Always Forward

Time keeps moving forward,
Always forward, measuring change.
Moving energy and matter through space.
Artificially divided into intervals,
We call by different names.
Seasons and seconds.
Hours and eras.
We order our linear lives in this way.
For we too are matter and energy,
Constantly being moved forward by time.
Our form is sentient, observant,
Aware that it’s being moved.
Fearing the moment when awareness ends.
Naming that moment, death.
Matter is neither created, nor destroyed.
So we won’t be literally be gone,
When we’re dead.
We’ll no longer be in the same sentient form,
But we’ll still be here.
Our matter, our energy,
Still being pulled along,
Always forward, by time.

A Day in the Life of an Expat

I read the news today. Oh boy.

On Wednesday, November 9th, 2016, I awoke in the five o’ clock hour and just lay there in a half-asleep state, my brain still feeling the effects of the sleeping pill I had taken before going to bed. I use them only rarely now, when I know it will be impossible to shut my brain off in order to fall sleep. This was one of those nights. The day before was the 2016 presidential election back in my home country, the USA. In Sweden we are several time zones ahead, so when I finally pulled my groggy ass out of bed at six AM, it was still going on. The polls had closed but they were counting up the votes. I went to sleep the night before feeling relatively confident that Hillary Clinton would win, hopefully with a sizable landslide. Of course she would win. Everybody said she would. They had totally dismissed Donald Trump’s chances and were already talking about her presidency in the present tense. When she wins, they said, the cult of personality started by Donald Trump and its zealous adherents will still be around, and they will be very pissed off and very loud. She will have to figure out how to deal with them and heal the country. This was the constant narrative being repeated during the final weeks leading up to the election.

But then, the totally unexpected happened, was still happening as a matter of fact, as I opened up Facebook fully anticipating the messages of triumph and joy from my American friends. However, those weren’t the messages I saw. Instead, I saw a lot of updates written in full caps, about the shock and despair and horror they were feeling. Wait a minute…

Thus began the Five Stages of Grief.

Denial:

My husband made us coffee as I sat there reading those updates, not fully comprehending what I was seeing. “Uh…so it looks like Trump won,” I reported. The words hit me like a sledgehammer. My heart was pounding in my chest, like I had just finished running a marathon. At first I actually thought this had to be a joke, that my friends were mistaken. Or they were trolling. I mean, there’s no possible way that Donald Trump could be the next president of the United States. Right? That’s just ludicrous.

“Whaaaat?!?” His response was undoubtedly being repeated around the world.

I should have been getting ready for work, but at that moment all I could do was sit there, ignoring my coffee and trying to figure out what had just happened, because it hadn’t really happened.

Bargaining:

After all, they were still counting up the votes and neither candidate had reached the 270 vote threshold in order to win. He was ahead but there was still hope. There was still time. It hadn’t happened yet. Hillary could still win. And she was AHEAD in the popular vote! But Trump had taken North Carolina and Ohio and…Florida. They said that if Trump took Florida then he would win. It was well and truly over.

Depression:

I somehow managed to shower and dress myself and board a train to take me into the city to work. I sat there on the train feeling completely numb. I no longer wanted to look at Facebook. The updates and articles being posted were just too goddamned depressing. I needed to try and focus on the day ahead of me, on my students. I teach Home Economics at an international school in Växjö, Sweden, and I went over the things that needed to be done. The ninth graders would be baking little meat pies and spinach-feta pies and I had to make sure I bought Quorn crumbles for the vegetarian students so they could substitute those for the ground beef in the meat pie. The sixth graders were making candy apples and caramel popcorn, and I was wondering where I put the Popsicle sticks.

I had to switch to a bus when I got to the train station in Växjö. It was a minus four (24 Fahrenheit) freezing cold morning, as November mornings in Sweden typically are. The bus was late, and as I stood there on the totally exposed bus platform, for fifteen minutes, then twenty, and then twenty five minutes, I watched bus after bus which wasn’t my bus drive by. I thought about jumping in front of one of them. I didn’t want to live on this planet anymore. Nothing made sense. Donald Trump had won the election. He had done every single thing wrong, lost all three debates, committeed gaffe after gaffe, and got caught doing and saying things that would have been deal breakers for literally any other candidate. And yet, he won. Hate had won. Sexism had won. Racism had won. Bigotry had won. Islamophobia had won. Xenophobia had won. Anti-Intellectualism had won. Stupidity had won. The Ugly American had won.

By the time the bus finally arrived, I couldn’t feel my toes, so instead of throwing myself under it, I boarded it and felt its delicious warmth surrounding my body.

