essays on life...by me

Category: Life Page 1 of 7

The Lonely Sci-fi Life

I’ve been watching a lot of science fiction TV series lately. Always by myself, since my husband doesn’t like that sort of stuff.

I spent a night on my sofa, binge-watching the 6th season of the Amazon Sci-fi series The Expanse. I had just gotten access to it and was only going to watch the first episode but then I got caught up in it and continued on to the second episode and then the third and by 2am I had finished the entire season. It was only 6 episodes after all. I had been waiting till the season was finished so that I could get all the episodes at the same time – so why not just watch them all at once? It’s just like what happens when you find a great book and just can’t put it down at the end of a chapter but continue reading each chapter after the other until you discover you have either been up all night or the book is done. Which ever comes first.

I also finished watching the Apple TV+ series, Foundation, based on Isaac Asimov’s Foundation books. I watched the first two episodes before the entire series landed. After those 2 episodes, I had very little desire to watch the rest. I spent a large part of those initial episodes exclaiming out loud, in rather bad language, what I thought of them. But I couldn’t hold out, curiosity and hope got the better of me and a few weeks after the first season ended I binged the rest – with lots more bad words escaping from my agonized throat. I decided that Isaac Azimov would be turning in his grave with what they did to his great story. Oh well, that’s what happens when other people think they know better than the original author.

After recovering from Foundation, I watched Disney’s The Mandalorian, mainly because it was there and I had heard about it. I liked The Mandalorian.  Unlike very “woke” Foundation, it was old fashioned space opera sci-fi – with a gun-toting hero, space ships, lots of fast action, and lots of wild west style shootouts. But after the second season it started to get repetitive and boring and began to suffer from the Law of Success, which means producers keep a successful show going even though they have no new ideas for it. So I stopped watching.

In between all these shows, I also watched the second season of The Witcher, which technically isn’t sci-fi but I like looking at Henry Cavill. That’s enough reason for me. And I also like Fantasy…if it’s good fantasy and The Witcher is.

I have been a fan of Science Fiction since before my wisdom teeth came in. I read Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles when I was 11 and by the time I finished high school I had read everything by Bradbury, Asimov, and Heinlein that my dad had on his bookshelf.

The Winter Hare

It’s 4 am and I am still awake. I went to bed early, at 12.30, but lay there reading, not tired enough to fall asleep. And now it has become 4am. I give up any attempt at sleeping and get out of bed, looking towards the window. Beyond the mostly open blinds covering the window frame, the world is filled with multiple dark shades of blue light. It’s still night and still winter dark but instead of just darkness this bluish glow lights up the view from my bedroom window. I go to it and pull up the blinds. Off to the right is the lonely streetlight shining on the path behind my building. In the glow of the lantern I can see snow falling gently within the circle of light. At such times it always brings to mind the street light in winter Narnia that the children come to after leaving their closet. It looks magical.

The path, the trees, the bushes and everything else within view is covered in a layer of sticky snow. Not deep but deep enough to cover the grass tips. There is no wind so each flake stays where it lands. Here in winter Stockholm, when snow covers the world, the darkness recedes – even without a moon, just the white snow-filled clouds covering the sky and the fallen snow covering the landscape – and turns into monochrome blue with everything visible to the eye as though it was day.

I notice a misshapen dark blob on the surface of the new, untouched white snow just to the left of the lamppost.

A new season

To everything (turn, turn, turn)
There is a season (turn, turn, turn)
And a time to every purpose, under heaven*

Celebrating 70 with princesstårta

Celebrating 70 with princesstårta

This summer, on the 29th of June, l shared a Princesstårta with a few friends at our country house, thus observing and commemorating the last day of my seventh decade and officially turning 70. Four days later, I celebrated beginning a new season and the start of my eighth decade, together with a much larger group of friends at a big party at our summer house.

OK… so I am now 70 years old. There is no new age box for when you reach 70. The highest seems to be simply 65+ as if over 65 is just one big blur. What does that mean?

Originally, I hadn’t planned on doing anything special to mark my seventieth birthday. All I really wanted to do was hide and pretend it wasn’t happening and just go on from there. But I got talked into celebrating by my long-time friend and summer neighbor, Barbara Eveaus. She insisted I had to have a party and it would be a breeze because she would take care of planning everything for the party. LOL…you can not say that to a control freak like me. I am compelled to take care of that kind of thing. So… I gathered the long list of email addresses, I designed the invitation, I composed the overly wordy email message that sounded just like me, and then…I pressed send.

Pictures of life

In a golden, Godiva chocolate box, I have a collection of loose photographs. There is no order to them. Godiva photoboxThey encompass many years, most of them from before I moved to Sweden, and are collected from many places. Inside can be found some baby pictures that I took from my parent’s photo albums. There are a number of photo ID cards, some from Pratt Institute where I was a student, some from the Metropoliten Museum where I worked after graduation. There are some old driver’s licences – yes, I did once have one. Some pictures were taken in photo machines – one strip dating back to 1970 and another with me, my very young son and my husband crammed into the frame. There are also a bunch of old Polaroids from the 70s, with their white borders loosening in places.

