I’ve written that a reason for my upcoming trip is a restlessness, that I’m in need of some inspiration. However, I don’t want to give you the wrong impression. I’m not tired of geography. I have not lost faith in the discipline that I have chosen for my university education. It’s more that I’ve lost faith in the world’s ability to recognize the urgent need for people with the synthetized knowledge that geographers, among others, have. We’re on the brink of a potential crisis, unlike anything that mankind has ever experienced before, and the people who decide seem to think that there are so many other more important things to discuss, like money and the power relations between nations. That the fact that we are slowly, one step at a time, destroying our own habitat, the Earth, is of no importance. That makes me sad.

Geography is an academic discipline that dwells in the regions inbetween science and society. It is the discipline of spatiality, that borrows knowledge from all the other sciences and liberal arts and places them in an intertwined, place specific context. Geography wouldn’t be much of anything without the other sciences, but the other sciences tend to be far too abstract to be directly applicable in real life. This makes a geographer an excellent person for handling many of the environmental problems that we are facing. Advanced research in biology, chemistry, physics and geology is certainly needed, but in order to make the most of the research results, they have to be adjusted to a societal context – and that’s exactly what geography does. But still, it seems as if this connection between science and society is far too weak and the awareness of the need to connect is limited.

I guess it’s something that started around last summer, even though I can’t really pinpoint it. This feeling that maybe there was no point. I watch the news and read the papers and I just want to curl up into a ball and cry. The combined feeling that there is something terribly wrong with the world without enough effort put into changing it, and the more personal fear that even though I’m getting myself an education that is by no means superfluous, I might not get a job as a geographer because the demand is so low and why would I be the one to get a job among all the other competent and smart people being educated today. The fact that I took a course in climatology in the fall didn’t really help either. Some parts of the change are already out of our control.

So, there I was, not believing in the world that I lived in. The lack of hope was slowly seeping into other parts of my life, quite uncalled for, until I felt that I’d simply had enough. You see, I’m not really a cynical person. Many have tried to infect me with their cynisism, especially guys that for some reason have found my enthusiasm provoking, but it has never really stuck. I need to feel that I can do something, that I can achieve change – and mostly I have felt that I could. That’s why this hopelessness that has come over me is so dangerous. For me, it’s even life threatening.

I needed to get perspective. Not only read about all the ways in which we are destroying our planet, as we mostly do in the different sub-disciplines of geography, but also experience some of the constructive efforts that are being made to slow down and maybe even reverse this development. That’s why I’m going to Canada and western USA. I’m going to volunteer at three different farms. At these farms, they are using our natural resources in alternative ways that are not as destructive as the common practices used in most large-scale agriculture today.

It’s not a holiday. It’s an inspiration trip, a search for constructive input that I can take with me into my further studies, so that I won’t be overcome with the hopelessness again. And, hopefully, the journey will also help me regain some of my faith in the world aswell.

Sometimes, I talk far too much. Especially if I’m with someone new, someone that I think that I could like, someone who maybe makes me slightly nervous. The talking just won’t stop, as if I can hide all my fears and insecurities by dressing them up in big words. It’s as if I fear the silence, because in the silence I feel totally bared. But when I talk, there is no room for doubt, no room for questions. I am like a hurricane, and the people that stand in my way might find me amusing to start with, maybe even a little excitingly strange and eccentric, but after a while the words become a solid wall and most don’t even realise there is something to climb. And I’m too scared to help them.

Sometimes the most intimate thing you can do with someone is to be silent together. Or just to listen. When there are no big words to hide behind, that’s when the real communication can start. And it is scary. Utterly terrifying. To dare not to speak. That is something that I have yet to learn.

So. Excepting the visits to the kitchen for breakfast and lunch, I haven’t left my bed today. My colleague came to work with a cough yesterday and since we are stuck in a small, dusty archive together, she infected me too. My muscles ache and my throat is sore. Right now, she isn’t my favourite person. I don’t do this being sick business well.

So I feel that it’s just my right to lie here in bed feeling sorry for myself and catch up on all the TV shows that I haven’t had time to watch these last few months. Nice in a way, but really, not at all nice in all the others. I was supposed to drive my dad’s wife to the airport today, to get some practice. Tomorrow I’m supposed to have a small goodbye party. Now I won’t be able to bake the carrot cake and hazelnut meringue cake and the chocolate and orange ice cream cake. So, even if I get well enough to receive my guests tomorrow, I won’t have any cake to offer them and what’s the point in that? A party is not a party without a cake. That’s my philosophy. I might just as well call it off right now.

