isobelll - with 3 l

I've realised over the years that my money is spent not on booze and candy but art and music. And I can't and wont carry the albums with me so I got all music digitally but I love concerts, and will do almost anything for a chance to see my favourite bands. (Some of them are on a list to the... uhm, right? I don't "do" left and right, can't tell them apart). But when someone asks me about my favourite band I always say that I've got two that are at the absolute number one, Björk and Nine Inch Nails. I've spent I don't know how many hours at end listening to both of them, laughing and crying at the same time. I've never been fortunate enough to see Björk live but had the pleasure to watch Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails creator, front man and really everything) 4 and a half times!

The first time I didn't even know the band, it was in Roskilde 2000 (?). The year with all the deaths at the Pearl Jam concert where I was suppose to be but got held up, puh for that one! I was at the festival with my mum and her friends, just turned 18 and my first festival. My favourite band at the time "Bush" were playing at the same time as NIN and I ran from one concert to the other and saw some of the final songs with Trent but then forgot about this amazing man for several years. Actually my mum made me listen to him in the end. Years later my boyfriend at the time liked NIN and gave my mum a cd which she for a whole years played over and over in her car, ok so this must be good? I slowly got into the music and when "with teeth" - the album - came I was lost. Shortly afterwards my phone rang and a very excited voice said "Nine Inch Nails are coming to Hultsfred, we need to go!!!" (Hultsfred is a big Swedish festival close to where my mum lives). We needed to be there, me and mum who'd made the call.


It was pouring down when Trent came out on stage. Wow! One of the best concerts in my life. The best thing, perhaps, was reading about it in the papers afterwards from a reporter who clearly didn't know anything about Trent, that he'd called the audience "you fucking pigs...!" while we were all lovin' it this poor reporter didn't get why. Haha!

Nine Inch Nails started, just as before he took his big break, spitting out god music and I got more and more lost. Fuck, this is to good to be true. He came to Stockholm not to long after Hultsfred and me and my mum where there again, screaming and singing along. He came a third time and that concert (even though it sadly had a horrible boring audience) was my mums 50th birthday gift!!


I moved to New Zealand and thought that I would never see NIN again, sadly but true. "The Slip" came out and sure enough a new tour was posted, with one stop in Auckland. Yay! I couldn't wait for the tickets and got them on pre-sale on the homepage as a fan and got a special ticket that let me come in with the other dedicated fans before the public was let into the concert hall. Wow! And there I was but this time, my 4th and a half, it was without my mummy which was really weird. Trent said that this was probably gonna be his last tour and I went form the concert with mixed feelings, what no more albums? No more music? Fuck, what the hell am I gonna do now, huh Trent?

So I took heaps of pictures and videos of the concert and loved every last minute of it. Until just a week ago when I out of a pure chance and a cute Danish guy, ok I gotta tell that story later on, checked out the Danish festival Roskilde and what bands they had for this year - and started screaming and txting my mum, NIN is coming! I still don't know if we're gonna be able to go, money, time, work (still don't know if I got it but the interview was ok I think)? But I'm keeping my fingers crossed for one last chance to see my favourite band - Nine Inch Nails.


"Nine Inch Nails - Something I can never have" Auckland, NZ 2009

So the story about the cute Danish guy? Well, ok... but now its getting personal again so this is the time to stop reading if you're scared or just feeling way to politically correct cause I'm sure as hell not!

So I went to Knutepunk in Norway and meet up with heaps of friends that didn't know that I was planning on coming, Ninja!! Had some sweet reunions and cool moments that I thought were forever gonna be buried in booze memories from last year. I wont go in to them, at least not right now.

