Kettles in my mind

After a long break I'm back to writing here again. Months in Chicago that have now come to an end, and then almost two months in Norway with work, travel, applying for jobs and hiking, and soon I'll be leaving again for a longer trip. It doesn't feel like time's run away from me, but rather that I've needed to get my school and its approach to art at a distance, and it really helped. I have a lot of ideas that I hope to realize in the coming years, and projects I'm about to initiate. 

And that's why I'm back to writing here! I need an outlet, I think, and a way to track what'll be happening in the next amount of time. Ups and downs and excitements and strategies. I need to learn a lot of stuff in a short amount of time, like how to make a budget (thought it's only embarrassing that I don't already know how to do this... or rather, my heart palpitations increase in frequency every time I even look at the excel-icon...), how to plan and successfully pull through an event, and apply for official artists funds in Norway. Because, oh yes oh yes, there IS money for art in Norway! At least a little.

This post, then, is mostly just to kickstart this off, force myself to write something (anything!) and be a bit open about what I'm doing. Though most days I cringe when people check in from their phones ("I don't want them to know where I am! I don't want THEM to!"). 

More to come!

Tattoos of colors

Written some weeks ago.

Last night I had a very vivid and colorful dream that I’ll now try to write about. I can’t remember what came first, but I’ll put down the part I’d like to draw;

I dreamt that I was at the graveyard I’m to work this summer. I’d never been there, and for some reason I was really, really late to my first day. I showed up around 11, and tried to find out what happened, if we were working and so on. It turned out that I’d come during the lunch break, so I sat down. I can’t remember if I ate anything, but the room was a typical Norwegian wooden room. Not very calming, brown and pine, like the room we had cake and sandwiches in when the gardener retired last summer. 

In either case, we were in this room, and I was really confused and kept wondering what was happening, and when were we working and was there coffee somewhere and shouldn’t I be clocking in? I can’t remember even working or going outside beyond this gravely path/spot where M and O were, two Swedes that I worked with last summer. A young girl was also there, and I thought I’d worked with her too, but she wasn’t nearly as annoying as she’d been in real life. Was it my sister? Was my father there? Certainly my boss was there, and he kept telling me things that I didn’t pick up on. It all seemed rational, but I just didn’t get it, and then it was noon, and then 1 pm, and I still hadn’t clocked in. 

So we were outside and it was sunny but too hot and clammy. I felt strange (feverish of sorts, or drunk, and dizzy. I was uncoordinated and couldn’t make up or down of anything). They had tattoos. I remember M (in real life) as having so many beautiful and interesting tattoos all over his body, even on his shins. They’re mostly black and white. O got his first proper tattoo last summer, and it was also beautiful, with a crow and a skull, I think. 

O had, in my dream, gotten many, many more tattoos that were really beautiful and full of color. I’d never seen anything like them. Oh, they were so wonderful, and they shone in the sunlight, and I was truly in awe.

The one I can remember most clearly was on his chest. It was a combination of areas of very strong color and text, like someone had painted on him. There were a series of shorter texts, like quotes or something, just sentences. Orange, pink, yellow, green? Yellow like the sun along with a much longer text that I had to get very close to read. I wondered what it’d be like when it got older, and if it wouldn’t bleed out. It was written in a regular typeface, not Helvetica or Times New Roman... Georgia? Trebuchet? 

Not quite, but something like that. And it was beautiful.

And actually, when I think about it, aren’t tattoos perfect? Because of skin. 

This is something I now need to think and write about.

(Which reminds me to reread Snakes and Earrings by Hitomi Kanehara.)

photos are from I do not remember where.

Quantified Self: thoughts

image from here.

I think about my parents. Every time we go for a hike in the mountains back home my dad has his GPS or phone—I can’t remember which—recording our trail, how many calories burnt, the speed at which we moved, and the length of our breaks. I always feel slightly annoyed with this habit, and I think my mother does too. The question in my head is this: why do you need to know? and, Can’t you simply enjoy it as is?

I’ve been wondering what this is, and whether it’s got to do with classical and romantic mindsets as outlined by Robert M. Pirsig in his Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The classical mind splits things up, quantifies them, study each grain of sand. On the contrary, you have the romantics, who love the Big Picture: why study each step you took when your breath is taken away at the top of the mountain? What’s the reason for counting calories when you can enjoy the dish itself?

I don’t necessarily agree with Pirsig anymore, although there was a long time when it dictated everything I did; the world’s changed too much, and I think scientists (particularly physicists) have been let off the hook. Discussing left- and right brain separations doesn’t seem to make much sense today, and integrated interdisciplinary learning is on the rise, thankfully. The question seems to be: how can we be happy and lead high-quality lives?

images from here.

 At a brunch last spring I ended up talking to a young woman about behavioral psychology. She worked in marketing, something I have a lot of prejudices about, but we ended up discussing ways to change people’s behavior for the better. She explained an app to me that allows friends to give each other to do-lists with items such as “Sleep at least 8 hours tonight” and “Remember to eat a fruit,” making a sort of check-system with someone you care about. 

Quantified Selfers, as outlined in this article, gather concrete, numerical data about their habits, diets, patterns of movement and even feelings. Looking back, they have knowledge about how for example hours of sleep affect their concentration and efficiency, or the way different medicines work. Naturally, there have always been people like this, but as it’s now become so much easier to track any kind of information about yourself the movement has become huge. 

 As I tipped into my twenties I noticed that I need extremely rigid schedules to function. Going to sleep after 9:30 PM makes me extremely anxious, and I still try to get up every day at 5:30. I meditate for 40 minutes and then exercise for 45 if I don’t have class in the morning. My breakfast is always the same with only minor variations in quantity. I bike to school at 7 AM and check my e-mails. After school I train aikido for 2-3 hours, go home and go to sleep. Naturally, I take breaks. There’s a social component where I’m forced to break this precious rhythm, and I always have to force myself to follow through with the commitments I make to people. I know it’s good for me, I know I won’t be particularly happy or healthy if I spend all of my time alone. 

But what about my feelings? And what about love and commitments? And what’s going to happen to my treasured schedule if I ever meet someone I want to live with? 

from here.

 Something I often wonder is whether this schedule is determined by things I read and learn are good for me, or if I naturally fall into it because I am a control-freak. Meditation increases the amount of gray matter in the brain. An active commute is healthier than a passive one. People who wake up early are generally healthier than people who sleep late into the day. These could all be variations of headlines on the New York Times health blog, and I know that they’re ways of manipulating data and statistics, but my firm belief in it is engrained. I don’t even make an effort anymore: my body won’t let me sleep much past 6 AM anyways even if I’ve been out late the night before. I’m just following my natural rhythm and the common sense of my body… or so I like to think.

This is why I find the Quantified Self-movement so fascinating. Rather than relying on headlines and fading trends you can fine tune your habits to optimize yourself. I am so attracted to this idea, but I also know that it isn’t good for me. Because the second thing I discovered when I turned twenty was that there’s an easy slip for me from rigidness to compulsion accompanied by large doses of guilt when I don’t accomplish what I’ve ambitiously set out for myself. 

picture (and recipe!) from here.

I'm now doing a project exploring my own food habits, because it’s one of the things I think about most, but like to think about least. When I was younger I was close to having an eating disorder, and I’m always afraid of going there again. I’m curious if it’ll help or only be harmful to record everything I eat for five days, and how I’ll feel when I translate that into body movements, with each limbs representing a type of food. If I realize I eat grains and carbs ALL the time, will I eat differently?

I want to be better, all the time. We all want to be. I just wonder when and if we let ourselves go.

The Art of Lonely Sloppiness

In about two weeks I’ll be left alone in the apartment I normally share with a close friend. The period of isolation will likely last for 16 days until I leave the United States to go home to Norway. I dread this event and its consequences for my psyche, health and social life. 

I worry that I won’t get up in the morning. I worry that I’ll stop cooking and resort to bread and peanut butter for all my meals. I worry that I’ll drink five cups of coffee a day and only read. 

But mainly I worry that the only reason I function regularly is because I have some external presence that can keep me in check. Don’t get me wrong, my roommate is not very intrusive at all, and we’re both extremely private people who need to be alone a lot. Yet somehow I function with her; I can feel like alone and focused although she’s sitting next to me. It took some time to get to this point, about all of last semester, during which I was conspicuously absent a lot of the time because I was still getting adjusted to sharing my space with someone.

Not that she’s my first roommate ever. I just find it so much easier to live with people I hardly know. We leave each other alone, and I can be as antisocial as I want. Now, I’m usually quite good at talking to people I both do and don’t know, and when I’m in a social setting I give it everything I have. Then, when I go home afterwards, I need to charge back up by reading, cooking, drinking coffee, staring into space. After the tumultuous unpredictability of interacting with other humans I can finally escape into the safe canyons of my mind—I don’t know the terrain, but it’s an exhilarating exploration that I love and only feel like I can do alone.

