Norwegian Wood

WHY did Watanabe have to sleep with Reiko in Haruki Murakami's book "Norwegian Wood?"
WHY?WHY?
I just finished the book, and fine, I get it .. he needs to sleep with random girls to dull his longings, he needs to sleep with Naoko because he loves her, and he needs to sleep with Midori because he's IN love with her, but Reiko???
Here, the book had a change to describe a "deep and meaningful" relationship with depth and insight and then it ALSO turns this relation into sex again? WHY? Does all transitions in a mans life need to be defined by sex? I was upset. Of all the things I got from that book, Murakami torn it down by making it necessary for Watanabe to have sexual relations to all the female charcters. What happened to the acknowledgement of the meaning of friendship... I hated that turn... As mush as I loved some of the quotes in thw book. e.g "her cry was the saddest sound of orgasm I had ever heard" [p. 40]

Happiness is the longing for repetition.

"In true love the smallest distance is too great, and the greatest distance can be bridged."
Hans Nouwens

"Have I told you about the tension of opposites?” he says.
"The tension of opposites?"
"Life is a series of pulls back and forth. You want to do one thing, but you are bound to do something else. Something hurts you, yet you know it shouldn’t. You take certain things for granted, even when you know you should never take anything for granted.”
"A tension of opposites, like a pull on a rubber band. And most of us live somewhere in the middle."
"A wrestling match." He laughs.
"Yes, you could describe life that way."
So which side wins, I ask?

"Which side wins?"

He smiles at me, the crinkled eyes, the crooked teeth.

"Love wins. Love always wins."


- Tuesdays with Morrie, by Mitch Albom

Images of others

What does the face of suffering look like? That's the question that occupies Maddy Krugman, a seductive photographer who is constantly playing for attention in Robert Wilson's mystery, "The Vanished Hands." Fixated on appearances and what they reveal (or don't), the desperate redhead has made a career out of shooting people "suffering in intensely private moments, but out in the open."

In the book Maddy is portrayed as a rather unsensitive women and her hobby as something bizarre. Looking at people, without letting them know you do, observing them in private moments may seem voyeuristic and, worse, as an invation of privacy. Oh, the presious privacy. But how close do you get to people talking to them? Do you always feel you reach them? With a few people we'll connect and make friendships or relationships and through time and interest we build up trust and intimacy. But we cannot reach everybody. We cannot learn something about the world of everyone. Except in small stolen moments of observation.

Sitting in a cafe or in a park or in any public place you rub your life against the life of strangers passing you. You may observe them smiling, putting on a show or being someone for the people they are with, or you might catch them with an expression at most reserved for private rooms, for lovers or friends. You can see tears or shaking heads, but mostly it is only the eyes that reveals the thought. The eyes that convey the feeling.

I often find myself drawn to observe. Depending on the boundaries of the person I tell this to, I will often hear the response that its weird to go to cafees and public places and just sit. Alone. But to me, its the best way to be with anybody without anybody asking anything of you. Without having to express anything about anything you can loose yourself in the thoughts, expressions and ideas of somebody else. I will never meet them again or know anything about them, i will never reveal the secret of their eyes, but I've knowned them, just for a second. And for a second I felt what their life was about. And then I go back to mine.

Fear

Good morning. Fear is the biggest riskfactor in our world. It is the fear that makes conflict inevitable. If you fear something is going to happen, you'll start thinking something WILL actually happen and it both paralyses you and makes you ready to attack. Even when you fear the unlikeliest thing to happen, you'll find reasons it will anyway, if your fear overwhelms you.

