The Army

Yesterday Saint Lucy’s Day was celebrated in Sweden. It is said to be the longest night of the year and the story of Lucy, or ‘Lucia’, is beyond fascinating. Arriving at work at eight thirty in the morning, it was still close to pitch black outside, but I can’t say it was darker than normal.

It’s Sunday and I feel restless. I keep walking back and forth in my flat moving furniture and multitasking house chores.  I think I am tense about next week and a little apprehensive about the summer too.

Our media team is spending Monday and Tuesday in the archipelago this week. The idea is to have fun together and stay in cabins on an island. I’m not nervous about that. I know we’ll have a great time sailing and making BBQ dinner.

However, straight after, I’m off to Boot Camp near Stockholm.

Why? Well, I currently lack the type of soldier knowledge you get after attending a year in what used to be known as our ‘National Military Service’. It doesn’t exist anymore, so Sweden will start recruiting and hiring soldiers very soon.

Anyways – as a result of not attending the National Service – from Wednesday 25 May, I will spend five intense weeks in Boot Camp; getting my civilian self kicked into soldier shape. The sixth week will be spent at a Psychological Operations course near Malmö in the south. 

I have no idea how I will feel after the next six weeks or what I will be capable of doing – physically and mentally – once my summer holiday start. There so many things I’d like to plan now, but will I feel the same once my vacation start?

My challenge is to chill and take time as it comes.

Many of my normal thoughts disappeared in the forest last week. Instead, my senses switched on full alert, perhaps for the first time in ages.

In the forest – very basic needs had to be satisfied and they were all that mattered to me at the time; staying warm and dry, cooking food to eat when hungry and drinking when thirsty, emptying bladder and bowels and taking care of personal hygiene, meaning staying clean and alert.

All of the above took a lot of work and planning and it required much of my energy throughout the day. However, achieving each was hugely satisfying and rewarding. It had me working in a meditative state with no room for much thinking, apart from what was needed in the present. And it brought on so much content afterwards.

When time off, I could rest or sleep and I really appreciated it. When hot, I could enjoy the wind to cool me down. I could listen to the birds calling each other in the morning and see the landscape transform from day to night. I could breathe in the moist air at sunset and enjoy the silence when the forest became dark. It was all so peaceful before going to bed. And it felt amazing on the inside too, as it made me peaceful, calm and alive. Life became simple.

In modern society we are complicating our lives. We are distracted, constantly –not just by city noises, words and signs, phones, email, TV and Internet but even by our own thinking. We’re planning our lives in a calendar and squeezing in so many things to do – believing we’re productive but actually feeling we’re running out of time. In fact, we only ever really seem to take the time to be, observe and enjoy life, during our longer breaks or holidays. Meanwhile we drink our senses numb to celebrate our ‘time-off’ from the crazy world we have created in our day-to-day lives. We no longer realize what really matters in our lives, or how to make ourselves happy in the long run. Or?

The truth is, we no longer have to fight to satisfy our basic survival needs and we may not even be aware of what these needs are any more. In modern society, we are trying to satisfy newly invented needs instead. These are excess needs we and are all helping to sustain. Or shall we blame it on brands, magazines, adverts or the government?

Chasing so many peripheral goals in order to live up to the perfect picture in our heads, which doesn’t actually exist, has perhaps tricked the entire world out of its true nature consisting of love, peace and happiness. We are simply lost and disconnected from our true selves. The more we try to satisfy the needs we are inventing and believe are important to us, the more trapped we become - all to be approved of and seen as successful in today's society.

And isn’t it funny how we keep on travelling to far away destinations to see, relax and enjoy life, but we fail to enjoy the life and the people that is always in front of us. Just like we have forgotten our basic needs, we keep forgetting who and what really matters in our lives. Try going into the forest for a week and you'll know what I mean...

Thursday 7 April 2011

Ever since I was a kid I’ve been scared of finding objects in bought food that aren’t suppose to be there. It’s not always a concern, clearly, but in certain situation the alarm bell instinctively goes off.

As a 13 year old, I was around a friend’s house playing Super Mario on Nintendo and eating a pastry from the supermarket at the same time. I started to feel something hard in the whipped cream part, and thoroughly swallowed everything - apart from the object. It turned out to be a piece of a nail, a typical chewed off piece of ladies nail. I stopped biting my nails as a 10 year old – but I still remember how they look. My friend was chocked I think. The feeling of having sucked on someone else’s chewed off nail was so dreadful it created a slight distress of ever having that happening again.

