Hi anyone who might stumble on to this site from wherever.
I've wanted to create a blog for some time that would be my outlet, so I could discuss whatever I felt like and whenever I felt like it. As can be seen from the name of the blog, I have some things I find more important than others and what better way to get it done than to publish it on the internet. No other place seems as suitable for cringing one's heart out than the internet and I've made the choice that I won't stay anonymous, so I hope this blog can give me the opportunity to stand up for what I like, dislike and find interesting.
I'm a 32 year-old man who lives with my wife in an apartment in Copenhagen. I have been studying English literature and language for the past 3½ years and recently got my bachelor's degree. For all of this time and since 2005, I've been employed by the Danish army. I'm a staff sergeant with a specialization in logistics and have been stationed in Afghanistan and Kosovo. I've always been proud of being a soldier, even though I might not have agreed on the mission I was performing, but after 7 years in the army, I started to become restless because of a lack of "personal development". I couldn't stand the fact that I might end up spending the next forty years as a soldier with limited opportunity for becoming a better person that could have a positive impact on my surroundings.
As can be seen from the paragraph above, I am extremely narcisistic. It's always me, me, me, but by sharing my thoughts with what I guess will be a very limited crowd (mostly me), I can perhaps change my self-perception into something that might be positive for other people and by extension, me.
I want to apologise for how the blog presents itself, but I have no intention of becoming proficient in using a computer for anything that is not strictly needed. I'm a user of the internet, not a profiteer and I will never use this blog for any commercial interests whatsoever.
My interest in politics is purely based on an amateurish interest in how we govern ourselves. In a distant past, I studied history at university and although I found the quantitative studies incredibly important, I couldn't stomach the effort that went into making them. The dull and mind-numbing repetitive task of gathering data is not one of my favourite pastimes, but the ideas that are provoked by historians interest me quite a lot. I don't subscribe to any particular political creed, but I sympathise mostly with socialist humanist ideals. My objection to capitalist society stems from the fact that we (people living in a capitalist world) are unwillingly participating in a culture, where we exploit and reduce humans to a commodity. This objectification of humanity is, in my opinion, the very real problem that the world faces.
Poetry is another of my main interests and that interest was awakened by my studies. I've always liked poetry and the way it presented difficult issues in a symbolic manner. I guess that I never fully realised how important it was to own the discourse to address issues in society and the most convoluted manner of saying stuff gives us a way to present the problems in a very human mode of expression. The inaccessibility of poetry is precisely the thing that makes poetry a necessary outlet for many people and the power of poetry lies in the obfuscation of meaning, which creates a paradox by being the most straightforward expression of thoughts. It's not an object to hide the emotion to create poetry. Poetry stems from emotion and is possibly the least manipulative mode of expression that humans have ever invented. It is constricted by massive amounts of tradition and every once in a while these traditions stymie the creativity and very emotions that the poet seeks to share with whoever is listening. I want to express myself as clearly as possible but in doing so, I often end up hiding my emotions, since I tend to value rationality and reason above an emotive response and while I think it's important to use reason to govern our emotions most of the time, I also believe that we must use our emotions to guide our reason. For this reason, emotion becomes the most important facet of being human.
My other insignificants are mainly given to say that I do not presently have an agenda that I want to push, but I get outraged at certain events in my society and I have a need to vent these emotions, so every once in a while, I will probably share something that is not related to poetry or politics, although I will have a hard time staying on topic for these things.
Thank you for reading this and I hope that you end up enjoying what I want to be my shared personal space on the internet.
Sincerely yours
Jonas.
