Jennifer Pratt-Walter – “inscription of Seikilos/Saltarello”.

Hey guys! 🙂

I don’t think I’ve ever shared anything from this harpist with you before. She is really in love with her chosen instrument and like quite a lot of harpists, she is a certified healing musician. As you can figure out from the title, this is actually a set of two compositions. The first one clearly refers to the Seikilos Epitaph – which is the oldest complete musical composition in the world that has survived to this day, written by a man called Seikilos to a woman called Euterpe. – I don’t know if this is her full rendition of this composition, or perhaps only a fragment or something loosely based on it, as I’ve never heard it in any other version. Saltarello, in turn, is, as you may know, a type of Italian dance.

Question of the day.

What are three things you’re reading?

My answer:

These days I usually try to read one book at a time, and so is the case right now. I’ve just started a new book this morning, and this is Your Brain Explained by Mark Dingman, if I remember the English title correctly as I’m reading it in Polish. I found it among the newly added books to our online blind library, as an audiobook (or should we say talking book as the audiobooks specifically for blind people are called), and since I like reading brain books, even as basic as this one seems to be so far, I picked it up along with several other new books that I found interesting when looking at their synopses. I’m only a few chapters into it but it’s interesting and easily digestible.

Other than that, I’m about to catch up on some blogs I follow and emails I’ve got, so will be reading all that too very soon.

How about you? 🙂

Roxeanne Hazes – “Bonnie & Clyde”.

Hiya people! 🙂

For today I decided to share with you a pop song in Dutch. I believe this singer is quite well-known in her home country, although I don’t have much of an idea about her really, nor do I have much of an idea as for what Dutch-language music is popular in the Netherlands as I don’t follow it consistently enough. I do know though that her father – André Hazes – was a famous singer in another genre. This is the first song by Roxeanne Hazes that I’ve heard, and I think it’s cool enough to share it on here, especially given that, despite Dutch is among my favourite languages, I’ve so far shared very little Dutch-language music, and know very little of it that I’d truly like, compared with most other of my favourite languages. Sadly I wasn’t able to find a reliable English translation anywhere.

Question of the day.

What do you miss the most about your childhood?

My answer:

As much as I never looked forward to being an adult and even now still don’t like it and find it kind of intimidating, I can’t say I miss my childhood very much either. Usually, I guess when people say they miss their childhood or being a child in general, they miss some carefree feeling that they remember from that time, or a sense of safety or something like that, perhaps less awareness about things going on around them. I don’t really remember any particular carefreeness that I’d feel as a child, I think I must have been born a professional ruminator ’cause I never felt very carefree for a longer period of time as a kid. 😀 There was always something I was stressed or worried about and while I often tried to distract myself from that, it only worked temporarily.

