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Filed under: life, Uncategorized | Tags: Ampetition, Anne-Mette Pedersen, antisemitic, Denmark, holocaust, lonelyness, misanthropy, nazi, people
Being lightly autistic I always have i bit of a hard time around new people, even though I am always open and try to get new input. I just need a little time to adapt to someones vibe.
Yesterday I met someone who really challenged my ability to control my temper. I have quite a fiery temper but usually I control it really well. Yesterday was a masterpiece of control.
My boyfriend and I had finally found the time to go visit a friend in Sweden whom we hadn’t seen for ages. Out of the blue the guy contacts us and asks if we can pick up a friend of his and bring her along to Sweden. She has a car but doesn’t feel like driving today. I thought… well, what the heck. It’s a bit weird, but why not.
So we go pick her up and drive of to the highway. The first thing she says is “Thank god for the election result. The time of occupation is over. Now I know how the people felt back in 1945.”
I understand that maybe not everyone agreed in the politics of the liberal party here in Denmark, that had governed the country for the last 10 years, but comparing them to the nazis…
Further along the day she also tried to convince us that the whole 9/11 incident was just a conspiracy by the Bush administration to get to the oil in Irak… including the “bombing” of the towers by the CIA.
When I then answered “well, the nazis also claim that the holocaust never took place” she simply said that the nazis tried hard to kill the jews but obviously didn’t do a good enough job. Because there are still enough jews left to pester the palestinians.
I asked her politely not to get into this discussion and to agree on disagreeing.
She also used the meeting with her friend to start a sales pitch for video-telephones that lasted over an hour.
What do I want to say with this? I do not want to say that I hate human beings as such. I love my family and friends very much. But there are representatives of our dear species that make me loose faith in us bit by bit. They take away trust and sympathy like the sea takes away land by gnawing at even the hardest rocks.
I know that I shouldn’t let it get to me, but more and more I tend to choose my garden and cat over humans because they are much more reliable
Maybe my destiny is to become the crazy cat lady that no one talks to… but somehow the thought does not scare me.
Tell me what you think.
Filed under: life, Uncategorized | Tags: 11 september, 911, Ampetition, Anne-Mette Pedersen, Denmark, New York, USA
Ten years ago I was sitting in an office in Germany. I was a telemarketer at the time, but on this day I was not able to pick up my phone and bother people with the rather irrelevant question if they wanted to buy frozen food.
I remember sitting at my desk with tears in my eyes, a bit hung over from the drinks from the previous night, that I used to numb the panic I felt and I felt that the world had changed.
I made one call that day.
The previous day had started with my friend and I going to Cologne for the recording of a television show where he played a person who had been sued by a friend and this was the court date. I at the time was his manager and went along to see the recording and talk to the producers about future jobs.
I had set my phone, my very old phone to “news”. A function the existed way before the iPhones possibility to access the internet. Your provider would simply send out news to the users that subscribed to this function and thereby keep you updated about news, weather, traffic and so on.
At a point where i was sitting in a room full of people waiting to play the courtroom audience or family member of the people acting in the current recording and an editor comes down and tells another editor sitting right in front of me that something has happened. She whispers it in his ear. He turns around and look at her in disbelief and asks quietly…”was it an accident?” She answers “I guess” and shrugs.
I knew that the editors had a TV on one floor above us and the weird fractures of info that I had just gotten made me frightened and curious. I went upstairs and to this day I clearly remember turning into the open doorway of the office, every detail of that office. The papers on the desk, the window to the east that was open, and the color of the light that fell into the small room. But most vividly I remember seeing the second plane dig it’s way into the tower and burst into a fireball.
In a millisecond so many things became a reality. This was not an accident, this is terrorism, this is not just an attack on the USA, this is an attack on the entire western world, this will result in war, this will change the world.
This was the point where my cell phone, set to vibrate, started to buzz… and didn’t stop for over three hours.
The editors had not seen me standing in their doorway yet and now turned to me. They knew I had been sitting with their audience and soon realized that no one downstairs had an idea what was going on. They quickly decided that They would like to keep it that way, because…”we do not wan’t sad faces on tape” or risk people even leaving. I did not like the idea but let myself talk into not saying a word.
As I went back to my fellow audience members I discretely read the incoming message that said that the first tower had collapsed and decided that I could not keep my mouth shut anymore. I walked up to the TV in the rather large room that held about 150 people and switched from the current recording to the news. I still feel the shine black plastic button against my finger tip.
At first people protested and said things like “hey, why are you zapping away from my daughters show and over to that stupid action movie?”
I said with a weird shake in my voice “…it’s not a movie. This is the news.” It took a while for them to grasp that this was reality, not a cinematic treat, not a weird joke, not a nightmare.
My friend comes out five minutes later and sees me having a loud discussion with one of the editors. He hears me saying something about “Did you really think this was a fair decision? Don’t you think they all need to know?” He turn around and sees the picture on the TV and the news bulletin and goes not pale but white in a second.
After this I got kicked out from this TV channels building and banned for life. I’m not kidding!