Anger:

I eventually got to work. Groceries were bought and I welcomed the distraction of lively practical lessons. Every now and then, an American colleague would ask me, “So, are you a proud American?” in a can-you-believe-this-shit-is-happening kind of way. Swedish colleagues would ask me how I felt about the election, and I would tell them that it hadn’t really sunk in yet. Right before my last lesson, there was some kind of minor drama involving two students’ lockers. They both started chattering at me in rapid Swedish and I couldn’t really understand what they were saying. At that moment, I couldn’t have cared less, and I told them so. “I don’t care.” I was fighting back tears at this point. If I get an email from a parent informing me that they didn’t appreciate me telling their kid that I didn’t care about their problem, then I would apologize and tell them that Donald Trump had just been elected president and I was barely holding it together emotionally. And they would totally understand.

There was a staff meeting directly after my last lesson, but I decided to skip it. It was almost miraculous that I managed to show up to work at all. Throughout the day, a various times I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs, “WHAT IS HAPPENING????” As I sat on the bus on the way home, it finally sunk in. This was reality. And the tears finally came.

Acceptance:

For some reason, my left ankle was killing me all day. I must have taken a bad step and twisted it. I limped through my lessons and when I got home, my husband took a look at it and said it was all swollen and bruised, like it was sprained. I have no idea what happened. I certainly do not remember spraining my ankle. But I must have. Nothing to do now but deal with it.

Almost every woman you know…

…has a story of sexual assault. Some of us have several stories.

The first time I can remember it happening I was probably about eight years old. I was riding my bicycle home on a sunny afternoon in a calm Los Angeles suburb. A man walking in the opposite direction waved at me, indicating he wanted to talk to me. I slowed down and stopped obligingly, and he asked me if I knew where a certain street was. I started to tell him that yes I did know where that was, but as soon as I started describing the way, he walked closer to me and shoved his hand down the front of my shirt. He felt up my bare chest for a few seconds, then pulled his hand out, and walked away, giving me a self-satisfied smirk that told me that he had just done this thing to me and there was nothing I could do about it. I didn’t speak or scream or react at all. Mortified and ashamed don’t really describe what I was feeling. I felt violated. Completely and totally violated. I’d never been touched that way by anyone before. But at eight years old I didn’t know how to process those feelings. I rode the rest of the way home, turned on the TV and watched cartoons. I tried to block out what just happened. I tried not to see his face. I was determined that I would not cry because I didn’t want anything to seem out of the ordinary.

I never told anyone or spoke about it until recently, when I told my husband. This was my introduction to sexual assault. I was eight years old and it happened in broad daylight. Other things have happened to me since then that make this first incident seem pretty mild by comparison. It had long since been buried and forgotten.

Then Donald Trump’s “grab’em by the pussy” scandal hit the news. That’s when women started sharing their stories of sexual assault, about how powerless and violated and weak it made them feel. It’s the guilt and shame that makes us never want to report it or talk about it. We know that we will be told that we must have wanted it if we made no effort to fight them off.

As for that, I can tell you that when it’s happening to you, these are the thoughts going to through your mind:

Oh god, this is really happening to me.
Please, please, don’t hurt me.
Please don’t kill me.
Please just let it be over soon.
Please don’t kill me.
Please just go away when you’re finished and leave me alone.
Please don’t kill me.

You’re not thinking about fighting back. You’re just hoping it will be over soon and that he won’t hurt you or kill you when he’s done.

To men like Donald Trump, woman are not thinking and feeling human beings. We are nothing more than play things to use and abuse whenever he feels like it, and then discard when he tires of us. We’re not really people and therefore we don’t need to give consent. Merely being in his presence is consent enough. After all, if we didn’t want to be grabbed, we shouldn’t have been within grabbing distance. The onus is always on the woman to not allow herself to assaulted or raped. Men like Donald Trump say they are unable to control themselves. She was drunk. She was wearing a short skirt. She was there. They see a pretty thing and they just act, and they know that most of the time they will get away with it.

This is not an indictment of all men. Far from it. There are so many wonderful, strong, loving, caring, supportive men out there. Men like my husband. This is about the pussy-grabbing, cat-calling, child-molesting monsters out there. A man-like creature who has the pretensions to the office of POTUS is one of them, and that must not be allowed to happen.

The Wisdom of the Swedes: Too much patriotism is a very bad thing

Perspective.
I has it.

It’s what most Americans don’t have. At least those who haven’t lived abroad for an extended period of time. They are, for the most part, totally unaware of how they and their country are viewed by other countries. As an American living outside of the United States I have the uncommon perspective of viewing my country from the outside, and I can tell you, at the moment it ain’t very pretty.

