have to practice and practice. On this blog, with the knowledge that someone might read what I write, I have to make myself write well. With the potentiality of a reader, my writing becomes more alive. Not at all like my diary. That is probably the most boring read you could ever have.

And really, there are a lot of things that I don’t write about here. The everyday stuff, details. The things that someone might publish on the feed on Facebook. For me, that feed has become a way to stay distant from the people that I claim to know. I can read what they do and they can read what I do without us ever having a single conversation. It’s like tabloid headlines, but instead of celebrities the featured persons are my former classmates and stable buddies and collegues. I don’t really know why, but it makes me feel really sad and disconnected. It has gone so far now, that I try to avoid Facebook altogether. For other than the extended address book features, I stay away.

Because there is a difference. Here, on the blog, I am the writer and you are the readers. Here, I require no two-way dialogue. It is part of the concept, and I am well aware of what I write about. But there, on Facebook, we’re supposed to be friends, and for me friendship is about mutuality. If I tell you something, I want you to tell me something in return. My need for social interaction has never been dominant, I have always enjoyed my own company too much. So when I do spend time with someone, I have actively chosen to do so because the person intrigues me, challanges me or I like the way the person makes me feel. Small talk with no one in particular doesn’t appeal to me. And friendship isn’t something that I take lightly. It’s about sharing, about a personal connection – and on the Facebook feed I feel as if I loose all control over who I share what with. I feel as if I loose myself. I guess that’s where my integrity draws my line.

Chapter 13: The origin of need

I’m reading “The folded world” by Catherynne M. Valente. Queen Hagia, the blemmye, writes: “I told her that this was her story, but if she had been my daughter she would not be so hopeless when it came to letters. I would have taught her to write her own history, how writing is like giving birth to yourself – no one can do it for you without making a mess.”

Someone asked me where this need to write comes from. That he didn’t understand. I’m not sure, but I think the need is something that I’ve created myself. It started as a game, grew out of boredom, but I lost control and here I am. Sentences growing in my head without my asking for them. I don’t know where it comes from, but I do know that I haven’t been this happy, felt this contentment for ages. Now that I’m writing again.

I guess people are different. That they need different things. I need to be allowed to sing. I need to be challanged. And I need to write.

Chapter 12: The addict in me

I had promised myself that when I finished “Purple Hibiscus” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (a beautiful book, by the way, beautiful and horrifying), I wouldn’t borrow any more books from the library. I leave in less than three weeks and it would be so annoying if I had to go when I’m in the middle of a book that I can’t take with me. I should start reading one of the open source e-book classics that I got instead. That I will be able to continue reading on the other side of the Atlantic too.

But no. I just can’t help myself. “The folded world” by Catherynne M. Valente had just been returned when I arrived at the library to return my last library books, and I just couldn’t. I just had to. I mean, it’s Catherynne M. Valente! I am a library addict and there doesn’t seem to be a cure.

Anyway, finishing a book in two weeks shouldn’t be a problem. It’s not as if I have anything else to read. I have my driver’s license now. The only things I have to do now are to go to work, to pack, and to wait. I feel oddly liberated.