Perfection

There's a certain skill, a certain craft, to being sad.

Sadness is the rain drops falling on the street when you are sad. It is the leaves on trees and the houses. Sadness is the cloudy sky in London and the cloudless sky in Salamanca. Sadness is rereading that beginning of a story that meant that we are so, so far away. Sadness is the song you listen to after so many years, when you thought you were over it, when you might have deceived yourself into thinking you had forgotten it. Sadness is knowing that you love somebody. Sadness is growing up, and holding on, and letting go. You can learn how to be sad.

Sadness is the smell of roasted hazelnuts, that smile that you know so well in the face of a stranger. Sadness is not being able to sleep when you are tired. Sadness is a feeling to bask in. The most beautiful poems are sad.

Sadness is perfection. A drop of bitterness, all that is worth telling. Sadness is that part of me that you did not want to know about. Sadness is what I put into everything I do when I want to make it beautiful.

(The table in the hall next to the front door is the only thing that hasn't changed. You are already past it, you walk straight in, talking about your plans, and I am standing in the hallway, thinking about how beautiful your voice sounds. I look down at the basket with the keys, back then it looked like millions of keys, it still seems like there are too many. My key is still there. You look back at me from the living room, smiling. I smile back. Sadness is a finished story.)

Part II: The Decision

My first daughter's name is destined to be Esmeralda. Esmeralda was my grandmother's name (on my mum's side) and I promised my mum many years ago, when I was 9 or 10. By the time I was fourteen I knew I wanted to have several children, 3 or maybe 4. Now I am more realistic: I still want to have 3 or 4 kids but I know that that's unlikely unless I win the lottery or luck out economically some other way. In any case, I want children , I've always wanted children. 

When I was little, my idea of having children was settling down with a nice guy (marriage was never part of the plan, not because I'm against it, but just because my parents weren't married so it wasn't really part of how I thought of "family" in my mind) and then having kids with him. As I became a (not very popular) teenager I started to think about having children on my own, without a guy. Artificial insemination was an interesting solution. 

I got a bit older and I came to realize that finding a guy to have children with wouldn't be a problem, but finding a guy that I wanted to have children with (this is, a guy that I thought would be a good dad) would be more difficult, so the idea of being a single mum didn't go away. By then, I had visited Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland and Iceland, and I had noticed not just that in these countries there were more children, but also that parents were younger. Mentioning this to my mother, she said that it was natural, that that was how it should be. You should have children young, when you have the energy to keep up with them, to play with them, to do things with them. I have read arguments for and against young parents and older parents. My conclusion has been that the advantages of being a younger parent (better fertility, less chance of children having certain health problems, being able to keep up with your children as they grow up, more chance of being alive to meet your grandchildren, etc.) were to me more important than the advantages of being an older parent (having money, and probably a house, having a stable job, being confident in who you are, having done everything you wanted to do, etc.). I admit that part of the reason for this has to do with the way I was raised. My parents didn't slow down when I was born. Sure, they did have stable jobs and they bought a house soon after I was born, but this didn't stop them. They moved to the States (twice) before I was 9, they traveled a lot (on their own and with me, I had visited the States, South America, Morocco and a few countries in Europe before I was 12), they learnt languages, they did things. Having me didn't really stop them from doing anything they wanted to do, they just took me along for the ride (and I'm grateful for that). Part of it, though, has to do with my attitude towards money: as long as you live in a country with a decent social security system (a good public school system, a good health system, etc.) having children is not that much of a burden. A child is expensive, sure, but in general children are resilient, they can deal with a lot, as long as they are well treated, and loved. What I mean by this is that I don't view financial stability as a prerequisite to having a child (OK, I wouldn't try for a child if I didn't have a job and I were in debt, but not having a permanent job wouldn't worry me too much). Combining these things I came to a conclusion: I want to have children young.

Ideally, I would have my first child at 26, and it would be with a guy that I thought would make a good dad for it and a good partner for me. But hell, if this doesn't work out, I'm not gonna sit around waiting until the perfect guy comes along. I have set myself a limit: if by 28 there's no guy I can see myself having kids with, I'll have a child on my own. The idea scares the hell out of me, but what scares me more is the idea of not doing it, and regretting at 45 not having done it. I want children, I've known this for years, and it's within my possibilities to have children on my own, without depending on anyone to do it, so I will. 

