Where is my camera!?

Grrr can’t find my camera. My small canon camera that fit into my handbag.

So annoying! I prefer to always have a camera with me so that I can take pictures of anything and everything funny I see.

For example like today when I wanted to take a picture of my old neighbour taking her dog for a “walk”. That is… the poodle was sat in a babystroller, but it looked like it was enjoying the walk anyways.

I also wish I had managed to snap a picture of Beijingers out and about trying to take a stroll with their cats in a leash. I wonder how long it will take before they realise that cats don’t make good walking partners, they just don’t ever seem to walk nicely on a leash. Naughty Beijing cats!

Excuse me, I think I lost my pants in your bar

Yeah, I managed to lose a pair of pants in the bar yesterday.

Not my pants though, they were Sarah’s. Duh! Dangran!

We were going to Jonas’ birthday celebration at Mao Chong (really good pizzas, I want to go to there again!). Only when Sarah and I were about to jump into a cab did I realise that a pair of her black tights had some how gotten stuck to my jacket. I put them in my pocket, but they must have fallen out when I took my jacket off at Mao Chong. And of course I forgot that I had accidentally brought them along and didn’t think about it until this morning. Ops.

I didn’t realise how bad it sounded, until I called the bar to ask if they had found a pair of pants lying around their establishment.

“Ehh Hiii, I think I lost my pants in your bar last night. I mean, I think I lost my friends pants. Ehm I mean…have you seen a pair of black tights lying around your bar from last night?”

Unfortunately, they said they knew nothing about a pair of missing pants. Sooo where can they be?

Oh the mystery of the missing pants…somewhere in Beijing a pair of pants are lying around all alone and lost.
Damn…

Status Update

I haven’t been online for quite since life has been very busy. In the last weeks I have
1. Lost my internet at home and haven’t had the time to fix it (surfing on the neighbours’ now)
2. Quit working at the Norwegian Embassy
3. Going through the process of getting a new Visa
4. registering at University
5. My computer broke, so had to go get that fixed
6. Practicing pole dancing for the upcoming competition
7. Got a job as a Swedish teacher
8. Oh yes, that little matter of housing. Need to be out of my flat on Friday and have still not found another apartment… Kind of stressful.

So as you can see I dont really have the time to write much, especially since my neighbours’ net is sooo slow.

The Domino effect

Zapiro (M&G)

What do STRIPPERS think?

So after reading about the whole “making stripping illegal” thing I decided I wanted to find out what strippers actually think about it.

I went to Studio Veena’s online forum (pole dancing website) and asked strippers to give their opinion on the matter, because even though a lot of pole dancers aren’t strippers, fact is many strippers are pole dancers so I figured I would be able to find some there. So far I have gotten 12 responses.

Pretty interesting stuff, so I have posted below some quotes:

“”in reply to the comment about people working grocery stores or other such things out of desperation – totally true! I’ve worked my fair share of minimum wage jobs at fast food and grocery stores, and I would choose stripping any day over have to do that kind of bullshit for so little money. If a politician told me I now had to work overtime at Walmart just to make ends-meet rather than making twice as much in half the time doing something I enjoy, I’d be like “Excuse me? You think this is for *my* benefit?””

“I retired from the adult biz of 5 years back in September. I loved it. I found it very liberating and I miss it. I never did anything that I wasn’t comfortable doing. I worked with some wonderful, highly educated and respectful people. It was the best times of my life.

Yes, some women get into biz for the wrong reasons and that’s unfortunate… I’ve met a few women in the biz for the wrong reasons (deperate for money, low self esteem, bad-drugs, alcohol, abuse, etc) and that makes their stripping career worse. The truth is if you want to be a happy, healthy, successful stripper, you gotta have your head screwed on straight and stay a head of the game and take care of yourself.”

“I just started stripping this past weekend, but I don’t at all feel like I’m being “objectified” or am there out of “desperation.” Granted, I got pretty damn excited over the amount of money I made, but I was like “omg, omg, look at how much I made! This is awesome!” Not like “god, I can’t believe I have to ‘shame’ myself to make this.”

Sure, there are some assholes at the club that don’t treat the girls very well, but most of the guys I’ve dealt with were very nice. And even the ones that couldn’t have cared about anything but getting a good lap dance didn’t make me feel like an object. It was my job – it was why I was there.”

“People need to actually talk to strippers and get the inside look because it’s really not something you can “just imagine” doing. And most of the girls I worked with didn’t seem depressed or jaded or bitter about how they “had to strip to make money.” They seemed pretty damn happy that they could capitalize well on just owning boobs lol I met maybe two women who seemed to be doing it because they were the “stereotypical single mom strippers who thought they couldn’t make enough money doing anything else.””

“I can make as much money in 6 minutes as I make for 3 hours at my other part-time job where I painstakingly stock a convenience store.” I told one of my guy friends, “All I have to do it shake around a little on a pole and I get guys like you to hand me hard earned money from jobs they hate. Who’s the one being exploited here?””

“Look, i am a HUGE feminist, but I guess im third-wave feminist, in that I believe women have won the right to self-determine their own lives, we’ve got the freedom to own our own bodies. So what we want to do with our bodies is totally our own business…,….It may be in the name of protecting women, but to my mind making it illegal for women to earn money for taking off their clothes or dancing in the nude is taking their rights of freedom of choice back away from them, its disempowering.”

