I EAT WHALE

2012-04-23

Anonymous asked: when you move back to you plan on going back to ny, or would you rather try somewhere else?

I’d love to move back to NY, but I’d also like to try out living in other cities… (I say ‘cities’ because I have just come to accept that I love those above other places)

if I finish the program I’m currently working on at uni of Iceland I’ll have to do 1 year at a uni in Tokyo. So that’s my current plan; to stay in Iceland for max 2 more years and then go away to do that, or something else… I can only really plan 1 year at a time :)

in any case, with all my health/disability bullshit I can’t just pick up and spontaneously move to a new place (as much as I’d love to be able to). So if I were to move to NY (or anywhere) I’d have to have something like a job or a scholarship and access to health insurance that would pay for my med supplies. Those things can be tricky. So we’ll see.

2012-04-20

superamiga replied to your post: Here is a time machine, where are you going?

if there was a way to prevent getting sick, you could’ve gone back and told your past self how to do that, then it’d cycle through to your future self immediately maybe… or even better, take your past self to the future where medicine is advanced.

that’s a good point, but the problem is that IF there was way for me to prevent getting sick, nobody knows what that would have involved.

I guess if I could go back in time I might try some things, like telling myself to not move to america, not put so much pressure on myself or not work too hard, but the truth is that if I would’ve passed on doing any of those things I wouldn’t have had the interesting life that I had for the past 6+ years and I really don’t regret that. and chances are if I would’ve just taken it super easy, it would’ve ended like this anyway cause it’s in my genes and I am doomed eternally or whatever. who knows?

actually I hope that the scientists of the future know. because your 2nd option does indeed sound better, I’d so go to whatever time they’ll be growing perfect human organs in tanks or incubators or whatever and just get a brand new digestive tract transplanted. that’ll be sweet.

2012-04-19

Anonymous asked: do you prefer america or europe?

it’s hard for me to answer this because while I’ve lived in [North] America I can’t really say that I’ve lived in Europe…. I know that Iceland is technically / legally a part of ‘Europe’ but it is about as far away from the continent / mainland of Europe as you can get (besides Greenland) and different from what people consider ‘Europe’ in accordance to that. It’s an isolated in-between and I imagine living on the continent would be very different. I did live in England for a bit, but I was to young to really have ‘a life’ so it’s also hard to compare that to being a young-adult living in america.

with all that said, just comparing the places I’ve lived in, I prefer America, hands down. Quick, someone hire me / marry me so I can move back there (◑‿◐)

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lazenby asked: Here is a time machine, where are you going?

sorry, it has taken me forever to answer this…

I kept coming back to this question and thinking “omg could I use the time machine to go back to a time before I got sick and just live in that time forever with my body whole and in tact??”

…but then I think “no, time machines don’t work like that, so I’d have to keep this body while being able to travel to any time in my current state, not as exciting…”

honestly, for me to exist in any time before the past ≈ 20 years would seriously blow (+ I’d be so dead if I had been born like 40 years earlier) so I don’t really see the point in going back in time, unless it’s for like a day, in which case I’d probably just go try to hang out with my dad when he was a teenager / young adult to see what he was like because I can’t really imagine that, while I feel like I know exactly what my mom was like.

also I would LOVE to go back in time to hang out with all of my grandparents; they were all alive when I was born but had all died by the time I was about 11

hm, seems self-centered and unimaginative but yes I have never really had a tendency to romanticize the past (except for of course that specific past in which I was “healthy” and “normal”).

HOWEVER I’d love to go to the future! any point in the future, as there is no way of knowing which time in the future would be better than another. so yeah I’d defnitely use my time machine to time travel all over the future and just see wazzup. wow that would be great.

2012-04-11

jokin2012 asked: and..??? how was it :-)))??

ah, it was great!

I somehow managed to not “do” very much, as in, I didn’t really “go see sights” etc. but I did get a lot of quality time with 3 of my favorite friends and I walked around the city and looked around at normal stuff, went to a couple of gallery opening things, ate some very delicious food (read: cheese), we had a “big” party for easter, I got kinda drunk for the first time since 2010 which was great and went well (HALLELUJA), me and raven spent like an entire day watching horror movies because we missed doing that together, we cooked a lot, etc etc…

so yes… my health wasn’t perfect and the weather was kinda lousy but I managed to chill pretty hard and have a sweet time and I definitely understand why my friends are so comfortable in that city, it is comfy and charming :3

p.s. I also managed to be completely baffled by your language and do stuff like order 2 ice creams instead of one and then eat them both alone cause i was too embarrassed to correct the mistake

2012-03-11

Anonymous asked: that map shirt is amazing, where is it from?

it’s from Nonfiction Tees

(◑‿◐)

2012-03-08

crownontherocks asked: youre an uber cutie pie and youlike big bang shows how potentially well rounded you are culturally! Do you find yourself singing along fluently? haha

(▰˘◡˘▰) thank you!

