There I was, with a handful rough drafts and nowhere to put them. Have you ever experienced the creative expiry-date? Like if you don’t finish your piece within a certain time, it’ll just die and you can’t really do anything with it. That’s where all those drafts went. And, having yet again been kicked off track in my creative habits, now I can’t find anything to write about again.

Just to keep things flowing, here’s a rant ↑, and a poem ↓ about not getting anything out (oh the irony).

Enjoy!
◊ Alex

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Drought

Perched on the kitchen work top,
cigarette in hand.
All creativity has drained
the imagination dried up
and I feel like
the most uninteresting creature
on the planet

When nothing more comes out
no images, no words, no ideas,
no gleaming insights nor blazing visions
I get stranded in this drought;
fall between the cracks
in the parched landscape floor
Waiting for the rain and another
flashing summer storm

What is left of me then?
If I do nothing, think nothing, what is left of me?
What purpose is there to breath and blood?
What am I doing here where
droughts are constant and
summer storms rare?
Or is it not the place
not the conditions
not the weather?
Is it just

me?

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Alex | June 2011

 

 

The thing is that at the age of 20 when I left my homeland, I had barely just stepped upon the threshold of adulthood. Having thrown myself into the unknown, I had to find out on my own who I was (and it was not who I thought I was), how to take responsibility, how to make the puzzle pieces of every day life fit together, how to be an adult. At that, in a country like China, light years away from the cultural context I grew up in.

In some ways, I think the road I took forced me to grow up faster. When you have no one to back you up, you simply have got to make it work any way you can. On the other hand, the path I chose meant a longer search for stability. I’ve sometimes been lost in the fog without a light to guide the way. I’ve stumbled and fallen on my face more than just once or twice. I’ve had periods of raging regression and by some miracle, every time I’m back in Stockholm I turn into a teenager again. None the less, all things considered, I’ve done a good job and I’ve turned into a (mostly) well-functioning young adult. I’ve learned how to deal with whatever comes, to not despair over confusion, to not be scared of not being in control, to get by and how to pick myself up off the ground when I trip and fall.

My path is hardly unique and I am far from the only one. The majority of my friends and acquaintances now, live or have lived under similar conditions. We left when we were young, we’ve lived abroad for a certain amount of time, and we’ve had to figure things out on our own. Moreover, most of the time we’re surrounded by people in our own demographic.

We’re maturing into adulthood without role models. When we substitute ourselves as our own advisors, we have to go back in memory to draw wisdom shared to us by the older generation as we grew up.

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...

Role Models and Mothers

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Because of that, when I occasionally have the opportunity to have a conversation that goes deeper than shallow small talk with someone of my parents’ age, I treasure those moments. It’s a different perspective, a mature point of view backed up by 30 odd years more experience than I have had time to accumulate, and it is important for me to be allowed to share it. Maybe this particular role model is just temporary. Maybe it’s for a few months, or weeks, or just hours. But I will pick something up, and perhaps sometime in the future this specific conversation is what I will fish out of my memory and use as a reference when I’m calling on myself for advice.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that the older generations have all the answers. I’m certainly not saying they, or anyone else, have the answers that would fit me, or you. We don’t have to do as they say. We shouldn’t do as they do. We all need to figure out what the questions are, and then find our own answers to them, regardless of our age, or where or how we live our lives. But the older generations do have the benefit of experience, and young adults benefit from if not getting the answers served to us, at least getting an example for how you can solve the problem.

Even though I have learned to live in the absence of a role model close at hand, I still have them on a distance. My mother is my greatest inspiration to how to do it, and admittedly sometimes an example of how to not do it. When I lived in Germany my ex-boyfriend’s mother was always a source of comfort and advice, and she have continued being my “German Mummy”. Even though I haven’t seen her for a year and a half I still miss her a lot and often imagine asking her for advice and trying to picture her answer. The most recent representative of my parents’ generation is my boyfriend’s father, who lives in Shanghai and whom I’ve had the chance to get to know quite well during my many visits to the city. He also happens to be the only older person I know who lives like I do, on the move, but has been at it for 25 years longer than I have.