“Stripping is not inherently evil or degrading. Its how the individual woman feels about it, how it makes her feel, the limits and values and principles she has, that determine wether its a good or bad thing for her. I found dancing on stage and getting nude for strangers to be strangely empowering, exhilirating, liberating. I felt like I was no longer being inhibited by social conventions, I felt proud of my own courage and daring, it taught me to be self-confident and appreciative of my body, what it looks like and what it can do. I think the human body is an incredible thing, and should be celebrated and appreciated whenever possible, not hidden away or covered for modesty or the law’s sake. But thas just me. As ******* said, it depends on the individual woman.”

“In my opinion, making stripping illegal won’t solve any problems, unionizing (to protect workers and customers) will. Things will just end up going underground where the real problems start. :(“

I will post more responses as they come in. Of course I expect there to be a underrepresentation of unhappy strippers that feel awful about their job, but the point is that there are loads of strippers who are perfectly happy in their job. It is as such not the work itself that makes people feel bad about themselves, but how they are as people when they enter the business. And as the chick behind the last quote says, making it illegal won’t solve any problems.

It might not be a white Christmas, but…

It’s a white New Year!

Woke up this morning to a white Beijing 🙂
Apparently this is the most snow they have had in 16 years. Okay, so it is about 3-4 cm deep, but whatever, I am SO excited!!!

I tried making a snowman but the snow was too loose, maybe in a few days time. It will snow again on Sunday so we’ll see if it goes any better then.

Everyone is out “shuffling” snow, cooperation in action!

China: the world from upside down

One of the many reasons I love China is that they look at things from a perspective we in the West would consider upside down.

Whereas in the West we look at Africa as a poor hopeless continent with pity (with the best intentions of course), the Chinese view Africa as the land of opportunity. Unexploited markets and industries, definitively an attractive place to invest in! I bet the Chinese businessman has wet-dreams about all the possibilities available.

We in the West tend to view young mothers as bothersome, a bit of a drag on society and in the labour force, you know, constantly having to take sick-days off work to care for her young. Can a mother ever really be devoted to her job when she, by her very nurturing nature, always will turn her attention to her child?

This is not how it is viewed in China though. Since a year back recruitment of astronauts to the Chinese spaceship program has had as one of their requirements that the potential candidates must be young mothers. This is because they view mothers as highly competent with sophisticated skills developed, such as multi-tasking, patience, time-management, and communication. Pure mental strength and therefore suitable for the most demanding jobs and tasks!

(Ministry of Defence, PRC)

Perhaps the Chinese are better at identifying strengths and opportunities than we are? Western culture has this habit of problematise and find the limits to everything. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but perhaps it would be a good exercise to combine the two approaches.

We all sell our bodies: Norwegian politicians want to make stripping illegal

A group of leftwing politicians in Norway want’s to ban stripping in Norway.

Sigh!

Just sigh.

Their argument is that it makes women into objects by them selling their bodies for men’s pleasures (not sure if they want to extend this to male strippers…ironically they seem to be forgotten in these women’s pursuit for gender equality). They also claim that women who strip are forced to such a life out of necessity, although they admit that none of them know a stripper (they also refuse an invitation to enter a strip club for a chat with those who work inside).

First off: Many jobs involve people selling their bodies and turning their bodies into a commodity. Actually I would argue that this is the case for practically all jobs in a market economy.

A carpenter also sells his/hers body through labour. And what about people working in theatres as dancers and actors? They are also using their bodies to sell labour for other people’s pleasure.

If anything should be made illegal for objectifying bodies then it should be the modelling profession. At least stripping requires some sort of development of talent, practice and training (especially if pole dancing is incorporated in the strip act).

Secondly, I really doubt that these women are forced into stripping because they are suffering and would not survive otherwise. Not in Norway. I would buy that argument if they were talking about the strip club in Swaziland. Those strippers are just sad and look miserable.

In Norway however, even though we have (relatively) poor people, our social security should be able to catch those who need help before they are forced into what these politicians view as prostitution-like work such as stripping. If the welfare network doesn’t do this then that is what they should fix, not make stripping illegal. That way, those working as strippers would be the ones that actually chose that line of work because they approve of it as a career rather than resort to it as an act of desperation.

And frankly LOTS and LOTS of people are forced into jobs they don’t like, or even despise, out of need. How many people actually want to work as a toilet cleaner? Was that an active career choice they made, or were they forced to take a shitty low paid job because they need money to feed and house themselves?

If we are going to argue that stripping should be illegal because people who work there would prefer another job if they could and that they actually feel really terrible, then we need to face up to the fact that quite a few people sit around bored and miserable in their jobs but stick it through because they have to. Is making these jobs illegal the best way to give people a better quality of life? Close down the grocery store! Or are there other measures we can take?

On top of this, there is no data on whether or not strippers are miserable in their jobs in the first place. The few strippers I have met (apart from the Swazi ones) seemed to love their jobs. Admittedly I have only befriended a small handful, but I can say for sure that there are women and men who consider their profession fun, challenging and of course, well paid.
So retarded.

The woman in the picture by the way is doing the Scorpio.

Superman to Scorpio

New pole move: the Superman

At the moment I am practicing something called “the Superman fall”, which basically is a transition from Superman into Scorpio. I can do it, but it still doesn’t look that smooth. Will have to upload a video once I master it to perfection.

Scorpio

YOU are made of stars!

Did you know that you are made out of recycled stars?

All the natural elements (that you find in the periodical table) were produced by stars burning and eventually exploding, eventually forming the matter that compose you and I.

My old professor Tony Fairall told us that we were therefore all made out of stars 🙂

I think it is a pretty neat thought to think that the atoms that compose my body once upon a time was part of a star.

A little something to remember on days when you feel a little shitty.

What you are made of!

(Wikipedia)