Therapy for free

I am sitting on the sofa. I feel like shit. I’m depressed like shit. Why is it like this? Why am I so unbelievably depressed? Should I feel sorry for myself? Should other people feel sorry for me? No... probably not. Or maybe they should. Maybe I’m manic depressive... that sure fits like a glow. Maybe I should be diagnosed. Where and how does one get such a diagnosis? I would probably have to go to a shrink. I cringe. I don’t want someone to tell me how to be. Wait a sec... what do I want with a diagnosis anyway? So I can feel even sorrier for myself? So I can tell myself I’m hopeless? I turn my head and spot a drawing on the wall. It’s of me, even though I didn’t actually bother to make it look anything like me. I look confused in the drawing. I give this version of myself the silliest voice and imagine her going:

“I’m manic depressive. There is nothing to be done about it. I might as well lay back and let it play out because I’m a total nut job!”

I snort. Jesus Christ! Now that’s depressing! I don’t want a diagnosis anymore. I’d just lay back and be even more depressed. They’d probably just give me meds and I don’t want meds. My head will just have to do without meds unless it gets too far out, cause meds always make me feel bad and in my book it’s a safer bet that I can deal with my mind then that I can deal with meds. I almost got myself addicted to fairly mild painkillers one time for crying out loud! So the shrinks can just keep their God damn pills. My liver is in good shape from my general dislike of alcohol so I don’t want to mess it up. I’m not that depressed after all. If I think about it real good, it’s not so bad :)

"Tripping on anaesthesia"

(the portrait in question)

Retroreflectors and elevator springs.

One day I was sent to fetch something in an old barn whose age is unknown. As I slid open the big red doors, red eyes start to open, red dots start to appear, curious as to what is disturbing the peace. It must be retro reflectors on the rear end of some sort of vehicles I decide, as any other explanation that comes to mind is highly repellent. I take a deep breath and step into the dusty, old darkness. I’ve taken a few steps inside before the angst start to seep in. The feeling is as though I slip into a dark pool that have gone undisturbed for the better part of the century, and now engulf me like starved quicksand. No questions asked, just step inside and fill the almost tangible loneliness in the air. It feels like something, maybe the building itself or whatever inhabits it, is zooming in on me, watching me. Like an old-folks-home where no one had visited for the longest time and the residents swarm around to check out the exciting outsider. Sometimes people come to the door, or even step inside, but no one goes to the back unless they have a good reason for it.

I can’t remember where the light switch is so I’ll just have to navigate through the darkness by the help of the scarce light that somehow makes it through the old structure. I can feel the atmosphere growing around me as I take in the gloomy landscape that is still growing and expanding as my eyes slowly adjust to the dim light. My panicky response is to make it even vaster by supplying every scene from every horror movie I’ve ever watched, just to maximize the experience.

Eventually, between the seemingly random collections of funny things, I arrive at the spot where the lawn mower in question is situated. It looks weathered and worn, but under the overwhelming amounts of dust and dry grass, it looks as though it’s itching, dying to get out of here, out of its idle boredom in this drop box for inadequate things. It still works and thus feels very strongly that it has been misplaced. It was almost calling for me in the silence where it might be doomed to stay for the rest of its life. Had it been able, it would have spun its little wheals and let me know with, ample enthusiasm, that it was the one under the table. I grab the other one, the one that is long gone and has no will to move, to work, and nothing against grass really. In its old days it has retired and settled in a nice spot by the snowblower and a massive set of springs that looks like it belongs at the bottom of an elevator shaft. It is slightly shocked and awfully offended by the abrupt change in plans with no opportunity for formal complaint. This can be felt in the resistance it puts up as the wheals start to move very slowly and I start to wonder what my boss is thinking. But I have more pull in me than the retired apparatus has resistance. It comes along, creaking and complaining loudly. I didn’t see the other one, almost bouncing in frustration under the table. “Why won’t anyone try me?” it wonders at the moment when it would have produced a few tears (or a few drops of oil) in great harmony and tune with some depressing music had this been a Hollywood movie.

Stryn Sommarski

When Stryn Summer-ski resort opened for the season, I was on the spot, ready to check out the conditions. Having spent enough of the spring drawling on the last spots of snow on the mountains surrounding my home town, I was ready for some more snowboarding.

The parking lot was full and people were told to park along the road. I ended up a few hundred meters further up the road from the resort. After I was done snowboarding I had to walk all the way back to the car.