What I can tell you is that most of the people I know love the idea of America and the people of America. They think it’s fascinating that I come from there, and choose to live here. For the record, here is Sweden. This is a country that thinks so little of itself they can’t comprehend why anyone would want to come here to live indefinitely and deliberately. At the same time, they are so elitist, they make American exceptionalism look like nothing. They honestly believe they are the best at everything, but unlike Americans, they’d never dream of boasting about their superiority. That would be very un-Swedish. Instead they are casually patronizing about it in an, “Oh, you poor thing.” kind of way. Americans adore their flag and display it proudly everywhere and on everything for any reason or no reason at all. Swedes love their flag as well, so much so that they only bring it out for special occasions: National Day (kind of like Swedish Fourth of July), Mid-Summer (the most important Swedish holiday of the year), graduations and weddings. However, it’s considered very un-Swedish to display the flag for no reason other than, like their American cousins, pure patriotism. The Swedes believe without a doubt that they better than everyone else, but they have an uneasy relationship with patriotism. They keep outward displays of patriotism in check because it’s considered to be a sort of gateway drug to a fascist authoritarian regime ala Adolph Hitler.

Ergo: Swedish flag -> Patriotism -> Nationalism -> National Socialism -> Hitler-like demagogue seizing power/World War III/collapse of civilization/nuclear annihilation/return to a stone-age like existence.

Maybe the Swedes are onto something here. Maybe too much patriotism can be a bad thing. A very bad thing. It’s okay to know that you’re number one but don’t shout about it. Don’t shove it in people’s faces. Don’t threaten with bodily harm and/or death, those who disagree with you or who would rather not participate in your patriotic display. Too much patriotism riles people up and turns them into a mob. A mob with a funny-looking man gesticulating behind a podium and telling it that everything is going to hell, and it’s all the fault of the Jews/Mexicans/Muslims/Gays, and only he can fix things and make everything great again. Yes, great again, because obviously things were fantastic before Those People came along, and they can be Great Again if they all just went away, if they build a wall to keep them out, exclude them from entering the country, or if they’re already citizens and cannot be deported or excluded, put them in camps to keep Us safe from Them.

And the mob believes the funny-looking man. It responds to him and wonders why it never saw this before. Their Muslim neighbor was always friendly before but now that they think about it, there was always something Not Great about him. He’s probably building a bomb in his basement. And their Mexican co-worker is obviously a car thief, or a drug dealer or a pimp. They are no longer friendly neighbors or co-workers. They are dangerous infiltrators trying to undermine our freedom and our democracy.

However, the thing about the authoritarian figurehead and its mob is that they depend on one another. One cannot exist without the other. As soon as that strong authoritarian figure disappears, the mob evaporates. It turns into individuals who suddenly blink back into existence and ask themselves what the hell just happened. One thing that I’ve read a lot lately is that even if Donald Trump loses the upcoming election, that his supporters will still be out there and the thought of that scares the shit out of people. But without Donald Trump, the “Make America Great Again” movement will eventually quiet down and become only a whisper. I doubt he will have the stamina to continue his rallies after the election. And he’s not getting any younger. By the next election, he will be seventy-four years old. Will be run again? Or will he wait until 2024, when he’s 78? At that point, I doubt he would have the strength to make the effort.

After this election Donald Trump should just retire, secure in the knowledge that he came this close to Making America Great Again by leading the entire country over a cliff. But, it wasn’t meant to be. We like our country just the way it is, okay? We have no inclination for the kind of greatness that consists in persecuting and excluding anyone who is not a wealthy heterosexual white Christian male. Thanks anyway.

Heart Feelings Linger

Science.
For all you’ve given us,
You’re not much of a romantic.
Love, you tell us,
Is only in our heads.
Just a chemical reaction.
Elevated levels of dopamine,
Seratonin, and ocytocin.
Flooding our brains and bodies,
With intoxicating pleasure.
High from the uppers and opioids,
Created by our own brains,
We wouldn’t mind staying,
In this crazy-in-love,
Can’t-get-enough-of-you phase,
Forever and ever.
But, Science tells us,
Such feelings are fleeting.
Your feel-good chemicals,
Will level off,
Because love, you tell us,
Is only a chemical reaction.
Elevated levels of dopamine,
Doping our brains.
Seratonin, soothing our souls,
And intoxicating oxytocin.
Nothing more.
But love is more complicated,
Than chemistry.
What if the chemical levels,
Drop in our brains,
Because they’ve migrated to our hearts?
Settled in the neurons there.
Which is why when we’re apart,
From the one we love,
We feel a physical ache in our hearts.
It’s because heart feelings linger.
And if you don’t feel that pang,
Then those feel-good chemicals,
Never made their way to your heart.
They were, sadly, only in your head.

