In case you are not as attentive as you ought to be, the New Years resolution of 2009 is: Chill the Fuck Out. Or CFO for short. If you like, you can make that homegirl gesture I’ve seen teenagers do (the floppy wrist thing) and say “oh, well, why don’t you just C-F-O, bitch!” and everything will be fine. I will elaborate on this further.
I came back to Gothenburg in time to welcome the new year with a couple of friends. After dinner we headed to Heaven 23 (on the 23rd floor of a hotel) for drinks and fireworks. We’d been told that a strict dress code would be enforced, and as a result we all looked bloody fabulous in jackets and such. Anna and Hanna had given me a scarf with flower prints on which allowed me to play the part of a toyboy and/or gay chihuahua.
We pretty soon realise that the whole dress code thing doesn’t apply to the scores of hotel guests that have found their way to the top floor with their kids in search for lebensraum and alcohol. The enterprise we had set out on is now transforming in front of our eyes into an after ski, but with more expensive alcohol and family friendly music volume. Once the fireworks start the kids are swarming, longingly staring out over the city but probably missing their Playstation consoles.
We’ve been buying drinks for two hours or so and slowly realise that we’re not getting value for money. We wrap shit up and leave in search for other venues that might enjoy our custom, and where we might actually enjoy being customers. I’m still sick and communicate mostly through coughs and spit – I’m a whiny bastard when I’m sick – so it’s actually a relief when we give up on finding anything interesting at half two and take the tram home.
Mum just got back from Hawaii, where she and her boyfriend were seeing new places and having a grand time. Sounds like fun, that. My Christmas has been spent under the banner of plague and lethargy, and I’m looking forward to getting back to work at Chalmers and planning stupendous projects. Also, I need to make more money so that I can buy people all those Christmas presents I’ve been putting off for three weeks. I mean, my brother got two pairs of socks from me, which although they were designer socks, still are socks.
Contrary to the title, I don’t have a new years resolution yet. I’m working on it and it’ll be a good one. Promise.
I’m beginning to believe that everything about me that makes me attractive to people and makes them want to be with me might actually be a personality disorder. I don’t know who I am anymore.
→ Grouphug.us: Anonymous confessinon #440163784
My boyfriend cheated on me and I retaliated by posting an ad on Craigslist and giving a random guy a blowjob. In his apartment. I’ve never cheated before and I had to get drunk just to be able to do it. Now I feel so dirty and worthless. I called him and my sister right afterwards crying and claiming rape. I’m a liar and a hypocrite. But I can’t tell him because it would hurt him worse than anything else I could have done.
→ Grouphug.us: Anonymous confession #727171051
I drive a VW but the Tuareg, not the oldskool buss. My wife just had to have a Lexus. I’m married to a half frigid wheight obsessed woman, have a stupid dog (she takes it to those stupid shows every other month) and 2 kids who I doubt will ever amount to anything other than spoiled brats.
→ Grouphug.us: Anonymous confession #334748862
I’m celebrating Christmas in Stockholm with brother. And by “celebrating” I mean “drinking.” Happy holidays!
Also, check out those funky clouds we had the other day.
Last Friday was spent at a party. A burlesque party. To better fit in with the crowd of Manson fans and strip-tease performers, I presented myself in tights and with a mustache + soul patch. I’m going to try this feature on for a couple of days. So far most people are bemused. I don’t know, is it too Wyatt Earpy? (Also, please notice the author pose I have going on. I’d be an awesome writer if I would only not have to actually write something)
Newspaper publishers should consider consolidating and outsourcing news operations — even overseas — to save money as revenues continue to shrink, the head of a major U.S. newspaper company said Monday.
→ USA Today: Outsourcing could be in journalism’s future.
In July of this year, the now-defunct Eureka Reporter reported that McClatchey has outsourced the copy editing of the Orange County register to India, outsourced the advertising design department of the Fresno Bee to India, and had intended to outsource the copy editing of the Miami Herald to India but ultimately changed its mind on that one.
→ Watching the watchers: Offshoring/Outsourcing Journalism: The Unstoppable Bad Idea?