I think if I do miss something, it would be the very early childhood, below age 5. I remember that when I was a teenager I often missed being a very small child or a baby, which probably says something about my emotional maturity. 😀 Not that I have many memories from that time that I’d miss, I just suppose it must be the nicest part of one’s life, when one doesn’t have much of an idea about anything. And most of the memories that I do have from that time are indeed quite happy. Also I’m plain curious because I know from my own experience with myself, and from what my family tell me, that I was quite a lot different personality-wise as a young child. I was definitely a really really weird kid and had my own little, freaky world which was very difficult for complete outsiders to grasp, just as it was difficult for me to grasp that other people don’t necessarily think the way I do and often had no freakin’ clue what I was even talking about, yet when I was like four, or even six, I was a lot more outgoing and socially capable, or even as my Mum claims “happy”, than by the time I was eight, and then since about being 7-8 years old, perhaps earlier, I was gradually kind of withdrawing. As a small kid, I was certainly shy and might have struggled a lot especially with initiating contact with people, but I was quite sociable and when I felt safe with people I always felt very happy to have everyone’s full attention. Most people liked me and I liked people if they didn’t seem scary, I could bond with nice people really quickly. At that time I had more trouble relating to my peers though, which my Mum was initially rather worried about. Some people still can’t get over it that that little Bibiel is gone. And no, thankfully it’s not my Mum. And while I believe there might have been quite a few things that contributed to this gradual yet at the same time seemingly abrupt change, it could be quite interesting to go back to that time and figure out with my current brain how exactly did it happen that that little Bibiel had left the stage. Also it was when I was a small child that my synaesthesia was developing from all sorts of sensory experiences I had, and I sometimes think I’d like to go through that process yet again but with a bit more consciousness to observe it critically, it would be really cool. What I mean is that, for example, a lot of my tactile synaesthetic associations involve stuff that I think I touched or felt as a child, like some of my toys. With some of my synaesthetic associations, I can only feel the overall shape of something, or the texture, but not much detail. And, while I’m sure that some of my tactile associations my brain has just made up, I’d like to go back to those objects or other things that existed for real and see how they actually looked like in full and what they were, and find out why I synaesthetically associate with them what I do. Like, why do i associate my Dad’s name – Jacek – with something as random as a screw cover? I don’t even know if that’s what it’s called in English. 😀 The round, ring-like metal thing that you can put on a screw. I often liked to play in my Dad’s garage, where he always fixed all kinds of things, and I played with all sorts of weird things, and I’m pretty sure that that’s how a screw cover (and lots of other similar things) ended up among my tactile synaesthetic experiences, but why is it associated specifically with Jacek and not any other word or sound? Perhaps someone, like my Mum, came into the garage and said my Dad’s name while I held it? I really like the name Jacek, plus of course it’s myy Dad’s name, so I have a lot of emotional connection to it, but I have none to screw covers. When I once revealed this to one sister at nursery (the blind school I went to was led partly by nuns), she got quite indignant that I have such odd associatioons with my own Dad. Except obviously it’s not what I associate my Dad with, but the sound and sort of overall vibe of his name. This in no way affects what I think of either my Dad, or any other Jaceks, it’s just a separate thing.

Other than that, I guess I could say I miss how, in retrospect, the world at large seemed kind of better when I was a child. Obviously it’s very subjective because I knew very little about it. But when I think about the world and various aspects of it as it was when I was a kid, vs now, it feels like those 15-20 years ago, life in this world in general was a lot better and more interesting. It feels like less crazy shit was happening in the world, and there were SO many cool things that are now a thing of the past. Think Polish Radio BIS, for example. I’ll never get over this loss, even though I’m sure there’s a lot of idealisation involved on my end. 😀

Also one thing not really related to my childhood as such, but that did happen during my childhood – I miss Sofi when she was very little. –
I miss the time when she was still a baby and a toddler, and all sorts of funny and cute things she did and said that she now doesn’t even remember, only from what we’ve told her.

You? 🙂

Llio Rhydderch ft. Tomos Williams & Mark O’Connor – “Ecclesia”.

Hey people! 🙂

Here’s another piece from the album Carn Ingli, on which Welsh triple harpist Llio Rhydderch collaborates with Tomos Williams – trumpet – and Mark O’Connor – percussion. –

Question of the day.

What is your favourite word in the English vocabulary?

My answer:

I honestly wouldn’t be able to pick just one, in any language that I like. There are too many words I like and I like them in different ways, so it’s kinda like asking a child who she loves more, mummy or daddy. But I did decide to pick one word, just for the sake of this post.

When talking about favourite words, people often focus on the really sophisticated, long ones, or the particularly weird or funny slang words that they like, or some swear words that they find particularly useful, expressive and/or versatile. But people rarely talk about the really mundane, common words that are used on a daily basis. Perhaps they’re less thought about because they’re so rare, or perhaps no one likes them? So I decided to talk about one really mundane, simple English word that I LOVE very much, and perhaps part of why I love it so much is this simplicity. This word is sleep. No language out of those I know has a better word for the thing! The word sleep just says it all and encompasses everything about what sleep is. And it sounds so insanely cute. I like saying it. It’s so calm, peaceful and fluffy, like a sleeping baby, better even, like a sleeping kitten. In a tactile way, it feels really nice too. It’s also round and… not quite fluffy, because it’s made of something hard, metal I think, but it’s small and cute. And gustatorily it tastes like walnuts. The Polish word for sleep – sen –
feels insanely bland and flat in comparison. Plus at the same time it also means dream, not like a daydream but specifically the dream you get while you’re asleep, so it’s also not very logical because they’re too different things even if they occur together. If I’m Polish and it’s illogical to me, I guess it must be all the more illogical for non-native speakers. 😀 So mostly when I see the word sen without any context, I think dream, not sleep. It’s also cheesy, because synaesthetically it feels and tastes like cheese, perhaps because cheese is ser so it’s just one letter’s difference. And it’s not even good quality cheese in this case, it tastes kind of artificial. The Polish verb for to sleep is spać, and it’s also very boring, even more so actually, but I’m a big fan of some of its conjugations. Like the imperative form of this verb is śpij (SHPEEY) and that sounds so much better. Or you can ask someone “Śpisz?” (SHPEESh) (Are you asleep?). I wish the infinitive form was śpić, not spać, it would sound more like what it actually means. The Swedish sömn is way too heavy for a healthy kind of sleep, like you’re sleeping on particularly strong sleeping pills or something, or like you’re drunk and when you finally wake up, whenever that might be, you’ll be mightily hungover. Much like I always end up on Hydroxyzine. 😀 And the Welsh cwsg (COOSK) is really nice but too light in turn and just not enough personality (which is rare with Welsh words but here it’s just how it is), so like sleeping with no dreams and waking up at every smallest rustle. Sleep is just right. It’s the kind of healthy, peaceful sleep from which you wake up rested, happy and refreshed, and looking forward to when you can go to sleep again, but not because you’re sleepy or have nothing better to do, it’s just a nice state to be in.

What’s yours? 🙂

Rosey Cale – “Ceidwad” (Keeper).

Hey people! 🙂

For today, I chose a really nice song to share with you from a Welsh singer from Pembrokeshire called Rosey Cale. She is a strongly country-leaning artist, and as you might know country isn’t really my thing, also she mostly sings her music in English, but I really like this one Welsh song from her. It is also available in English and titled Keeper, but I personally prefer the Welsh one so that’s why I’m only sharing this one. I think it’s really cool and she has great vocals.

Question of the day.

What is the simplest thing that makes you happy?

My answer:

I’ve said it many times before that Misha makes me happy, but one particular thing about Misha that makes me really happy is when he eats something he really likes. When he’s enjoying himself so much that his bowl is moving back and forth as he’s eating and he eats more noisily than normal and when he’s eaten, he rubs his head with his paw, as if he was stroking himself. When he does that, it means something was really really delicious. I just like when Misha is happy and it makes me happy too.

You? 🙂

Maire Brennan – “Where We Once Met”.

Hey people! 🙂

Today I thought I’ll share with you something else from this Irish singer, I think this is a really nice piece. I like all the harp in it, and, as a gem stone lover and collector, all the gem stone references. 🙂 The word samhradh, which appears in this song regularly, means summer in Irish.

Question of the day.

What’s an insignificant thing that triggers the shit out of you?

My answer:

I have a lot of anxieties and anxiety triggers that I guess most people would consider quite insignificant. I guess the most prime example though are some sounds/combinations of sounds/words that really crip me out in a sensory way. The degree to which they trigger me will depend on how I’m doing overall and the context and probably some other things, and also there are creepy sounds/words that are less scary than others, but it can feel really nasty. I guess usually people won’t be able to spot when this is going on. As a small kid I would start shrieking when something sensorily creeped me out particularly badly and a few times it made me feel freakishly weak physically and it was like one moment I’d be standing, and before I even fully realised what was going on I was sitting on the floor ’cause my legs were so wobbly haha, and I felt like I was going to faint or something. These days however, it most often just makes me freeze. Which perhaps works better in social situations as it’s more socially appropriate than screaming your lungs out and is more discreet so every random peep doesn’t need to know that “Wow, this creeps Bibiel out, good to know!” 😀 but other than that it stinks because even if I could extricate myself out of the triggery situation with no problem, I practically can’t because my brain’s stuck in a weird kind of limbo thing pretty much until the triggering stimulus goes away. And then it’s too late because my brain has already absorbed it and is going to be throwing it at me of its own accord, without the need for the external stimulus being present, until I basically either will eventually become kind of less sensitive to it or totally desensitised, or until it has something more interesting to throw at me, or unless I can manage to provide it enough distraction/other sensory stimuli that don’t creep me out. I suppose it’s a lot like hallucinations (actually when I was a kid that was what my Dad thought it was) except I know when I hear it for real and when not, but there’s still some irrational element to it. Like, I’m not just scared of the sound itself, I also have a strong feeling that something real real scary will happen while I’ll hear it, whether in the real world or in my brain. I wouldn’t be able to say what this potential scary event could be, but it could be anything, doesn’t even have to be realistically possible at all, could be a freakin’ zombie apocalypse, feels just as likely as anything in such situation. The fact that, so far, over the entire course of my life, nothing major has happened directly in connection with these stimuli, other than me being creeped out and all the fun consequences of it, doesn’t mean anything, because everything might still be to come. Sometimes these creepy sounds also automatically come with some kind of personifications associated with them, that are very basic and two-dimensional but this makes it feel even more realistic a threat. Especially if they appear in my sleep paralysis dreams, as they tend to, at least some of them.

This is also why silence is another insignificant thing that triggers the shit out of me, because it provides tons of occasions for my brain to throw its half-digested, auditory shit at me. And the sounds that can creep me out can be really, really insignificant and objectively inconspicuous, most of the time it’s hardly creepy for anyone and is totally neutral, but when I hear it, I have a very strong feeling like it’s just seething with aggression, or evil, and that it’s directed right at me. They can be words that are totally random for normal people, sequences of sounds in music, small bits of songs or entire songs, rarely single sounds and if so they would typically have to be rather elaborate or something, a lot of very specific sounds. As a kid, I would get particularly frequently scared of things like jingles, commercials etc. mostly music in them, later on also election commercials or however they’re called, I don’t even think this is the thing in all countries. It is a really weird phenomenon because there are a LOT of blind children who I know were scared of some jingle or ad at some point, each of different ones, of course, mostly around preschool age. This is freaky and I wish someone did some research on that at some point but I guess other than being very niche it would be quite difficult because it’s so specific to a person and I don’t think there are any rules or anything as to what kind of jingles have a higher likelihood of being creepy or not, I mean I could probably think of some criteria for myself, but it’s different from person to person at least from what I have noticed. However most people grow out of it at some point and to me it still happens (my Mum once said it’s because my brains are gonna be forever young hehehe) and there are still a few old jingles that are even no longer in use since like fifteen years that my brain still remembers very exactly and likes to throw at me out of the blue, and it just goes beyond my cognitive abilities to think why those people came up with such evil jingles and what they must have been thinking or what sort of people they must be to have such utterly evil ideas. It is this jingles thing that made some (sighted) folks around me think that perhaps I pick up on some subliminal stuff and that it’s this what creeps me out about them, haha and feels evil. 😀 This is all freakishly difficult to explain to people in a sensible way.

Another such thing that I can think of right now that triggers me pretty badly sometimes is when people diminish other people’s trauma and I happen to witness it or something. This is so weird because I myself have had some shitty experiences in life that I think have increased my risk for getting mental illness and eventually contributed in some smaller or bigger part to it developing, but while in my subjective experience it was really difficult, I don’t like thinking about it as traumatic, because there are SO many trauma survivors out there, and I call my experience trauma, then what should people with stuff like CPTSD call theirs? I think what has largely contributed to things having been as difficult for me as they were is lack of resilience, plus some other things thrown in the mix, not that my experiences as such were traumatic in nature. There are plenty of people who have been through similar things and are doing just fine. I suppose it’s quite difficult to figure out what is and what isn’t trauma. Yet, with that all being said, when I hear people talk about/to someone else, about how this person’s trauma isn’t valid, despite there being evidence that they have been through something that has been really stressful for them in a way that has impacted their life in a major way and despite them showing actual signs of trauma, this can really trigger me. Both in that I feel really upset or even angry about how this person is treated, and also because some of my own brain stuff gets stirred and starts boiling all over again and I don’t like how it makes me feel. I guess we could say that I find witnessing emotional invalidation in general triggering.