The road is quite narrow to begin with, but with cars parked along it, it becomes even narrower. On one side there is about a meter of snow that gives way to the view of mountains, the blue sky and some strange glowing orb in the sky, whose name I manage to forget in the vast wasteland of gray clouds that comes between every time it bothers to make an appearance. On the other side there is a white wall that does not seem inclined to give way to anything. It reaches about 4 meters in the general direction of the heavens. In fact the only thing it seems inclined to is to fill in the gap, which is the road. It is a warm day, not the day one would feel comfortable this close to a wall of snow. Actually, scratch that! Upon closer inspection, (I couldn’t help but run my fingers along it as I was walking by) this was a wall of slush. I was wearing a t-shirt, my sweatpants were pulled up to my knees and my feet were shoeless on the warm asphalt. I reached out and grasped a fistful of slush from the towering wall. Such a vast amount of snow is a strange sight to see up close, all the while being good and warm in the summer sun. Like ice-cream served with a warm piece of apple pie, or picking summer flowers wearing mittens. As the snow is slowly dripping away from my hand, I realized that this is... what is the word? Awesome? Funny? Cool? Nice? Anyway, it’s a moment, and it’s a good one. I’m very easily moved in any sort of emotional direction, so by design, I’m smiling from ear to ear at this point. I hadn’t even noticed. I slap my hand over my mouth and nervously look around to see if anybody saw me. Already sure my lack of sanity is now an established fact around these parts of the world, I’m relieved to find there is nothing but cars, snow and more cars for at least a hundred meters in every direction. Though not very pliable, my face has now been forcefully altered and manipulated into a more suitable expression (I hope), so I remove my hand. I don’t want to come across like a total geek/freak/you-name-it. Now, I look cool, bored and generally uninterested in the world. My favourite things to do is snowboarding, drive fast and climb rocks as far as I can go with no rope just to spend an hour wondering how on earth I’m going to get back down... my point is that I can’t just go around getting so easily entertained by such stupid things. I gave myself a mental knock in the head and continued up the road. On my left side, the wall was slowly melting and slowly leaning in. But I would not be interested by this. Because even if there might be a risk worth considering, no one else was paying it any attention and there was nothing I could do to sway the outcome one way or the other. I can see my car now. I put my left foot down. Still barefoot, my skin hits something cold. Before I have time to react, I’ve put my foot all the way down and the chill spreads unevenly. Close and covering near the sole of my foot, but it scatters into individual dots of cold further up. Like something breaking into little pieces. Even before the initial shock has worn off, I have discovered the cause of this peculiar feeling. I’ve stepped into the little stream of melted snow on the road. I almost burst into laughter, being off guard, but I catch myself in time and leap for the safety of the car. Once safely inside, I sigh with relief. That stupid snow almost had me there.

Farther down the road, a buss has stopped and the passengers have been less fortunate. They are all deeply entranced, something that can easily be diagnosed by their behaviour. In one large crowd, they exit the buss and make their way over to the snow. Excited beyond belief, the all start to touch it and make snowballs, all the while grinning like the Cheshire Cat with eyes wide and somewhat bewildered. They’ve got it bad!

Languages, dyslexia and other shit.

I am extremely interested in languages. Recently, I was reading an article on Wikipedia about dyslexia and I came across something interesting. Apparently, some languages are more dyslexia-friendly then others. According to this text, I should struggle severely with English as it has very deep orthography (don’t ask me, ask Wikipedia: Orthographic depth and Dyslexia). I do find spelling in English quite backwards and unmanageable, but I always figured it was just because it’s not Norwegian...

My English is mostly a product of my inability to read fast enough to keep up with the subtitles on TV and in movies, a problem which forced me to learn to understand English much faster and better then I otherwise would have to. Still, I sometimes find it quite troublesome, so I was open to alternatives. Naturally, I would jump at the idea that English is indeed very confusing and makes no sense at all. Not for the first time, Wikipedia had shed some light at a seemingly insolvable mystery. This mystery turned out to be quite unsolvable, and surely would not be worthwhile. I figured it was best that I would stop torturing my fragile and confused brain with this weird language. Instead, I might try something more dyslexia-friendly.

I’ve wanted to learn a new language for some time, but it seems I’ve been looking in the wrong direction. English and French are among the more difficult ones (for “special” people like me) because the spelling is so.... well, messed up. Now it seems it is time to give up this language before my brain crashes, like it occasionally does with the effect that I become temporarily word blind (as my diagnosis suggests) and can’t read for a little while, or even explodes and leave me permanently analphabetic. I’m actually a little (or actually a lot) surprised that my brain haven’t come up with some kind of natural defence against it, like spontaneously falling asleep or something when I try to read or write it. The prospect is indeed dark and gloomy but hopefully there is still light at the end of the lingual tunnel.

Reading long books in Norwegian Bokmål (literarily “Book Language”) is getting increasingly dull, but I’m hopelessly hunted by the incurable feeling that things can always be done differently and better if I could only figure out how. I started easy with getting a book in Swedish (Baby Jane by Sofi Oksanen) to see if I could manage to get through it. It turned out to be easy as pie. This left me full of confidence and dyslexia forgotten along with the times when I complained loudly about being made to read a school book in Danish... which is basically the same language as Norwegian on paper. I decided it was time to try something new.

I’ve started to learn different languages before, but I could never really decide which one to focus on. This was clearly a major problem. But I remained confident that it could be done, if I could just figure out how. I can be quite persistent when I set my mind to something. Actually, it’s more like my mind take a liking to certain things with no regard to what is actually useful to know, and then I think about it nonstop weather I want to or not. It’s really annoying. Like this audio book that I’ve been listening to at work lately. It’s in Swedish, which is pretty straight forward for most Norwegians to understand, but there are always new words and phrases to figure out, so after listening to it for a while, I find myself thinking in Swedish for hours afterwards. I can’t seem to get a Norwegian thought in edgewise. When I talk, it even starts to sound a bit like Swedish, even though it’s Norwegian, if that makes any sense. Also, once when I and a friend went to Iceland, we were excited to learn some Icelandic. My head ended up totally hell bent on figuring it out and was constantly comparing it to Norwegian, with the result that I became pretty much incapable of saying even the most basic things in English (true story!). When we did speak English, we also mixed Norwegian in with the English because some words are the same in Norwegian and Icelandic (“ja”, “nei”, “takk” etc). This is where my brain draws the line at lingual oddities and refuses to follow. Just to top it up, some of the shopkeepers and guides unexpectedly spoke Norwegian to us, which left me unsure if they spoke Norwegian or just some particularly understandable Icelandic words. If I hadn’t been concentrating, I was sometimes even unsure if it hadn’t been English. Having just reminded myself of all of this, I start to wonder if learning more words in strange, foreign languages is a very bad idea. Why, oh why can’t I get a brain-transplant? I’ll take one that doesn’t want to learn anything and doesn’t get itself into problems like this.

I decide to listen to Wikipedia. One of the languages that were listed as being more suitable for people like me was Finnish of all things. I always thought Finnish sounded funny and have been interested in it ever since way back when I used to watch MTV with Finnish subtitles whenever there was nothing on Norwegian, Swedish or Danish MTV. Considering how similar the languages of the other Scandinavian countries are, one might wonder if Finland has been adopted and moved here from somewhere far away. In school, we were told long ago never to even think about trying to learn Finnish or Sami because it is apparently way too difficult for anyone to work out. This could only be viewed as a challenge. Finnish sounds just funny enough, is just difficult enough and dyslexia-friendly enough that it can only be viewed (by me at least) as the perfect challenge. Also, it is just useless enough that there is no pressure on me to ever really figure it out. When will I ever need to know Finnish? It’s just a bonus if I do.

Finnish is indeed challenging, but it’s actually going better than expected. I haven’t memorized a whole lot of words yet, but I’m starting to get a feel for it. And more importantly, I’ve managed to keep up the enthusiasm! Which is by far the most important thing. I started out at PurposeGames.com to learn a few words to start with (numbers, months, weekdays, colours, names of European countries etc). Asides from that, my vocabulary (it feels a bit bold to call it that) is mostly restricted to what I have been able to decipher from Finnish news. One of the first words I learned was “lumilautailu” (snowboarding) and that trend still sticks, so now I can understand quite a bit when I read news stories... as long as it’s on snowboarding. It is pretty easy to learn the spelling too because it actually makes sense! My brain doesn’t protest violently the same way it still does every time I write English. I thought Wikipedia was a bit off, as it seemed to good to be true, but it turns out they were spot on... or at least whoever wrote the article was.

The other day, I finally managed to get my hands on a little Finnish – Norwegian dictionary. So now I look up all kinds of stuff that pops into my head.

There will probably be more on this later as my enthusiasm flourishes and the people around me become increasingly bored with listening to me :P

One thing that particularly annoys me about English is this business with dividing words that in Norwegian would be written in onewordlikethis. In Norwegian we call it “orddelingsfeil” (word dividing errors?) and it makes all the alarm bells in my head go off even though I know very well that it’s not the same in English :P

My epic fail.

I’m sliding down a hill with a slightly worn out board still separating me from the wet slush. Throughout the day, I have worked up my courage the way courage can easily be manufactured given the right circumstances. At this point I was sure I could handle whatever the semi-natural (or shall we say “accidentally man made”) feature ahead of me can throw at me. How I came to think such a thought is unknown to me, as it was only this winter that I strongly preferred to keep the entire length of my board on the ground at all times. Still, boldly certain, I crouched myself together as tight as I dared and picked up enough speed to make it up the hill ahead, and then some. The uphill bit passed in an instant as I eagerly awaited the view of the other side of this corner-thingy. I hadn’t actually bothered to check, though I had passed by it several times. I can imagine my jaw dropping as I glide off from the top and into thin air, looking for my landing. I say “imagine” because at this point in time there wasn’t room in my head for much else then the cold revelation that there wasn’t really that much on the other side of that corner. Epic! There is no other word in my (English) vocabulary that quite describes this moment. I was flying, I was falling, I was crashing and there was nothing I could do about it. Just to top it up, I had actually put myself in this situation of my own accord. As much as my brain twisted and turned, I couldn’t find anything even remotely similar to an explanation.

The landing had probably been worn down from excessive use or melted away by the sun. Whatever the cause, it had been replaced by a 2-3 meter drop and a landing as flat as a pancake. Maybe this was the make shift halfpipe I had overheard someone talking about? If it was, they probably hadn’t meant for it to be entered from the air. When I hit the ground, my poor legs didn’t stand a chance in their feeble attempts to withstand the force of the impossibly flat spot I landed in. The fact that I land with my board in the wrong direction and flat based didn’t exactly help. They gave way like jello and I was forcefully lined up with the ground. This somehow didn’t hurt. Relived, I rolled myself around to face skywards and sat up for a moment. Then I bounced back onto my feet, suddenly hyper aware that a bunch of people were in view farther down the hill, and some of them were watching me. I started to slide slowly downhill, checking if my body and mind still worked. Then I made a few slushy turns and even got in a few tiny jumps to take the edge of what had just happened. It was actually quite unbelievable. I had barely jumped before so this was by far my most dramatic and worst looking fall on a snowboard. Still it didn’t hurt at all, at least not right away.

It was only a little while later that I started to notice how much more troublesome the slush came to be all of a sudden. How I could barely walk in a straight line and how I almost fell over twice while changing into some dry clothes. My head wasn’t on quite straight apparently and suddenly I understood the feeling of being here and bin a dream at the same time. I was wearing a helmet and my head didn’t even touch down, but it haven’t been the same ever since my concussion.

I’m still morbidly fascinated this whole situation. I was thinking I’ve manage to change my mind set a bit since the two car accidents this spring, but I felt it was a bit forced and would take some time to settle if it ever did. To be honest I thought it would wear off quickly. It seems my lack of faith in my own brainwashing abilities is quite unfounded. Just the concept of me doing something like this didn’t fit in anywhere in the known reaches of my twisted mind. This is a bit worrisome to me, even though I did indeed set out to brainwash myself after the first accident in April. I didn’t actually thing it would work, at least not as good as this. I did not recognize myself in this situation. Even that same morning I wouldn’t have guessed in a million years that I would go and do something like this. Creepy! Had I not still had a healthy dose of self-restraint and fear still intact, I might already be plotting my next move. Maybe I’d make myself into a duck or something.

In the sketch below I am apparently falling on top of a completely unrelated copy from a book about languages and a section about cases. “NORSK ER ET LITE SPRÅK SOM ER I FERD MED Å DØ UT og andre myter om språk” by Guro Fløgstad and Anders Vaa. Really good book actually, go get it!

It started to rain just as I was about to leave. I took this while just sitting around on a rock, waiting for my head to level itself out enough for me to drive back down to Stryn at the very least.

I managed eventually, but I was grinding my teeth the whole time, taking a lot of breaks and constantly analysing my own driving to be sure I would catch even the slightest sign that I should pull over. I had the funniest feeling that I needed to be really careful not to drift away mentally.