Some drawings in progress for two different projects. I have been drawing until my hand hurts. Luckily, I am left-handed, so my right hand still works so I can use the mouse for the mac. Unluckily for me, I have a to-do-list (langt som et ondt år!), and it involves homework, which involves handwriting, which involves my left hand. Time to do some hand-exercises and get back to business.

YAY! I am happy! I knew I had seen these illustrations on the internet somewhere with a download link for the entire book, but I lost the link some time ago, until I found it again today! So! This is a couple of scans from “Kunstformen der Natur”, and since I love both science, design and art, my inner nerd officially very satisfied atm! One amazing person has scanned the pages and you can see / download them all here in BIG SIZE! Oh, the joy 🙂

Yesterday I had one of those days where I just wasn’t up to par, and had to spend most of my day nurturing a throbbing headache while watching Dexter. And missing class (which meant missing a test, oh no)! It was time to practice what I preach, so when the bad conscience hit me with thoughts like “I probably could have dragged my ass to class” and “at least I could have done more homework”, I just had to stop myself and think “Some days will not be all you want them to be, but if you relax and accept it, you will be back to business in no time.” So that is what I did. And now I will get ready for today. (And my headache isn’t half as bad as yesterday!) Hope everyone out in the world is well, and if you are not entirely ok, give yourself a break so you can get well faster.

Mindrelic – Manhattan in motion from Mindrelic on Vimeo.

This made me want to go to New York! I probably will not be able to go for quite some time, but wow, this video made me lust for it. I wonder if I will ever find more places like Tokyo, where you just feel so at home. I love the way both New York and Tokyo looks, but I also love the feeling of politeness, safeness and security and not to mention the cleanliness that Tokyo provides. I feel safer in Tokyo than I have ever felt anywhere else, including smaller cities in the north of Europe.& completely unrelated, I want to shoot time-lapse movies as well, but I have to say that I do not understand all of the equipment.

Lately I have been thinking that I want to write a couple of things that can be useful for other people to read. Of course it is nice to post pictures and write about what is going on in my own life, I will continue with that as well. I thought that after I moved to Japan I learned a lot of things about how it is to live here that I wasn’t really prepared for, so I decided to write a little list of things I wish people would have told me before I moved. (these are only my own experiences, feel free to disagree with me!)

10 things you may or may not know about Japan

1. The laundry. To do laundry in Japan is a fun experience. There is usually no warm water connected to the washing machine. There is only cold water. When I first moved to Japan I was worried that the clothes wouldn’t get completely clean, but now I think the cold water washing machines are grand. The colors last much longer and the cold water is not as hard on the clothes. And oh, usually the washing machine is placed on the veranda, not indoors.
2. Your clothes and your hair and your apartment in the summer. Speaking of laundry; Japans summer is very humid, which makes it hard to dry clothes. They kind of get almost dry, but not completely. Same with drying your hair. Even when you use a hairdryer, I often find that my hair doesn’t completely dry. The humidity also makes awesome conditions for mold and fungus. And the Japanese black mold is not like western mold. It is mold on steroids. I have no science to back me up on this, but I sincerely believe it can form over night. That is why you usually try to have a gap of a couple of cm between the wall and the furniture, so the air can pass through and no mold will form. And don’t get me started on the dust. I have no idea how or why the dust gathers so quickly, but prepare to clean a whole lot more if you move to Japan.
3. The kitchen. There average Japanese kitchen does not have an oven. You can not roast a turkey or bake a pizza. I am sure kitchens with ovens do excist, if you are willing to pay the rent for such a place though. (A lot of the microwave-ovens here have a toaster-oven function though!) You cook with gas, and I still find the open flame incredibly scary.
4. Smoking. Smoking is forbidden in public places (at least most of Tokyo), however, smoking is totally legal inside restaurants and bars. Sometimes there will be a non-smoking section within the restaurant (especially if it is a family-resturant), but a lot of the izakayas are all smoking seats. Very many bars allow smoking in the entire bar.
5. Eating on the street. Eating on the street is not illegal of course, but it is kind of frowned upon, Japanese people have a tendency to sit down and then eat. You almost never see people eating on the train or the bus, or walking down the street eating. It is kind of strange since Japanese are very busy, you would think they would always walk and eat, but that is not the case. (You can see young people in Harajuku and Shibuya eating crepes and kebabs and walking though.)
6. Drinking on the street. … however, drinking alcohol on the street is totally legal. Hurrah!
7. Opening hours. I have only lived in Tokyo, so I am not sure how the rest of Japan works in this area, but basically, Tokyo does not really close. The bars stay open late, and there are even bars that open when the other bars close, so the staff that works at the first type of bar can go and drink at the second type of bar. Grocery stores stay open until 11, 12, 02 and 05, depending on what grocery store it is. All the combinis (like 7/11, FamilyMart, MiniStop, Lawson etc.) stay open 24/7. However, the last train leaves between 12 and 01 to most places, so the people who do not catch their last train, can stay out drinking in bars (and take little catnaps with their head resting on the counter) until the trains start going at 05 or 06 in the morning and they can get home.
8. Buying bulk. In most other countries, buying bigger packages usually means that the price goes down pr gram/kg. In Japan, half of the time the price goes up. It is often more expensive to buy a bigger package. Example from the supermarket yesterday: 100g pack of chocolate = 168 yen. 400g pack of chocolate = 800 yen. Why? I don’t know. It teaches modesty, at least. (I am sure there are stores like Walmart where buying bulk is cheaper, I am just talking about the average supermarket.)
9. Addressing other people. You probably already know that Japanese people always address people whom they are not very close with by their last name. This is absolutely true. I actually do not even know the first name of half of my teachers, and I would never ever think about using a teachers given name to them. Friends are of course a different thing all together. To stay safe, add -san after people’s last name, but never after your own.
10. Names that end with -ko. Speaking of given names; until about 40 years ago, most girl-names ended with -ko. Yukiko, Aikiko etc. Nowadays there are other names like Eri and Nana etc, but finding a woman over the age of 45 with a name that doesn’t end in -ko is not that easy. To learn the given names of women over 45 is not always easy either (unless you become good friends), see previous point.

I haven’t posted to lookbook in forever, but I finally got over myself and posted there for the first time in a year or so.

• 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.