I’ve had this box since I worked on a slide show for a production company in New York City back in the 1980’s. The production time-period included Valentine’s Day and we who were working there were working our asses off with long, stressful days and very late nights. The owners of the company came around on V-day and handed out to each of us, a large box of Godiva Chocolate – to keep our spirits up, I guess. Every night, I would go home very late, carefully choose one piece of chocolate from the box, eat it and fall into bed for a few hours of sleep – till I had to go back to work the next morning. It was a beautiful box, covered in embossed gold paper, and I didn’t want to just throw it away after all the chocolate was gone. In those days, I almost never took photographs. I’ve rarely owned a camera actually, and never a really good one. I had a Polaroid camera for awhile and one of those cameras that used a special film cartridge. It actually didn’t matter much what sort of camera I owned, I was a terrible photographer anyway. Because of this, I never had a lot of photographs lying around but I did have a few. I decided that the new golden box was the perfect place to put my meager collection. So that was where I put the polaroids that I took as reference material for illustrations and the few things from college and the baby pics. The box is now pretty filled up and I rarely put new stuff in there. Occasionally, however, I open it and look through the images that are there.

I also have a newer collection of photos taken after I moved to Sweden. My husband is a good photographer so we have lots of pictures. A large portion of them fill about 4 small IKEA photo boxes which sit on the shelves of a bookcase. The storage boxes contain neatly organized envelopes, the kind you used to get from photo stores after they developed your film. On each envelope is written the date and a brief description of the photos. Most of the envelopes contain double photos – that’s what we always ordered – so we could send pictures to my family back in the States. I guess I didn’t send a lot of photos because most of the envelopes still have their doubles. Or else I just sent the ones I looked good in. Occasionally, when we would have guests, the envelopes would come out and we would bore our friends with 30 or 40 pictures of us doing things.

In the late 90s, photos became digital and I stopped collecting envelopes of paper prints and collected them on my computer instead – in well organized folders. These days I don’t have to drag out envelopes of photographs to show to people, I show them on Facebook instead – and only a few of the best.

Facebook recently celebrated its 10th anniversary by offering to make a 1- minute video compilation of your Facebook posts. Many of my Faceys (my Facebook friends) did it but I was hesitant. There was something about it that bothered me. Was it because I didn’t want a machine to remind me of who I was?  Occaisionally, I find myself looking through my Facebook Photo Albums, reminding myself of the images I have posted there. I’ve even gone back and taken a look at posts I have written through the years. I had this idea that I might collect them and list them all in one long blog post –  as a way of seeing what I have been thinking about over the past 7 years since I have been a member of Facebook. But, like so many other things, I never got around to doing that. Now, however, here was FB offering to do it for me – collected into just one minute. Part of me was curious but part of me thought it was creepy. Well, curiosity got the better of me and I finally did it. I would send you the link so you could see my life too but it only works if you are logged in as me.

A few weeks ago, I listened online to a short radio program (www.thetakeaway.org/story/facebook-best-place-archive-our-memories) about the type of effect Facebook and its personal collections of photographs and texts might might be having on people in the long run. One of the ideas that was brought up was how, instead of showing our real lives, on Facebook, we only show the sort of life we want to project outwardly. It only shows the good side, our best self – that it is a scripted narrative. More recently, there has been a trend away from posting exactly what’s on your mind and instead posting something that illustrates how good your life is. The question asked during the discussion, was,
“Ten years down the line, will people look back and think that this “artificial” life  is what their life was actually like? Is this the only thing that will frame their past and how will it effect the way they remember their past?”

My response to this question is, so what? What is the big deal – how is this different than before? Our memories of our past have always been framed by what we keep and what we show. Whether its the boxes of junk left over from every move we made, still sitting in the garage; or the photo albums collecting all the photographs taken through the years; or the journal writings we made or the letters we sent to or received from others, telling bits of news of our lives. Some people have more and some people have less of these tangibile reminders of the life we have lived. A friend of mine who was the youngest of 5 kids says that by the time she came along her parents had gotten tired of taking photos and there are very few of her but masses of her oldest siblings. Some people wrote journal entries every day and others barely managed to send out a Christmas card once a year. I remember what my dog Skippy looked like from the photo I have of her and me when I was 5 years old. I have other memories of her but they are fleshed out by that photo. The same goes for many other past events that I remember. Sometimes the memory has become vague and faded but the photograph proves it was real and actually happened. The black and white photographs which my mother so very carefully arranged, with captions, in her photo albums with their black paper pages and white photo corners were a selection of the best images of her and her friends that she could collect.  And that is how I know her past. Facebook isn’t really different from this. The medium is different but the purpose is actually exactly the same as it was 70 years ago. The only thing to really worry over is whether the medium we use today will have the same possibility to last as long and be looked at as long as those old albums with their paper photographs. I can look at my mother’s photographs without needing the correct operating system, the right hardware or a particular App or Program. All I need to do is carefully pick up the slightly falling-apart scrapebook and gently turn the pages.

I sometimes wonder if the youngsters of today will be able to reminisce and enjoy looking through the images which they today capture in their smart phones with the same pleasure that I feel when I rummage through the contents of my Godiva Chocolate box. When they are 62 years old – will their images even still exist to be looked at? Will they still have something real to look back at to help them remember who they were? Will they still have something as sweet?

Page 1 of 7

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén