100% honest?

It was year 2003.
I met my favourite Turkish writer Ahmet Altan in the lobby of Hotel Bristol in Oslo. His eyes widened when he saw the pile of books I had brought for him to sign. He wrote a different message in each one of them. We talked for hours.

One interesting topic was the honesty in writing diaries. According to him, when writing a diary, we aren't 100% honest. Altan's argument, was that when writing a book, honesty comes out in shape of characters and places as I interpreted it, cannot be directly connected to the writers own emotions and experiences.

First it shocked me. How can we possibly not be honest? Had I actually found a subject with him to disagree on? Then I had a sudden flashback on my own insecurities and weird moments during my teenage years and how I deep inside feared that my diary would be read by someone else one day. I despised the thought.That's not what I really wanted to share.
That same fear had kept me from being truly honest and retained a lot of things that I most probably chose to keep to myself. I'm glad that I did.

E.Y

So the story goes.

This world, this country, this city, consists of people pretending that everything is OK all the time. Everything is great. We wish each other a great weekend. We wish eachother a great day. When the weekend is over, we ask eachother if we had a great weekend and so the story goes.

How often do people talk about how low they feel or how lonely they are? Everyone seems to be having a blast. Talking about how depressed we are is a taboo and not really an interesting subject to be brought up. We are drawn to happy people but are not aware that in most occasions, it is the same happy people that makes us feel depressed.
In the movie As Good as It Gets, Jack Nicholson's character, Melvin Udal says,
"Some have great stories, pretty stories that take place at lakes with boats and friends and noodle salad...Good times, noodle salad. What makes it so hard is not that you had it bad, but that you're that pissed that so many others had it good."

In my world composed of sarcasm and cynicism, the train to Disneyland passed long time ago.

E.Y.

The silent library.

Every now and then, I go the public library. I need motivation and the only way is to be with other people that are motivated. That's what I used to think anyway.

Let's just blame it on multitasking or Facebook or the 5 minute commercials that have made us impossible to concentrate for a long term. I thank God for not creating Facebook before I graduated. If so, I would have had big trouble in studying for my exams.

The library is stuffed with people and I barely find a place to sit down. People with their laptops( on Facebook) and girlfriends talking silently about something while in between, you spot the elites. The ones that have one book only and take notes with their beautiful handwritings. For they come from the generation when handwriting was mandatory and for them, internet is rather complicated than easy. The elite that I'm observing is most probably writing an article or essay. For every twenty minutes, she disappears behind the isles and returnes with the most ugly looking old book and takes notes from it. I'm amazed, I'm jealous.

All I can thing of is what I want for dinner and which ingredient I can get where. I'm looking at the soup of texts ahead of me and wait for the clock to turn 4. At least then, I will have spent some time there to comfort me.

I mean I did try, didn't I?

E.Y

Bukowski

The shock effect.

As I mentioned earlier in my blog, I wished I had bought tickets to somewhere warmer for Easter.
Dublin was never my priority on the cities that I wanted to visit but I just had to get out of the country, out of Scandinavia, to a place where I had never been. So there we were, lagging with our luggages at Torp airport, unaware that within a few minutes we would practically DIE to get to Dublin.

On by one, flights were announced cancelled due to the fog. "What fog?" we asked and turned our backs to look out the window and were met by a ridiculous whiteness as if it had waited for us all week.

Suddenly I felt a drop in my blood sugar level and pictured what it would be like to come back to my apartment where I had spent the whole week cooked up because of essay writing. My only comfort was that if I needed to back to my aparment, I had enough booze to get me through Easter.
But I'm going to Ireland damn it! The land of Guinness and Jameson, 715 pubs in total. I do not wish to stay in a out- of-order-Oslo where everything is closed and only weirdoes wander around the streets. Hell no! I must go Dublin.

Fifty minutes after the last cancellation, my hands were sweatty and I was biting my lips. What's it going to be? Then, another announcement. "The flight to Dublin is ready to leave from gate 16". You can only imagine me and my friend's excitement.

Dublin here we come!

E.Y

Happy Easter!

There's nothing like coming home to a clean and tidy apartment after you've been abroad. As if you're not tired from the trip already, finding the apartment with leftover food and piles of clothes is not an option for me. So I have been in and out every corner you can imagine with the cleaning cloth and will not settle down unless the whole place smells of Jif. Trust me, it is worth it!

From the cleaning cloth to bag packing,I have quite a long task ahead of me. What to bring to a country where it rains more than in Norway? Wish I had bought tickets to somewhere warmer...

E.Y

Looking at the past: 21 Jump Street!

Suddenly, I remembered one of the most popular series from the end of the 80'ies, where Johnny Depp, playing a young cop,could still be considered as a newcomer.
In my opinion,it has one of the best -all time- theme tune. Listen and see if it still excites you as it does me! Enjoy!

The bad boy; coming to a cinema near you!

I have already touched upon the myth of the the bad boy earlier in my blog. About their mystery and indifference in the way of living and how they sweep us off our feet. These are the natural born ones.

On the other side, we have the ones that pretend to be one, such as one of my friends. He shared with me that he sometimes likes playing a bad boy because it seems to have a better impact on girls and make them come running after him, to be precise. I'm amazed by the fact that us girls transform these good hearted guys into villains in order to run after them.

Bon Jovi says in a song "I blame this world for making a good man bad". So could it be us women to blame, that men adapt a fake bad boy identity?
I, myself do not know how long I would allow someone to mess up my mind.

Games,games,games.

E.Y.