Television makes me feel smart. Makes me realise I'm dumb.

Books make me feel small. Makes me realise I'm able to grow.

One of my favourite things at work is the times I work night and get to be a part of the daily "homecoming". At the end of the day all the remaining buses return to the garage and there's this strange energy to the routine. Everyone is bustling about getting the buses hooked up to air/biogas/electricity grids, meanwhile more buses constantly stream in. There is a muted urgency to it as well. People are in a hurry, only not really. Because as soon as you've gotten rid of the bus the urgency fades and suddenly people are just milling about, getting another cup of coffee and small talking for a while before slowly dispersing and heading home. There is a strange and uplifting energy to it, one that fills you with a feel good sensation that lasts you throughout the bike ride home. And it's as if that good sensation in the pit of your stomach only grows as you're surrounded by the quiet and sleeping small town. It's nice. I like it.

I had a most strange sensation the other day when I sat down behind the wheel and started driving. It was the exact same sensation that you get when you dive into a body of water and take a few strong strokes beneath the surface. The world fades away, at least momentarily. The noises are all replaced by a sudden silence that isn't really quiet. And there's comfort in it. It's like an embrace. A feeling of content.

It's interesting how something I mostly did for the sake of it, is actually able to instil with me with the same kind of comfort that my favourite kind of physical meditation does.

Life is fucking mysterious.


Also, unrelated note, but I'm back to journaling (cause well Lolly told me to) so there will be a lot of unrelated and random posts with ill matched themes and paragraphs. But I love it when a fictional character burrows in your mind. Right now I can't seem to shake Anna-Karin from The Circle. She's just made herself at home and keep bubbling up at random intervals. She's not the most original and she's not the most fascinating and when reading that book she wasn't even the most relatable of the characters, but there was a certain determination and unorthodox strength to her, one that was coloured by a moral ambiguity. And for some reason she won't let go. She lingers. Not in the existential sense that she makes me ponder life, the universe and everything in between, but it's more like she made herself comfortable inside my head while I read and now I'm stuck with a fictional parasite. Only she doesn't really cause any harm. She's just there. Like benign foot-rot or something a little more pleasant but not necessarily welcomed. Or maybe that's not entirely true, it's not that I don't want her there, it's more that I can't figure out what she is doing there. It's confusing me a little, cause I don't feel like I am feeding off of her (that happens with fictional characters as well, but that's a completely different sensation) it feels more like she is just there demanding my attention, maybe feeding off of me. And I do realise I am babbling and probably sound a little insane. But what the what. I'm probably anaemic and definitely in need of sleep. So slack you shall cut me.

For me fiction lives. Even when I have moved past an obsession it still lives and on the occasions that I do return it still holds value and it still feels strangely organic. If I close my eyes I can reach out and touch it and all those old emotions immediately bubble up inside of me. Obviously not with the same strength as before, but still with enough strength to make you truly feel it and treasure the immortality of fiction.

Which is why I am so baffled by the death of fiction. I have never experienced this before. To have something you cared for fictionally lose all its value. To look, touch and feel and the only feelings that spring to mind is a disbelieving giggle. It's a kind of fictional; Her? And I am not sure what to make of this. Right now I can't get over how funny it is to see cardboard where you once found elements to spark your creativity and imagination.

How did this happen? Is this a good thing? I guess the experience in itself might be a good thing, because of it I've gotten emotionally richer. But it does also feel like I might have lost something. What if it happens again? What if things keep slipping through my fingers? What if this is only the beginning?

I'm strangely frightened of losing my ability to emote to fiction. It might sound and seem silly. But I consider it to be one of the better things about my personality, that I so easily can let myself go and take a twirl around in something that might not be classified as real, but is still tangible for my mind. It's not just about losing yourself in another world and universe, but it's more than that. It's about the person who sits still while the mind travels also will become more experienced, a little brighter, a little funnier, basically just a little better for being able to soak up the fiction and incorporate it into the real. So what consequences will the fact that I have begun experiencing a death of fiction have for all of that? If I know that things will lose their value am I going to be too afraid or indifferent about it to treasure them in the first place?

Maybe this is a fluke. Maybe nothing will change at all. Maybe.

(now I feel like joining a book club)

Kobra är min favorit. Jag tycker om kultur om kultur. Särskilt när den är sådär lättsmält och förenklande.

I just finished reading The Circle. I've seen it being hyped the past few weeks because the sequel will be released and then I found a copy discarded on my mother's coffee table (she treats paperback novels like they were crack-cocaine). So I picked it up and mindlessly thumbed through it and thought why not (the fact that a friend described it as Buffy meets Runaways was the final incentive I needed).

Then I couldn't put it back down again. It's that perfect combination of perfect realism and thrillingly paranormal adventures. Sure it might be categorised as Young Adult, but it's so rare to see realism and the supernatural alongside each other, especially when it's combined with simple yet unspoken feminism, so it's still worth a read. I say this despite the fact that the numerous point-of-views narrating the book will bitch slap you back into your teenage years and they'll bitch slap you hard.

I'm not sure how inclusive the book is, if it goes beyond the Swedish small town experience or if the realism falls flat for those who have no experience of Gymnasiet or trying to navigate from being a girl to a woman in that extremely hostile environment. Perhaps if that is lost the book also loses a lot of it's power over you, because I think, despite the pain of reliving it all, it was those elements that was so thrilling I couldn't stop reading. The paranormal aspect was great, but it was the realism that was spellbinding.

I might also be a little biased, because one of the co-authors is a personal favourite of mine. I've had a small crush on him ever since I discovered his chronicles which were always that perfect combination of geek and gay. Also the book itself, in addition to all the other glory, contains the seeds of a slowly developing love story which just so happens to be queer. That was a nice little surprise.

It's so rare to be getting all these elements, the supernatural, the real, the memories, the empowerment, the feminism and insight into how compassion is created, in the same piece of fiction. So if I were you I'd ignore the Young Adult label and read it anyhow.

Or if you're curious about what it's like to come of age for the female population in small town Sweden then this is the book for you.

I've figured out why the internet is getting more and more depressing. Once upon a time it used to be words. It was a way to escape all the materialism and vanity of the real world. A little hiding place where you could find hippies and bohemians and people who didn't mind taking a few minutes to just talk to you. Now that's replaced by the general vanity and consumption culture only times a hundred. And it's all about pictures. People are cold and cruel. Everything becomes an object. They use their words to consume and destroy. Never about the connections. Always about what they can gain or destroy. Never about the giving.

In other words, I miss the days of BB and XOC.

Somewhere out there someone must have written extensively about the impact the increasingly common correlation between women of colour and queer women in pop culture has on the heteronormative understanding of “woman”. I’d like to read that, but I have no idea where to start looking for it. Anyone care to guide me in the right direction? Or any direction?

Do you ever feel like you're drowning in parallels? In barely graspable connections that linger on the tip of your tongue but never form coherent sentences? Or if you do grasp them it's only to begin unravelling a thread so huge, so long, so massive, you cannot contain it but will be smothered by the inevitable avalanche of information, facts, metaphors and concepts.