Today when I was having dinner in the big restaurant at work, which is currently catering for over 2000 people, I felt something small and hard in my chicken pasta.

Evidently, my alarm bell went off. I felt I had no choice but to go through the same process as last time, and therefore swallowed everything, apart from the object. I took it out and it was a small blue bead from a necklace or piece of clothing. OK, it wasn’t as bad as a nail, but still – how gross! I complained loud and clear but before I even got half into my sentence my new friend at work – we’ve known each other for three days now – exclaimed: Wow! Perhaps you have won something! Who got the bead? I burst out into a loud laughter that had our whole table turning heads. What a fantastic view on the situation and what a genius thing to say?

My mood completely changed. I mean, what are the chances of shit always ending up in my food? Perhaps it’s even lucky? I’m completely cured of my paranoia! Plus, next time I’ll just spit it out if it doesn’t feel right.

I've had a lovely weekend with my dad in Enköping, and today I've had a sunny day off from work.

I have mentioned the writer Mats-Eric Nilsson in my blog before and in one of his books, he explains the concept of real foods. It’s also a guide to the foods that aren’t fake in our shops. Since I had to return 'Äkta Vara' to the library today, where I am now, I’d like to share some of his words. I've translated sections and parts into English for you.

“Mankind has throughout history learnt to eat around 80,000 different types of plants and 3000 of these has widely spread around the world. However today, only four – corn, soy, wheat and rice – stand for two thirds of the calories we consume. The astonishing large number of foods in modern grocery shops makes it difficult to see that the actual number of plants in our diet is constantly becoming fewer. The food industry are growing only a tiny group of plants, mainly corn and soybeans, in order to produce their wide offering of processed foods. They are using chemicals for financial reasons – it’s simply too expensive to use natural foods as ingredients.

Most industrial food ingredients are based on a real product (mainly soybean or corn), however it’s usually been taken through such a rigorous chemical process, it can’t really be recognized after the procedure.

Since soybeans are used to produce a huge number of substances for the food factories, the manufacturers want us to believe that the beans are needed to feed the world’s population – it’s even what the news is telling us. However, nobody tells us that a large portion ends up in our ice cream, cookies, crackers, bread, margarine and ready meals. And since a growing population is starting to eat the same foods we are, the demand of corn and soybeans are becoming bigger.”

Nilsson also talks about the vitamins in our foods: The vitamins are hardly extracted from fruits and vegetables. They are created synthetically in China or India, where the environmental laws are less strict than in the West. To take care of the vitamin process and the remaining chemicals from it, would be extremely complex, inconvenient and expensive in the West. So many food manufacturers has moved to Asia, and started polluting the world from this end instead. Plus, it’s much cheaper. So from the industrial food manufacturers point of view, this is more profitable business.

“By adding food preservations which makes the shelf life longer, today’s grocery chains that can buy enormous bulks of fabricated foods for less and store it in their shops, and then they encourage the consumer to continue storing the volumes in our homes too. There’s hardly a consumer who’s asked for this extreme shelf life, so whose idea is this?” Nilsson asks.

Something I noticed whilst reading the book was that Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream brand pride themselves with being climate neutral and caring about the cows. “Instead of milking natural resources, the cows are milked instead”, it says on the pack. It’s a sweet message to consumers. However – the soylecitin – also in the B&J ice cream – is hardly a climate smart ingredient. I suppose the average consumer doesn’t even know what soylecitin is. And I won't bore you with a page long chemistry class...

Nilsson writes:

“Never before have we spent such little time on buying and cooking food,

We have never before used such a small portion of our salaries on food,

We have never before known so little about the food we buy: how and by who they are made or what they even contain.”

Before reading Nilsson’s book I read that soybeans are grown on fields that are so heavily treated with chemicals that the earth becomes useless after three years. Then new land needs to be found for the soybean. The areas are often rainforests. So the world’s soybean crops are obviously leading to deforestation.

Considering we get our drinking water from the world’s forests, as well as much oxygen production, which lead to clean air - it doesn’t seem like a good idea to grow any crops in an unsustainable way. Without water, oxygen and clean air, we can’t exist. Whether or not we’re aware of it in our day-to-day lives, we come from nature and we live in symbiosis with it. Humans have never been separated from nature – we’re the same living and breathing organism. So, by favouring the industrial food business as consumers, we’re slowly killing ourselves.

