Made by Agnese with the glasses. We didn’t talk almost at all but this doesn’t change the fact that she made something pretty.
This picture is a little token and memento of what took place in Olde Vechte in The Netherlands the past few weeks. That Olde Vechte. It’s become out of the blue a significant part of my life and if all goes well it’s going to become more important still in the months to come.
I’m posting this here because somehow everything I put on here gets reinforced in my head, it becomes more tangible. It works. Synapses and shit (I haven’t taken advantage of this enough, by the way—never too late to start).
People and how we work are weird… no no no. Sorry. I do this a lot: I talk about the general we when I mean to talk about myself and what I do. Let’s try this again: I’m weird. Remember, gotta accept accountability.
So I’m writing this post purely for my own benefit and not because I think it might be interesting to anybody apart from those with whom I shared the experience—kinda similar to how you post songs on Facebook and the only people who like your post are the people who already know and like the song and very few others actually listen to it, usually people who have a crush on you. That’s how talking and writing about youth exchanges and trainings is, including EVS, including Erasmus, all those sexy international things that have been taking a great deal of my time and energy the past few years. The feelings they have created in me are difficult to convey, offline as well as online, so I’m not going to go into the boring details of a purely experiential thing that’s as useful and interesting to read about as listening to people talk about the dreams they had last night. What I am going to say is do yourself a favour and participate in such programs. If you want to learn how, I can help you and direct you, and, who knows, one day even train you.
Sudden spontaneous insightful realisation time. The above paragraph starts with “So I’m writing this post purely for my own benefit” and ends with me urging you dear reader to give it a shot. What can I say, contradicting myself seems to be my new favourite hobby.
Scratch that, it’s not new at all.
Since I’m writing this, have a look at some of my older, more thorough posts about these experiences. Are you intrigued by what you read? Honest question. I’m really curious, because in real life most people express indifference when I talk about these projects. This might explain why I felt the need to write the way I wrote this post.
Watched this movie with Daphne in Aello a few days ago (Wednesdays and Thursdays it’s two tickets in the price of one, check it). Generally I don’t do film reviews unless I feel like I have a very specific thing to say, so in this case I’m not going to write one, because this movie didn’t leave me with any feeling in particular apart from “meh, Nolan’s making progressively less interesting films based on more and more interesting concepts.” And to think he used to be one of my favourite directors… The final scene in particular…
Um…
The soundtrack was pretty good. Have it play in the background and make your day a little bit more transcendent/epic/worthy of a Nolan movie.
Two reviews of the movie that mentioned some of my other unpindownable quotes of Intersteallar:
This is a manga recommended by Daphne a million and a half years ago. I read it in one single-hour sitting on my Kindle, surrounded by unknown Bulgarians in a hotel in Sandanski. They were sleeping in different beds.
I’ll be brief and to-the-point: this was self-reference taken to the extreme. I like it when artists play around with these things, when they break the fourth wall, for example, or whatever the equivalent for texts might be – I’m not feeling creative enough to come up with something better than the incredibly lame “burning the press” – but Monsieur Boilet went over the top. You did, Frédéric. I admit: it was interesting in a way, but in the end I couldn’t help but get the feeling that, were the veneer of pretentious self-reference, such as the sketches, supposedly the inspiration of this comic book, to be removed, there would be nothing left.
No. There would be something left: the small details that made me want to visit Japan (yawn, right?); the cute observations the artist made of Yukiko and masterfully put onto paper, most memorably the mole on her face that reminded him of the geography of some islands in the Pacific the name of which escapes me right now, and its art style, which had me wondering all along: “How did the guy actually make this? It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen.” The answer came at the end as part of the story itself. Or did it?
And to think I usually like this kind of stories… Alas: while reading it, I made the shuddering realisation that, if I chose to write a story or make a comic about something that took place in my own life, a few years ago or maybe even today I might have chosen this oh-so-mysterious-I-wonder-what-really-happened! style of self-reference. *looks around uncomfortably*
But seriously: this looked amazing on the Kindle (see above). Even though I didn’t enjoy the story so much, I would still recommend checking it out if you have one.
Golyam Beglik is a lake in the Rodopi mountains that didn’t exist before 1951.
Since 2008 it’s also been a gathering place for people who believe in change and new possibilities and who want to have a good time surrounded by beautiful nature. Enter Beglika Fest, which has become one of Bulgaria’s biggest and most important summer festivals.
