Absurdia.Net

So it goes.

Mothers are a foreign country – pt. 1


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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


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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.

The return of the boy bands


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Yesterday night I could not sleep, so for some unknown reason, instead of counting sheep, I started enumerating boy bands of the 90’s. I didn’t want to get distracted, so I guess in my pre-sleep delirium I thought boy bands were something I would never be able to find attractive or interesting under any circumstance

It was an epic fail, at least to my sleeping standards.

It’s true I find boy bands boring to unreal extents, but what actually happened is at some point I thought about “Boyzone” and I absolutely could not remember who they were and what they looked like, let alone what songs made them famous. I had to get up and google their name to find out they were a totally forgettable incident in worldwide music history. It took me more than three hours to fall asleep after that.

Random things to abhor – Bank calendars


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Free calendars issued by banks represent the quintessence of human taedium. In the past though I remember banks were making an effort, using famous paintings to decorate the dull pages of their calendars. They managed to make any remarkable artwork very boring of course, but at least looking at your wall you could learn something. For example, thanks to the 1984 — or was it 1986? — calendar I could find all about Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo. My grandmother, who collected everything, used to cut out those photos and frame them when the calendar wasn’t useful anymore.

The quality of those calendars over the years has lowered, and I doubt these days anybody could learn anything significant looking at them — anything significant apart from acknowledging the unbearable tediousness of average graphic designers. Today I got my 2011 calendar and… guess what? It’s really really uninteresting. Terribly uninteresting. It’s so uninteresting that it made me want to buy immediately another calendar to make up for its overwhelming lack of interestingness. There are photos of rocks and water in it. And some of mossy soil. And more rocks, inside and outside water. There are also captions explaining why all those rocks and mossy soil should be considered so relevant to the point of justifying a whole calendar devoted to them, but the captions are even more boring than the pictures, so I couldn’t really focus and read any of them in its entirety. But yes, I actually looked at the calendar, first of all because it was free and secondly because I wasn’t really thinking, and since I am very lazy I doubt I will throw it away.

Don’t take me to a cruise


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We went earlier to see the AIDAwhatsitcalled harbored here in Reykjavík. Such an overgrown amass of metal and glass that was a truly impressive sight to behold. A lot of Icelanders were there too, to take photos and jawdrop in silent envy. But seriously, who would want to be on a ship like that for fifteen days, or more? It’s so much like a luxury concentration camp. From when you wake up to when you go retire to go to sleep, your daily routes and routines are traced by marketing experts, that know exactly what you will want to drink and eat and where you will want to sit and when and what kind of dresses you will have brought with you in your suitcases. You will bath surrounded by fake palms and bamboo groves and then listen to the country music act – very likely German despite the fancy cowboy attire – at one of the eleven available themed bars, while sipping your Mojito, battling with paper umbrella miniatures to get to the straw. And then you’ll dine in one of the seven restaurants, all covered in mirrors and other vomit-inducing materials in case of seasickness. I mean, seven restaurants and eleven bars? More than in the city of Reykjavík itself. But of course, I don’t like bars here, so that’s not a point in favor. And a casino and sport centers and at least a cinema screen – but I suspect there are more – and god knows what else. When and where can you be free just to be by yourself, instead of roaming the decks like a brainwashed monkey, eager to spend money on anything? When can you really enjoy the sea and its wild moods and the life in the middle of nowhere? I felt fed up even before being aboard. To think there are people with so little imagination as to save for years to be in a prison like that, with the well-offs that are even less imaginative than they are, ha.

Old but not aged


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I‘m losing track of the time. Time flows so easily. I look at the clock on the wall and it’s like looking into a crazy man’s inner space. I can’t follow. It’s light all day, without interruptions. Faces are not submerged by tidal shadows. I’m afraid I’ll get used to monotony of colors and shades. Wind blows now and then and I am cold all the time. The body still remembers the suffocating taste fo past summers, the scorching sun, the smell of dusky breeze. And I’m changing shape quickly enough to know that I’m no longer a girl. I’m a relic that’s waiting for dust and the beauty of age to gather on its recesses and edges. But no dust can gather. I clean and wash, and it’s ugly dirt only that gathers and needs to be washed away, no dust or beauty or oxide coating.
Birds are confused. They sing all night. The see light and feel light and perceive light with all their senses. So they get younger and younger and sing to acknowledge their existence. I would like to sing as a proof I’m still alive, but I’m no bird.