yess big bang is wonderful and I do end up learning most of the choruses by heart. I listen to music in my car alot, and I try to have AT LEAST half the music I listen to be in a language that I’m not fluent in (usually either korean, japanese, spanish or french) …that way I listen to the songs over and over and learn the words (cause I really like singing along to VERY LOUD music while I sit in traffic on my way to class at 8 AM)… and then once I’ve learnt every word, I go look up the ones I don’t know and figure out exactly the meanings of the lyrics, then continue singing them with the added knowledge (which I could usually do without because pop-songs have the dumbest lyrics but oh well, it’s all for the sake of LEARNING)

it’s a great way to learn words / sentences / languages… for one I can remember song lyrics a lot more easily than just a random sentence from a book. and it’s fun. and I learn “contemporary, casual” language that is often scarce in textbooks.

anyway, you’ve got a pretty good playlist going! I rly like three 6 mafia… haha and a lot of stuff I guess, being “culturally well rounded” is a nice way to put it…

2012-03-01

Anonymous asked: Please tell us what icelanders think of bjork

well,

I don’t think there is really any single opinion that all icelanders share on Björk,

personally I just think she is very hardworking and talented and that she has done well for herself… and i respect her for using her power to fight for stuff she believes in like nature conservation etc.

and I’m sure a lot of icelanders share that opinion…

I never really got into / bought any of her albums, but when I was a kid my sister was into her (Debut, Post, Homogenic?) so I was too. and when I was in junior college Medúlla was quite popular among my peers and a lot of my friends would play it constantly. I actually went to the same jr. college she went to, but I have no idea if that factored into it at all.

oh, on the new-years-eve comedy show (an annual icelandic TV show where they make fun of the year’s events) they made fun of her new album, implying that it sounded terrible… so I guess some icelanders must think her recent music sounds bad / weird / inaccessible… although every concert she plays here seems to sell out, so I dunno how seriously that can be taken haha.

I guess we don’t really think about her too much? hm… how can I explain…

well, when I worked in a videostore downtown for about 2 years, her and matthew barney used to come there to rent movies when they were in town. there was also a hostel around the corner that had a special deal with the videostore so sometimes tourists would come rent movies. anyway, every time Björk came in, the icelandic customers would just go about their business as usual, meanwhile the tourists, as soon as she left, would come up to me and be like “*GASP* WAS THAT…! OMG!!”

actually, after realizing that Björk (+ MB) had THE BEST BEHAVED, most polite child to ever set foot in that videostore (probably the best behaved child in all of iceland, the kids here are animals) I respect her a lot more (︶▽￣)

2012-02-26

on eating animals and cannibalism

lazenby asked you:

Okay so I’m really not coming at this from some bullshit vegetarian militancy, because I like cheeseburgers too, but what do you think about eating things like whales? There are probably things you wouldn’t eat because they were disgusting (a handful of spiders or something), but is there anything you wouldn’t eat for the same reason you wouldn’t eat another person? For that matter, why, exactly, wouldn’t you eat another person?

gotchu.

so here is what i honestly feel about this from deep within my brain:

(*click* to read; WARNING: not for the “faint of heart” - what can I say I just like to keep it real.)

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tiredtired replied to your photo: green coca cola cup i got at icelandic McDonalds…

what happened to the mcdonalds?!

it got shut down when our economy crashed back in 2008

D:

now there is not a single McDonalds on this entire island!

there are some other fast foods though.

2012-02-22

moondrool asked: what was moving to england at age 12 like? what was going to british school like?

well, on one hand it was refreshing because I wasn’t really loving life at my school in Iceland when I was 12. I didn’t feel like i fit in very well and I was itching for a change of scenery, so when my mom asked me if I would like to join her in England while she finished her masters I was like YES.

on the other hand… if I didn’t fit in in Iceland, it was faaar worse in northern-England, hah. I had just started learning english and I didn’t understand a WORD anyone said to me… I got bullied pretty hard and didn’t really make a single friend the entire time I lived there.

BUT… considering I was already pretty good at entertaining myself, I remember it as an overall pretty good time. I got to spend a lot of nice quiet time with my mom, she would take me on week-end trips to London and let me just roam the tate-modern for hours (MY FAVORITE PLACE IN LONDON not that I’ve been there since I was 16). And a lot of the kids at my school hadn’t even been to London ever, and they had lived in england THEIR ENTIRE LIVES so my weekend trips of course just made them hate me more haha.

This one moment is super strong in my memory; I was sitting in geology class and at the start of the lesson the teacher enthusiastically says “I’m not gonna tell you who, but SOMEONE IN HERE comes from a place with a lot of volcanic activity!!” …ofcourse everyone turned around to look at me like “volcano-bitch you gotta be kiddin me” and I was just like “o gawd let a volcano open up under my feet this very moment and swallow me forever”

haha anyway. when I wasn’t in school I passed the time playing pokémon on my gameboy, or watching dawson’s creek or Buffy on TV, or looking out the window at the GIANT HERD of bunnies that lived on our back lawn.

also my mom was generally amazing, she let me get whatever I wanted from the grocery store (all those ‘exotic’ foods!) so I ate a lot… and she took me to the book-store like every week and let me get as many books as I could read. So I read a lot and between that, schoolwork and TV I learnt a lot of english really fast. Durham is also a very pretty old town, so I liked going on walks around it on sunny days.

