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A lesson on international relations and social anthropology: Creating collective cultural narratives on the "other". Subtly.

Made in China.

I´ve come to a new conclusion regarding what I want to be when I grow up. The fact is that the US is a land of opportunities, right? I still doubt that the country's citizens (eg. R and Scotty) realize just how many opportunities they have in life: Take Jacko for example. Poor black boy miraculously turned into super rich white woman! And almost the spitting image of Sigourney might I add (a tad bit freaky but still..).

So screw this studying stuff, I´m moving to the States to become a rich cool black rapperman. Like Mac Hammer or whatever his name was=) Wow.. the possibilities are endless..

Do you sometimes feel like the load is just getting too heavy?


What I´ve decided to do is to just stay calm first of all and start working on making the load lighter. And that´s exactly whats happening as we speak. By tomorrow I´ll have finished my exam and only have a zillionbillion other things/exams to ponder! Cool! Positive thinking is the way to go, don´t you think?

I think I need two brains. That way I could avoid cloning all of me (another Marjaana would cost me alot cause I´d have to feed it and buy it clothes and stuff..) and get the benefits of being able to think about my exam with one brain and my thesis with the other! GENIOUS! Being blessed with only one brain has left it confused: how do "genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia-Hertzegovina" and "avoiding cognitive dissonance with the just world phenomenon (that is almost exactly like karma!)" fit together? Well they don´t!!

Mumblegrumblegroan...

Here it is: The Duplicator! (as introduced by Silje through Calvin and Hobbes) Now my only fear is that my clone is going to actually be the duplicate of me, indicating that not too much would get done in either Thailand or Israel because of the thinning out of responsibility. You know (at least R knows!), the bystander effect. Kindof.. Anyway, both are thinking that the other will step up and take responsibility to gather data for a thesis and both just end up hanging out and drinking Mai Thai´s or eating hummus!

The main point of today´s blog is to vent.

I have a passion for Israel. I don´t know what is going on, but my interest for the Israel-Palestine conflict just grows and expands as we speak. So it´s not a passion for Israel more than it is for Palestine, I just have more experience on Israels side. They´re just so wierd, both of them. Seriously! And as a student of conflicts, naturally one that seems to have no resolution is on the more exiting side. I decided to stay out of it when it comes to my thesis and have skipped along to a more tranquile environment, the activist environmental monks in Thailand. Planting trees and stuff, you know.. Anyway, my friend Silje has stepped up to the challenge and is getting me all worked up about I-P again! We have come to a solution though, cause Silje would like to go to both Thailand and Israel, just like me. Ok, here goes: cloning. Thats the plan, to clone one of me and one of Silje and to go to both places!

Spending too much time at school again..

I must admit that that was the first time for me.. fishing in the Arctic Ocean. Before our succesful fish hunt was over, we started feeling the effects of the piercing icy wind in our brains as well as our toes. We somehow ended up singing "You can leave your vest on" and dancing like they did in the movie Full Monty. Hmm.. I don´t have any pictures of our sexy diaper vests yet but be sure to look out for them within the next couple of days!

Aaah. I read the article again in a more sane state of mind and it actually said that people who had made anti-regime comments on their Blogs had been captured. So infact bomb isn´t gonna do it for me. Should I maybe then say for example... Bush! That´ll get them agitated, what ever totalitarian country they happen to come from.

Check this out: I read in Newsweek last night, while suffering of insomnia, that there have been several Bloggers who have been captured and tortured. This is apparently because of the content of their Blogs that have been filtered through and found to be pro-terrorist in one way or an other. This left me with a very tempting idea that I finally fell asleep to.. What if I also were to be provocative? I could cut the crap that I have been writing about and just start saying bomb-bomb-bomb-bomb-bom-bo-bom-bom-bomb. Bomb. And publishing dangerous pictures. Let´s see what happens!

Oh man.. I personally think the resemblance is just too striking! I´ll leave the decision up to you.

Adrenaline is a funny thing. After another exhausting gym day for the brain at the uni yesterday I thought that I couldn´t achieve anything else for the rest of the day exept laying on the couch and staring at the TV.

But lo and behold!!

We had set an appointment with Kjetil, our secure and muscular climbing instructor, so the couch was out of the question. I could feel my palms starting to sweat after we got to talking about what we were going to practice.. lead climbing oooooo! Which could be freely translated to "the thing that climbers do when they start getting bored of the more secure types of climbing and want to once again achieve that crazy feeling you get when you know that what you´re doing is a tad bit risky". So basically its the type where you take the rope up with you instead of it already hanging from the roof. What a rush of blood to the head! My body was so enthusiastic many hours after we got home that i could hardly get it to calm down so that I could fall asleep. Now thats what I call a hobby!

I have just witnessed the system from the inside. And when I say system I mean Norwegian healthcare and when I say from the inside, I mean from the outside. Kind of. I don´t actually know what happened in the whole process or how me and Doc got to talking about Norwegian backpacks in Gran Canaria? (I don´t have one, he didn´t have one, I´ve never been there, he´s never been there..) Or why I ended up peeing into a little cup?? But that´s how it goes I guess. And he also ended up telling me to lie a little so that we could screw the system and so that I wouldn´t have to pay anything for the whole package! And at the end he just said that if anything goes wrong, I´d know where to find him. I mean what could go wrong? It´s not like we were planning to form an insurgent group or anything like that, I was just supposed to pee in a cup! Reasons unknown but still. I´m just a little confused..

There is an air of joy floating around in Tromsö and the credit for it can be given to one element that has been missing from our lives. I´ll give you a hint:

Tromsobians have been inspired to spend time outside after the missing element showed up and so have we. But before we got to where we were going, there were moments of doubt about our ability to actually get there. At least in my case..

But the prize at the end of the hill, after all the pondering and sweating and slipping and sliding was over, was better than expected.

What takes 3 and a half hours, makes you laugh so much that you spill at least a teaspoon of pee into your knickers upon every outburst and makes you question the unsensitivity of men? Well my dear readers, the answer to this riddle is so simple that its almost ridiculous: A GOOD OLD BOLLYWOOD MOVIE! I´ve never seen one before saturday, I´ve only experienced the joy of these movies through the imitations my sweethearts Elina and Tamir always made me laugh with. I was overwhelmed by the amount of singing, dancing and tears that where present during those hours we spent in Verdensteatret.. Man, those Indian dudes cry more than the guys in Spanish soaps ("Mariaaa? PorQUE?!?! snifflesniffle..)