365 things you can do

Would you let that beard into your home?

Today’s guest blogger is Farzad Farzaneh, and he thought he was the only one in Sweden with that name. Until he Googled himself. And started a blog.

Stalking is a phenomenon spontaneously pretty gross. The first image that comes to me when I hear the word is a sweaty and wheezy man standing in some bushes that gets off on looking into a lit kitchen observing his victims doing everyday things:

23:13: She scratched her head.

23:22: She looks in the fridge, but doesn’t take anything out.

23:58: She gets naked and lies down under the covers.

Or the stalker is an evil person with evil motives. Like an ex-boyfriend with too much testosterone who’s dropped everything to stalk his former girlfriend. We have seen it on films, we don’t like it, we might even be disgusted by it. Most would agree: a stalker is a disturbed person in need of help!

But there can also be more or less harmless and actually pretty pleasant motives that drive us to stalk someone. It could actually be about loving the spontaneous and adventurous in life. The driving force can of course be to step out of the gray daily routine and going with your impulses. Going all-in can be a little scary. But go for it man.

This spring I learned that there’s a man living just a few blocks away from me that has the exact same name as me. And when I’m not called Anders Andersson but Farzad Farzaneh! An incredibly rare name in Sweden. The fascination made me want to know more about and to get closer to this man. I followed my intuition and allowed myself to be a little crazy. At the risk of treading ever so lightly on his toes, I initiated a project that was about finding out more about him and then seeing where that’d lead me. I gave the project a name and with the first 365-post in mind I started a blog as well - as a way to keep a record of my work. One day my project ceased to be about spectating. It was when my "victim" (an extremely ungrateful word in the context) got in touch with me and told me to stop exposing his life on the Internet. Since I’m only a little crazy, I did as he said and censored most of my posts. It's all about stalking with style and dignity. But the blog is up and I got a promise of having coffee together. How that went, you can read about here.

Some things have to be experienced to be understood. Giving birth, hiding from enemy aircrafts and planning an event. You don’t know miserable the experience is until you’re there at 08.00 and realize you don’t have a power outlet, that the midwife has terrible breath or that someone’s taken a crap in the shelter and that there isn’t any toilet paper.

Watching films and making films are two entirely different things. By being included as an extra in a movie you will give you a small glimpse of what a hell it can be.

It all took place one dark November night in Malmö, where I was as an extra in a friend's short film. The film would be a few minutes long and he had already put several months of preparation into it. The scene we were shooting took place outside a hotel and I was to walk past one of the main actors who, in the film, was waiting for his girlfriend.

The whole thing took eight hours. Not only because it was cold and raining and blowing so hard you had to wipe the lens of the camera every two minutes. For some strange cosmic reason people kept exiting the hotel all the time so we had to shoot the scene over and over again.

Since then I look at movies in a completely different way. My respect for film directors and the entire ensembles behind films like Lord of the Rings and Titanic is almost religious. I will never ever again say that a movie is bad. Perhaps that story was lousy. But the production is admirable.

Text: Navid Modiri

Today’s guest blogger is Camilla Orjuela, a peace researcher who in addition to peace is also interested in tango, poetry and life in general.

I think it's the small things that can get to you. If you suffer from a real disaster (losing someone who means everything to you or suffering a serious illness) you go into a kind of "emergency mode" and manage wonderfully in any way even though it cuts like a knife in the heart and you feel like you’ve been kicked into space all alone without wings. It is somewhat different for the small stuff - the things that can trip you in everyday life, which have the power to suddenly get you to sit on a sidewalk sobbing, kicking the wall and leaving marks or screaming at some innocent bystander. You probably know what the triggers are in your life. Perhaps a neighbor's disgusting taste in music is heard through the wall again. Your boss’s annoying voice at staff meetings. Pedestrians who are always in the middle of the bike path when you’re in a rush. The endless "press 1, press 2" while holding for customer support. The things that push us over the line into temporary madness.