What are such seemingly mini triggers for you, be it for anxiety, phobias, trauma, or whatever else they might trigger? 🙂

Roosberg – “The Author”.

Hi hi people! 🙂

Today’s song is from Finland. The people behind are a duo, for whom, from what I know, this is their first song on which they collaborated together, both in terms of writing and producing it. They are Jori Sjöroos and Christel Sundberg, the latter more commonly known as Chisu. While I don’t know anything about Jori Sjöroos, I’ve been familiar with Chisu’s music before and she’s quite successful in her home country. This song was written for the 2019 Finnish-British TV series The Moomin Valley. Never watched it, but I absolutely love Moomins, and I think this song is really cool, hence I’m sharing! 🙂

Question of the day.

How are you feeling today?

My answer:

A bit jittery or stressed or something, and I don’t even know why. I was feeling pretty neutral in the morning, maybe slightly blah, but for the last half an hour or so I’ve been getting some increasing antsy feeling as if something bad was going to happen even though I don’t know what it could possibly be. I get such a feeling regularly so it’s most likely false alarm. I had a freakish migraine on Monday which totally put me out of action for the whole day, and I was still feeling a bit off yesterday after it (it’s weird how a day of lying in bed and mostly sleeping could wipe you out so much), but I’ve regenerated properly by now so physically I’m feeling a whole lot better.

How about you? How’s your life going today? 🙂

Gwen Màiri – “Y Feillionen” (The Clover).

Hey guys! 🙂

Today, I decided to share with you another piece from this Welsh-Scottish harpist, whose music I’ve already shared with you on here before. This piece is her original composition and comes from her beautiful album Mentro (Venture, on which she is accompanied by two other great Welsh folk musicians, Jordan Price Williams on cello and Gwilym Bowen Rhys on guitar, mandolin, fiddle and shruti box. I think if I had to pick my most favourite piece from this album, I’d pick this one.

Question of the day.

What was the greatest pleasure you ever felt?

My answer:

It’s really hard to pick just one thing, since there were several experiences in my life that I felt great pleasure from, and now after some time has passed it’s difficult to say which one was actually the strongest. But I often have a whole lot of pleasure from hearing “my” languages. Sometimes it’s to the point where it goes beyond just being aesthetically pleasing or even synaesthetically pleasing and I feel it like on a physical level, especially right before I fall asleep or when I wake up but haven’t yet woken up fully, and when I hadn’t heard the language in question in a long time and the speaker has an interesting accent or uses some word that I like the sound of and that is new to me or something like that, it’s absolute bliss when it happens. The same thing can sometimes happen to me when listening to music when something really really really really really resonates with me on, like, a sensory level, I don’t know how to put it. Just like there is music which can give me sensory heebiejeebies, so there can be music which works in the opposite way, except the latter phenomenon is sadly less frequent. It’s kinda like frisson except more intense because I get frisson a lot and it’s not quite the same.

Another thing that stands out to me is the intense relief I felt after my final exams were over. I guess it was only then that I fully realised how much of a strain on my brain the whole year has been, especially with all the preparations for the math part. At that point I didn’t have the results yet, except for oral exams and I got 100% from both oral Polish and oral English (with oral Polish it was mostly just a stroke of luck that I got the best question I possibly could), and while from the beginning I knew that it’s entirely possible that I won’t pass the math (and I didn’t, as you may know) for the time being between passing all the exams and getting the results I decided not to think about it at all. And I can still quite clearly remember the feeling I got after all the exams were over and when I came back home (I wasn’t taking them in my actual school but a special school for the blind a few hours’ drive away, but a different one to the one I used to attend earlier, which from perspective I can say wasn’t a good idea because it only ended up being way more stressful and didn’t give me any benefit over taking them in my actual, local mainstream school). I came into my room and it was like I got hit by a wave of euphoria and relief and like my brain was flying, it felt so good not having anything to do with the screwed education system anymore haha, and not having to deal with all the math stuff or travelling to that fricken school anymore. It was like all the stress I’d been feeling for the past year suddenly left me all at once.

