This is a rather random poem that I wrote, that expresses a feeling I think everyone has at times. I don’t usually write poems, you know, but this one is not about love, it’s about significance, and about being a human. Enjoy.

“Like a newborn,
I praise myself and what I have made
I fill myself with pride, and I feel,
for a fleeting moment,
that I am of significance.Like a newborn,
I learn, and am inspired by what I make,
each new thing seems infinitely more refined, and I feel,
for a fleeting moment,
that I am evolving.

Like a newborn,
I can be fragile, and my world can be destroyed,
smashed by realization that I will never be,
for a fleeting moment,
one of those, of true significance.

But like any newborn,
I may cry and scream awhile,
and then forget come dinnertime,
about my insignificance.
And like the fool I am, filled with pride for insignificant things, I remain inspired.”

Awhile back, I was getting a delivery. The delivery was, I’m afraid to admit, supposed to arrive so early that I simply stayed up throughout the night. My schedule is a little gooky, but 10 am was about 4 hours after I go to bed usually, so it kind of made sense. More sense than trying to backflip and wake up earlier, anyway.
Now, we all know what happened. It’s obvious. I was up, I got more and more tired. 10 o’clock passed, and so did 11, and so did 12, and Kalle got reeeeeeally tired.

So I lie down in my bed and start watching something random. Now, while I lie there, eyes drooping, I think to myself, “I should blog about the fact I knew all along that the delivery would arrive just as I fall asleep, because I know it will.” And it did.

The day afterwards, I thought to myself, “Hm. I thought about blogging about that matter, but eh, why should I do that at all? It’s so obvious a thing. Like blogging about eating breakfast. (Though, granted, some do that too — nothing wrong with that… just don’t expect me to read it…)

So later the same day, I thought to myself, “Hm. I thought about thinking about blogging about that matter. Maybe I should blog about the fact I thought about the matter and that I in fact found it so plain a matter that it wasn’t worth blogging about.”

And then I caught myself thinking “Wow. I should blog about the fact I thought about thinking about blogging about that matter.”

Then I caught myself — no, seriously, I did — thinking “Jesus christ, I should blog about the fact I thought about thinking about thinking about blogging about something. Screw the actual topic, the fact I seriously thought about thinking about thinking about thinking about blogging about something is in itself hysterical.”

And on it went. I couldn’t stop myself. At some point it took me several minutes to finish the myriad of “thinkings” to get to the blog deal. So there you have it. I succumbed to the desire to blog about the thinking of the fact I thought about the thinking of the thinking of the disinclination of thinking about blogging about the fact I thought about the thinking of the thinking of the discinclination, and so on.

No braincells were purposefully harmed in the writing of this blog post.

- “More than a decade of hard lobbying by two powerful trade groups, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), has convinced U.S. lawmakers and law enforcement officials that it’s worth using America’s muscle to protect movie and music interests abroad. Now, lawmakers are calling the trade groups, asking what else Congress and the government can do for the entertainment industry.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/14/AR2006061402071.html

Allow me to repeat that. It is worth using America’s muscle to protect movie and music interests abroad.

Allow me to clarify that. By “America’s muscle”, we cannot presume anything other than “American military power”, at best used as a threat, and at worst used to murder people. Taking lives over movies and music.

How hilarious is that? It’s quite hilarious, lemme tell ya.

Right up until they start dropping nukes over my head. After all, I committed the mortal sin of being in the same country as some guy who has an unhealthy obsession with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Lost, 24, or whatever else there is (or was) the so called entertainment industry spews out these days. (Speaking of that, this gives a kind of Romanesque, Gladiatorish meaning to the word entertainment, doesn’t it?)
I’ve kind of felt that this whole thing has been steadily ascending toward war. War, over movies. What’s left of us in the future won’t know whether to laugh or cry when they look at the dumb shit being produced today and compare it to the devastation that will befall us over that same, dumb, mass-produced shit.

Something I find particularly interesting (and cute) about languages are the various “sounds” people make to express feelings. Swedish and English are rather similar in this respect, but Japanese has some very cute and odd sounds to express things.
For one, “uhn” or “un” mean “yes” sort of like the English “uh-huh”. “Fun” means “hum”. Drawn out (”fuuun?”) it becomes something like “huh!”. “Eeee?” is similar to the English “Eeeeh?” and means confusion, but short (”eh”) it means “yes”.
I’m generalizing a bit here, but I think you get the point.

“Iya” means “no”, as opposed to the English “yah” sound, and the Swedish “ja”. “Iya da!” is very frequently expressed especially by kids or young adults, and is akin to “No way!” or “Never!” or “I don’t wanna!” etc.

(Speaking of young adults, by the by, my Japanese apparently sounds like that of an old Japanese male. I need to work on that…)

(I mean I need to work on making it sound even more like an old Japanese male. Who wouldn’t want to give the impression of being an old Japanese lad, anyway?)

It gets really interesting when you go into sounds that are very vague in English/Swedish, like “the sound you make when you’re trying to think of something”. Some say “uhh….”, others say “um…..”, yet others say “and…..” and so on. These sounds are more distinct in Japanese and go either “anooo…” or “eeetooo…”. Needless to say, I was very skeptical about these two until I heard a native Japanese use them for the first time. “Ano ne…?” means something like “hey…?” or “hey now…”. “Anooo” is a way to subtly call someone’s attention (”Um… … …. am I supposed to be in this class?”), but is also used to express the “uuuuuh….” that in English means “what the fuck are you saying/doing?” (disbelief, shock, etc).
I have not researched it one bit, but the origin of some of these sounds in Japanese seem logical enough. The word “ano”, for example, means “that [something]“, as in the sentence “ano hon” (”that book [over there where you are not]“).

One distinct situation where the sounds differ in Swedish, English and Japanese is expressing pain. In English, this is “ouch” or “ow!”. In Swedish this is “aj!”. In Japanese this is “Itai!”. Sometimes you hear someone going “Ow ow ow!!” (traditionally while jumping up and down and shaking their hand or whatever body part got caught in the fire). In Swedish this is expressed as well, in the same fashion, as “ajajaj!” but this becomes more of a sympathetic sound by an observer than an actual sound made by the wounded person. In Japanese the sound goes along the line of English, and sounds something like “Itatatatata…!”.

So, conclusively, if you see a Japanese person jumping up and down going “Itatatata!” you can now smile knowingly about it. If you have more “sounds” like these, please comment on this post. I’m sincerely curious about it.