For me it was the doors at work. I work at the university. Free thinking and openness, one might think. But no. A nightmare of heavy doors, access cards and codes. To go from the break room to my office with a cup of tea, an evening snack and a pile of articles while getting all the doors open seems more impossible than achieving world peace.

But you can outsmart your enemies. Transform them from evil mood killers to little moments that you fill with something good and useful. I started with an annoying electrical door that opens in slow-motion, slow enough to break you even on your most merry day. I began to kill the time by kicking. Kicking as high as possible (in the air that is) while the door opened. I became better and better at it each time I passed the slow-motion-door. Eventually I found it fun rather than tedious to go through that door.

You can use your little moments for anything. If you’re trying to learn a new language, you can choose a phrase to practice when your enemies show up. Or maybe a song verse you want to get really good at, or a dance move. If you’re religious you can use the time for a small prayer, where you thank God (or any higher power) for how wonderful life is (please specify). If you’re into self-help books an affirmation can be nice (tell yourself how cool and great you are).

After the slow-motion-door I went after the worst and heaviest doors in the stairwells, which squeeze you like the garbage compactor in Star Wars once you’ve finally pried them open. I decided to bend down and touch the floor each time before I try to get through (at least if no one is looking). I hope to become a bit more flexible from this exercise but it also leaves room for a little prayer ("God, I bow before your greatness and thank you for all the doors you give me to open throughout life", or something like it). If you manage to touch the floor, even though you’re carrying a tea cup and a sandwich and reading materials it’ll be a piece of cake to get through that monster of a door. Haha, you have lost the power to break me!

Today’s guest blogger is Jonna Abelsson,a 32 year-old, born and raised in Trollhättan, Sweden. She now lives in Gothenburg, is a little sister, a child of divorce, an indie kid, an HIV-preventor, she talks on the radio on P3 Christer and she’s also an anglophile. She thinks that Ben Gibbard is a genius. She read Nina Björk's "Under det rosa täcket" at the age of 23 and got quite an awakening. She gets upset thinking about narrow-mindedness, SUVs in the inner city, global injustice, sexism and people’s lack of humility. Likes: Commitment, love, good food, champagne & juice, good music, rock biographies and Paul Auster.

In English, the phrase "Show & Tell" is associated with teaching schoolchildren how to talk in front of a crowd of people by holding some sort of presentation on a topic chosen in advance, or about something they’ve brought with them from home. My friend Annika told me a while back that she and some friends from Umeå had brought the concept to Norrland and had made a version of their own..

They had also moved the activity, from some kind of strained classroom situation and people with whom you were forced together, to a living room comprising only close friends. And they had simply discovered a brilliant way to spend time with their best buddies, and a way that they could also learn interesting facts about something completely random as well as teaching their friends brand new stuff. As a little added bonus, people that had previously been a bit scared to talk in front of people got a chance to talk about something they in which were interested in front of people they liked and knew.

So. Show & Tell means that you meet up with a bunch of friends on any day / evening. You can get snacks / food / drinks, which adds to the atmosphere, but if you’re broke and skip the frills then that’s okay too.

You decide in advance who’s going to Show & Tell that day. Next time it’s someone else's turn. The only rule we have is that you can’t show & tell something that is directly related to one's job because it’s too boring and predictable. The idea is that you learn something about your friends that you might not already know. I learned that a close friend competed in diving as a young teenager at an elite level, that another was shark expert, that another knew basically everything about dachshunds, and how one was an expert on crocheting who put several people to work during the presentation. Not to mention how many people have a wonderful obsession with Star Wars, for example. Of course, I know a lot about Star Trek Voyager and have surprised friends with my geeky knowledge of Starfleet, the Klingon language, the Delta Quadrant, the Borg and the USS Voyager NCC-74656. So apart from you learning a lot, you also get the chance to show a whole new side of yourself to your loved ones. You can make your own PowerPoint presentations, gadgets, demonstrations, pamphlets, films or just talk passionately about something that you like and are good at, without a lot of props.

It’s highly recommended. I get happy just thinking about it.