Also when I have some real cool dreams, the first seconds after waking up feel priceless. It feels a bit sad because you know the dream is over, but you’re still stuck in the dream with one foot and you can still experience the great feel of it while being almost awake, I just totally love it.

What was such a thing for you? 🙂

Rura – “Weary Days”.

Despite I consider myself quite familiar with the Scottish folk scene, this band is fairly new to me and I’m really surprised I didn’t know about them earlier than I did, because their music is great. This is their first song that I’ve ever heard.

Question of the day (23rd August).

What’s a boring fact about yourself?

My answer:

Hmmm… I’ve been thinking about this question for quite a while now, and I have to conclude that, perhaps a bit paradoxically, it’s more difficult to come up with boring facts than at least slightly interesting ones, I guess because you never really think about the really boring, really obvious stuff ’cause it’s too obvious to think about. Is the fact that I have a photo of Misha as my phone wallpaper sufficiently boring and predictable? 😀

How about you? 🙂

Song of the day (23rd August) – Rolffa – “Gulatgo Mu?” (Can You Hear Me?).

Hi hi people! 🙂

Let’s listen to Sami music! I’ve been listening to quite a lot of it lately. I mean, I listen to it regularly, with Sami languages being among my most favourites, but I have times when I listen to it particularly frequently. This Sami group is from Norway. I guess all the members are Sami but they live in different parts of the country. Originally it was just a project of Rolf Morten Amundsen, from Karasjok who made music and uploaded it to a website where people could download it for free. At the beginning apparently no one did. Then he teamed. Then he teamed up with some other people and together they created Partyjoik, which I suppose is their most famous song, and it was only then that they took off. However the song I’m sharing with you is my favourite song from them. I even found an English translation

here.

 

It’s not easy to understand each other

When the other doesn’t listen

If he doesn’t even try

It’s best to let go

Hello? Hello? Do you hear me?

We don’t seem to communicate

Hello? Hello? I said do you hear me?

There’s no use to talk anymore

You have go reach a higher status

If you want to get your message across

An eloquent language can be useful

But these words don’t seem to get anywhere

Hello? Hello? Do you hear me?

We don’t seem to communicate

Hello? Hello? I said do you hear me?

There’s no use to talk anymore

Question of the day.

What tastes worse the more you eat it?

My answer:

All sorts of fast food and a lot of junk food, or some things that are either really filling, or very sweet, or both, since as you gradually feel more full, you’re less and less hungry and more stuffed so naturally it no longer tastes quite as good as it did at the beginning when you were properly hungry. I usually eat small portions of food in one go because I feel totally filled really quickly, or in any case as it seems it takes a lot less for me than most people. I think I might have screwed myself up a little bit in this regard through eating little and quite irregularly due to emetophobia and other mental health stuff like that I had times where I would eat very little or skip meals as a way of self-harming/defeating, or because I sort of didn’t like having needs like that, or simply due to stress because when I’m stressed or anxious I feel nauseous and unable to eat. Then when the stress would be over, like after exams or stuff, I’d get myself a chocolate or a bag of crisps and eat it pretty much in one go. It’s not a real problem for me most of the time, I guess it’s better to eat mini meals and the fact that I don’t need loads of food means I’m pretty low-maintenance and there’s always more left for Olek who eats like four Bibiel portions for dinner, except when we go to a restaurant or get takeaway food and it’s a new place so I don’t know how big the portions might be, and I order something which turns out to be HUGE and I end up feeling full by the time I eat half of it. 😀 Even when ordering from a place I know, I can sometimes overestimate how much I can eat when I’m really hungry, plus being blind and having a brain that doesn’t really do counting also means that over- or underestimating abstractive amounts of abstractive food you can’t actually see is easy.

