The Flossy Flossy
Keeping it “on the real” the best I can.Archive for May, 2009
Small Details and Big Picture
Glurgh, I am so sick of it! How come the guys I like never like me back? Am I just that unlucky in finding love? I feel like I’m gonna die an old lonely spinster.
I think I’ve seen more sun these past two days than I have in all the other 300+ days that I’ve been here in Norway. Chilled with Tilly at the beach yesterday. Transportation problems; walked back to Asker station. Honestly, I think sometimes we’ve become more Norwegian than some Norwegian kids here. I mean, I’m taking hikes and sykkelturer for leisure now.
“Hei, åsen går det? Har du lyst til en tur?”
At night the family minus Marie plus Joakim’s girlfriend, Rebekka, took to Borre Golfbane to hear nightingales and sip cocoa. (Haha, see what I mean? Midnight Songbird Badge: Check!)
Today, we were at a huge family gathering near Holmestrand: lots of tremeninger that I haven’t met before, grilling, and oddball but fun games. They also had a helicopter fly in dropping candy over us, which was pretty darn cool.
As of tomorrow, I will have been in Norway for exactly 10 months, although nowadays, all of us are counting how many days we have left (a month and four days). I don’t think the anxiety of leaving has really hit me yet. I know it’s coming, and I’m expecting it to bother me, but it doesn’t. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to leave at all; despite school more or less sucking ass, I still love many things about Norway. But I can honestly say that after having lived here for almost a year; I find myself…disillusioned. I remember an email from a boy was in Sweden for his exchange year, and he said he had a love/hate relation with his host country. I can definitely understand that mindset now. In a sense, it’s quite painful because I can’t openly declare that I love this country without feeling a bit antipodal. But I suppose that’s how you also know that you’ve truly lived in another country: when that coat of sugar dissolves.
Just something to gnaw on for your brain…
Se Non Ami
So after falling into a hellhole today, I am finally feeling a bit better. I’ve got Zaiko kosing himself on my lap; I think I’ll miss him more than leverpostei. Which makes me wonder if the damn thing will even remember me after I leave, never mind miss me. That’s the only thing dogs have over cats, you know; their blatant loyalty. You can never tell what a cat is thinking ‘cause it acts so damn nonchalant all the time.
Har akkurat kommet hjem fra Engler og Demoner med Anniken. Hun kom hos meg, vi spiste litt Grandis, og så dro vi til kinoen. Jeg må si at jeg føler så mye bedre etter å ha vært ute med henne. Det var en pust av frisk luft å kunne endelig få snakke med noen om disse følelsene jeg har fått i det siste, og det føles like bra å få høre hva som skjer i hennes liv. Vi snakka om masse, både seriøse og dumme greier; det var i allefall en skikkelig bra fredag kveld.
Filmen, forresten, var innmari bra. Selv om jeg har lest boka allerede var det likevel spennende. Og den skuespiller’n, Ewan McGregor, fyttikatta han er kjekk ass! (Selvfølgelig spilte han rollen sin veldig bra også, men det hjelper jo at han var deilig å se på òg, haha.)
今天晚上带给我了心的希望. 我会继续努力的. 虽然我跟学校一大部分的人不会有设么结果, 我还有时间和机会去交一两个好的挪威朋友. 嗯!
I’m going to leave you with a song that I’m beginning to like very much. (It’s by Nek, no surprise there; I am so taken by him.) Its lyrics, though simple, are poignant, a hopeful yet cautious reminder of l’importanza di amare.
