Snusmumriken

Since my last post, i’ve been to finland, and to england, and i’ve ben high and low doing loads of stuff that I’ve been either planning to write about later, or just pushing to the back of my head. I just came home from Solmukohta and Finland where i and Martine made a larp, and where I got all kinds of inspiration for stuff i don’t really have the time to do, but sorely want to. I might write better about it later on. The real reason why i’m updating, is to tell everyone that I can’t find my phone. It’s probably somewhere in the luggage, seeing as i had it on the plane, but if anyone needs to get hold of me, it’s probably easier if you contact me here, on facebook, on mail or skype or even call my neighbour, Mikael. I’ll get back in touch as soon as i manage to.

Today is buy nothing day, and for some reason, the mere existence of this day bugs me more every year. I know that it’s there to get some focus on the over consumption problem, and focusing on that is a good thing. But to me, it’s a bit like saying “i’m fat because I eat too much on christmas eve” thus ignoring the rest of the year.

I was pondering a bit about that a couple of days ago, but ended up eating my words when I opened the paper and read this article by Marta Breen. It was about Judith Levine, the autor of the book and social experiment “not buying it”. She also mentions Ann Christin Gramming, a swedish Librarian who did a follow up, shopping free year.

Inspiration or discouragement?
I guess these people try to set a good example, and I guess all the articles and interviews are there to inspire us mortal people. For me it works in the opposite direction. It makes my everyday efforts seem so small in comparison to theirs. And they are, although I too do try: I choose norwegian made food and products to minimise environment costs; I’m darning my socks and patcing my clothes; I carry a coffee cup because several of the university cafees only have paper cups; and of course I only buy new gadgets and clothes when the old ones stop working. But compared to the “I won’t buy anything for a year” people it’s nothing. But then I started thinking. I weighed the argument back and forth. And then I realised that it’s the same argument as someone aguing: “You say you’re dieting? No you’re not. You’re still eating!”.

Making it simple and manageable
For me, knowing that I should buy norwegian vegetables is a thought I can understand. I get that I must buy safari cookies rather than Maryland because the latter are foreign owned and have twice as much wrapping. I don’t drink bottled water. I can carry a backpack when I don’t need more shopping bags, and I can put the paper waste in a separate wastebin. I manage to do all those singular things most of the time. But when it turns into a complete ideology and a yearlong consumer fast, it’s too much to cope with.  I can’t do that. And judging on what I remember from discussions on the topic, this goes for other people as well. When you try to convince people that they can consume less, you try to make it sound simple. You explain all the little things that make big differences. Not these people. They are explaining the gigantuous effort you can make. And of course they are simultaneously making it alot more difficult for people to cope with.

But it’s buy nothing day. I’m heading down to town to try and buy some new trousers. I bought myself a new pair in july, which is far less than a year ago. And do you know what? I don’t think it makes me an awful consumer junkie.

I spend about three textmarkers a month. One yellow, one orange and one pink one. If I add and divide a bit, that amounts to 36 markers a year. And I throw them all away in the end.

Because I felt a bit bad about that, I headed down to the bookstore to buy one of the nifty marker refillers. I used to have one of those some years ago. You just dip your pen into the box, and after a few seconds it’s full of pink highlighter-goodness.

When I came to the bookstore, the shopkeeper looked at me as if was rather strange. Perhaps it was because I was standing next to a tray of highlighters that cost less than a dollar a piece, or perhaps because she hadn’t seen a nifty refiller before. They didn’t have neither a refiller, or an actual refill that you could insert into the old marker.

I’m disappointed. All my good promises are ruined like that.

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.

“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.

There’s a new channel on Norwegian Tv. It’s “The woman’s channel, fem”. Their slogan is that it’s “made for women, with access for men”, and the posters are filled with pink shoes. Pink shoes? Pink shoes. Ten years ago, just talking about Girl’s and boy’s colours were a taboo, and now luring women with photos of pink shoes is considered good coutume.

Seriously, tv channel makers. What are you thinking?

It’s not the pink shoes that upsets me, and it’s not the existence of a channel with dating programs and yaddayadda that upsets me. I can just chose to not watch it, right? Like I do with almost every other tv-channel out there? And perhaps the generalisation that women and men like different tv-programs wouldn’t upset me so much if it didn’t try to place me in a category where I’d feel completely alienated. Cause it’s true that there’s loads of stereotypical male films that I can’t even find vaguely amusing. I don’t like watching people killing each other, and I don’t care to watch people hitting each other in the face. Long fight scenes are boring. Perhaps a tv channel that is like P2 (norwegian radio channel), but televised wouldn’t be so bad? I skimmed the program list, it makes me feel that the world in general has expectations on how I should be, think and behave as a woman. Expectations that I can’t fulfill. I end up thinking that I, because of those silly double X chromosomes really should be interested in paranormal phenomenons and “big love”. It’s like there’s an agenda where the ultimate goal is to reshape those decaying gender stereotypes and create some new ones, nice stereotypes where women, no matter how smart and independent they seem, really are little girls who just want to sit down in the sofa, eat ice cream and watch a good dating program.

I guess it’s a comfort that noone seems to be watching it, and that according to the previously mentioned article: “The tv3 airing of the Champion’s League-match Porto-Liverpool actually had more female viewers than FEM’s most viewed program so far.”

But then there’s the general tendency that the tv-channel is following. Where you can’t find raingear for a five year old girl in any other colour than pink. Where the separation of the way the kindergarden children play is much more severe than when I was little, because the girls are wearing skirts that are a bit too long, and a bit too likely to fall off, and that are pretty, and that shouldn’t get dirty. Last year, I had a kindergarden outside my window, and for fun, I counted the children and made a little statistic in my head. 26 children. 14 boys/12 girls. Only one of the girls were wearing trousers. Girls play quietly and cleanly. It makes me wonder what went wrong.

I have this little book at home, called something like “how we create the women”. It’s nice and brown and from the 70’s. A bit outdated, and sometimes when reading it, i’m giggling. I know that social constructivism isn’t too trendy these days. I know that there is research these days, showing us that the male and the female brain works differently, and I know that perhaps as a result of all that brain research the current norm is more essensialistic, - that one should accept that girls are born with a set of girly characteristics. I know that “we shouldn’t try and make the girls into boys. We should let them be girls, like they really are”. In a way it sounds reasonable, but when i turn it upside down it feels like it’s not me who’s the social construct, but them. That they are creating a generation of little princesses, just to protest against the jeans and corduroys we grew up with ourself.

It might be. But I really don’t like it.

This is tough. Progress party, almost as big as the labour party? And “the retirement party” is bigger than Rødt? How can it be. I can’t deal with this. I’m going to bed.

Congratulations on your first mayor, Rødt! (communist party)

I’ve been trying to convince myself that i’m an avid newspaper reader for years. Updated people read at least two news papers every day, but I don’t. As a matter of fact i’m more likely to read one paper a week. At a maximum. It’s been two weeks since i moved to oslo, since i left my office job where I was listening to the radio all the time. And I already feel really out of touch with the world. I need to go and buy myself a functioning dab radio really soon. Does anyone have any good ideas? Anyone know one that isn't shit expensive? I need one, and I need one now. Making dinner-time is a good time for being updated on hte news. When sitting down, or at the bus I much prefere novels.

I also need a new computer. First it gnawed it’s way though a plastic bag and fell to the ground. It survived that. Nothing bad came out of it. But my luck was about to turn, and while it was standing peacefully on the table, the hinges of one of my wardrobe doors broke, and the door fell straight down on my coffee table and the computer fell down, got cosmetic damages and has turned into the slowest computer I’ve ever used. The guarantee doesn’t cover crap like this. I need a new computer. I need a healthy one.

I just did my civic duty and voted. Go me. It always makes me feel good. Perhaps I'd feel even better if I get to vote more often?