Although caffeine does not produce with life-threatening health risks commonly associated with the use of classic drugs of addiction such as cocaine, heroin and nicotine, some caffeine users report becoming “addicted” to caffeine in the sense that they report an inability to quit or to cut down their caffeine use, they continue to use caffeine despite having medical or psychological problems made worse by caffeine. and they continue to use caffeine to avoid experiencing caffeine withdrawal symptoms.
→ John Hopkings Medical Center: Information about Caffeine Dependence
The motif of harmful sensation is a recurring idea in literature: physical or mental damage that a person suffers merely by experiencing what should normally be a benign sensation. The phenomenon appears in both traditional and modern stories.
→ Wikipedia: The motif of harmful sensation
Both McKinney and Bedard told me about people who took Tylenol or phosphorous, which also destroys the liver (and incidentally produces phosphorescent vomit). In both cases, they slept off the initial sickness and recovered for five days — during which time they decided suicide was a mistake after all and they wanted to live. But the liver had been destroyed and after five days each of them started to feel very sick, passed into deep coma, and died. “He knew it would happen and that there was nothing we could do about it,” Bedard said, “and his friends and family knew it, and for five days they sat in the hospital together waiting for it.”
→ How not to commit suicide, by Art Kleiner, 1981
I want you to know that I have a deep affection for you. I am deeply grateful for all your kindness. I wish I could have made a happier life for you. It was mostly my fault, please forgive me.
→ Suicide notes. ibid.
Jill Tracy – Evil night together:
[audio: https://monocultured.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/01-evil-night-together.mp3]I’m looking specifically about a rejection of postmodern theory (I apologize for the broad terminology), that looks at thinkers like Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Deleuze, Jameson, etc etc, that accurately comprehend their arguments, and then rejects them. That is, if postmodernist thought is broadly characterized by a general rejection of singular, grand narratives and a method of critical thought that involves a disbelief in foundations — then I’m specifically interested in arguments that go against these characterizations and arguments.
→ Ask.metafilter: Anti-postmodernism for postmodernists?
Before Facebook, this is how we communicated status. You could only do it during winter, so you’d move further north to improve ping. You kids and your newfangled internets. It was a simpler time, it was a better time.
Last Friday was an odd day. I’d spend the whole day at Chalmers with Ana and Juaqim (an architect from Barcelona who’s at the course as a guest tutor) going through what the students had done. The video-course stuff is interesting, and being forced to verbalise what you know is always challenging.
Ana’s train didn’t leave until well after eight in the evening, so we spend the interim hours at Bazar where I once again cemented my position as a connoisseur of internet perversions knowledge. Tired as hell, I saw Ana off to the tram and went home.
Or, rather, I would go home as soon as I’ve checked in on friends at a bar. I mean, the bar was on the way home and a beer would help me sleep even better. As tired as I was, my sleep deprived carcass just wasn’t able to do much but stare into space. Besides, a backpack heavy with laptops and such was a last straw of sorts.
Turns out that I tossed that straw after a while and drank from the bottle. Anna and Petter Jan has told this drunk girl that I’m the second best chess player in Sweden and was left by a girlfriend during my latest tournament; Petter is a world class taekwondo champion at the moment, and we’re both being hit upon by this economy assistant who’d just dismissed her boyfriend (he’s skulking nearby). At one point I launch into a monologue about killing and eating Jan. I might have tried to make a vegan point.
Dignity-wise, it goes downhill from there. I start speaking English with a heavy Polish accent. Ponglish is not a language made for singing, something that becomes apparent in the karaoke-taxi we take to Röda Sten. I absolutely maim whatever respect the driver might have had for East-European people, and how they combine with ABBA. Someone in the backseat is screaming “Bitches and hos, bitches and hos!” into the microphone, and I’m explaining something to someone.
The mood has reached a fever pitch, where every movement takes on colour. Everything you say is potentially funny and you are acting on a meta-level where your behaviour is a choice rather than something personal. The philosophical term for this is “shitfaced” and we are all very charming and fun. We have become the party and expect everyone else to know this as well.
We demand that the cab stop with open doors outside Röda Sten so that we can finish the song and entertain the people, perhaps improving on their lives so barren of joy. A woman has taken shelter against the rain, and for some reason we are all pointing and shouting; In each of our minds there are hundreds of reasons for why this is hilarious.
Intermission. Arts and Ideas: The quiet carriage. 4 minutes.
[audio:https://monocultured.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/the-quiet-carriage.mp3]
We march past the queue and get in without paying. Attitude can take you past two guards and a cashier, no problems. We take Bloody Mary by the hand and sit on the stage; Someone suggests I help steal a microphone cable because it’s really expensive and fun. What fun, I don’t know, but it must be fun because we thought of it. In the end, someone was whipped with the cable and that was that.
Jan suggests another jest for the evening, and I upset a young man by telling him that I kill and barbecue dogs, selling them as mystery meat. I can’t for the life of me remember this, so I imagine that my brain has long since gone to bed. On the dance floor, I dance like there is no tomorrow. I’m Kali the destroyer and my flailing arms create a space I promptly occupy with a butt as lively as any butt has been. If you have seen people in voodoo trance – trashing about, throwing themselves all over the bloody place – you might have a grasp of what is happening. I am the snake man. Petter has a grainy video to prove it.
Once again joining the others outside – I’m still not smoking but enjoy the company – I take a picture of one of the guards. He gets upset and yells at me to erase the image. This is the point of the evening where I decide that civil courage is called for and I tell him to call the cops if he wishes to press charges, but I’m not erasing any images, thank you very much. I get pushed into the street and yelled at a bit more, evoking sympathy from standers-by.
Four minutes later, he comes up and apologises profusely. He didn’t know that I was a freelance photographer for the largest daily, and surely I wouldn’t want to publish the image of him, and the job of a bouncer is a stressful one and he didn’t know that I was only doing my job.
Anna has convinced him that I’m actually doing an undercover story on the secret life of bouncers and have to take candid images of them in order to catch the real person behind the badge. Anna played him like a really thick brick, creating the most beautiful music of explanations and excuses. I don’t know how any of this happened, and Jan can’t believe that I didn’t get the shit kicked out of me. The image wasn’t even all that good.
Intermission. Arts and Ideas: Studio Shehrazade. 2 minutes.
[audio:https://monocultured.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/photo-studio-story.mp3]
Well, whatever. Three of us are left, everyone else has dropped off during the night. The place is boarding up but we manage to get three more drinks to celebrate my narrow escape and Annas’ talents. We leave after only I am left standing on the dance floor, shouting and battling invisible monkeys.
Two guys try to pick up Anna outside the club. It’s a lazy attempt and we’re laughing it off – things are still in meta-space where nothing is really happening – and I mimic their accent to the great enjoyment of myself. I am my own biggest fan at the moment. They give up, seeing as I might be insane; I’m encouraging them to make camp and sleep under the bridge, and laugh like a maniac.
There’s a heavy mist enveloping everything, and our sounds are muffled as we’re making our way home. It’s a short walk, and soon we’re all drinking Resorb in the kitchen.
And there it ends. The evening that was supposed to have seen me in bed before ten, had me running about like a nappy mythomaniac. I don’t know if this happened exactly because I was tired and certain that I wouldn’t go out, or if I’d just temporarly gone around the bend, but it was a learning experience.
Should you like to fill in the gaps there’s always the comments section.
The doctor in charge, who is now on trial, reportedly lured teenagers with unwanted pregnancies by offering to help with abortion. They would be locked up there until they gave birth, whereupon they would be forced to give up their babies for a token fee of around 20,000 naira (170 dollars, 135 euros).
→ Babies for sale in Nigeria [via Warren Ellis]
As the hornet enters the nest, a large mob of about five hundred honey bees surrounds it, completely covering it and preventing it from moving, and begin quickly vibrating their flight muscles. This has the effect of raising the temperature of the honey bee mass to 47 °C. The honey bees can just about tolerate this temperature, but the hornet cannot survive more than 46 °C, so it dies. Often several bees perish along with the intruder, but the death of the hornet scout prevents it from summoning reinforcements which would wipe out the colony.