Puoi creare un grande impero intorno a te
Costruire grattacieli per contare un pò di più
Puoi comprare tutto quello che vuoi tu
Ma se non ami, se non ami
Non hai un vero motivo per vivere
Se non ami, non ti ami
Non ci sei
[You can build a great empire around you
Construct skyscrapers in order to matter a little bit more
You can buy all the things that you want
But if you don’t love, if you don’t love
You don’t have a true reason for living
If you don’t love, you don’t love yourself
You don’t exist]
Solitudine
The new question these days is, “When are you leaving? Are you looking forward to leaving?” I’m always at a loss for words when people ask me that. Am I looking forward to leaving? Yes, I’m looking forward for school to end; I’m looking forward to not having to sit alone in a classroom at lunchtime twiddling with my iPod. I so look forward to having a long, intimate chat with someone I care about and someone who reciprocates my feelings. I’m looking forward to feeling welcomed again. So yes, I am looking forward to getting out of Horten.
But how I am here, I can’t really lie to myself. I’ve roundabouted. I had high hopes in coming here, to make great friends with the Norwegians, to establish myself and immerse myself in their world. I wanted to fit in. But now I realize that the life I had created for myself here is not different than the one I wanted to flee from last year, give or take a few extraneous factors. I try not to have the same expectations for Switzerland; I can’t be quite sure that I won’t.
And perhaps this is it. Perhaps I’m not so much disappointed with this experience as I am with the realization that no matter what city, country, continent I find myself on, I can’t escape the loneliness of my own existence. I guess that’s the most upsetting thing.
I said I could never understand those people who want to live in the same city they grew up in; I think I do now. It’s a blissful life that I can never lead, because the only time I feel truly at ease is when I’m moving.
An Ounce of Cure
I was reading a piece by Alice Munro for my Internasjonal Engelsk class when I came upon this passage. God, she puts it more eloquently than I ever could. That night was the beginning of months of real, if more or less self-inflicted, misery for me. Why is it a temptation to refer to this sort of thing lightly, with irony, with amazement even, at finding oneself involved with such preposterous motions in the past? That is what we are apt to do, speaking of love; with adolescent love, of course, it’s practically obligatory; you would think we sat around, dull afternoons, amusing ourselves with these tidbit recollections of pain. But it really doesn’t make me feel very gay — worse still, it doesn’t really surprise me — to remember all the stupid, sad, half-ashamed things I did, that people in love always do. I hung around the places where he might be seen, and then pretended not to see him; I made absurdly roundabout approaches, in conversation, to the bitter pleasure of casually mentioning his name. I daydreamed endlessly; in fact if you want to put it mathematically, I spent perhaps ten times as many hours thinking about Martin Collingwood — yes, pining and weeping for him — as I ever spent with him; the idea of him dominated my mind relentlessly and, after a while, against my will. For if at first I had dramatized my feelings, the time came when I would have been glad to escape them; my well-worn daydreams had become depressing and not even temporarily consoling…. It’s fiction, but it has all been lived before. There should be a club for people like us. Or a Facebook group.
Tilfeldige Greier
In other news, I had the strangest dream today. Normally they’re not worth mentioning but this one was at a whole new level of wack. I took a nap after school and my iPod was on shuffle, and apparently I had set it to lock in the middle of a Koreanclass101.com podcast. I seem to recall the dream itself pretty sexual, 德这儿朝那儿的–but all of a sudden I was stringing beans with Mom and Grandpa, with–get this–my left foot in a shoe filled with porridge. And you know those moments where you’re barely conscious enough to register your surroundings? Well, I was barely conscious enough to register the voice of the lesson host through my earphones, which I mistook for my grandpa (coincidentally, it was a lesson on Sino-Korean numbers and months, so everything was vaguely familiar). I think I spent about five minutes in that state: lying there, confused as hell, trying to shake the non-existent porridge off my feet, listening to “Grandpa” listing off the months in Korean. Anyway, that was a little public preview of the things which go on in my head.
Moving on: I just booked my flight back from Newark to San Francisco. My itinerary is as follows: Oslo to Copenhagen to Newark to Philadelphia to San Francisco. It’s insane! And you know what? I think I had my first little panic attack about leaving today: an image of being bored on a Saturday afternoon in Fremont again–truly frightening.
안녕!