We hitchhiked to Beglika and back and camped there for a few days with Maria, Zanda, Miro and Daphne. Apart from a couple of stormy nights we (and our 20lv tents with the water resistance of my towel) had to endure, and the fact all the interesting workshops they had going there were almost exclusively in Bulgarian, we had an unforgettable time. Plus, it felt like we were part of something important, something ground-breaking.
I mean, dry toilets, hammocks, seed exchange, Suggestopedia, sailing, astronomy, kung fu, yoga and tasty vegetarian/vegan food all in one place – I will never forget that chocolate pancake and the vegan kyuftechta, never! What more can a person ask or hope for?
We didn’t get a chance to listen to all of the bands because of the bad weather during most of the nights, but also because the spatial and temporal layout of the stages made it difficult, at least for me, to follow everything. One band in particular, though, made an impression on me. Traditional Balkan sounds together with beatboxing and dubstep, you say?!
The following is a video I made out of all the videos I took from Beglika. It’s small and humble, there mostly to give you a small taste of what the Beglika experience was for our small international group.
As you might’ve been able to tell from the video, however, I’m definitely happier with our selection of photographs. Credits go to Daphne, Zanda, Maria and yours truly – can’t bother to do it for each one separately:
Hammocks over water.
Signs to where the find the good stuff.
I love this picture
Weird thing about Beglika: at night they had the “chill” music and during the daythey had all the pumping beats, especially at the chill station.
Miro introduced us to the concept of dendrophile and nothing was the same again…
Looks interesting doesn’t it? Само на български!
BEGLIKARTA
At the MMUUZZAA tent.
…all kinds of crazy things…
Maria and Zanda got their henna tattoos.
Sharing is caring.
Занда и кончето
ВЕДЖИ КЮФТЕТААА
“At night it can get cold”, they said…
Tent City
Foggy mornings.
Kung Fu for dummies at sunset.
Where we got most of out sunburns.
Ghetto water resistance!
Haide, next time in Beglika let us be volunteers with perfect knowledge of Bulgarian! Or we could be the ones with the game corner…
There is this custom in Bulgaria where people go to the seaside to watch the sunrise on July 1st; the seaside in this country faces east, so it makes sense!
People in Varna, Burgas and other places on the Black Sea stayed up all night or woke up earlier than normal to thank the sun for its warmth and welcome the 2nd half of the year, but I missed it because I was in Greece with Daphne for a surprise visit for her birthday.
This is my small tribute with the song that popped into my mind the second I first heard about this Bulgarian tradition. Play it loud!
PS: my tags just reminded me that I’d posted this song on the blog before. I had forgotten doing so, but does it really matter if I have it posted twice? It won’t be the first time I do it by mistake, I’m sure…
6/7/’14 EDIT: Velina from my Advanced English Conversation Group told me that actually people started doing the whole July Morning thing precisely because of this song. The plot thickens…
The simple fact of the matter is that I’m sick of the internet.
Got your attention?
I’ve been wanting to write this post for the past several days. It came to me when my laptop stopped working for a day, and I was somehow relieved that I had an excuse not to check my e-mail, my facebook, follow through with my obligations. In truth, I think I’ve wanted to write this for the past several years, but the time was never just right – or I was not ready to take things seriously.
Now the time is right. I know because I’ve had this heavy feeling in the greater area of my heart and stomach all day, the same bodily sensation I get every time I get the urgency to publish something important for me. In fact, it’s the exact same feeling I get before I ask a girl I like out, have an exam coming, or need to make a phone call to somebody I’ve never met before. It’s the flinch, but it’s funny how a simple sudden need to write something makes me experience the same physical reactions to insecurity, the knowledge of what’s to come, the question of whether it will be accepted or rejected (tell me again, which one’s worse?)
Before you say anything, I know. I know all that. All of it. I’ve had my life shaped by being online, guided by it. If there was a poster child for this brand new technology 30 years ago, I could have been it. I even studied the thing in university, both from a more theoretical, humanistic perspective and a drier, technical approach. The only reason I believe I might not be the most suitable person to talk about it today is that every day, to I’ put it politely, I’m becoming less of a fan.