This raises the problem of being a single mum. Other than the fact that it means working and taking care of a child (hard enough as it is), I face a moral issue. Is it right for me to decide that a child is born without a father? Many will say that a lot of children grow from single parents and they turn out perfectly OK. I agree, I don't think that single parents, or gay parents, or heterosexual parents, or communes where children are everyone's, necessarily affect how a child turns out (in terms of good and bad, in terms of what they can become) as long as the children are treated well and loved. However, do I have the right to decide that a child will be born into this world without a parent? Monoparental families are often the result of death, separation, abandonment. In all of these cases, the child grows up with a single parent, but this is not out of the choice of the parent. In the case of monoparental families that are the result of a woman getting artificially inseminated or of a man using a surrogate mother, these people have decided to have a child knowing that this child wouldn't have a parent from the beginning, to satisfy their need for being parents. I know I will do it, if it comes to it. I don't think it's wrong. But sometimes I wonder. As much as I tell myself, "the child will have a network, I have friends, I have family who will support me and the kid if I do decide to be a single mum", sometimes I wonder if it's (ethically) my choice. I suppose it is. After all, no one chooses who they are born to. A lot of children are born to people who don't want them at all, so I believe it's not wrong of me to bring  a child into the world that will be loved and wanted, even if that child happens not to have a dad. 

Part I: Life before birth, or why I'm not truly a feminist

I was born in Spain in 1991. I grew up in Spain (and for short periods of time in the US) and as I got older I often got told that because I was a woman I was being discriminated against. I never felt this. At home my parents shared chores. My mum was more of a cleaner (she cannot stand dirtiness, while my dad and I can quite happily live with it), my dad was more of an organiser (he often says if he didn't put an effort into being organised he would probably go crazy). My mum does laundry (most of the time) and my dad irons (my mum hates ironing). Both of them cook (though my mother prefers to cook herself). Overall, I would probably say my mum does a bit more on the house chores side of things, but only because she wants to (if it were up to my dad and me it's likely that the kitchen would be cleaned once a week, and this wouldn't make my mother very happy). As far as I can remember they both took equal care of me when I was little, and (maybe because I don't have any brothers or sisters) I always helped out with whatever needed doing, be it setting up the table, building Ikea furniture or trying to do some electrical work in our new house in Salamanca (I have to admit I never paid enough attention to this last thing, I am scared of any electrical work, I don't want to be involved with anything to do with cables). The only time I ever heard a comment about me being a girl was when my dad said that girls can't play football. He never stopped me from playing, but I was bad enough to admit he might be right.  The point I'm making here was that when I grew up I never once felt that I was being discriminated against because I was a girl. I never felt that I got a worse deal because I was a girl. The only time I ever felt I was treated differently was when I started going out and some clubs would let me in for free because I was a girl and they would make my male counterparts pay. Though I didn't think it was fair, I never thought to complain about it.

In the past few years, partly because I've been at Imperial, which is a predominantly male university, partly because I love reading so-called feminist blogs (I say so-called because they rarely deal with feminism, most of the time they discuss isolated incidents of sexism and refuse to admit that maybe what they are discussing is due to a deranged individual rather than to half of humanities attitude towards the other half), I have become more and more interested in sexism, feminism and gender equality. I have had discussions about it with many people, and my general conclusion has been that most people I know aren't sexist, if you give them a chance to think about it. I have met very few individuals who think men are superior to women, even less individuals who are willing to admit it. There are cases of "cultural" sexism, but whenever I've made someone aware of this (and I don't do it often because 99% of the time I don't feel like it affects my life at all, I mean, if you think you should pay for your girlfriend's dinner every time you go out that's between you two) they have nearly always been able to show me that the reason behind it is cultural and based on custom rather than on an ingrained belief that men are superior. And then, one day, I discovered that I myself am sexist. Or, in the very least, I am not a feminist.

According to the online dictionary I've been able to consult, in British English, the definition of feminism is "the advocacy of women's rights on the ground of equality of the sexes". A feminist is "a woman who supports feminism". I don't believe men and women are equal. Therefore I am not a feminist.

