Snusmumriken

Uncle Ben’s has just come up with a brilliant idea. They have made “tasty rice that’s easy to make”. Amazing, you just boil the rice for a few minutes. Then you take the rice, which is in a specially designed perforated plastic bag, out of the water and let it rest for some seconds. Impressively easy. Nothing like the old fashioned way, where you put rice and water in a kettle and boiled it for a few minutes.

One of these little satchets equals a bit less rice than you’d want to eat. Thus a family of two kids and two parents would need six satchets for an average dinner. This means six little plastic bags for every meal. It makes me wonder if Uncle Bens have been taking part in a “who can fool people into creating more garbage”-competition.

Some numbers
An average norwegian in south-east norway produces 414 kilos of garbage every year. That's 40% more than an average person did in 1995. This means that we throw away about 1.25 kilos of garbage every day. SSB

We've established that “environment is in again” and that “we’re in the middle of a new environmental wave”. After all it’s is the mantra on the news these days, and it’s repeated until we believe it. Then you’d think that one would want to turn the trend? You’d think that producing less garbage would be part of this “new green wave? But au contraire, my friend.

If people really are unable to boil rice. I’d rather use the extra expenses on giving them a free recipe book.

For the first time in my life, I have a hotel room of my own. It feels a bit weird to have my own bed, my own towels and my own shower like this. The general rule is that whenever I’ve lived at a hotel, it has been with my mother, but now I’m on my own. It feels weird, but then again, it feels rather nice too. What’s stranger is to live at a hotel in Fredrikstad. I’ve been living here most of my life, but with the exception of a scout trip, I've never paid to stay anywhere in this town. But it’s nice. Of course it’s nice.

I’m at a magazine editing and publishing seminar, and although most of the people here are editors, most of the lectures are relevant for a little committee member like myself. The lectures are nice. The room is all mine. The food is really good. The lunch must be one of the best lunches I've ever eaten. As a bonus, the people are nice and I’m enjoying myself alot.

What’s even better is that I’ve got a camera again. This means that a lot of my coming posts will contain photos. It feels good. I’ve also bought a computer, but it’s still a week away from being delivered. I love having new gadgets, but what I like more, is to have things that actually work. My new camera works like a charm, and I really hope my new computer will too.

Photo nr one is called: “is my mind dirty, or do these mussels look obscene to you?”

“I like propaganda,” said my little brother one day, quite a few years ago. He had been downloading old propaganda films and posters from the internet. As he just a few weeks before had proclaimed that he thought we should make false statistics and more censorship on the telly, I got a bit worried.

Fortunately, the wish for false statistics turned out to be one of his finer traits. He had observed how the girls in his class used statistic average weight as a reason for why they wanted to diet, and along with the extreme makeover programs that had entered tv that year, they had started to talk almost obsessively about how they wanted to change their appearance. Of course he wanted to forbid the extreme makeover programs, when they resulted in fourteen year old girls who yearned for liposuction and wanted to “give their breasts a little lift”. And, as he said, - “I think it does them more damage to go funny in the head because they think they are fat and abnormal, than to be a little thicker than what’s average, or even what’s healthy.”

But back to the propaganda he’d been downloading. He said he liked the buzz that it gave him, and of course I instinctively replied that “sometimes it’s a bad buzz”, cause good propaganda can help to create goodwill for bad causes. Then he god me hooked. He showed me American “pay taxes”-propaganda from the second world war, and yes. It gave me the urge to pay taxes, and it gave me the urge to defeat nazi germany. Of course it also made me wonder why we don’t make our own tax-paying posters, to make people understand why a severely progressive taxation is good for society. Of course, the Nazi propaganda has pretty much the same effect on me, after all: who doesn’t want a society that stands together to protect what’s good, a society with happy families and healthy children? My mind has horrible connotations related to nazi germany, but in a way, it’s the fact that films and posters gives me this positive buzz, that fascinates me. That it manages to make me want to be a part, that it gives me a feeling that I should contribute, even to causes which I don’t agree with. That’s really impressive craftsmanship.

Break virgin lands!
It’s rather fascinating that the breaking of the virgin lands above, which gives me such a lovely buzz in my tummy, is related to the ecological disaster of the Aral sea that shrunk to nothingness because the rivers leading into it was used for irrigation. There was a Russian slogan that went along the lines of “The aral sea must die like a soldier fighting for our new motherland”. Sounds beautyful, doesn’t it? Even though it’s pretty horrible in real life.

There is an amazing blog that posts old Soviet propaganda posters, and gives you the historical background information to understand them, and a little daily Russian history tidbit to match. Incredibly fun reading. I recommend: this one about railroads, this one, this one and this one about physical health and this one about agriculture. Another fun thing is how you could just replace the red cross on this one with a swastica, and it would have been perfect for hte nazi market, although she should replace those russian blushing cheeks with a healthy german tan.

Final credit: I found the posterblog through Ida, which is what started the whole propagandistic flashback process.

So last sunday I went to the birthday of a friend of mine, as I mentioned last week. And as it was a dinner party and I didn’t know anyone, I ended up talking to the people who were sitting around me, and I ended up spending most of the evening talking to this one guy, who I thought was really nice. And I found myself thinking that it would be nice to see him again.

And earlier today, I heard someone calling my name in a “wow, nice to meet you way”, and I suddenly got weird and nervous, and I ended up just exchanging a few sentences about having listened to his band and stuff, really awkwardly. I can be female wold champion of awkwardness. And went to eat dinner, quite hasty as if I just wanted to be somewhere else. Fuck, how being nervous and shy sucks.

Stupid stupid stupid.

The larp Kristianiabohemen took place this weekend, and it was good. No, - more than good. It was really really nice.

Everyone played historical characters. Some which we know alot about, and some which we don’t know much about at all. I played one of the less known ones: Lily Brun, a bourgeoise girl that Hans Jæger had been trying to liberate from the “chains of the bourgeoisie”. That way I could do pretty much whatever I wanted with the part, which was nice. What was mildly challenging for me, though, was to decide, as I went along, how much the character knew about the other people. After all, I know alot about several of them, but how much would a normal 21 year old girl know? While I have a book with all of Christian Krogh’s paintings, it’s hard to know how many of them miss Lilly Brun had actually seen. And while I myself know alot about Jæger’s personal life, chances are that the character didn’t know much about it at all. Have I read the books which everyone are talking about? The books in question were actually confiscated and not in public sale. Chances are that miss Brun hadn’t read any of them. I ended up winging it most of the time, somtimes knowing a bit more than I guess I should, as it made social interaction easier. It went quite well. It was a really fun setting to play timid and bougeoise.

To discuss marriage with Jæger was also really interesting, and he did a very good job trying to convince me that free love was the only solution, without ever mentioning anything straight forward, but talking about “urges that every man and woman experiences, even before the age of marriage.” He was amazingly subtle, and still I blushed.

I love when the border between myself and the part starts to blur, especially when the part is as different from myself as this one was. That happened this time. I actually blushed furiously when someone were mentioning masturbation.

At The first day of the larp several of the characters came from the theatre where they had seen Ibsen’s a doll’s house. Discussing that as if it was the first time I’d seen it felt weird. But to imagine that i had seen it as a young woman who most probably would be married within a year or so, without much formal education and still living in the house of my father, gave it all a new dimension. That detail gave me alot, as I knew the character would see Nora as the person she herself was likely to become.

I took today off until noon in order ot do all the things i haven’t had the time to do lately. I did my laundry and went to the post office. I should have gone to the library too, but I forgot. Instead I took a walk in the neighbourhood, and it was sunny and nice. On my way home, I bought a chilli plant, and it’s really pretty and colourful and full of tiny red chillies that I can use when cooking. I don’t know how to care for a chilli plant, but I guess
I’m bound to find out.

I took some stem cuttings from my stevia plant, and added soil and did nice things to my other plants. The day I was dumped, well aware of the symbology, I took cuttings of my lovely stevia. I planted one in a bowl Aksel had given me for christmas, and one in an old pewter can that had once contained olive oil. The symbology of it all can’t have slipped past the plants either, cause the cutting in the bowl died after only three days, while the other one still lives. It hasn’t started to grow yet, but it lives. Still, holding on to the symbology I wish it would start growing soon. Grow plant, grow!

Tomorrow there’s another concert with the lovely maud. I’m really looking forward to that.