– – –

Later: I ventured out to the post office to get my driver’s license though. The actual card. I look slightly dim in the picture. But I guess that’s just as it should be. One shouldn’t look good on driving licenses and ID cards and in passports. And really, considering how I feel at the moment, the picture might be accurate. Dim. Just wanting for someone to feel sorry for me and go buy me pizza with four kinds of cheese. Please.

The first time I went abroad, I was three months old. Dad, mom and me were going to Karpathos, Greece, and I slept all the way on the flight there. A year later, we went again. That’s when I learned to love olives.

When I was five, we went to Zimbabwe. My mom was working with Zimbabwe then, and just before we landed I claimed that I saw a giraffe being chased by a lion through the airplane window. I might have been a child with a lively imagination, but later, when we drove south from Harare to Cape Town, we went through a national park and I yet again claimed to see an animal. This time, it was an elephant in a bush. The adults in the car didn’t believe me. My dad thought that since I was listening to Astrid Lindgren stories in my walkman, I couldn’t possibly be able to see animals at the same time. But I insisted, so finally they drove back. And there it was. A huge African elephant, eating away at an entire bush.

We also visited Victoria Falls during that trip. A group of small monkeys lived outside our hotel, and one afternoon I got some bread crums to give to them. They were cute and happy for my bread, but when they had taken everything, there was one monkey that wanted more. He must have thought that I still had some bread in my hand, because he grabbed it and bit my finger. He was probably as chocked as I was of the drops of blood that started flowing. I got it cleaned and it didn’t get infected or anything, but still I sometimes think that I caught something from the monkey that day. A subtle monkey disease that sometimes takes hold of me and makes me do strange and crazy things. It’s nice to have something to blame when people look at me strangely.

And that’s how my childhood continued. With a mom who worked for the Swedish international development agency and a dad who was a travel journalist until I was 17, I got used to traveling as other kids get used to visiting their grandparents on holidays. At 9, we went to South Africa and Botswana and parts of my journal became the first of my writings to be published in a newspaper, included in a piece dad wrote about traveling with children. Later, parts of my journal was included in pieces from France, Italy, Vietnam, Norway, Iceland and New York. And at 11, I lived with my mom in Tanzania for a little more than a year, uprooting my sense of home even more.

So maybe it isn’t that strange, this impulse that I have. When I don’t know what to do, I go traveling. That I automatically think of strange and foreign places when I feel the need for clarity and inspiration. And that it comes naturally to me to write about my experiences on the road. Because, when you think about it, that’s how I was raised.

The first six months after high school graduation were tough. I had no idea of where I was going and since no one wanted to hire me, I just spent my time at the library, taking long walks or just letting the days pass me by.

It was during this period that I discovered the TV shows. I hadn’t watched that much television before, what with my days being spent in school and at the stables and my evenings spent studying, reading or surfing on the internet. But now I suddenly had oceans of time and one Saturday I just happened upon the first season of Gilmore Girls. I was alone in my father’s huge apartment with a fever, and Lorelai’s and Rory’s quick and witty dialogue seemed like the perfect cure.

Soon I had finished all the seven seasons and went on to other stuff. By mid-fall, I was watching Grey’s Anatomy, House, Ally McBeal, Scrubs, Sex and the City, Six Feet Under, Heroes and Entourage. I could spend entire days in bed with my computer watching the shows, not even bothering getting up to get food.

Well, that went on for a couple of months. Then I got fed up with myself, got out of bed and applied to university. That spring I studied philosophy and since then I have been just as busy as before high school graduation. But still I get those lulls, those Sundays when I can’t seem to move an inch out of bed. That’s when I fall back into my old habit and watch episode after episode until the Sunday is gone and the week starts anew. A part of me feels that I’m wasting my time, that I should go outside instead, meet people, live a little. But another part of me is just too exhausted from all the studying and working and caring that I can’t be bothered. Some months, the other part wins every time.

And really, who can blame me, when there are so many great shows? How I Met Your Mother and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Downton Abbey and Community and The Good Wife and Lark Rise to Cranford and The Big Bang Theory and Greek. I just can’t seem to stop watching Grey’s Anatomy and during my weaker moments I even enjoy Supernatural. They create a brake in a chaotic life and oh, how I need that sometimes.

But my little TV show addiction hasn’t only led to me being asocial. It has also given me one of my very best friends. During that depressing period after graduation, I for some reason stayed in touch with one particular friend from high school. Natalia. Most of my other friends from high school I lost contact with, but her I kept texting and one day she invited me to drink tea at her house. We hadn’t been really close before, but that first cup of tea at her kitchen table led to more tea drinking sessions and when I think back on that fall, those moments at her kitchen table are a few of the only positive memories that I have. And one thing that we talked about, one of the things that made us discover our similarities in taste and humour, was when we both realised our shared passion for TV shows. Zach Braff was our hero and our guilty pleasure was the BBC miniseries made from Jane Austen novels and other costume dramas. I got her to start watching Bones, and then when she moved to Bolivia for two years and I went to visit her, we spent entire nights watching pirate copies of Scrubs and Bones in the guest house by the river, eating artichoke and huge, elbaborate fruit plates and drinking papaya and banana milkshakes and Amarula.

So, since Natalia came home from Bolivia about a year ago, we have started this tradition. Saturday nights or Sunday afternoons with TV shows. I cook or bake a cake and she brings crisps or ice cream and then we watch. We have seen the two seasons of Pushing Daisies, a few episodes of True Blood, the first season of Game of Thrones and the last few seasons of Bones, of course. If it’s Saturday, she sometimes spends the night and then we make American pancakes for breakfast and watch some more.

And it’s such a liberating feeling, to have someone to share with. Even if hours pass without us uttering a single word except for the bare minimum (“pass me the chocolate sauce”), there is another kind of trust being built during these TV show marathons. We are sharing our need to be asocial, to get some time off from the chaos that is life and go on vacation into other, imagined universes. There is comfort in doing this together. And when we are done for the day, we get up from the couch, stretch our stiff backs and take the dishes out to the kitchen. We have shared a secret. Now our batteries are re-loaded and we are ready to face the world again.

Those TV show marathons with Natalia are among the things that I will miss the most when I’m away.

Monday night: On the verge of tears. What have I been thinking? How could I ever imagine that I can leave, go away, stand on my own two feet on the other side of an ocean and half a continent?

It’s only the jitters. Or that’s atleast what I tell myself.

For one who writes a blog as personal as mine, an internet community such as Facebook shouldn’t be a big deal. I started my career as a citizen of the internet at the tender age of 12, when I became ZebraGirl @ Lunarstorm, a Swedish internet community. There, I kept a journal, wrote to my friends and had some really strange conversations with strangers. And from there I guess my internet identity started to grow, through several other internet communities and the blog that I started at 18, until Facebook came like a tsunami over the world and more or less destroyed all the competition.

I was 19 when I joined Facebook, and to start with I found it really practical. It had so many extra features, and since it was international, I could reconnect with some of the friends that I had outside of Sweden aswell. Especially during my travels in South America, I used Facebook alot – to upload photos, write to my friends and stay in touch with all the new people that I met on the road. A few of them I have actually been able to contact now, thanks to Facebook, so that I have couches to sleep on both in Portland and San Francisco this summer. Used as an extended address book, Facebook is an amazing tool.

But it’s the new developments with Facebook that have come with the introduction of smartphones that I find uncomfortable. Maybe I’m just scared and conservative and don’t understand the thing because I don’t have a smartphone. But people seem to live their lives through Facebook, updating their profiles with everything, photos and music and ideas and opinions and it’s kind of like high school, this showing off, and that automatically leads to me feeling inadequate.

Someone told me once that she envied and respected my integrity. For a reader of this blog that might sound strange, since I reveal just about anything about myself here. But for me it’s not the same thing. Here, I strive for some kind of artistic quality. I know that that sounds pretentious, and I’m not saying that I succeed with it – but it’s a goal. I haven’t totally lost hope yet of one day being able to call myself a writer, but to end up there I have to practice and practice. On this blog, with the knowledge that someone might read what I write, I have to make myself write well. With the potentiality of a reader, my writing becomes more alive. Not at all like my diary. That is probably the most boring read you could ever have.

And really, there are a lot of things that I don’t write about here. The everyday stuff, details. The things that someone might publish on the feed on Facebook. For me, that feed has become a way to stay distant from the people that I claim to know. I can read what they do and they can read what I do without us ever having a single conversation. It’s like tabloid headlines, but instead of celebrities the featured persons are my former classmates and stable buddies and collegues. I don’t really know why, but it makes me feel really sad and disconnected. It has gone so far now, that I try to avoid Facebook altogether. For other than the extended address book features, I stay away.

