Aslaug's Axe Shed

So … how are things going?

To be completely honest, I’ve been better. I’m sick of people promising things and not keeping them. To a heathen, keeping a promise is a matter of honor. If you promise something, you uphold your end of the bargain. If you try and fail, that is alright as long as you tried as hard as you could, but you don’t simply say ‘oh, I changed my mind’. You don’t simply go ‘Sorry, but you’ve got to understand that…’

No, I don’t have to understand. And I could care less if you changed your mind. If you promised something, you keep it, or you shouldn’t have made the promise in the first place. If you feel uncomfortable about the promise you have made, you should have thought it through better before making the promise.

The ONLY TIME it is acceptable to break a promise is when you learn that keeping that promise will bring harm to other people.

Lately, quite a few things in my life have involved broken promises and no, this has nothing to do with my work-situation. No one actually promised me anything there, except to try, and they did. And I am grateful for it, and for what work they COULD get me once the support-period runs out. So no, this has nothing to do with that.

This has to do the anonymity of the internet, and with broken promises in general.

I’m not going to give any concrete details because first of all they would make no sense to anyone else but myself, and secondly, I’m not in favor of pointing fingers. Those who wronged me are who they are and they can feel sanguine about their rotten ways to their hearts desire. It makes no difference to me, because they don’t matter to me as people.

But I hate being lied to, and I hate being led on. I absolutely loathe being told I am wanted, needed or useful to someone, only to then be told the exact opposite a few days later.

Sadly, the online community does not seem to change in that respect. If anything, it just keeps getting worse. It annoys me severely, but there’s really nothing I can do about it except to vent steam here. Vent steam about something no one else but me knows the full story of and that no one needs to get involved in. But I hate being made to look like a fool, and I am tired of people who think that just because they can’t see my face, they can pull me around the circus-ring like some trained animal.

Enough of it. I’ll get better at saying no. I’ll learn to trust a little less easily.

It’s either that or setting myself up for more rejection.

It’s the same every time we get to New Year’s Eve. People promise that next year they’ll fix their lives in some way or other. New Year Resolutions are always popular, and rarely kept. It’s one of those promises that people tend to simply ignore a few days or at least a month after making it, because it means changing their life in some way that is really quite uncomfortable … now that they’ve settled into life long routines.

For that reason, I long since stopped making such resolutions. If I know already I won’t keep them, then why make them? Instead, I sometimes … though not always … come up with a sort of ‘declaration of intent’, which I keep to myself. This year, however, I’ll make an exception.

This year, my declaration of intent is to try to not just get my life back on track … yet again … but also to stabilize it somehow, so that instead of always looking BACK to a time which I really want to forget about or at least push to the background, I can look forward. I’ll turn 34 this year. I think I need a touch of stability by now.

Of course, that does involve getting a steady job, and since I can’t promise myself I will, only that I will try very hard, I don’t want to make it a resolution.

Speaking of New Year’s Eve, I think it is time for me to spread some resentment about a Danish tradition that I am NOT a fan of.

It concerns fireworks. While exploding fireworks are highly illegal in Denmark (the strongest of them have the explosive capacity of a military training grenade, and consequently owning such fireworks are considered a breach of the weapons legislation), they are not illegal in Germany, and so many people travel south to purchase things that don’t make pretty lights, but just loud noises, in huge amounts during the month of December. A black market flourishes in this stuff, and chrysanthemum-bombs and Blue-Lightning (as some of this stuff is called) is confiscated in huge amounts by the police every year. And even they realize they only see the absolute tip of the iceberg. One fellow was arrested three days before New Year’s Eve, for having stored literally two thousand two hundred pounds of high explosives in his garage without any safety precautions whatsoever. He had intended to sell it to others and was grossly insulted that the police took his stock away for destruction.

However, rockets that don’t just go ‘boom’ but make fancy patterns on the night sky are allowed. Rockets, batteries and other such fireworks are the most popular kinds of celebrations for New Years Eve, which is the ONLY night of the calender year where private people are ALLOWED to fire off such things without a special permit (which is next to impossible to get unless you’re a professional in the fireworks industry).

On New Year’s Eve.

Fireworks.

Think about it…

Denmark has about five million inhabitants. Let’s assume that just one FIFTH of these shoot off fireworks (the rest being awed family members, old-timers who think the Germans are coming back whenever a rocket goes off, and people like me who are deathly afraid of this stuff), it still leaves one million people. If only ONE HALF of them are drunk on New Year’s Eve, I’ve been very, very generous in my estimate. So…one million untrained civilians have access to copious…even ridiculous…amounts of booze and ten thousand tonnes of high explosives at the same time.

