Snusmumriken

Jag har en vän som vet att han har hittat hem
Fast han aldrig sett sig om
Jag har en till och hon kan aldrig sitta still
Hon har alltid nåt på gång

Ibland så vill jag följa med
Ibland så står jag helst bredvid
Ibland så vet jag inte vad jag vill
Eller vad jag vill se

Men jag avundas er för ni ser nåt som jag inte ser
Ibland så känns det som ni lever så mycket mer

Mimikry

During most of my still relatively short life, I’ve been continuously looking for someting else. Something that wasn’t what I was currently doing. No matter what I’ve been doing, or where my life has been going, I’ve been longing to be somewhere else, doing other things. For most of my childhood, I always had some sort of an escape plan.

I guess it made me behave a bit strangely. When I was eleven for instance, I always carried fishing gear, and although a fishing line, a sharp knife and a ball of string hardly makes it possible to survive, it reminded me that I always had the possibility of leaving. I used to borrow “how to survive in the wilderness” and “which plants out there are edible” - books from the local library, so that i would be able to survive in the wilderness, and I wrote lists discussing whether I thought the shore or the woods would be the ideal place to settle.

But someting has happened during the last half year.

I realised during my exams this december, that my thoughts weren’t wandering like they did some years ago. Earlier years, I have always been browsing for other subjects of study during my exams. This year I didn’t, because I know I have ended up just where I want to be. Earlier, I’ve been looking for study abroad programs, or plane tickets for a country far away. This year I didn’t.

It feels weird to be at peace like this. To know that my field of study is what I want to keep on doing, and that my hobbies are best suited to keep on being hobbies. To know that some people are restless and lonely, even when everyting is the way it should.

It feels good to relax, but it also feels a bit strange. I wonder if I’ll get used to it.

It’s the summer of 1996. I’m listening to toni braxton, the beatles, blur and santana. I’m eleven, and a few months later, I would go and see the backstreet boys playing in oslo. It’s the year where I really start trying to figure out why I don’t fit in at school. The year I start wearing copious amounts of makeup. It’s when I start obsessively washing my hair, start dieting and stare into the mirror for hours at the time. As if that ever helped anyone.

I’m eleven, and because it’s in the middle of the holidays, the hard things in life are far away. I like music, reading and words that are long and difficult. I hate to write with pens that aren’t green, but have experienced that green inked pens never last.

This is the day I decided to become a comic-maker, and although i never became one, I can still remember it in vivid detail. It’s july, and it’s so hot that the air is shivering over the warm asphalt. I’m wearing shorts made from old jeans, and probably my favourite green tee-shirt, which by the way is identical to the one my second cousin has. I’m sitting on the stairs in front of the house with a horrible sketchbook made from the kind of recycled paper which mechanical pencils cuts straight through, a cup of tea and a Beetle Bailey magazine. I’m drawing miss Buxley over and over and over again. My green pen is digging into the cheap paper.

.

I know that the comic-strips that features miss Buxley are considered sexist. Most of them are also sexual. I didn’t see this when I was little, and the strips with miss buxley in them were what made me keep on reading Beetle Bailey for years on end. Not because they were sexist, but in a world where the literary characters were all smart and popular; a world of Nancy Drew; a world where the indie comics i read today, packed with the lives of alienated kids who read too much didn’t exist; - miss Buxley was the only character I knew of who was pretty, sexy, popular and still remarkably stupid. For a girl like me, who wasn’t doing too well in the social aspects of life, it felt wonderful. For me, miss Buxley doing something stupid and brainless became a symbol of how the popular kids in my class probably weren’t too smart either, in spite of their looks and their popularity.

But today I found the comic manuscripts from that summer day. I read it, and was embarrassed. The two miss Buxley’esqe characters, Zonia and Zubretta are as stupid as I remember them, but what I didn’t see then, is how quickly the theme of the comic changed from “let’s laugh at these popular, pretty girls cause they’re obviously stupid and shallow” to a sore description of all the things I longed for myself. Having loads of friends. Being wanted in a sexual way that I, being a child hadn’t yet articulated. Being wanted in spite of all ones flaws.

When reading through these little snippets of dialogue, it becomes clear that when making this comic, I was trying to convince myself of how the popular kids in my class really were shallow and stupid. I almost find it embarassing how easy it is to see the real message behind it all:

The one that goes: “Oh god. I want to be just like them.”

“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.