Until I got used to living with my roommate, that is. 

I sometimes secretly desire an hour or two alone in our apartment. I think it’s what I want, and I drink cups on cups on cups of coffee and work out in our living room with loud music (otherwise I’d be too embarassed) and bake bread. I enjoy myself! 

One, two hours go by, and I miss her. I want to tell her stuff. I want her to make me fried eggs with onion. I want to show her things I made. I want to sit quietly in the same room as her with headphones on. I know she’s there.

The premise of the project Dear-Data is beautiful to me: two women send each other postcards of their graphic visualizations of the personal datasets they’ve gathered throughout the weeks. They decide what they’ll collect—drinks in a week, compliments received and given, efficiency—and then they send each other a postcard with a graphic representation of this as well as a key with how to read it. It’s often beautiful, at times hard to read, and always surprising. 

That is why I’m afraid of my roommate leaving. No matter how happy I might be alone, this desire is always, always a deception for me. I begin missing her. I want to speak to my family. I text a friend and ask to see her. Do I want to think of myself as a loner? Do I tell myself I am? Or am I just a normal human being? Likely. 

Last week I wrote that I’m constantly surprised by people. One of the reasons I sometimes choose to isolate myself is because I know what people are going to do. They’ll burden me, demand things from me, confine me into a box and worst of all, try to do things for me or even spend time. It’s scary as shit, all of the time. Getting a text message is wonderful, but then I have to reply, and then all I want is to be left alone.

It’s weird how I make myself do a lot of things for another person who doesn’t even know that they’re my catalyst. I’d likely not do a lot of the things I do daily if it wasn’t for her. The thing is, I just want to be as good as I can. Not for her, not so she can see it and then care about me. But rather, because someone else will see me I am forced to have the self-respect to change out of my pajamas and sit up straight in my chair as I do my homework. Is it self-censoring? Is it Foucault again (four years of undergrad and I’m done with him, hopefully forever)? 

I like to think of myself as independent and relatively autonomous, but I’m not. Everything I am is made up of other people, and this isn’t a bad thing, but I’m realizing that this even applies on the tiniest level of when to set my alarm clock in the morning. 

Dear-Data goes beyond the Quantified Selfers in this way. They’re accountable to one another. I suspect that, when you know someone else will be reading it, you make it more understandable. 

Meanwhile, I’m constructing an intricate and completely packed schedule for the 16 days I’ll be spending alone where I see at least one other person every day. 

Recap of: so many things!

(Poem by Olav H. Hauge that is so beautiful you'll just have to learn Norwegian for it. Something something blood, basically.)

So I went back over a bunch of photos from around this time a year ago, and it feels incredibly weird. Not only to avoid falling into the two holes of either I was amazing and still am! and/or I'm such a jerk and haven't changed at all...

Which is always a challenge? A teacher I had last semester described it as the genius-jerk spectrum, where at any given point you're either at the I'm a genius! or I'm a jerk... side of things.

Anyways.

Things like this.

So weird! Like, my hair. Gosh. 

This is not about to be a post about how much I've changed (how little) or how fast time flies, and that is, in fact, all I know about what I'm currently writing: it will certainly not be this moral thing that I always end up clipping to my Evernote and then whine about or the Norwegian blogs about kids and families that I read lots of meaning into and then just... don't believe.

It'll be different!

I mean, this is the kind of stuff I did last year. In my studio, everything was a mess and I was painting/drawing with ink on the floors and walls (never to show anyone: my space was almost totally bare when the final show rolled around), and I was wondering about New York subway ads.

I still don't get it. I would sincerely love for someone to explain this ad to me. 

No, really, really.

One night I felt very lonely in a big group consisting of "my people." I drank too much but look surprisingly sober in a photo I found when I googled myself.

And it always felt like everything started out like this, so simply. Cleanly.

And ended up like this: feet cracking and lots of pain but also really good and dancing? 

I mean, I don't even know, and I write that all of the time. This is me thinking everything is very weird, and I'm about to graduate, and nothing and everything has a direction. Everyone is very keen on giving good and well-meant advice, but it all seems to go over my head: it has absolutely no meaning to me because I'm not there yet. I haven't lived that.

One thing I thought of today while accomplishments were being listed in class was that my father, 60 years old last year, just recently finished his bachelor's degree.

That's something I want to learn how to do. To do that. To do something like that.

It's 4:38 pm and time for oatmeal. All images by me.