The LARP convention started with a Larp, yay! Even though it wasn't that good and brought up a theme that wasn't really appropriate or rather it was to big for that short amount of time I got some good gaming and had a lot of fun. (I'm not gonna try and explain larp, which I've tried many times over in the blog I think.) So I got the part as the flirting bimbo and didn't really know who to flirt with. There were three guys to choose from that my character could "fall for" but two of them didn't seam to experienced with playing and had a totally different gaming style then I have, I mostly go all out within reasonable limits of course. But I saw that one of them, The Game Master or rather the guy with the papers, had a character that was perfect for gaming and the guy itself seamed ok and the same "all outthere" gaming style as I have. So I played along, flirted and got closer so I could drop a real sweet line, later I heard that it must have been strait out of "American Beauty" - "Oh... Have you been working out?". Looking up on the guy with huge admiring eyes and biting my lip, this was all in game of course. (That is, my character as the bimbo was flirting with his character - larping.) Later I found out that the Game Master, the one organising the game for us had giving me this part so that he could have some game time with me. Oh, really? I should be pissed of for being type casted but well... I really can't.

Cause later on that day, as embarrassing as it is to admit, we started flirting. As ourselves. Gah! But he was a bit to cute besides it was way to fun not to. And I always, as bad as it sounds, go for fun. Or I try to. So we kept on flirting and late at night when I was heading up to my bed and I just had turned down the offer of getting a drink in his room I left him with a sweet, innocent and nervous good night kiss.

The next day I had heaps of games to go to and some real cool seminars. One was how to have a monologue in a game and help each other having them (a meta technique in larping) and in the afternoon we tried it out by taking part in the game "A place to rest" where all the communication between players was in monologue form, yay! This actually turned out to be such a good game that its competing with some of the best ones on my list, and I've been doing this for more then 10 years now. Good on ya, "guy's"!

The gala dinner came and went, I kept on spontaneously gaming with a few friends and then the cute Danish guy (hmm, I'd better get him a nick name that's shorter... what to call him?) came and asked me to dance. Which I at first couldn't due to game but later on loved every minute of. He turned out to be a real good and fun dance partner who loved to play along to the lyrics and after being part of a secret ritual on knutepunkt, getting back with an old friend and then returning to the dance floor to have some more fun with TCDG (The Cute Danish Guy). You all know what happened afterwards. Come on, I'm not some sort of saint. You know even though I can try to hide it. We spent the rest of the weekend being rather cute and me having a strangely warm tummy whenever he was around.

Ok, so I crush rather easily but at the same time there has got to be something there that really captures my attention. And for some reason it did, even though it was a guy which I'm not really interested in any more and way to young. Lets not go in to numbers, just that he was way to young. I'm thinking I might have some sort of "I'm getting old (26 now) complex" cause this is not the first time I'm going for people that are way younger then me, embarrassingly enough. At some point we started talking about relationships, oh no... Not that one again. I always get into trouble right about there cause there are so few relationship anarchist around and when I started explaining that I want just what everyone else wants but without rules that make me wanna jump fences, that I preferred trust and warmth. The love you can only experience when its totally voluntarily and being chosen every time someone spends time with me it got sort of complicated. Apparently "you can't have the sweet without the sour". But what?! No, no, no... That's not how I wanna live my life, besides there is always heaps of sour when you relate to people - why would I want to create more just by following this silly norm we've got in society? No, not my thing. "But you're just gonna go back to Stockholm and forget all about this. Gone with the wind..." Well, No, that's not me. I keep in touch and when I say, "I'd love to see you again" I actually mean it. So even though we are as unlike/alike as we can be and everything else that's "wrong" I still kinda like him.

But hey, he's another box for me. Everyone that has made me smile, for whatever reason, goes into a little box in my head and on rainy days or when everything has turned into pure shit I look for my little boxes, dusty and forgotten but not lost. And I open them and smile, feel, love and remember. So Thank you for making me smile, whatever happens that was the simplest and most important thing. Now we have a good mailing contact that I hope continues and that we at least stay friends. I'd like that very much with a still somewhat (scared) warm tummy.

To explain things a bit clearer, relationship anarchism means that every relationship - every time you relate to someone - its unique. This means that all your contact with someone else is totally unique and can't be replaced. So every time I'm jealous, cause of course this happens to me too, I think about how I wanna be treated and that I'm, however hard they try, am unreplaceable. So if I talk about more people then one in this blog ots because I'm trying to be as open as I can and show me, you, someone or just write about this other way of looking at relationships with the people we love.

Band of the day: "Nine Inch Nails"
New Zealand Band of the day: "Left or right"
Muic that has been playing all night: "Tool" and "A perfect circle"