12 was also the age when I started my period and stopped growing and I am currently the same height and weight as I was at that time… haha :/

1 more thing. my next door neighbors were 2 or 3 japanese dudes who had failed terribly at bleaching their hair so they all had some sort of BRIGHT KETCHUP ORANGE hair and every time I passed them I wanted to be like “dudes… has anybody told you about your hair….?”

2012-02-17

Anonymous asked: who are some of your favorite icelandic rappers?

I gotta preface my answer with this: I am very much an ‘accidental’ fan of rap-music; i never really paid attention to icelandic rap-music until after I had lived in New York for 5 yeas, and I only started liking american rap music after I moved to ‘the hood’ (bed-stuy / bushwick cusp) during my 4th year in NYC and had the young money team coming in thru all my windows on 24-7 surround sound.

having said that, I’ve paid a little bit of attention to rap music in iceland for the past year Ive lived here and here’s what i like so far:

Gísli Pálmi, the dude whose lyrics I just translated - [here’s another song i rly like]

Emmsjé Gauti - [heres a very recent collab he did that i like idk]

Erpur or Blazroca or whatever dude calls himself - here are two emmsjé gauti + blazroca collabs: [Hemmi Gunn] [elskum þessar mellur]

7berg - [here’s a song that ‘impressively’ incorporates the word ‘eyjafjallajökull’]

oh also! I totally lied earlier, there were icelandic rappers I really liked when I was a tender teen still living in Iceland: [Dáðadrengir!] …but they havent made music for a long time

and here’s a dude my mom e-mailed me recently, I think he’s her friend’s son? Opee? [idk i like this] <- also this song actually has nice + good lyrics that are typed out in the description

lastly, xxx Rottweiler are kind of classic: [this]

( =①ω①=) the fresh cat…

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Anonymous asked you:

Can you post some choice Icelandic rap lyrics or videos (and their translations)? K thanks. B-)

haha oh man… I feel like translating rap lyrics is almost weirder / more difficult / more pointless than translating any other kind of song lyric, because the “feel” and “texture” of rap is so specific to the words the rapper chooses and the language.

but actually recently I posted a bunch of screenshots and a link to a recent icelandic rap-video that I like. not so much for the lyrics / language as for the style and content of the video. The Icelandic lyrics are in the description box on youtube and because they are really simple I will translate them FOR YOUR READING PLEASURE! but I wanna stress that this is not an example of “really good icelandic rap lyrics” because those would take a lot more work to translate…

ok here goes:

2012-02-16

Anonymous asked: This is sort of expanding on your other post about being multilingual, but more in regards to Icelandic specifically. I'm Canadian, but have an Icelandic grandparents/great grandparents, and relatives (whom I've never met) over there, and have always wanted to learn the language. SORRY FOR THE RAMBLING, but I guess what I'm asking is just how difficult did you find it going between the two, and would you think it harder to go from English to Icelandic as opposed to tot he other way

no need to apologize! (◑‿◐) and excuse me for taking forever to get back to you, but I just finished writing my 50796 papers for uni for the week (okay, 2 papers. two.) …the last one about a four hour long argentine film which ohmigod what the hell did i get myself into. anyway, it’s done, so on to your question:

in short; YES it is much harder to go from english to icelandic than it is to go from icelandic to english, for various reasons, for example:

like i said in my last language-post, icelandic grammar is much more complicated and very difficult to learn, while english grammar is fairly simple
since the icelandic language is only spoken by around 350,000 people MAX in the world, and there’s not really enough of us to produce a lot of movies / TV / music / videogames / INTERNET / academic writing in our own language, we are exposed to a lot of that stuff in english our entire lives (and danish / swedish / french / german / etc., but the VAST MAJORITY of foreign TV / music etc. is in english).

so, you probably understand where i’m going with this. I usually advise people against learning icelandic because, honestly, it’s not the most useful language to know, BUT if you really want to (and especially if you’re of icelandic ancestry!) it’s definitely possible. I was just the other day talking to a guy who I believe is french-canadian, who taught himself icelandic and is now fluent, living here and speaking the language perfectly well. granted, he is some kind of polyglot and people like that are usually the exception, but all the same it goes to show that everything is possible!

2012-02-13

on language

Anonymous asked:

What is it like being bilingual? When you are in Iceland do you tend to think/dream in Icelandic/is it the opposite when you are in America or England or hanging out with a lot of anglophones? How, in your opinion, are English and Icelandic different (beyond the obvious)?

Good question :3

[click for answer]