No wo/man is an island. Young adults, reach out for your parents’ generation, they may not know how to send a MMS, but they have a lot to share. Mature adults, understand that, like a light house, sharing your experiences helps us to find our way, even when we chose a different path than you did.

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◊ Alex

The thing with languages is that you can’t learn every rule, every expression.  If you haven’t realized already, let me open your eyes to the truth about English. In terms of spelling vs. pronunciation, it just doesn’t make sense. At all. A reason behind this is that English is, more than other languages, a whore. Whenever another language passes by, English will open its legs and take it all. There are so many influences from other languages, and sometimes words have kept their original spelling but gotten a new pronunciation.

The difference between native speakers and non-native speakers of any language is that natives accept that certain things just are. They don’t wonder why “pronounce” is pronounced pro-nuns although there’s clearly a noun in the middle and the word “noun” is pronounced naown, so why isn’t it pro-naowns? (And to make matters worse, “pronunciation” is spelled with a “nun” and not a “noun”. I mean, come on English, cut me some slack!) Native speakers don’t question the logic behind why a six-letter word like “phlegm” is meant to come out as a four letter sound. Do you know what I see when I see that word? I see peh-leg-umm. Native speakers aren’t bothered by the inconsistency. They know it’s pronaownsed flem and if you ask them why they’ll probably tell you that that’s just how it is. Possibly, they’ll laugh at you too.

To some, these are crumbles.

And now, I have had enough. There will be no more trying to make dirty jokes and failing fatally by mixing up appendix and appendage. There will be no more confusion between wenches and wrenches. There will be no more getting smirked at after having proclaimed that my sandwich left a lot of crumbles on the table. No more being called cute for not knowing how many Ls there are in “metal” (one, as it turns out).

My ever-supporting boyfriend, a native English speaker, has assured me on several occasions that English is surely not out to get me, but I take it personally. English has made me its bitch for 20 years and now it’s payback time –I am going native on English’s butt! Even if it means that I have to sit with dictionaries and thesauruses and take notes on words I don’t know and harass every native speaker I know about idioms, pronunciation, spelling and word-use. (And that is what it means, and that is what I do.)

So how to go about it, when you need to precipitate the speed of your vocabulary influx, without having to take classes or just twiddling your thumbs hoping that what you pick up as you go along will be enough? Expanding your vocabulary isn’t necessarily all that difficult. And mind you, this doesn’t just go out to English learners, native speakers have a thing or two to learn as well.

My best friend.

Dictionary. com has turned out to be my best friend in my quest to kick English’s butt. If you want to pimp your text, go to their thesaurus and search for synonyms to replace that same old word you have already repeated five times in the last paragraph. When you occasionally stumble over a word you don’t know the meaning or pronunciation of, write it down and pop over to their dictionary when you have time. Since they know what a bitch English can sometimes be, they also write out the word according to how it’s pronaownsed and have an audio tool for each word.

Dictionariy.com’s possibly greatest contribution to non-native and native English speakers the same is the Word Dynamo tool. In Word Dynamo, you can make a ten-question test to see an estimation of how many words you know. You can practice already existing vocabulary lists on many different levels, and more importantly, create your own flash cards. So after you have looked up snazzy synonyms and checked word definitions, take all your new words and put them in your very own word list and start practicing.

Have I not managed to convince you yet? Perhaps you’re one of those who think that learning words is boring and I’m just a big linguistic geek. Well. I am a big linguistic geek, it’s part of my charm, but words can be confusing, amazing and downright hilarious. I don’t want to sound grandiloquent and I certainly don’t want to discombobulate you, but no matter who you are, if you’re a gastromancer, ecdysiast or calliphygian, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain. After all, who wants talk like a troglodyte? I challenge you to take a word quiz on my very own list of funny and absurd words. Click on the link below, chose your quiz type (I’d suggest match) and see how many of these words you recognize. Do me a favor and post your score in the comments section of this post.