This realisation came to me quite casually, during a discussion with a colleague. It was a discussion I had had once before, with my parents, though that first time I had taken the complete opposite point of view (anyone who knows me will know I love arguing, and I can take up almost any opinion just for the sake of having an argument). The discussion was about abortion. I am of the opinion that abortion should be legal. I am also of the opinion that people who think that supporting the legality of abortion means supporting abortion itself are in the best case naïve, in the worst case, trying to demonise the supporters of the legality of abortion. I don't think any woman wants to ever have to go through an abortion, in fact, I think that any woman, being given the choice between not falling pregnant and having an abortion would prefer not to fall pregnant. However, women fall pregnant and I believe they should have the right to decide whether or not they have the child.

This wasn't what the discussion was about, or at least not exactly. The discussion was about the rights of the father. If a woman gets pregnant and she doesn't want to have a child, but the man who made her pregnant and would be the father of that child wants that child to be born, does the woman have the right to get an abortion? The person I was discussing this with said "no". I say yes. I say, it's the woman's body, it's something growing inside of her, it's a nine-month process that can be dangerous, and painful and extremely emotional, not to mention it can have effects on her social position, therefore it's the woman's choice. Yes, the father put in 50% of the DNA, but he sure as hell isn't putting it 50% of the work (that goes into a pregnancy).

And then the question comes nagging. What if the father of the creature does not want to have a child at all? Not just, not be responsible, but (against all evolutionary logic) what if he just does not want to pass on any of his genetic material? Does the mother have the right to make this choice for him? I've heard arguments from both sides. For me, the only valid argument from the "it should be the mother's choice" side is that, just like a woman can't be forced to go through a pregnancy because it's her body, she can't be forced to go through with an abortion. Most other arguments for this side (such as, "as long as he's not legally responsible for the child and the child can't legally look for him, why should he care?") completely ignore the issue. I don't mean to say that I agree that if the father doesn't want a child the mother should have the abortion (I'm of the opinion that the mother should always have the final say), but I can see why this is such a thorny topic. In my opinion the best we can do is guarantee that only the person who wants to be responsible for the child ends up being responsible to the child. A parent should have the right to anonymity, if he or she so desires it. Recently the laws changed regarding egg and sperm donors in the UK. If you have donated sperm or eggs after 2005, any offspring that might be conceived from your donation have the right to find you once they become 18. I will not pretend to understand a person's need to meet their biological parents, since I have known mine all my life. However, I do understand a person's desire to remain anonymous. I have considered donating eggs a few times (I may do so yet) and one of my main reasons for not doing so in the UK is the fact that I wouldn't be anonymous. I would hate my child approaching me in 18 years time. I would feel guilty. Responsible. Some might say that this is how I'm supposed to feel, after all, they are my child. But I don't think this is fair. With any luck, this child was born to a couple (or a single parent) who couldn't have children any other way. With any luck, this child was born, and had a loving family that raised them. Why should they need to meet me? I only gave my DNA. I didn't have any rights over them, why should they have any rights over me? (Please, if someone can shed any light on this question for me, leave a comment, I really want to know what the reasoning is behind eliminating anonymity from sperm and egg donations).

I read back through what I have written and some points, some truths about what I think, shock me. In an ideal work, this discussion shouldn't have to exist. Every child would be wanted. Anyone who wanted a child would be able to have one without the need for anyone else. This is not the world we live in. Maybe one day.

Introduction

On Sunday I found myself lying around in my room, watching many episodes of Elementary and trying to get some work done, when an idea occurred to me: what better form of procrastination than writing an entry for the blog? So I sat down (ok, fine, I lay in bed) in front of my computer and started to write. I ended up with eight paragraphs, all about different aspects of what I thought was the same thing, but no post. There was no connection between the paragraphs, it was a mass of difficult to read opinions and experiences. It wasn't pretty.

Frustrated by my incapability to write a coherent blog post I went on Facebook to complain. I wished I had a white board, somewhere big where I could map out my ideas the way they seemed to be in my head, to see if that way I could find a thread that ran through all of them. Unfortunately, Facebook is distracting, I don't have a white board, and the ideas just stayed in their jumbled form in the draft for the blog post.

This morning I woke up and after a few events that announced that this week was going to be far from easy (again, check my Facebook statuses, they are full of my whines), I decided to do an eight part series for the blog. One post for each of the paragraphs. That's what my next eight (actually, it will probably boil down to more like four) posts are going to be.

