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I took these pictures on my birthday a week or so ago. I was busy studying for my last exam, so no birthday celebration for me. (It would have been too sad to admit that I was slaving over linguistic books ALL day on my birthday, so moving my birthday to a more suitable time and forget all about it seemed like the best strategy.) Maybe I am finally starting to look all grown up, haha.

Hello lovelies! As you might have noticed, the update rate at sushibird has decreased drastically in the last month or so, and I wish I had some sort of exciting story about why, but to be honest, it is due to the fact that I have been super-busy with studying until my eyes fall out of my head. (I am currently attending a Norwegian university, and a regular course load is 30 points, however, I am super-sushibird, hence, I am taking on double load, 60 points! Go Go Go!) The fact that I might be a tad bit of a perfectionist *cough* means that the time I have had for fun things like internet has been almost zero. That being said, I have had such a grand time in Norway compared to what I thought I would! (The weather is not included in this calculation, mind you.) I have met so many nice people in the past months at uni, I’ve had good sake several times, I have had nachspiels with my mother, petted a cat repeatedly, enjoyed the wonderful Norwegian coffee almost every day and eaten fresh pasta and lots and lots of cheese. I have felt all grown up when I can make my own phone calls and have no trouble getting across my message because I actually KNOW the language, and I could send text messages with all my friends via cell. How amazing isn’t that? And I have learned a lot of Japanese, of course. Bit by bit, things are falling into place, and this fall I read my first novel in Japanese.  I have learned to love the feeling of being so busy that your head is spinning and you are forgetting what day it is – is actually more exciting than stressful.

I can feel that something is lacking despite the tight schedule, I want to pick up a camera and take lots and lots of pictures, I want to draw and paint and cut paper into a million pieces and make food from scratch and put on nail polish and tweeze my eyebrows and put on makeup and shave my legs and sort my bookcase and go running and read books for fun and create pretty things. My mind is bursting over with ideas, but I have no time. Right now I have a small notebook, and I am writing it all down, and once I ace these exams, I have plenty of ideas to keep me occupied.

I had my first exam today. It went fine. I have three more to go in the next two weeks. And I guess what I am trying to say is:

Don’t forget about me!
I will be back within a month.
Promise.

Kisses and hugs and all that jazz;

I was browsing modcloth (all items above are from modcloth.com) just to look around, try to get some inspiration, try to see if anything tickled my fancy. I encountered two problems.

1. I see things I think are cute, but the styles of the things are all over the place (as you can see from the above collection). It is like I have lost any kind of direction in personal style, and mix and matching stuff like this doesn’t always work. It is hard to wear a classy mad-men type of dress and combine it with a pug-party-ring. I don’t know what happened to my sense of taste (or lack thereof), but god, I can not seem to settle for any sort of style. And I have been feeling, maybe for the past two years or so, that I am getting to old for quite a few styles, and I feel that I need to grow up and not dress like a teenager anymore. And I am kind of stumped, because I still come across things that glitters like god and go “ooo! I want that!” even though the item does not match a single thing in my mostly black closet. So – how do you guys solve this? Settle for a style and keep to it?

2. The second “problem” I encountered is not really a problem; I do not feel inclined to actually buy things anymore. I look at things, think they are cute, but I don’t feel that yearning or longing for all sorts of items like I did when I was younger. I can easily walk into several clothing stores now, look through their collections, conclude that yes, certain garments are pretty, but I don’t feel like they are pretty enough to spend my money on them. After I have moved back and forth to Japan, I do not want to carry a shitload of clothes and whatnot with me, and right now I am living in a 5 square meter room, and I simply do not have enough space to keep a huge wardrobe. And it feels strangely liberating. Owning fewer things, getting by fine with fewer things. When I was younger I would keep closet upon closet filled to the brim, but going through old clothes now, I realize that most of the items are unnecessary, so I have thrown most of them away.  And you can do it as well! Clean out your closet, and just throw out all the old junk you are never going to wear again. There is no point in letting things clutter up your life. That being said – I miss that feeling of really falling head over heels in love with items. The only thing I have truly been wanting to buy all year was a pair of JC shoes. What do you do to get excited over items? Winter is coming, and I lack a couple of base garments, but I can not bring myself to go out and look for them, because most things are just so utterly uniteresting to me.

I have not read books for several years. Not because they do not interest me, but because I have been so terribly afraid of losing myself somewhere between the pages. I used to read a lot when I was younger, several books a week, plowed through both classical literature and quirky newcomers. I discovered Jon Fosse when I was 14, read through classical Greek plays, I loved it all, it moved something inside of me. I felt a lot, but – feeling – it is such a two-edged sword. Being able to experience so much emotion jumping off the paper, but not knowing what to do with it all once it hit me. So, I started avoiding books. Just like I still avoid movies, for the most part. It is too much. It is not enough.

For my Japanese course this fall, I had to read four novels by Japanese authors, and I chose Banana Yoshimoto’s N.P. and Kitchen, and I choose Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the shore and Norwegian wood. I have spent the last weeks evenings curled up in bed, gulping down the words on the pages, rediscovering reading. This is what it feels like to read fiction. I had forgotten. Upon rediscovering books, I realized that there was something about them which I missed immensely. I am not sure if it is the literary drought inside of me, the fact that I have not read books in such a long time, that made all of these four books so stunningly amazing to me, or if I just hit the jackpot and managed to pick out four amazing books to read in a row, but needless to say, I loved them all. Yoshimoto writes in such a clear and crisp way, so tangible and concrete about difficult subjects like death and complicated love (spiced up with incest and transexualism), and maybe just by pure chance, Murakami covers the same topic in Kafka on the shore, but writes about it so differently it is hard to think they cover any of the same topics at all. When Murakami makes everything surreal and floaty and you are not sure what is reality and what is a dream, Yoshimoto drags you down to earth and explain things in laymen’s terms. The combination of these books made my October evenings spectacular.

Random mobile / web pictures from the latest weeks! Speaking of – Any ideas how I am going to cut my hair? I have no idea what to do with it now. It is too long or too short…  Can’t quite figure it out. Growing it out is not really an option, because I am going back to Japan next month, and my hair turns flat and awful if I try to grow it long. Thinking about just cutting it back in the shape of a perfect a-line bob again, but haven’t quite decided. I am pretty skeptical towards hairdressers in this city, so part of me just want to wait it out and cut it once I am back in Japan. Oh first-world-problems, what to do, what to do…