• The fact that I have gotten the opportunity to live in Tokyo, meet amazing people and broaden my horizon.
• Impromptu sushi take-away on rainy evenings.
• Black coffee and time to waste on the internet.
• My mother, who always tried as good as she could. The outcome wasn’t always perfect, but I know she did her best. Thank you mom! ♥
• Making zines!!! I just added a new page here on sushibird.com with a couple of booklets and zines I have made in the past. The page is here: http://sushibird.com/zines/
• Skype calls from my friends! Hi Kristin, Joseph and Madeleine!
• Inspiration from the internet. Lately here, here and here.
• Actually feeling passionate about something half political. This hasn’t happened in forever, but I read this article, and I actually felt annoyed and upset with the content of it. Which is a good thing, at least it managed to stir up something in me. I even wrote a commentary against this article, but I am not sure I would dare to send it to the newspaper after all. I then read this response to the first article, and felt better about the whole thing.
• Small earthquakes because they make my head stop spinning, for a while I am just standing and holding my breath, in complete concentration to see if they get bigger and scarier or not. Earthquakes (the ones that does not escalate) feels like a wonderful exercise in emptying your head for thoughts.
• Shopping for hair-clips and accessories. I don’t do it very often anymore, but I love how you don’t have to stand in a sweaty dressing room to see if a hair-clip looks cute or not.
• Budgies. Budgies budgies budgies. They are small and playful and fluffy and cute, and they bring out my girly side. Other girls might go “aww” when they see a baby, I go “aww” when I see a budgie. I miss having one of them sitting on my pencil and help me with both homework and illustrations.

… I still wore clothes that wasn’t black black black. I guess I went a bit overboard at times, but dressing up like you were going on stage every other day really gave me a boost! Looking at the picture I guess I get the same associations as everyone else get looking at old picture, a lovely mixture of embarrassment and tardy proudness. Kind of like “Wow, I can not believe I wore that. I can not believe I dared to wear something like that.” This kind of clothing style is not for me anymore, but I did enjoy finding these pictures.

…the weather was crazy. It was rainy and sunny and rainy and I caught a cold laying around in the damp grass taking pictures of water drops.

… I found bugs everywhere. Bumblebees, spiders, all kinds of insects. Snails and worms as well. I don’t think I have ever taken as many pictures of bumblebees in my entire life before or since. I think I did the whole spider-glass-paper-trick to toss the poor buggers out alive at least 30 times that summer.

… I felt childish and spent a couple of hours spying on random people. Good old fashion dress-up in a detective-like coat (bought secondhand and in remarkable condition still), equipped with a black moleskine notebook, and then.. tamtamtam… follow a random stranger around town for 30 min or so, plotting down what they were doing, taking pictures through the bushes. I thought it would be a remarkable experience, but I quickly I came to the conclusion that other people’s life were not as exciting as my own, and retreated to the coffee shop to draw in my moleskine instead of taking notes about strangers. It was probably the year where I first got back into drawing on a more serious level.

… and last, but not least, a lot of picnics in the park. Those crappy, 1-time-barbecue-tinfoil-monstrosities that I could never figure out how to use properly, overcooked sausages which tasted perfect in the sunset, strong wind and smokey eyes and wine with screw-caps. Nice June.

Tiden går og jeg består. Eller noe som likner. Jeg føler at jeg bare gjentar meg igjen og igjen, men dersom det er mulig har tiden i det siste gått enda fortere enn vanlig. Jeg trives med det. Det finnes ikke tid til å bekymre seg, det finnes ikke tid til crash and burn, baby. Dagene kommer og går, før jeg visste ordet av det var det regntid i Japan. Hver juni regner det som bare det, men jeg er fornøyd, for i motsetning til det kalde nord er det fremdeles lyst og fint ute, selv når det er overskyet.

1. When trying to get the facts, I pretend that I am collecting this information not for myself, but for some other person. This helps me to take a cold, impartial view of the evidence. This helps me eliminate my emotions.

2. While trying to collect the facts about the problem that is worrying me, I sometimes pretend that I am a lawyer preparing to argue the other side of the issue. In other words, I try to get all the facts against myself-all the facts that are damaging to my wishes, all the facts I don’t like to face.

The best possible way to prepare for tomorrow is to concentrate with all your intelligence, all your enthusiasm, on doing today’s work superbly today.

The secret of being miserable is to have the leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not.

More pictures from the “Toy Cities” project. Tilt shift is fun!

Head is to busy to worry about anything these days, and I love it that way. Above, best hairdresser in Tokyo, and they even speak English! If you are in Tokyo and you need a good haircut, check out www.sinden.com.

I made it into the top 20 of the kanji competition! Here is a silly picture of the people in the top 20 who got a diploma. Next to me  in a beige jacket is the principal. If there would have been more time, I would have done even slightly a bit better, but I am actually kind of proud to make it to the top 20 at all! Who would have thought!

♥ discovering music that you had completely forgotten about ♥ waking up in the morning to bright light, even on overcast days ♥ having a full stomach after eating too much sushi ♥ sorting your underwear drawers on a rainy Sunday afternoon ♥ escaping the hangover; waking up after a night of drinking and actually feel completely clear and fresh in the head ♥ realizing that you can actually eavesdrop on other people’s conversations, despite them being in Japanese ♥ the smell of the pavement right after the rain ♥ long slim women in beautiful suits going to work on an overfilled train ♥

♥ smelling her clothes ♥ singing karaoke in front of drunk Japanese women and realizing that you actually do not care as much as before about making a fool out of yourself, because you are having fun ♥ spending several hours talking only Japanese, like a plug that has been pulled and you can finally speak speak speak and make sense ♥ learning new things and actually understanding them and being able to put them into use ♥ spending four hours you do not really have drawing details into mediocre illustrations ♥ discovering that there is actually more coffee left than what you can drink in one morning ♥

Look at what a lucky girl I am!!! I was surprised on Friday with an extra special treat!

She: I bought you a random sparkling wine from the store.
Me: Oh, thanks.
She: Don’t you want to open the box and see what it is?
Me: *opens box* Oh. My. God.

This is not a random bottle. And she knows it is not a random bottle. This was a really nice surprise. Jacques Selosse is probably one of my favorite champagnes in the whole wide world. I have only had it a handful of times, because it has been really hard to come across (and well, hum, kind of pricey to be honest). I felt like the luckiest girl in the world. The taste was absolutely amazing, full and yeasty but yet crisp and clear. The color was a deep yellow and the bubbles were really fine.

She had put it in a Moet-box. I never drink Moet, but this box is really practical and pretty. It keeps the champagne chilled. Later that evening I had a bit of the Nikka 21 year pure malt. I am not a whisky drinker and never have been. I would like to get a bit more into it, but my problem is that once the alcohol goes over a certain percent I am not able to distinguish particular tastes, and a lot of hard liquor just taste similar to me. This one was good in my opinion though, it was easy to drink and smooth. Apart from that, I know nothing about it, and I know very little about how to taste whisky.

& this post is dedicated to my favorite San Fransisco brothers, Joseph (vinosseur.com) and Jonathan (emptywhiskyglass.wordpress.com). Joseph is crazy about wine (especially bio-dynamic/organic), and Jonathan is crazy about whisky. Their blogs are awesome if you are into wine, whisky and high quality alcoholic beverages. Take a look!

A sneak-peak of something I am working on. The final thing will be HUGE! It takes forever to draw the different parts. I lack a daruma, a lucky kitty, gemstones and treasure chest and 5 yen coins… Hopefully I can finish the other parts for this later this week. For now, I have finished the octopus at last.