Sweden is not at the forefront when it comes to the food debate, and we’re behind the UK as a result, what is mentioned on the ingredient lists are not as strict over here. Some of the foods we buy in our shops contain taste enhancers (yeast extracts or E621 – MSG), colourings, and preservations – that aren’t allowed in dog foods!

When a reporter became aware of this, the Swedish “Jordbruksverket” was contacted for a comment - their food expert explained: “The human has her free choice… But animals can’t read the list of ingredients - that's the difference and that is why the rules for animal foods are a lot stricter.”

It sums it up really:

You and I have a choice as consumers. We obviously have a responsibility towards ourselves – to what we put into our bodies - but also to what we feed our children, and what we feel is acceptable for the world that we all live in.

We can all make a difference, we just need to live by the belief that we can.

I wasn’t as deep into the rat race as many other people in London. I was highly creative producing content for the music and entertainment industry. It was a challenging and competitive business and I had to develop new skills, but it was rewarding, as I was following my passion. I was true to myself.

It’s easy to get caught up in the wrong values obviously, because fame, money and power have been dominating our society and most cities for some time now - probably since the birth of Capitalism.

When it comes to money, it’s true that there is freedom in having a bit of cash, but only as long as you know how much cash you need. That’s how you put a limit to your desire of wanting more. If you don’t really need more cash, then why chase them?

People are weak and easily manipulated by the media that want us to consume to make the rich richer. So these external means of measuring ourselves in society: money, fame and power – is still what the majority of people are selling their souls for.

My ex boyfriend was seriously trapped and caught up in the rat race. It’s only just daunted on me – despite writing an entire introduction piece about the rat race – I wasn’t really that deep into it myself! However, I did experience it to the max and I suffered all the negative consequences from the rat race by being with a person, who prioritized his work over me.

For nearly two years, I was in a battle I couldn’t win. As stressful as it sounds, it was always a matter of time before I’d loose my boyfriend’s presence to either planning or running to a meeting, “work” dinner, checking emails on the blackberry, or waiting for a conference call – even on holidays.

We did travel together, but it was always weekends away, never a longer break. Apart from once when we spent a week in a city, that was a combined work trip. However, I didn’t know about the work bit until we arrived. So I was by the pool on my own, dropped off at the museum to explore on my own, and spent a day with people I’d never met before. A bit like “Lost in Translation” but without the marriage, and I never met the funny bold guy. I even came along to two of his meetings, since I didn’t want to be on my own anymore. I was allowed at those two… I was such a good little puppy.

The difference from having a partner in the rat race and actually being in the race, is that as a partner you don’t “benefit” from the time invested into work. As a partner you don’t earn a higher status in your career and you don’t reap the benefit from a large bonus from working so hard in the last fiscal year. Instead, you get limited time and presence from your partner as well as the stress he is ventilating. Add to this a huge amount of insecurity and worry, since you’re never prioritized.

The relationship was ruled from one person’s calendar only, and if I had started to use mine in the same selfish way – I knew the relationship would be over. Besides, when I meet someone I like, what can be more important than spending time with that person?

Talking about it always led to arguments as it threatened his ego and wish to be a good boyfriend. So I couldn’t express myself freely and when I did, I wasn’t heard. Although trying to express his preferred way, it didn’t make a difference.

I was helping him to grow his career responsibilities by being his emotional support crutch and source of calm. At the time, I really needed his support. However, the pressure of my need became too much for him.

What do you do when you love someone, but you don’t feel safe, connected and relaxed with that person? I was trying to figure that out for the duration of our relationship. I was absorbed by it and in the end I was drained by it. Drained and depressed – mainly from giving myself the blame of my negative feelings and not succeeding in convincing myself I was loved and protected.

When eventually splitting up with him, I ended up without the boyfriend I loved, and looking back at the relationship none of it seemed happy or fun. For a year afterwards, I was angry – primarily with myself. Then I had a short period of feeling sorry for him. Then I realized it’s about time he grows up and start to take responsibility for his spoilt actions and learn to fight for what he believes in, like the rest of us – if it ever becomes clear...

When I left London for Stockholm last year, I wasn’t removing myself from the rat race. The rat race can be found and created anywhere. I removed myself to get the support I needed at the time. Without being conscious of it – I also protected myself from the environment of my relationship. Stockholm became my shield from not being heard and accepted. The new situation away from all that I knew in London, challenged me to build a place of understanding and love for myself, and it slowly removed the hope that those would ever come from my boyfriend.