To give you a rough idea of how long I’ve been a user, I have had access to the internet generally available to me since I was 8 years old – my father’s 28.8kbps with GroovyNet. That meant web surfing about twice a month on the weekends I used to spend with that side of my family. All I would search for on AltaVista or Yahoo would be related to Nintendo, Mario or Donkey Kong. I’m talking about 1997 here.
I’m not going to say more about my own personal history and milestones of net use (i.e. when I made my first e-mail address, when I first had a net connection of my very own, my first online game, my first download from P2P networks or my first social network account, even the first post on this very website), for the very simple reason that, for the majority of my life, these internet-related milestones had been so closely connected (heh) to my real-life history, that any attempt of recording or writing about them would be like trying to write something about my life the past 15 or so years in general. The boundaries between online and offline life would be arbitrary. It would be like a book no-one wants to read, because they have their own sitting right next to them.
I won’t go into details about how the internet is important today, either, but I will do a rough run down. We all know about it more or less: it’s the fastest growing (tele)communications technology in the history of our species, at least as far as we know; it has created new dynamics in virtually every field, accelerating change in unprecedented rates and paving the way for greater shifts yet; it has proven a disruption in the status quo, an experiment gone wild, an almost unharnessable beast with inner workings that global capitalist, democratic, free market societies weren’t prepared for and still don’t know how to manage.
For human communities and communication, it’s been the culmination of all human inventions to this point, the convergence of all human endeavours to create this network of everything, everywhere, a single entity that contains the entirety of our heritage and makes it available to all. It’s the connection of anybody with anybody else. In 20 years – less! – we’ve created this thing, this pulsing, vibrating cybernetic superconstruction that would make science fiction writers of just 30 years ago pee themselves with excitement and anticipation. We live in the future!
How do you, personally, feel about that? Do you realise what important times we live in? Speaking for myself, writing the above gave me a rushing sensation, just for a second there. It was surprising, to tell you the truth: the net nowadays has been making me little more than numb.
Which brings me to my initial point. I’m sick of it.
Rant incoming.
I’m sick of Facebook. Sick of everybody obsessing over themselves so much. Sick of selfies, sick of cries of attention which are answered by other, louder cries for attention. Sick of how our stupidity, our short-sightedness hasn’t been cured or at least lessened by our newfound ability to communicate more efficiently than ever, but instead we’ve inadvertently used these tools to make stupidity travel harder, better, faster, stronger.
I’m sick of having to think about checking my multiple e-mail accounts, their unusually high number explainable by my taste for playing around with nicknames and forever tranforming identities, and my peculiar distaste for comfortably centralising my communications. Call me also slightly paranoid – I’m sick of that too. I’m sick of having to worry about not replying as soon as possible, sick of “not having checked my e-mail” not counting as an excuse anymore. Who cares if I really don’t have a smartphone – for how much longer still unknown?
I’m sick of the routine of it. Checking the same site again and again, the pointless refresh. If I’m going to do something in the morning, why does it have to be checking the false news of a false world on a website full of shills paid to swerve public opinion this way and that? Do I really need to know what’s happening, all the time, if I can only ever remember so little of it, talk about less of it and act on almost nothing of it? If the net is the most democratic medium we have, what happens when, after everyone and their grandmother has facebook and can make their comment and opinion public for all to see and be somehow influenced by, the same shit we experience in everyday life is copied to the web?
I’m sick of a web, a “democracy”, where trolls set the scene and have the upper hand, sick of pitiful little men that externalise their social anxieties and complexes in a space that can’t really harm them, being the driving force in some of the worst cybercultural phenomena we get to see online. But I wish it was just trolls: I’m sick of everybody’s self-centered non-trolling opinions, too. If we give everyone a voice online, we should be able to call the bullshit. But why do our bullshit detectors work so much less effectively online than in real life? Isn’t it a little bit like the mere fact that somebody’s doing something online, it’s given more validity than if it were done offline? Is that just the novelty of the medium that will soon pass? It’s no wonder @AvoidComments exists and that some sites have disabled their comments features altogether…
I’m sick of people smugly declaring they don’t have a television when asked if they’ve heard of the news on this or that celebrity, but they spend more time watching Youtube videos or TV series than they ever spent on watching classic old WeTube in the past.
I’m sick of writing “I’m sick of”, so I’m going to externalise and project a little bit here.