Because there is a difference. Here, on the blog, I am the writer and you are the readers. Here, I require no two-way dialogue. It is part of the concept, and I am well aware of what I write about. But there, on Facebook, we’re supposed to be friends, and for me friendship is about mutuality. If I tell you something, I want you to tell me something in return. My need for social interaction has never been dominant, I have always enjoyed my own company too much. So when I do spend time with someone, I have actively chosen to do so because the person intrigues me, challanges me or I like the way the person makes me feel. Small talk with no one in particular doesn’t appeal to me. And friendship isn’t something that I take lightly. It’s about sharing, about a personal connection – and on the Facebook feed I feel as if I loose all control over who I share what with. I feel as if I loose myself. I guess that’s where my integrity draws my line.

I’m reading “The folded world” by Catherynne M. Valente. Queen Hagia, the blemmye, writes: “I told her that this was her story, but if she had been my daughter she would not be so hopeless when it came to letters. I would have taught her to write her own history, how writing is like giving birth to yourself – no one can do it for you without making a mess.”

Someone asked me where this need to write comes from. That he didn’t understand. I’m not sure, but I think the need is something that I’ve created myself. It started as a game, grew out of boredom, but I lost control and here I am. Sentences growing in my head without my asking for them. I don’t know where it comes from, but I do know that I haven’t been this happy, felt this contentment for ages. Now that I’m writing again.

I guess people are different. That they need different things. I need to be allowed to sing. I need to be challanged. And I need to write.

I had promised myself that when I finished “Purple Hibiscus” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (a beautiful book, by the way, beautiful and horrifying), I wouldn’t borrow any more books from the library. I leave in less than three weeks and it would be so annoying if I had to go when I’m in the middle of a book that I can’t take with me. I should start reading one of the open source e-book classics that I got instead. That I will be able to continue reading on the other side of the Atlantic too.

But no. I just can’t help myself. “The folded world” by Catherynne M. Valente had just been returned when I arrived at the library to return my last library books, and I just couldn’t. I just had to. I mean, it’s Catherynne M. Valente! I am a library addict and there doesn’t seem to be a cure.

Anyway, finishing a book in two weeks shouldn’t be a problem. It’s not as if I have anything else to read. I have my driver’s license now. The only things I have to do now are to go to work, to pack, and to wait. I feel oddly liberated.

I remember writing a text about this right after I had started studying geography. The new studies meant meeting alot of new people and having alot of those potentially awkward conversations when you try to figure out if this person is someone that you could get along with for the next three years. Quite a few of those people were older than me, and talking to them I always felt so self-conscious. They seemed so relxed and sure of themselves and only talked of relevant things such as the previous lecture or pop culture, while I always ended up blurting out some or other story about myself when I got the feeling that it was my turn to add to the conversation.

I realized that I always related things to myself and my experiences. For me, talking about things as something abstract, not part of me, was almost impossible. And realizing this felt awful, because I didn’t want to be such an egocentric person. I wanted to be cool and detached, just like my classmates. They were mature, while I was still stuck in some late adolescence.

But this gave me a new thought, the thing that I later wrote that text about. Maybe my self-centered conversation skills were part of my age? At 21 I was still defining myself, trying to find that place in the world where I belonged. Maybe it wasn’t that strange that I compared the things that I was confronted with with the person that I was trying to become. That was just a way of getting to know myself. My older classmates on the other hand were several years ahead of me and had left that self-centered period behind them. I envied them.

Later that fall I went to Oxford with my choir. We were to sing two concerts there. I was far younger than anyone else in that choir and one of the singers that I liked talking to the most was a man who was a bit older than 60. He had somehow found my blog and used to read it sometimes and then comment the things I had written at the next choir practice. During the first evening in Oxford we ate together at a resturant and he said that he still refered to himself in most things, and this lead into a conversation at the table. Our pianist didn’t agree with me about that age thing and said: “I mostly talk about myself too, but I also find the people that are willing to tell things about themselves are the most interesting to listen to. It’s about sharing. All that detachment is just boring.”

And really, she was absolutely right. It’s when we get personal that things start to matter, when we start to feel. But somehow, for me this general notion doesn’t seem to apply to me, but only other people. Because at 24, most of my conversations still seem to end up being about me and afterwards I get so self-conscious and think that the people I have been talking to probably think that I’m just extremely boring. But I can’t stop myself. I seem to have an endless need to discuss myself and my life.

That’s the main reason why I have a blog like this. Here I can discuss whatever I want, and since I haven’t asked anyone to read it, no one has the right to complain about the topics that I choose. The few readers that I do have, have found it on their own and they can always choose not to come back.

This is for the good of the people that I meet. It’s an attemt to make my conversations less self-centered. Because in real life, I still want to seem cool.