This introduction is the meant partly to explain why the next few posts will be titled "Part I", "Part II", etc. and partly to tell you not to waste any time reading these posts unless you're interested in feminism, parental rights, children and my opinions on all of these subjects. You have been warned.

The dangers of curiosity

I have never suffered writer's block. Give me a blank page and a pen and I will be off and away, filling it as quickly as my writing will allow. When I read about it I am fascinated. I just want to keep reading. I have trouble understanding that someone who is willing to write, moreover someone who already has something to write about (apparently many authors get it in the middle of writing a novel) will suddenly find themselves unable to produce any writing. It is incomprehensible to me. I may not be able to write a short story every time I sit down, and I sure as hell cannot continue writing something exactly where I left off, but I can always sit down and write something. There is always some little inspiration, in my head, in the paper, something that someone mentions, someone on the tube... I am fascinated by those who suffer it, but more than that, I am fascinated by the condition. I want to suffer it. Not forever, not acutely, but I wish I could choose to experience it for just a couple of days, wonder what it's like to sit in front of my computer, or my notebook and be not unwilling but unable to write. And sometimes I wish I could have writer's block just because it sounds more interesting than not having writer's block. It's something to write about.

My obsession with what it must be like having a mental disorder started many years ago, when I did a small school project about anorexia nervosa and bulimia. I've never suffered either disorder but I do have issues with food. I count calories obsessively, generally know roughly (or quite accurately) the number of calories that go into my meals, check menus of places I'm going to eat at and occasionally I binge, though clearly more often than I should. I also hide what I eat sometimes. Most of the time however my relationship with food falls within the realms of normal, I like food, I like cooking, and I like eating. Learning about anorexia nervosa and bulimia was fascinating to the 15 year old me. I wanted to know more. I wanted to know what it felt like, and I have to admit, partly it was because I felt slightly fat, and it was very attractive to know that a disease could cause people to lose so much weight so fast. A purely theoretical curiosity about the diseases mingled with my own slight obsessions with food, provoking me to wonder what it would be like to be anorexic or bulimic. Soon I found out about forums in the internet where girls (mostly) with anorexia and/or bulimia would give each other tips about how to avoid eating, how to fill full, what foods had less calories... They also encouraged each other and gave each other the security they needed: you are striving for perfection, don't believe the people who tell you you are ill, you are not sick, you are making yourself better. To me, these girls sounded crazy (amongst other things because I can't see the meaning of life without three or four full meals a day), but they were also fascinating. I wanted, to an extent to be like them. Their strength of will, their dedication to a goal, was inspiring. I became addicted to reading what they wrote. If a doctor had looked at my internet historial when I was fifteen he might have worried that I had an eating disorder. I could spend hours reading accounts and tips. I can still remember the most popular tips and suggestions. I might have agreed that the forums were dangerous, but in a way I also saw them as a form of therapy. The forums form a community of people who understand each other and love each other. I have rarely seen abuse in these forums. They are, above all, supportive. If a girl posts that she's feeling like crap because she ate two cookies for dinner the rest of the community will tell her it's alright, give her suggestions as to how to get rid of the two cookies (or their calories) and tell her that tomorrow it will be better. As I grew a bit older, I stopped visiting the forums, partly because I lost interest, and partly because the morbid fascination they held for me started to worry me. As much as I sometimes wished I could develop an ED, I knew that it was wrong, that it was not healthy, that it was potentially dangerous.

Recently, I returned to the forums. I thought I would have outgrown the fascination, that today they would just seem strange and dangerous, and that I would just want to write to tell these girls to get better. I was wrong. I still find, amongst the obvious issues of the people who participate in them, a certain beauty, a certain unique willpower and a support amongst members that I rarely see anywhere else. And yes, I become a little bit obsessed again, and yes, after a couple of hours I start wondering what it would be like, to not eat for days, to lose my period, to have body dysmorphic disorder. As with writer's block, I don't want to really have it. But I'm curious. I wonder what it would be like.

I guess what I'm saying here is that illness and obsession are intimately linked. That they are made of the same thing. That being driven can easily turn into being ill. That the limits between health and disease are lines in the sand, that pushing our limits is exhilarating but also dangerous. That when it comes to our behaviours, especially to every day things, we are mostly unable to recognize when we are pushing our limits and putting ourselves at real risk.