It seems particularly difficult to find the golden mean when ordering fast food. Yesterday I wanted to have a deep talk with Sofi about something, and I was craving something salty so I figured that since we haven’t had fast food in a good while, I could order some for both of us, which would also make getting the desired information out of Sofi hella easier, ’cause fast food is not a frequent thing in our house and it’s even rarer that Mum would spontaneously get something for Sofi so she would definitely be delighted and chatty as a result. So we ordered some KFC which is closest to us, and I had a problem again, ’cause the last time we ordered from there I got very little food for myself, and it didn’t feel quite enough. So this time I got small fries, five hot wings and a big chocolate milkshake since it seems like you can no longer order small ones, at least online. Sofi got herself big fries, a wrap, five hot wings and a big chocolate milkshake as well. And both of us ended barely being able to finish our meals, and we couldn’t even think about food without feeling queasy. 😀 Those KFC milkshakes are really good, but there’s always a problem with them, even Sofi says so. When you eat all of your food, which is filling in itself, you no longer have the space for something as sweet and filling as the milkshake. So we often have to drink them over time and this way they no longer taste as good. That’s one reason why we rarely eat stuff like that.

What’s such a food in your opinion? 🙂

Trollguten – “Pell Deg Ut”.

Hiya people! 🙂

So last month I have already shared

one song

from this young and quite surprising Norwegian artist with you, and I was intending on sharing some more of his music, so that’s what I’d like to do today, as, in my humble opinion, the music that he’s made that is actually good is really underrated compared with how much attention his less ambitious stuff seems to be getting in Scandinavia.

This song, just like the previous one from him I shared with you, has interesting and kind of weird lyrics. I like weird, creative and genuine. As you may know, lately I’ve been playing around a little with Norwegian and I find it fascinating how this language has such a load of dialects and how cool it is that people don’t have this kind of shame about speaking them as some other nationalities with a lot of dialects often have. He wrote his lyrics under this particular stage name in what I believe is the Stavanger dialect or something similar from the southwestern Norway, and I was able to pick up bits and pieces of this song via my Swedish and some knowledge I’ve recently gained in Norwegian, so I had a basic idea of what it’s about, but I decided to sit with it before writing this post and try to figure out as much as I could from these lyrics when seeing them in writing so I could give y’all some idea. I didn’t understand everything, but here’s what I gather from it. He/the lyrical subject addresses some girl who lives in his house, presumably renting or something like that, who sounds like one huge disgusting nightmare to share your living space with. She eats and drinks like a pig, leaves crumbs of food on his sofa, doesn’t flush the loo, carelessly sits on his guitar, doesn’t pay rent and seems to be a real fart factory or potentially shitting herself ’cause that’s how bad it apparently smells, and it sounds like some default state for her to smell of sweat and poop. Ew! It sounds like a super weird arrangement if you ask me because she not only lives in his house essentially for free, but he also cleans up all her mess and even makes food for her! :O And she won’t even say thank you. It’s not surprising, given all that, that finally the lyrical subject had enough of it and decided it’s time to kick her out. So he told her to pack her bags and beat it. Except when she did pack her bags, he discovered that half of the tings she packed were actually his.

As an introvert who hates parasite people and considers my private space extremely important, this sounds like quite a hell for me to put up with, even though at least I don’t practically have much sense of smell.

Oddly enough, despite I think I understand quite a fair bit of it (which I consider great since it’s a dialect and not standard Norwegian and since I don’t actually speak Norwegian as such), I have no idea what the title means literally. I mean I can guess it’s something like get out of here or something, but I don’t know what the verb “pell” (which is probably pelle in the infinitive) means exactly.

Question of the day.

What is something that sounds safe but actually isn’t?