Enough with the folderol, to the Bat Mobile! Funny words | Word Dynamo.

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Punctuation is also important.

◊ Alex

I have journals dating back 16 years. I have boxes filled with diaries and notebooks, short stories, novel drafts, poetry. I have archives online and on my hard-drive with all sorts of fictional and non-fictional writing. But since March I’ve barely been able to squeeze out a single well-phrased paragraph. That was when  I hit a creative full stop, a stress and restlessness induced writer’s block that hasn’t let go of me yet. Even writing articles for the local, English-language entertainment magazine feels like pushing my way through dough: slow and painfully frustrating. I’ve referred to my writer’s block as “phrasing dyslexia”. For five months the words, which have always come easy, are jumping around in my head and I can’t put them into eloquent sentences. They seem blurry, just out of reach, like something you can see only in the corner of your eye but when you turn your head you can’t quite catch sigh of it.

I’ve made a couple of attempts to break out of the writer’s block. The problem is that writing is something I need to do regularly. Creativity is not just a switch you can flick on and off, you’ve got to keep it flowing. Even days when you’re not inspired to write anything, you have to write. Sit down and write half a page and maybe that will be enough to spark your imagination so you can carry on writing another page. Despite my feeble attempts, I have not be able to get back to writing regularly. There are days when I believe that I will choke in my sleep if I don’t create something. The Block leaves me frustrated, uninspired and embarrassed. On top of that, it’s a frustration that comes sprinkled with just enough self-doubt to get a minor identity crisis rolling;  Who am I if I don’t write? What purpose does this life carry if I don’t create? Why am I here, why do I do the things I do, if it just lands me in this inspirational wasteland where ideas dry up and crumble to dust?

I want to be like this dude.

The thing is, after five months “I’ve got writer’s block” just isn’t good enough as an excuse anymore. It’s clear that sitting around twiddling my thumbs waiting for creativity to unblock itself isn’t leading anywhere, so what to do? Maybe it’s time to try to crawl out of that bottomless pit, show the angel of despair who’s boss and give CPR to the dying ideas. Today I stumbled over a blog post called Return to Writing in Six Steps which, shock smock, gives a six-step guide to how to just simply get on with it. The ideas aren’t exactly new to me, but it’s none the less good to be reminded of these simple and oh so difficult steps. Perhaps I’ll spend another five months producing nothing but heart-breaking, eye-watering rubbish, but I believe that once I manage to get into my old creative routine again, sooner or later something good will come out, even if it will just be accidental. So what’s the plan? I have no plan, just… pick up the pen and get on with it.

To the Batmobile!

◊ Alex

What do you say? “Oops, I accidentally dumped 20 tons of acid into your water supply, sorry about that”? I know one truck driver who is very bu-hao-yisi right now.

Stay safe and dry people!

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• The Guardian – China chemical spill taints city’s water supply
• Wikipedia – Carbolic acid

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◊ Alex

Let me put this in a context for you. I have now spent the last five years (mostly) abroad. Up until recently, I suffered from a common delusion, namely that at some point you’ll have to stop moving from one place to another and settle down. At least if you wish to have a family, which I at some point certainly do. A nomadic life-style seems irreconcilable with having a home.

Must-Settle-Down, its message comes creeping from all directions, like subtle propaganda from the heart of modern culture. It is hearing the story of the child of a diplomat who fought for years to accept that she had to settle down (and she did, good for her, when she’d fought so hard for it). It is the well-travelled co-worker who tells me she will not move any more, because you know, you cannot travel forever if you want to have a family. It is even the simple question “are you home now?”, asked by a dozen persons every time I’m back in Stockholm. As if I really ought to be “home” by now. (As if “home” can only be Stockholm.)

For quite some time I assumed that the vagabondery would eventually pass. Everybody I knew who had spent some years abroad claimed that “at some point you will want to come back home” (thus unknowingly acting as henchmen for the Must-Settle-Down propaganda). I assumed that even if I wouldn’t return permanently to Sweden, I would find a place where I would want to stay. I was waiting to stumble across that place. And I waited and travelled, travelled and searched. Only to realize that the longer I am on the move, the less inclined I am to settling down.

