Absurdia.net

Year: 2011

  • Mothers are a foreign country – pt. 1

    How mothers can prove in less than 150 characters that they have no taste in music, no tact, and no idea about geography.

    After almost a month of silence, my mother sends me a laconic text message stating she has received her birthday present. The present in question is a CD by Ólöf Arnalds — not the latest, the previous one. Mother’s opinion, in less than fifteen words, is the CD sounds like Japanese music, although of course she knows it’s not Japanese but Icelandic from the bits of text contained in it. She doesn’t know Icelandic, but she can tell it’s not Japanese because titles and credits — but I doubt she actually looked at anything besides the title on the cover — look like they are written with some sort of alphabet, although very bizarre; Japanese is written differently, of course, a bit like hieroglyphs, but without the fancy little birds and men with bobbed hair doing stuff. She doesn’t say if she likes the music or not: I can affirm from experience that this is evidence she doesn’t like it or, rather, that she doesn’t get it at all. She concludes her message saying she’s happy I’m living in Iceland instead of Japan right now, like they were close countries and one could end up in either of them just for a chance.

  • Owl wants to go to prison

    OK, so… I just learnt that inmates in Iceland get paid to study. If they want to study, of course. They can get paid more than $3 per hour, for up to five hours daily. Sure, 3 dollars per hour isn’t much, but I doubt you have many expenses when you are in prison anyway. Unless you are The Godfather, at least. Just for comparison, in Italy slave trad… I mean… employers pay the same amount — but very often less — to immigrants to do very hard work for 10+ hours each day. And after that, these people — the immigrants, not the employers — have to take care of themselves; with crazy rents and all that jazz, they end living in very shitty and dangerous slums, with no assistance or social rights whatsoever, etc. I’m not even talking about the situation of prisons in Italy, because it’s hopeless and disgraceful and very depressing. On the other hand, inmates in Iceland are said to be treated quite well. According to rumors, Icelandic prisons are more like hotels than like correctional facilities as we know them. I’m not sure about that, but from the outside some of them don’t even look like actual prisons.

    At the moment there are 189 inmates in the whole country, which for Iceland’s capacity is a lot. Around 300 criminals are waiting to serve their sentences because there is no way room for them can be made. Basically, they are waiting in line till it’s their turn to be jailed. This will very likely be going on till another prison is built. Why is it so strange though? At these conditions, I would definitely want to go to prison too.