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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I realized that I always related things to myself and my experiences. For me, talking about things as something abstract, not part of me, was almost impossible. And realizing this felt awful, because I didn’t want to be such an egocentric person. I wanted to be cool and detached, just like my classmates. They were mature, while I was still stuck in some late adolescence.

But this gave me a new thought, the thing that I later wrote that text about. Maybe my self-centered conversation skills were part of my age? At 21 I was still defining myself, trying to find that place in the world where I belonged. Maybe it wasn’t that strange that I compared the things that I was confronted with with the person that I was trying to become. That was just a way of getting to know myself. My older classmates on the other hand were several years ahead of me and had left that self-centered period behind them. I envied them.

Later that fall I went to Oxford with my choir. We were to sing two concerts there. I was far younger than anyone else in that choir and one of the singers that I liked talking to the most was a man who was a bit older than 60. He had somehow found my blog and used to read it sometimes and then comment the things I had written at the next choir practice. During the first evening in Oxford we ate together at a resturant and he said that he still refered to himself in most things, and this lead into a conversation at the table. Our pianist didn’t agree with me about that age thing and said: “I mostly talk about myself too, but I also find the people that are willing to tell things about themselves are the most interesting to listen to. It’s about sharing. All that detachment is just boring.”

And really, she was absolutely right. It’s when we get personal that things start to matter, when we start to feel. But somehow, for me this general notion doesn’t seem to apply to me, but only other people. Because at 24, most of my conversations still seem to end up being about me and afterwards I get so self-conscious and think that the people I have been talking to probably think that I’m just extremely boring. But I can’t stop myself. I seem to have an endless need to discuss myself and my life.

That’s the main reason why I have a blog like this. Here I can discuss whatever I want, and since I haven’t asked anyone to read it, no one has the right to complain about the topics that I choose. The few readers that I do have, have found it on their own and they can always choose not to come back.

This is for the good of the people that I meet. It’s an attemt to make my conversations less self-centered. Because in real life, I still want to seem cool.

I remember the fall of 2006. My grandmother was dying of cancer in Finland and I got “9″ off the internet the day it was released. It was the fall semester of my last year in high school and I felt as if the pressure would choke me. I remember getting home from school, putting on the record, lying down on the kitchen floor and crying. I see myself doing this for weeks, but maybe I remember it wrong. But I know that for days and days, “9″ was the only record I listened to. I even dreamed “9″. Later, over Christmas, I went to Finland and helped my mom and aunt take care of my grandmother. I read the Bible to her and sang Christmas songs and for once I was happy for her rigorous faith. When I left to go back home just before New Years, I still felt sad but somehow better, calmer. She would die in her sleep a month later, in her own bed, in the house where she had raised seven children, with my aunt and uncle in the next room. That is what I think of when Damien Rice sings “Is he dark enough, enough to see your light /…/ do you miss my smell?”

And I remember October of 2008, I had a fever and my phone rang. It was the guy I had begun to fall in love with. He said that we wouldn’t work. We hadn’t had time to become anything at all yet, so it wasn’t even a breakup – but still I felt like my world was falling apart. The next day, I took the subway train in to the city, in spite of my fever, and walked through the beautifully red and yellow leaves on the pavement. I went to an old record store and found “More modern short stories by Hello Saferide” on display. It had been released that very same day. I bought it and returned home and already at the first line she had me dangling from her every note, Annika Norlin, “People are like songs, it’s true. /…/ and God only knows and you have this one sad similarity that every time it’s over, I want to press play again but the only difference appears to be I can force it on one of you, and on the other I can’t.” She helped me through my fever and all the other, more unidentifiable pain.

These memories became my Friday night, and even though they were sad, it felt good. Because it is a controlled kind of sadness. I can always choose to stop the music. These songs made me remember parts of why I am me, now, here, today. And I think that in order to know the right direction on the journey ahead, you need to remember the path you’ve put behind. Before I went to sleep, I lay on the floor listening to Damien Rice playing on wine glasses after the last song on the record, and felt achingly whole.

But then again, I come to think of that one thing he said to me once, and I feel that maybe he wasn’t that perfect, after all. Not for me, anyway. He said: “You should start drinking and taking drugs, live wild and rough, so that you have something to write about afterwards.” To my knowledge, he didn’t take drugs himself, but he drank quite alot.

It is possible that he found my soberness provoking. Because I don’t drink. I never have. I can honestly say that I’ve never been really drunk. I do sometimes take a glass of wine with dinner, if I’m offered, and I love Amarula, but otherwise I prefer water above anything else. And drugs are out of the question.

But for a while there I thought that maybe he was right. Maybe I needed to experience things like that in order to have anything worth writing about. Everything for the art, right?

I didn’t try anything though. Maybe I didn’t dare. Maybe I didn’t want to do anything that would have reminded me of that guy after things ended. I just know that since then, I have read alot of books written by and about those wild and crazy people, the ones that drink and take drugs and sleep around and I just can understand where the fascination lies. I find “On the road” both badly written and pathetic, “Fear and loathing in Las Vegas” tragic and “Creme fraiche” kind of sad. I don’t want to write about experiences like that, and if that is what is needed in order to write a ‘real’ book, I’d rather not. I guess I’m just boring that way.

I do other crazy things instead. Once I climbed a mountain. Huayna Potosi in Bolivia. 6088 meters above sea level, and all I could think about up there on the top, while the sun was coming up above the cottonlike strato clouds, was how the hell was I supposed to make it all the way down again, kind of regretting letting my friends talk me into this crazy scheme in the first place.

Once I posed for an art film that was to be shown at an art exhibition about Virgin Mary. I was a female Jesus hanging on the cross, totally naked except for a small cloth around my waist. I was offered the part by my friend Kirke, who was producing the film. The director told me to look angry at God, but all I could feel was sweaty. It was a very hot day in July, and the film was shot in an old factory without any air conditioning what so ever. Later that autumn, at the Virgin Mary exhibition at the museum of history in Stockholm, I remember standing in front of the screen showing the film, not at first realizing when the first snapshot of me appeared. I looked so voluptuous.

Or now, when I am going to Canada and western USA all by myself for five months, to volunteer at farms without much experience at all, just to see if I can handle it. That’s the kind of crazy things I do. And I feel that they are worth writing about too.