The Must-Settle-Down has been bothering me for quite some time. Like ill-fitting clothes I’ve been able to wear it, but never found it comfortable. In November, on a visa-run in Hong Kong, another epiphany hit. Home is not a place, it is people. I twisted and turned it around and tried to figure out what that meant for me, how I could make it go with the previous idea of wherever I lay my hat, that’s my home. The whole matter turned into a crisis with a view over Victoria Harbor. Despite being clear about not wanting to commit to permanent residency, the idea continued to loom over me like bad weather waiting to strike. The stress it brought about remained up until three months ago, when all of a sudden a revelation came to me, in the shape of a man. The revelation that you don’t have to settle down. That there is more than just one way to do things, more than just one solution to every problem.

The revelation in the shape of a man has never spent more than a few years in the same country. His father left his homeland some 30-odd years ago and never looked back. I felt almost stupid hearing it, silently wondering “you can do that‽”, as in “is that allowed?”, as in “is that actually an option?”. His parents lived on the move, married on the move, raised their children on the move. I’m sure it wasn’t easy, but when is it ever easy to keep a family together? They showed me that it can be done. He himself showed me that growing up moving every so often isn’t a trauma for a child, nor does it turn them into damaged, dysfunctional adults.

The Must-Settle-Down turned out to be a bluff. So much agony when the answer is so simple. You can settle down if you want to. But you can keep moving from one place to the next too, if you wish. And if you find a like-minded person, then home can be people, wherever you lay your hat. There is more than one solution, and we all have to find the one that suits us best. I don’t know what my solution will be, but I know that I am free to find out. The Must-Settle-Down is no longer looming over me, and I’m all the better off for it.

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◊ Alex

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ps. And by the way, as coincidence would have it, that revelation in the shape of a man, he’s my man now. Like two peas in a mobile pod.

pps. Did anyone notice that I used the interrobang? Hrr hrr hrr!

in·ter·ro·bang

–noun
A printed punctuation mark (‽), available only in some typefaces, designed to combine the question mark (?) and the exclamation point (!), indicating a mixture of query and interjection, as after a rhetorical question.

American Martin K. Speckter conceptualized the interrobang in 1962. As the head of an advertising agency, Speckter believed that advertisements would look better if copywriters conveyed surprised rhetorical questions using a single mark. He chose the name to reference the punctuation marks that inspired it: interrogatio is Latin for “a rhetorical question” or “cross-examination”; bang is printers’ slang for the exclamation mark. Graphic treatments for the new mark were also submitted in response to the article.

In 1966, Richard Isbell of American Type Founders issued the Americana typeface and included the interrobang as one of the characters. In 1968, an interrobang key was available on some Remington typewriters. During the 1970s, it was possible to buy replacement interrobang keycaps and typefaces for some Smith-Corona typewriters. The interrobang was in vogue for much of the 1960s, with the word interrobang appearing in some dictionaries and the mark itself being featured in magazine and newspaper articles.

The interrobang failed to amount to much more than a fad, however. It has not become a standard punctuation mark. Although most fonts do not include the interrobang, it has not disappeared: Microsoft provides several versions of the interrobang character as part of the Wingdings 2 character set (on the right bracket and tilde keys) available with Microsoft Office. It was accepted into Unicode and is present in several fonts, including Lucida Sans Unicode, Arial Unicode MS, and Calibri, the default font in the Office 2007 suite.

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Thank you, dictionary.com and wikipedia for this invaluable knowledge. I can now rest easy knowing that the conundrum concerning the use of “?!” – which has haunted mankind since the beginning of history – has finally been sorted out.

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◊ Alex

Her monolithic poem A Woman is talking to Death, written 1972, is a brutal documentation of the  political atmosphere and devastating helplessness of minority groups in the American (I dare say Western) society only a few decades ago.