My answer:

Registering somewhere online. ANYWHERE! Creating an account. Especially when they want your email! 😱 It’s like opening yourself to evil because you let all them companies and big tech people invigilate and track you and eavesdrop on you and read your most important emails (even the ones you didn’t send ’cause they were too cringey but still keep in drafts) and probably even your thoughts because they always show you the ads of things you’ve been thinking about recently! It’s not just Facebook and Google (although of course Google is the worst and responsible for all the catastrophes in the world) but everything, even small businesses which want you to log in on their website, they actually sell your data to China and God knows what else they do with it. 😀

That’s what my Dad recently shared with me. My Dad is slightly, well, perhaps more than slightly, backwards when it comes to technology, but he has no shame about it, and he doesn’t have to because he has Bibiel to deal with that when it comes to his work stuff, and other than work stuff, he only uses his computer to watch YouTube (I don’t think he realises it’s actually Google), go on Marine Traffic, which is also kind of to do with his job as he delivers fuel to ships among others, browse the Internet (using Bing), “travel” (with Google Maps, which he’s perfectly aware of, but oh well), go on OLX (which is like a Polish equivalent of eBay (logging in from Mum’s account, or rather not logging out), and sometimes watching some regional online TV and stuff like that. He also has an (Android) smartphone (from China) and to his credit he had a smartphone LOOONG before I did, but the only smart functionality of it that he uses is (paradoxically) Google Assistant, when he needs to look something up on the phone on the web, because asking Google is faster than typing. Oh and he also uses some app for translating in real time when he interacts with people at work who speak other languages, which I’m sure also uses Google Translate and Google speech recognition system, so… Somehow when it comes to the phone it doesn’t bother him so much that he uses Google as the search engine, and although I tell him that repeatedly, he still doesn’t seem to fully grasp or accept or something that his phone’s system is actually from Google.

He does NOT have an email address, well, to be exact he has several and with different providers, probably even more than I do, which either Mum or me or Sofi or Olek helped him create, but he doesn’t use any of them because (a) he doesn’t know how and doesn’t have the patience to learn, and (b) he doesn’t remember his passwords, or he doesn’t remember where he put the piece of paper where he wrote the password down. Back when he was still somewhat motivated to learn to use an email address, he’d ask me what his password was, as if I could have any idea about that, and then he’d be mad at the whole world. 😀

Anyways, quite recently he was sharing with me some of his tech woes and how he was trying to buy something online from somewhere else other than OLX, but they wouldn’t let him, because they wanted him to log in, to even see the seller’s phone number. I said that it seems pretty reasonable to me, it’s easier to shop when you create an account, and why would the seller want their phone number to be visible to all the random peeps in the world? I also began to wonder why it’s such a problem for him to register somewhere. I mean yeah, it can be a hassle, I myself don’t like registering somewhere where I don’t really feel the need to simply because it’s waste of time and sometimes you can still come across surprises like visual captchas which are very annoying and discouraging, some bigger websites can also be pretty intrusive with all their nagging, but generally I don’t see much of a problem with registrations alone. He doesn’t have an email address but Mum lets him use hers for stuff like OLX shopping so he could use it for registrations. So I asked him what his problem with registering was, was it too difficult or something, and that was when he told me all that amazing stuff about how it’s unsafe and evil. Well yeah I exaggerated it a bit for satirical purposes, but even knowing his paranoid tendencies it was a surprise for me how skewed his idea of Internet privacy is.

And don’t get me wrong here, I don’t like big tech either, I hate Facebook, wouldn’t use Google if there were better alternatives for some of their services and I value my online privacy very dearly and some people would probably also call me a freak in this regard. I totally get people’s concerns over their privacy online, but the extent to which my Dad takes it is quite hilarious, especially given that he doesn’t really understand how Internet works and really enjoys invigilating all those ships, looking up where people live etc. and it’s funny how he uses so much stuff from Google without even realising it, while at the same time hating it so much.

So that was the first answer that came to my mind when thinking of such unsafe things that sound safe. Being more serious, food is an excellent example, it can make you vomit. And can make loads of other things to you. Allergies, poison, choking, cancer, diabetes, what fun!

Also amusement parks and similar, all the rides in them. They always say they’re safe, but accidents seem to happen regularly. Oh yeah and you could also vomit from it and make your vestibular system go nuts.

Your turn. 🙂