I am fairly sure that if I had kept visiting Ana and Mia forums at the age of fifteen I would have sooner or later developed a full blown eating disorder. I didn't, and I'm glad, but I have to admit that it's attractive knowing that I could have. Most of the time I'm happy to be normal, but sometimes, very rarely, I envy people with issues, for one simple reason: they are more interesting.

Untitled

It happened so long ago, but that doesn't stop me from feeling it sometimes. It starts in my throat, and if someone asked me a question on that precise moment I wouldn't be able to answer. It moves to my chest, where it makes it a bit harder to breathe, and finally it comes to my face, where it makes it impossible to smile, and my eyes feel like they're going to cry, but they never do.

I cried once for each of them. Just once, maybe at the wrong time, but who knows what the right time for these things is. Everyday it's there, I cannot say "everyday I remember", but it is there every day. I've grown since it happened and that makes it hurt more. Why didn't the world stop? Why didn't I stop? And why am I happy sometimes?

It's strange to be happy and have something remind me suddenly. I feel like I'm betraying them. When people say "they would have wanted you to be happy" they don't know what they're talking about. They wanted me to be happy, and now they don't want anything anymore, because they can't want anything anymore. And I'm happy, even though they can't want me to be happy, even though they can't be happy. They can't be sad either.

Not all the memories are there. Sometimes someone will tell me a story, and I won't remember. That is the most painful part.

Stockholm

Last weekend, taking advantage of the bank holiday, I visited Stockholm.

I've always been distrustful of weekend visits: they're too short, they can be too intense (trying to visit every single "sight" in a city in a weekend can be exhausting) and they are (usually) comparatively more expensive than a longer visit. However, this time I was pleasantly surprised. I have to admit I cheated: a friend of mine is currently on Erasmus working at the Karolinska Institutet, which meant that I didn't pay for accommodation (although this isn't that rare, I could have couch surfed) and, more importantly, that I had a guide to the city. Not that I was following my friend around the whole time (I think this would have ended up annoying both of us), although she took me to some really cool places, but even when I wasn't with her she suggested places to go. Not just landmarks or sights, but also nice walks, restaurants and cafés, making me feel a lot less like a tourist than I might have otherwise.

Stockholm is beautiful. I can't say this enough. Several islands interconnected by bridges make up the city, and each island has its own distinct personality, but this doesn't detract from the feeling of the city as a whole. All the neighbourhoods are necessary, the disappearance of any of them would be the disappearance of an integral part of the city. There are many parks, and most areas are nice to just walk around, with beautiful buildings in Östermalm and Gamla Stan, cool shops and cafés in the area around Katarina-Sofia and Södermalm, and a more commercial area around Norrmalm. The city is alive (although this might just be an impression gained from going there on an amazingly sunny and warm weekend in spring), and walking around it and traveling in its excellent transport system has led me to draw a few conclusions about the people who live in this city.

I visited Stockholm for the first time a few years ago, when I was about ten or twelve, and even then certain things surprised me (not just about Stockholm, also about other Scandinavian cities/towns/countries, but since this weekend I was only in Stockholm I can't really generalize). Firstly, children, and teenagers. I saw more children this weekend in Stockholm than I would normally see in London in the same period of time. There are children in the parks, on the trains, doing the shopping with their parents, out for ice cream. There are children everywhere. Teenagers too seem more common than in London, and they seem a lot more diverse (although this might just be because of the ever present uniforms in British schools). This is probably due to the fact that Stockholm is smaller, and so parents feel safer letting their kids go around, but it doesn't explain why in London I see plenty of children and teenagers taking the tube to school on weekday mornings yet I don't see them around much on the weekends. Secondly, and this is a big one for me, young parents. If children are more common in Scandinavia than elsewhere, it is also true that parents are younger. I didn't see a single parent with kids who looked older than, say, 35. This isn't to say they don't exist, of course, but I suspect that it is a lot more common (and a lot easier) for young people to be parents in Stockholm than it is in London. The free school system and family benefits go a long way to explain this, but I still find it surprising to see men and women just a few years older than me walking around with one or two kids. In Stockholm this weekend I found myself thinking, more than once, these people (as a society) take care of their children, these people truly believe their children are the future, these people have truly created a system where children are the most important thing. These thoughts made me happy for a reason that I have trouble explaining, something to do with "this is how the world should work", but a bit more irrational, probably to do with the fact that nearly all humans feel the need to protect children (this makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, but that's material for another time). Thirdly, and this one has nothing to do with the other two, culture. I won't say that Stockholm is more cultural than London. Museums are expensive (as are most things in Stockholm) and the quality isn't as high as you might get in London or even in Madrid (yes, Madrid has the largest, and perhaps the best, paint gallery in the world), and there may not be as many theatres as there are in London or New York, but one feels that the culture is there, on the streets, that it isn't a side project that belongs to just a few, but that it is of the people and that everyone is involved in it. I may be completely wrong about this (since it is just an impression, I haven't lived in Stockholm, so I can't know whether people are actually more involved in culture than they are anywhere else), but of the cities I've been to, Stockholm is one where I felt people were interested in culture, in music, in dance, and where I also felt that these things weren't exclusive.