How do you feel about having to stack up against the whole world with your creativity? How many times have you had a great idea but did nothing to make it happen, because the thought that “somebody else must have done it already” killed it on the spot, and to make matters worse, you googled it just to be sure and somebody else had already executed it 5 times better than what you had even conceived of, sending you even farther down that internal pit? How does that make you feel? Why?
When was the last time you talked to each of those tens of Skype/MSN/whatever friends? Are you still interested in what they’re doing? Would you consider that the internet is bringing you closer to them?
How about reading? What was the best article you read the past week? The past month? No, you’re not allowed to look up your browser history. Go on, tell me what it said. What’s that? You can’t?
The pictures you have online, things you wrote a while ago, all that… Do you ever consider that people looking up your name have access to that and can paint a mental picture of who you are now based on who you were 5 years ago? In another 5 years or 10 years from now, these numbers will have skyrocketed. Do you want that? How does it make you feel? For me it used to be really stressful that somebody might have the wrong idea of who I am (I have some form of social anxiety IRL about being misunderstood and rejected, which translates in interesting ways in the webosphere) but there’s increasingly nothing I can do and I’ve just sort of embraced the fluidity. You can’t win them all anyway. I suppose you just have to live with your everything being public and always be appropriately mindful of your actions online.
All this makes it very hard to disown things you did and said in the past, however. We’re not allowed to purge, which is I think very normal behaviour we should be encouraging more, and neither are we allowed to change as people; if we change we instantly create inconsistencies across the various existing representations of us online. If I wish to stop using the name cubilone, for example, because I no longer identify with what the name carries with it, who will be the tens of cubilones you can find on the web?
Talking about public, have you been finding it more stressful to decide what you should be sharing and what not? I have been very bad with sharing lately, and don’t consider most details about my current life as worth sharing with others, including things I would definitely post here in the past. Remember, though: I’ve had the ‘mension for almost 7 years. Who’s not to change his or her habits in that time?
But no, I’m talking also about sites like Tumblr, Pinterest etc. Sites that force the whole damn interestnet (read that again carefully) down your virtual gullet before you’ve even had the chance to blink/chew. Tumblr especially is excellent at making you insensitive to beauty. Time and time again I’ve caught myself and others scrolling down the feed, giving a split second of attention to pictures that under different conditions would have made it to our desktop background. What happened? Have we forgotten to stop and appreciate? If we haven’t yet, I reckon we’re well on our way down that path.
I’ve talked and written about the web and infinite novelty before but, as you can see if you click on that link, I wasn’t able to limit my susceptibility to it in the 7 months that have passed since the post above. It’s a dangerous thing that can silently devastate a mind such as mine that feeds on new ideas and connections and is always on the lookout for the novel and the untried. Indulging myself in infinite novelty feels right, more or less because surrendering myself to it is one of my strongest habits, but at this point I think it’s time I admitted that it’s poisonous for my creativity and my ability to concentrate; it’s detrimental for my already distracted personality constantly spread thin, and it’s bad for my mental health, my relationships and happiness in general.
Does any of this resonate with you at all?
Good. It’s time we did something about it, don’t you agree?
I’ve decided to do it the hard way, since everything else I’ve tried to this day has more or less failed. I will use the internet less – I will force myself to use it less. Everything: skyping, downloading, facebooking, e-mails, checking up on that book I learned about earlier in the day, writing on the blog, working on my sites… Everything.
At this point, I want to make it clear that I don’t think the internet is all bad. It’s an extremely powerful tool that can be used to do incredible things, spread world-changing ideas or just help people keep in touch, and it’s very practical, too. I’m not saying we should forfeit all the great things the internet has brought in our lives – at this point we can hardly turn back, anyway. What I’m trying to say with this post is that the power of the internet has to be harnessed. One has to be smart about using it and not surrender oneself to its siren song. I believe that by dramatically limiting my access to it I will be in the position to use it more purposefully, and I believe so would you.
My internet access days will be Wednesdays and Saturdays. I might add another day or two for emergency Skype calls that can’t be avoided, but generally, this will be it. I will keep it up for at least the next 24 days, the duration of the rest of my 7×7 challenge, but I aim to keep it up past that point.
This is a personal experiment, but I wish to find other people to join me in this quixotic quest. Will you take a stand with me, friends?