→ Wikipedia on the giant Asian hornet
[audio:The_Cave_Part_3.mp3]
Rose-Marie Gascoigne of New Orleans was the first to answer. She had sat with her lightboard for hours each evening, accompanied by two disinterested tabbies. She said later that her heart had “just plain stopped” when the lights began to flicker on and off. “The whole world just held its breath. I could hear the blood rushing in my head. I knew what to do–what the hell else was that damn button for? It just took me a couple of days to work myself up to it. It was like sending a message to God.”
→ The loneliness engine [Via MetaFilter]
An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal. While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have the “hipster” – a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society.
→ Hipster: The dead end of western civilization
And worst of all. Dumbest, deafest, shittest of all, you have removed the unstressed ‘a’ so that the stress that should have fallen on “nosh” is lost, and my piece ends on an unstressed syllable. When you’re winding up a piece of prose, metre is crucial. Can’t you hear? Can’t you hear that it is wrong? It’s not fucking rocket science. It’s fucking pre-GCSE scansion. I have written 350 restaurant reviews for The Times and i have never ended on an unstressed syllable. Fuck. fuck, fuck, fuck.
→ Giles Coren: Indefinite article, definitive anger
John Schula, 30, a Latino male from Montebello, and a 17-year-old boy were fatally wounded in what sheriff’s deputies described as a gang-related shooting in the 3900 block of Aleman Avenue at 10:45 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 18. The double homicide ended a year of relative calm in Pico Rivera. It took place near where 57-year-old grandmother Maria Hicks was gunned down in August 2007 after trying to intervene when taggers were spray-painting graffiti on a wall in her neighborhood.
→ Los Angeles Times: The homicide report
We’re back from the trip and Wednesday passes in the sign of leisure. Me and Anna walk around the beach and try to find the “real” Sousse. There has to be something that isn’t geared towards tourists, something that keeps the local people sane if for no other reason than because it’s cheaper.
At a beach café we drink coffee, and even Anna puts sugar in it now because there’s a salty quality to the water – maybe they’re desalinating sea water, or the ground water is so full of it. It reminds me of how Iceland all smells like fart because of the sulphur that permeates everything.
A few tourists, seniors mostly, lay like beached whales on the scattered sun-deck chairs. Walking in sand takes time, and a few hours pass before we choose to take the inland way back. Along unfinished skeletons of hotels, and fancy resorts with tennis courts, we’re looking for food. Anna scores the only interesting foodstuff on the whole trip, a deep fried bread filled with egg and tuna, and is munching while we make our way downtown.
One of my few and (in my opinion) humble goals of the trip was to eat a lot of nuts. We passed a few stores that carried olives, beans and nuts, but to my dismay they proved to be as expensive as in Sweden. Considering that the average salary in Tunisia is one sixth of what it is in Sweden, we couldn’t see how people made by. Either Sousse is an expensive city and the salaries are adjusted accordingly because of the tourist trade, or there must be a big enough upper middle class that skews available consumer goods.
The train station is just next to our hotel, and we check the time tables for Tunis. Anna is by now fluent in French thanks to sheer willpower and mutilated Spanish, and once back with our friends we decide to take the train early next morning and be back the same day.
Thursday morning finds us hastily drinking coffee by the train before the station manager ushers us into the carriage. Afterwards, we’re not certain why he was in such a hurry – the train doesn’t leave until fifteen minutes later, and we’re longingly looking at the people who are standing outside, smoking. We needn’t have worried about this though, because smoking on the train in Tunisia is not a problem at all.
The vegetation outside our train is much greener, and there’s something reassuring about trees that don’t seem planted. With the ocean far away, smaller mountains to one side, the landscape is far more pleasant than in the southern parts of the country.
We’re going to Tunis and then onwards to Carthage. We’re unsure how to get to the ancient city, but that matter is sorted for us by a taxi-driver just outside of the station. Anna is certain that we’re being taken advantage of, but the price is low enough that no-one else minds. Carthage is a twenty minute drive away, and having probed us enough to realise we don’t know much about the city, most of the trip consists of our drivers incessant attempts at offering himself as our driver for a day. We’ll get to see all of Carthage and the blue city as well, all for the very reasonable price of 15 dinars per person. Too high price? Twelve dinars?