While in Stockholm I visited just two museums. The Moderna Museet and the Fotografiska. The first one I enjoyed a great deal (I never thought I'd say this, but I am becoming more and more fond of modern painting. Modern art as a whole doesn't do that much for me, but modern paintings are special), the second one was an altogether different experience.

The Moderna Museet had an exhibition on Duchamp and surrealism that I enjoyed especially, highlights of this were Dalí's "The Enigma of William Tell" (I give the title in English since I am uncertain whether the original title was in Spanish, Catalonian or French, and a quick google search hasn't shed light on the matter), Duchamp's "50cc of Paris Air" (again, don't know for sure what the original title is), Duchamp's "Nu Descendant un Escalier n.2" (either the lighting in the museum was incredibly good, and I looked and it didn't seem anything special, or the lighting in this piece is incredible, which I suspect is true) and the screening of "Un Chien Andalou" (Dalí and Buñuel) and "L'Age D'or' (Dalí and Buñuel again). They also had a couple of rooms dedicated to Niki Saint de Phalle, which I really liked for a different reason. Her paintings (if they can be called that, they are more like posters or postcards or letters, or diary entries, and they were at some point all these things) are almost childish, except they can be explicitly sexual, and they evoke (for me) happiness, they are somehow instructions about how to be happy, how to love, how to live. I get the feeling (from both her paintings and a movie she collaborated in which I watched part of) that she had issues with sex, but this fed into her art, and created something that speaks to me.

The Fotografiska started off OK, an exhibition of the work of Ruud van Empel of the last few years, collages made using photoshop to create new worlds and people (especially striking were the creations of faces of children from parts of children's faces, not always successful, and sometimes slightly disturbing). Although I enjoyed walking through the images I don't especially like this type of photography, because I feel that it's fake, and to me photography should be real. I have no clue what I mean by this, since photography is never "real", one chooses the exposure, sometimes the pose, the situation, and so the photograph is nearly always a construct of the photographer, a reflection of what the photographer wants to show... In any case, although I thought Ruud van Empel's work was nice, it didn't strike me more than to create a slight tension while I was seeing it.

On the second floor was an exhibition of some of Henri Cartier-Bresson's work. I admit (rather to my embarrassment) that I don't think I knew his work before. It was impresionante. I have no word for it in English, it caused an impression, I can't stop thinking about it. The images are vivid even now, and come into my head as I'm doing things. Not shocking, not strange, not surprising, just so vivid. They are images taken in different countries, at different points in the 20th century, all in black and white. There are images of Germany after the Second World War and of Russia during the Cold War, images of Spanish cities (Madrid, Seville and and Valencia) in 1933, and images of the States in the 50s and 60s. They were all pictures of people. Real people, people going about their every day business, happy people, alive people. Pictures from India and China and other Asian countries were (to me) the least striking, probably because they feel like they are the most contrived. Pictures of children playing on the streets behind a wall that has a hole in it, in Seville in 1933, are the most vivid. The children are (to me) inequivocally Spanish children. The US pictures hold in them somehow the idea of what the US was in the 20th century, or more than that, the idea of what the idea of the US was. This exhibition was probably what will most stay with me of what I saw during my visit to Stockholm.