The rat race had become his comfort zone. It allowed him to feel successful, important and admired by his family and friends. Nobody apart from me saw the ugly side; the egocentric shadow the race casts. I believe my friends did, as he had a self-centred way about him, with little interest for other people, unless they were business people or could prove useful in some way... Deep down it’s also how I felt; He just didn’t have the time to take an interest in my life or the emotional capacity to understand me.

It’s perhaps not all because of the rat race – some people are just egocentric and have been brought up to think they’re the shit by parents or culture. I know now that those people offer me little happiness, friendship and love. And if they seem to shine – it’s only on the outside.

There’s really nothing I can do about all this but learn from it and move on. Plus, the experience has taught me what qualities I really adore, which makes me appreciate my beautiful friends and family all the more.

I’ve had today and yesterday off, since I just worked for 10 days straight in the military.

I actually earned one extra holiday for each day on my mission, so the whole experience is starting to feel worth it now. And I’m yawning less today.

At the moment I’m in Stockholm, where I’ve had a casting session with a voice-over agency. It felt great to be back in the studio again and taking on different roles with my voice. I really love that type of work.

I’ve also been working on my Visual Communications project here, as part of my course at Konstfack. Having acted as models with a photographer yesterday, we’ve discussed the whole experience today and I will spend the rest of the weekend writing it down for our memo.

I really feel at home when I am at the art school. I get the same feeling when I am inside the studio or whenever I arrive in London.

Although I grew to like living in Stockholm last year, the city doesn’t make me feel at home. It’s a beautiful city in places – especially in the summer – and with some wonderful buildings and closeness to the sea. However, I prefer to walk in cities, and I don’t enjoy walking in Stockholm. The city has too much traffic and condensed grey building blocks in my opinion. There aren’t enough places to stop, breath and enjoy the city. And if you do, there’s polluted traffic noise right next to you. On top of this, there aren’t any free toilets, not even in the malls! Such a rip off place...

London is packed with inviting squares, free toilets, benches and forest like parks where people happily enjoy a break. Despite having dressed smart for my high-pressure jobs all over London, I’ve always been able to walk to a nearby park and lay down for 20mins during lunch. Where could I do that in central Stockholm? And if I did, I’d probably be considered a freak. That’s actually how I feel when I’m here. I just can’t identify with any groups of people in my capital.

I love “Vita Bergen”, but it’s kind of far from central Stockholm. In the centre, I feel like I am constantly walking in a hurry and getting crap in my eyes from traffic – like Oxford Street or Piccadilly Circus. Perhaps Stockholm is just too small to have any walking-only sections, big parks or recreational areas in the centre? Or, I will just need to move close to “Vita Bergen” in the southern part.

However, people are too segregated here. If I live on “Söder” in the south, I’m meant to be extremely hip with a radical haircut, or a bohemian lover of vinyl records hanging out at book swapping cafés.

If I move to “Östermalm”, I’m expected to have at least one aristocratic friend, wear Tommy Hilfiger pants, party on Stureplan and have dinner at Riche – preferably several times per week, as only regulars are welcome when it gets crowded. I’m not exaggerating.

“Kungsholmen” is perhaps a more neutral area, and that’s where I lived last year, but its got heavy traffic and loud trucks right next to the beach walk. What a waste!

I know it’s not of any use to be comparing cities, but after two days in Stockholm I really miss London. I miss the variety and eclecticism. I miss the people, huge parks and quiet leafy streets with pretty houses. I miss the range of learning and entertainment on offer, as well as the nightlife – not because I enjoy going out every night, but knowing it’s there. The nightlife in Stockholm is lame. People are too cool for school and it creates a too stiff or too drunk environment.

Man, I feel homesick now... Enköping here I come! hahaha

The snow is melting quickly in Enköping and the 25mins walk to and from work has become a great start and finish to my day.

Somewhere between the main square and the train station I pass the same three people every morning. They must all be getting off the train... First a medium height black man dressed in dark clothes and a blue hat pulled down over his ears, then a short and very large woman in her early 30s with brown hair, and always wearing a brown poncho. The third person is a good looking man in his late 20s with thick “media” glasses and black hair. He wears a smart jacket and is kind of geeky looking.

It’s been sunny every day for the past week and it’s great to get back from work around 5pm and have five hours of spare time before going to bed. Time really is our most precious resource. I love that fact that as soon as I leave the military base, I am no longer thinking about work and a new creative mind kicks in.

Having been without a TV and internet since I moved here has definitely pushed my creative thinking forward. I love it, and my life is starting to feel richer than ever before.