Here it will be posted piece-by-piece, you can find the other parts either through ping-back in the comments section (for parts posted later), through the links (for parts posted earlier), or just simply by making a search for “A Woman is Talking to Death” in the bottom of the right-hand sidebar.

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Three

This woman is a lesbian be careful

In the military hospital where I worked
as a nurse’s aide, the walls of the halls
were lined with howling women
waiting to deliver
or to have some parts removed.
One of the big private rooms contained
the general’s wife, who needed
a wart taken off her nose.
we were instructed to give her special attention
not because of her wart or her nose
but because of her husband, the general.

As many women as men die, and that’s a fact.

At work there was one friendly patient, already
claimed, a young woman burnt apart with X-ray,
she had long white tubes instead of openings;
rectum, bladder, vagina—I combed her hair, it
was my job, but she took care of me as if
nobody’s touch could spoil her.

ho ho death, ho death
have you seen the twinkle in the dead woman’s eye?

When you are a nurse’s aide
someone suddenly notices you
and yells about the patient’s bed,
and tears the sheets apart so you
can do it over, and over
while the patient waits
doubled over in her pain
for you to make the bed again
and no one ever looks at you,
only at what you do not do

Here, general, hold this soldier’s bed pan
for a moment, hold it for a year—
then we’ll promote you to making his bed.
we believe you wouldn’t make such messes

if you had to clean up after them.

that’s a fantasy.
this woman is a lesbian, be careful.

When I was arrested and being thrown out
of the military, the order went out: dont anybody
speak to this woman, and for those three
long months, almost nobody did;…..the dayroom, when
I entered it, fell silent til I had gone; they
were afraid, they knew the wind would blow
them over the rail, the cops would come,
the water would run into their lungs.
Everything I touched
was spoiled. They were my lovers, those
women, but nobody had taught us how to swim.
I drowned, I took 3 or 4 others down
when I signed the confession of what we
had done…………..together.

No one will ever speak to me again.

I read this somewhere; I wasn’t there:
in WW II the US army had invented some floating
amphibian tanks, and took them over to
the coast of Europe to unload them,
the landing ships all drawn up in a fleet,
and everybody watching. Each tank had a
crew of 6 and there were 25 tanks.
The first went down the landing planks
and sank, the second, the third, the
fourth, the fifth, the sixth went down
and sank. They weren’t supposed
to sink, the engineers had
made a mistake…..The crews looked around
wildly for the order to quit,
but none came, and in the sight of
thousands of men, each 6 crewmen
saluted his officers, battened down
his hatch in turn, and drove into the
sea, and drowned, until all 25 tanks
were gone……did they have vacant
eyes, die laughing, or what?…..what
did they talk about, those men,
as the water came in?

was the general their lover?

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A Woman is Talking to Death, Part 2: They don’t have to lynch the women anymore
A Woman is Talking to Death, Part 1: Testimony in trials that never got heard

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◊ Alex

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Small Things and Close-Ups from Around the World (2008-2011)

◊ Alex

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In that dark jungle long shadows are thrown, of past and present insults. Everything that has ever happened grows with thick, rugged trunks there. Every little detail, every situation are lined up. Nothing goes unnoticed, nothing is left forgotten.

You can get lost in that jungle at night. That’s where the present is explained and put in contrast with the past. That’s where the scars are magnified and the betrayals swollen. That’s where I remember things long gone, the events which cause me to react the way I do today.

In that deep forest the walls between consciousness and subconsciousness are thinner. The almost healed wounds from pointed edges and corroded spikes are brutally torn up again, and I’m forced to see what I otherwise don’t want to acknowledge. The ache that should be as forgotten as it is dusty, the annoyance over a daily dose of exaggerated attention, the restlessness that comes from boredom. Nothing is forgotten there, it’s where the hidden things are pulled out. You can get lost in that raw honesty at night.

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Figured out what it’s about yet? No? And the photo isn’t giving you a clue? Well, here’s a hint, it’s a three-letter abbreviation for a state that many albeit not all women suffer from at a certain point of their monthly hormonal cycle. Now do you follow?

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◊ Alex