Other than the art, I got to enjoy a few of Stockholm's cafés (they truly have a huge coffee culture, and a really good one too) and a three excellent restaurants: Pelikan, for Swedish fare, they really know how to cook meat; Jebena, a restaurant in a tube station serving delicious Eastern African food, which we had to eat with the help of Injera, a delicious bread; and (last but not least) Hermans, a vegetarian buffet that I would recommend to anyone who thinks vegetarian food is boring/can't be tasty or any variation on that theme. I have Justine to thank for these places, since I might not have found them/gone to them if she hadn't been there to tell me about them.

The best thing about the weekend, though, were the people. A huge thanks to Justine for having me, and for the conversations (I never get tired of discussing anything from science to feminism with her) and for the company, and thanks to her friends for making me feel welcome (drinks on Friday, hall party on Saturday and a long afternoon chat on Sunday come to mind).

In conclusion, the Stockholm weekend experiment was an all around success. As always when I travel, I should do this more often.

The News

As some of you may know, last year I became obsessed with two shows: Homeland and the Newsroom. I watched the whole first season of Homeland in about 24h and kept raving about it until the second season calmed me down a bit (until the last episode). It was exciting and hectic and fast.
The Newsroom was a different story. I watched it one episode per week (more or less), enjoying it. The first episode destroyed me then built me up piece by piece. I couldn't believe that such a show was being made. I'm not going to say that the Newsroom is the best show ever made. It isn't. I'm not even going to say it's a great show (Homeland is a lot better). In fact, I'm not going to defend the show at all. It preys on people's emotional connection to "better times past" and to "doing things right", even though, deep down, we know that's not how things actually work. It's an alright show, but let's be honest, the news are news because they're interesting. When they say they will cover the "real news" it sounds exciting, but then, is the real news only international conflicts and politics?

In any case, I don't want to discuss the Newsroom. But I do want to discuss news. I read Metro nearly every day. I also read El País (a Spanish newspaper, more or less left wing) and The Guardian. I read an article or two of the Financial Times, scan through the New York Times and try to read (although this is purely to practice my language skills) Der Spiegel and Le Monde. I like my news in newspaper form, even though I also listen to the radio every morning (lately it's BBC radio 4, but it changes). I like to know what's going on in the world, though I will be the first to admit I have a weakness for celebrity gossip (yes, I know what Rihanna has been up to this weekend in NYC). In 2008, after the Mumbai attacks, I became conscious of how newspaper are illustrated. This is, I became conscious of photojournalism. I don't know much about photojournalism, and more than that, I don't really care about it. The reason it became a small nagging thought in my head is because I was disturbed by many of the pictures of victims of the Mumbai attacks. It had happened before, after the 11M (the bombs in trains in madrid) in 2004, and even after September 11. But it was only after the attacks in Mumbai that I started to wonder if it was ethically or morally licit to show pictures of dead or severely injured people in the media.

Firstly, it has always shocked me that this usually only happens when an act of violence occurs in a developing country. I have rarely seen photographs of victims of violence in Europe or the US (to put two examples). Secondly, permission is required from people who appear on television or on photographs, but I wonder if the same applies to bodies. It probably doesn't, but I can't help but feel that the families of the deceased might not want the pictures to be out there. Thirdly (and least importantly), I find that the pictures are sometimes a way to sensationalise a piece of news. Writing that 20 people have been killed after a bomb doesn't sell half as well as showing a picture of the moment the bomb goes off. But does showing a photograph make the news any more important? Does it make a better point? Somehow I don't think so.

On the other hand, photographs break through. It's possible that some people can read "20 dead" and just skim over it because they've become insensitive to this kind of news, and a photograph shows, in a way, the reality. 20 dead means 20 dead. 20 people who won't get up in the morning, who won't see their parents or brothers or children again. It means 20 lives. Maybe a picture showing destruction, or showing the bodies expresses this feeling better than words can.

I can't decide. On the one hand I feel like pictures of dead people should be avoided in the news as a sign of respect to them, and to their families. On the other hand, I can't help but feel that photographs make us truly conscious of what people dying means, of what war means, of what pain means. It is a conflict. And I guess, the playing out of this conflict is part of the reason I will keep watching the Newsroom.