Bummertime

When summertime,
Goes on holiday,
It’s a real bummer.
And even more so,
For it to go,
During the summer.

Magnetism Organism

We live on the surface,
Of the shallow crust,
Of a gigantic magnet.
It has positive and negative poles,
Constantly interacting with one another.
Simultaneously repelling themselves,
And yearning to complete themselves.
Everything depends upon this polarization.
The rotation of the earth,
And its orbit around the sun.
The fusion reaction of the sun,
Generating the light,
Filling up the darkness,
Creating life itself.
Positive spaces,
Filling up the negative spaces,
With light and life.
They say we’re not made,
Of magnetic stuff.
But nature knew what she was doing,
When nature made our nature,
Just as as magnetic,
As the earth itself.

The summer of our lives…

I’ve always found the term “midlife crisis” to be a bit of a misrepresentation. Basically it means that you’ve reached a point in your life when you’re suddenly aware of your own mortality and you’d better goddamn well have some fun before you die. Where’s the crisis in that? Thank god you came to this realization before you got too old to do anything about it. At this point in your life, if you’ve followed the conventional path, you’ve probably been working and raising kids and acting like a responsible mature adult for years. Empty-nest syndrome has a lot to do with it as well. One day you discover that the kids are old enough to look after themselves. Then they move out to go to college or start their own lives.

Assuming your relationship has survived the trials and tribulations of raising kids, suddenly you and your significant other find something that was carefully packed away or misplaced for years: Your Lives BC (before children). What to do…what to do? It’s only natural to pick up where you left off. What were your passions and interests when you were younger? What kind of fun did you like to have? Now you have the time and, most likely, the money to do all the things you always wanted to do, but couldn’t afford to, when you were a kid.

In other words, it’s summer time, baby. The season of prolific spring is over and it’s now time to revert at least partially to a child-like state. Play, relax, take that trip, drink too much, buy some kind of over-indulgent grown up toy like a Ferrari, or a sailboat, eat a lot of ice-cream, get a tattoo, take ukulele lessons.

Buy something completely pointless. Like a bubble machine.

A friend of mine recently posted this on facebook:

You know what I’ve always wanted? A bubble machine.
You know what I just bought? A bubble machine.
You know why? Because fuck you, it’s my midlife crisis and I’ll do what I damn well please.
Kidding. I just love bubbles.

This got me thinking about the whole midlife crisis idea. People tend to use it as excuse for doing something crazy and uncharacteristic for a person their age. The thing is that my friend and I are the same age, and we’re hardly middle-aged. I told him that this isn’t a midlife crisis at all. We’re in the summer of our lives, when it finally becomes “okay” to have fun again, to be immature if we want to without having to explain anything. In Sweden we have a saying: “Sommaren är kort.” It means, “summer is short.” Winter is just around the corner so you’d better lap up as much of the summer while you still can. However, I see no reason why we shouldn’t make our summer time last until the very last day of our lives.

So have another drink, put bacon on that sandwich, turn that that music up, stay up all night finishing that book, binge an entire season of Game of Thrones. #YOLO

And yes indeed, buy that bubble machine. Sommaren är kort.

MOAR GUNZ!!!

WE WANT MOAR GUNZ!!!
WE NEED MOAR GUNZ!!!
FUCK YOUR STUPID
REGULASHUNZ!
SHOVE THEM WHERE
THERE IS NO SUNZ!
MOAR GUNZ! FOR ALL
THE THIEVES
AND RAPISTS
MOAR GUNZ! FOR ALL
POTENTIAL TERRORISTS
MOAR GUNZ! FOR ALL
THE KILLERS TOO
MOAR GUNZ! FOR ME
MOAR GUNZ! FOR YOU
MORE GUNS!
IZ FUNZ
FOR EVERYONEZ!

Monsters and Machines

It’s a curious thing.
What makes a man begin to hate everyone,
And everything?
Is it an insurmountable sadness,
That drives him to madness,
That makes him not a man,
But a monster filled with rage?
Or rather a machine,
With no empathy or anything,
That makes one a human being.
Was he really a monster?
Was he really a machine?
Did he really hate those people?
How could he go through it?
Was it God that made him do it?
We can really only speculate.
What filled him with so much hate.
So much hatred.
So much death.
So many people willing,
To be the monsters and machines,
To do the hurting and the killing.