My friend and I drive back to our home town about 50 kilometers away, but before we leave the city we see people sitting on the curbs of the larger roads holding each other… crying. The news anchor of German RTL broke down in tears. Everything stopped.
As we came back home I had to go to the theater where I worked and prepare our show for the evening. I did not expect it to take place but went there anyway. The whole cast was sitting in the café of the theater and said nothing. There was only this terrible silence.
We asked our theater leader if the show would take place and he insisted that we go on. This I didn’t like but when we asked him to leave out a sketch that featured a fireman and a person trying to locate his wife inside a burning building and he still insisted I there and then decided that I would carry out my job but under the influence of large quantities of alcohol.
A colleague and I both at the time had relatives living in Israel and had heard that many Palestinians were celebrating the event and we were very worried about our relatives.
During the show I got so drunk, that I left my car at the theater and walked home. My grandmother, with whom I lived at the time, was sitting in her chair and was watching the repeating of the footage that looked like an attempt to grasp these unbelievable images.
That evening we got drunk and cried together.
The first thing I did the next morning when I got to work was to make that one phone call. I called the American embassy in Berlin and offered my help. They noted my name and info but fortunately for me they let others see the wreckage, the carnage and the pure destruction that lay at the feet of New York. I would have helped in a heartbeat.
Last year i went to New York and visited Ground Zero. I still can not fully grasp these events.
Please tell me your 9-11 story.
Filed under: life, Uncategorized | Tags: Ampetition, Ampolution, Anne-Mette Pedersen, art, Copenhagen, David Lynch, life
It was a cool day at the middle of a very tough winter.
The snow had come and gone in large portions and at the moment the ground was covered by grey slush.
She had not been to the city for months… or so it felt.
People walked by in their thick winter outfits, hiding from the cold but still trying to squeeze in something fashionable, like a pretty scarf or large, sparkly earrings.
She did not. She walked throught the big city in her large, black boots, her mismatching socks and her scarf that needed a wash. Her hair was a mess and the make up was rather minimalistic. She did not care.
She knew that she was going to a place where all this did not matter. A place where her way would be… not understood, but accepted.
It was the last week of the exhibition of David Lynch’s “The Air is on Fire” collection and she had desperately wanted to see this for months. Now it was possible. Now the time was right.
She entered the gallery through the large old entrance at the water side. A welcoming scent of fresh coffee filled the room and a tiny smile changed her face from ‘busy’ to ‘present’.
A room full of coffee table books also held the ticket booth. Allthough money was rather seldom at the time she felt that this would be money well spent. Money that would truly buy her something good and private. Something to remember when she felt alone.
She left her things i a locker downstairs and put the key in her hand. Her pants did not have pockets. This made her a bit nervous.
What if I lose the key?
The sentence kept ringing in her head. She held the key so tightly it hurt her hand. This would prevent her losing it or just forgetting it.
The large stairs brought her up to the first floor. The music in the background already set the right atmosphere.
It was the dark, ominous, gloomy atmosphere she had always felt was her own… soundtrack.
She turned right at the first door way and entered a square, white room. In here she found 3 pieces of art… or they found her.
Two people were dying, a spirit was ascending and a couple was communicating with words of hate/pain.
In one corner there was a box. From this box up came a square pipe. At the top of the pipe it was bent in a 90 degree angle that made it point at the viewing person in front of it. On the tip of it was a black button.
She smiled. She gave it a good look.
What was she to do? Was it a piece of art that wanted to be pushed? Was it a clever trap from the artist, that would illustrate the fact that if you give people buttons, they will want to push them? To show that we are conditioned dogs?
She decided that she was a coward and moved on.
The next tiny room held a form of contrapment. It was an imaginary piece of equipment for night fishing. She loved the irony of the large light bulb strapped to it.
The next room again had a button. It was red. It was too compelling. She pressed it. Sound, mechanical sound, rolled through the speekers and thickened the atmosphere. No trap.
A rectangular room on a higher floor was what she had been looking for… without knowing it.
The walls where lined with small scraps of paper behind glass. She slowly stepped closer and saw all the details. The feeling of finding a mind that works the way her own does, that she experienced for the first time from seeing a picture of a dead girl in a preview to a TV-series almost 20 years ago, again filled her heart. All the tiny pieces of paper, all the notes, all the tiny thoughts manifested on compressed wood fiber. “Someone is a lot like me”, she thought and was happy.
Here she stood. The locker key in her hand, her two different socks, wierd hair and even wierder head… and she felt absolutely, perfectly normal. While others walked through the exhibition shaking their heads, finding the pieces absurd, strange, vulgar and not accessible, she was in a world so familiar it felt like her own.
This was her world, these were the things tiny imaginary people would scribble on the inside of her skull. These were the things that exist when she’d close her eyes.
After longer time than neccessesary she finished the exhibition, let go of the key, got her stuff and resurfaced. She bought the book and took home the large catalogue of evidence. Evidence that even someone as weird as she is not alone in this world.
She treated her self to a cup of coffee and a long lasting smile.