Having spend two days on a tour bus we’re not very keen on being herded from one Kodak moment to the other, and decline in different ways until we give up on it and Christoffer, who is riding shotgun and acts as spokesperson, is repeating “thank you for your offer, but we’d rather walk” over and over again. Once we get out of the taxi Sine gets the drivers business-card (on it, a picture of a Porsche) and he walks over to the other drivers, maybe hoping to snag us on our way out of the museum.
I eat crisps, the others eat sandwiches, and we’re all shivering with cold. The museum proves to be little better, and with our arms wrapped around ourselves we’re looking at relics 2500 years old – shards of pottery, glass works, someones skeleton.
Some people can be swept away by the tides of history when they’re among old ruins, but that isn’t something that I’m good at. I can most often immerse myself in a photo or a description as much as the site itself, and looking down from the former fort atop Carthage makes my mind drift to more practical matters – i.e. where can I buy coffee – rather than back in time to when proud men would carve dentures out of bone at the age of 30.
In the store on our way out we meet three bored girls that are a wonderfully friendly bunch. One of them tries to pick up Christoffer, unbeknownst to him, and we’re all given fragrant ointments rubbed on our hands – the one on my right hand is “Tunisian Viagra”. Viagra here smells of peach and flowers.
Sine has had cramps the past hour or so, and she’s drinking Coke and then mint tea that the girls make. The one who tried to charm Christoffer now joins us in a light mocking of Sine, and suggests that we either lead her as a camel, or carry her as luggage. Ah, the good-spirited art of kicking those who are already down!
We’re walking down the hill, look at some water and the presidential palace (no pictures, please), and decide to take the commuter train to the blue city – Sidi bou Said – because apparently it’s pretty and some famous people decided to take consecutive shits there. The older man selling tickets for a pittance tries to scam Sine out of 20 dinars, and it takes a bit of standing around and staring angrily before he returns it.
It’s not the stealing per se that is annoying, it’s the nonchalant routine of it all: He couldn’t brake the twenty that Sine wanted to pay with, and asked her for smaller bills without returning the twenty – all the time acting as slow and ignorant as he could in the hope that we’d leave. It’s disheartening how common this behaviour is wherever tourists are involved; just be an asshole and whowever you’re scamming will get mad and leave, with little hope of reprimand.
Sidi bou Said is pretty enough, but how much sight-seeing can one take? Yes it has pretty blue decorations, yes I imagine that it must have been inspiring at one point, and no I don’t want to buy your chess-set nor water-pipe nor a henna tattoo. Somewhere along the way we have become so hungry as to be grumpy, and we’re walking to and fro before finding a café with a beautiful view and the most hideously crappy and clinically retarded staff ever. (Except the guy who made the expensive omelettes whom Sine liked.) The mood becomes rather grim in a general “fuck you I shouldn’t have gone on this trip you fucktart” way. Soon enough we’re smoking water pipe somewhere else, and start back to Tunis so as not to miss our train back to Sousse.
The commuter train takes longer than we expect, and we’re worried that we’ll miss our last ride. Once in Tunis it takes the help of a very well dressed man to show us the subway, and we’re soon in front of the train station with fifteen minutes to spare before departure. The bureaucracy of any given country is always interesting, and we encountered one at the train station. We had open return tickets, but before we were allowed on the train we had to validate extra return tickets and gotten them rubber stamped before showing them to three station hosts to get on the platform. It reminded me of all the meaningless jobs that people were made to have in communist Poland; you dig a hole, someone else will be along to fill it.
Once the train is rolling, a few young guys start banging out a rhythm on the walls and windows and singing loudly – we’re guessing it’s local talent warming up for a raucous night, and as charming as it might seem we’re glad when they get the hell off our cart and disappear into the night. The rest of the trip is spend sitting on the floor in between carts, smoking a lot and watching the wagon become more and more empty the closer to Sousse we get.
The bar on the corner is happy to serve us boukha and gin and beer and popcorn on small plates, and with one eye on the tv screens showing scantily clad women advertising phone-in sex-lines, we are summing up the past week. Sahara is an overwhelming place, tourism is rotting the country, and let’s buy a lot of olive oil to back home.
Back from Tunisia. I’ll get a video up tomorrow. Now I sleep.