I experience this my self every time I fly. I hate flying. The worst time is the walk from the airport gate to the seat on the plane. Or the bus ride they take you on where you pass the planes that just landed, the men who load the planes off and on and the airport buildings get further and further away. At this point my heard starts pounding at an unnormal speed and my feet loose touch with the ground and my head feels like air, producing a dizzy feeling. I don't know why I'm afraid. I'd consider that it might be the loss of control, or the unnaturalness of it all. I mean, what are we doing up there in the air anyway, we were given feet for a reason and NOT given wings for an even better reason. The thing is, I'm way too rational to be handling this fear in a good way. My rationality demands of me to find a rational reason for my fear or a rational reason not to fear it anymore. I read tons of pages on how an airplane can fly, check out http://www.allstar.fiu.edu/AERO/airflylvl3.htm and pages of psychological advice with calming statistics that basically says: "don't worry, one million, trillion people fly every year and you're a sucker if you think you're going to be in the one plane that crashes every fifth year". OK, fine I get it. So I decided it might not be the turbulence or the lack of a motor or a storm or the disappearance of air that’s going to make us crash. And, still, I was afraid, I was petrified. How to explain that? How to rationalize that I was sure to die just boarding the next plane? I started looking amongst the passengers and crew. I started looking for drunken pilots and incompetent cabinpersonell. I started looking for passengers with a look of willingness to die, and here is where I got screwed up. In my effort to ease my fear and understand it I activated all I'd ever heard about psychology and politics. Fear let what I had had on an analytical distance get under my skin. I'm a student of political systems and cultural behaviour, I've spent the last seven years breaking down barriers through initiating dialogues and understanding social patterns, and then I got afraid of flying, and I started doing the one thing I hate: I started profiling. Who amongst the passengers was most likely to take us crashing down. I loathed myself for it. All my morals fell, I do not judge people on the way they look, never, but my fear paired with my logic made a dangerous explosive and I started to see what great danger fear harbours. How inhuman it can make us, how far it can drive us from what we believe. I decided that I might fear flying again, but in an effort to save my own humanness I needed to except my fears illogic and focus on my own flaws instead of the ones I projected on to others. I'll let you know how it went. Next time I fly.

Cool Cat Club

Here is a show I was part of making.

ME

I'm a blogging virgin

Four o'clock in the afternoon, tuesday 27th of March 2006 and I'm blogging. I mean, seriously, I'm blogging for the first time. I'm like one of these people in the 90's that didn't get a cell phone before their friends started sending sms' to their home phone.
I've read bloggs, I admit that, and I support the concept, but I never really considered initiating one. It could be because I really didn't know how to or, more likely, because I'm never first on anything. I was first on one thing, one time. I discovered Alanis Morisette. I mean, not really off course, she was probably already discovered by a Canadian agent, half of USA and off course all of Sweden, but no-one i KNEW knew about her before I did. And I found her and bought her songs because I loved her CD cover (back in the days, when CD's was IT, and iPod uninvited, damn - I have to get myself an iPod). OK, thats how much of a music-freak I am, but you must admit her cover was pretty awesome on her "jagged little pill" album. Although, I'm not as slow with these things as my dad. He thinks Armageddon’s going to happen if he pays his flight-tickets online. Really, he screamed at me (and he's a calm man) for suggesting giving sterling his Visa code. He does not consider the internet to be of any use beyond researching and emailing. '
Anyways, so far we've established I'm a little late on the blogging scene and that I pick my favourite music from covers. And that I have a dad. What else? Wondering why I picked findthesource as my address? Wondering if I'm a Star-Wars fan who forgot that the quote is "remember the force, Luke"? No, that’s not it. I'm a huge movie-fan, and also a huge quotation-fan. This one's from an old Chinese saying: To find the source, you must travel upstream. A quote that I like for so many reasons. First of all, it makes the salmon a pretty intelligent creature. Secondly, it asks us not always to go "with the flow", but rather to counter it, to question it, and to create new paths. And for me, now, this blogg is a new path. A new start with an opportunity to broadcast my thoughts in a way I've never done before. I might not find a source (as the internet offers so many), but I definitely will try. And if you know of a source i need to visit or if you know of a quote i should read, let me know. I might not be the first to know it then, but experiencing something for the first time sure makes it almost indifferent if people saw it before you. The feeling is equally exhilarating. So, I might be blogger number 234 trillion. But its all new to me and just as cool for me know as it was for the first blogger ever. Anybody know who that was?