And this … they call ‘entertainment’.

Me? As mentioned, I’m scared witless of fireworks. To illustrate how afraid, think of how most dogs react when the fireworks start outside. That’s how I feel. I hate this stuff. I think it’s pretty … but I hate it. I hate knowing that someone might blow their hands or faces off with this. I hate to think that these rockets might misfire … often being mass-produced in Chinese factories where safety regulations are, frankly, non-existant and where ‘quality control’ is a city in the Midwestern United States. Misfiring rockets can blow up … causing more damage to people. Or they might actually leave the ground and go through someone’s window or set fire to their roofs or somesuch.

It is a case of the Gods watching over us that every year, only a few hundred accidents happen. But they are a few hundred too much.

The stench of cordite hangs in the air for DAYS afterwards if the weather is wrong (fog, wet weather … you can smell New Year’s Eve for almost a week afterwards that way) and the burnt out rockets and batteries are just left where they fall or stand, making a mess of the streets for most of January.

I love fireworks, when I see it set off by people who are trained professionals, where I feel safe and sure that they know what the Hell they are doing and where the fireworks used are often made by themselves, to high quality standards. Then I think it looks great, because it’s under a controlled environment.

But leaving Tom, Dick and Drunk Harry with free reigns? No way.

I’m sorry to say this, but fifteen … sixteen year old males with way too much testosterone rushing around their bodies and a pathological need to prove their manliness, coupled with explosives and alcohol spells catastrophe in my world. Every single year, groups like that roam around the streets, roaring at the top of their voices, shouting insults at all and sundry, tossing illegal firecrackers around.

When I was fifteen myself, I didn’t take part in those things. I thought it was vandalism. As a reward, one guy, so drunk he could barely stand on his feet, threw a firecracker not in my direction … but AT me. Face height.

I saw it coming and managed to get mostly out of the way and it still knocked me for a loop. The jerk just laughed his ass off with his friends and continued on his tour-de-hooliganism, while I was seeing sun, moon and stars in a snowdrift. Since then…I’ve hated fireworks.

I know a lot of people are very responsible with this stuff. But those few who are not are a menace to everyone else and in this case, the actions of the few should result in legislation to the detriment of the many.

Fireworks in private hands should be banned. Completely. Not just the explosive stuff because first of all, that ban doesn’t work … and even if it did, those who wanted to blow up something with a large bang know how to disassemble a harmless rocket, pack the gunpowder into tubes and presto…homemade bombs gallore.

Get rid of the damned things. The benefits do not live up to the downsides.

…I thought it would be appropriate to write a few lines here.

This Christmas will see the posting of the last two Transitions chapters. I’m not going to say ‘ever’, because one cannot predict the future, and who knows, in a few years I might want to go back and write something for that storyline again. At the moment, though, I think I’ve managed to write a good trilogy that many people have clearly enjoyed, and I am grateful for the opportunity to do so.

Grateful? Yes, because without all the people who encouraged me throughout the years, the 206 Transitions-chapters, plus an epilogue, plus 32 AVC-chapters and a prologue for that, would probably all have amounted to 5 or 6 chapters before I’d reach my usual ‘Who the hell will read this crap’-state of mind. I would then have deleted what I had written, and I would have never looked back. I would probably still be nurturing ideas of being an author, and I would be up to my 40th attempt at starting a book, all ending around chapter 6 with the same ‘no one will ever read this drivel’-feeling.

I may be the one who wrote Transitions and Amat Victoria Curam, but you, the readers, are who kept me going at it.

That being said, I have, as those of you who use my forum should know, come to the decision that I have enough experience at this by now, to create my own world. I have tentatively named it ‘Breach’ or ‘Breachworld’ and you will find out at the end of the first book in the series which will be posted here, on this site. The first book will be called ‘Witchhammer’, and like Amat Victoria Curam, it will take place in a ‘historical’ setting. Now, I want to make sure you all realize from the word go, that it is not meant to be a realistic historical depiction of a period, although certain things will be fairly accurate. I do not claim accuracy in this. The Breach setting is specifically NOT historically accurate for reasons you will all find out when reading the books. It is, however, a much darker setting than Transitions, and it will involve a lot of uncomfortable situations for the characters as well as for many of the readers. As usual, I hope you will all understand that I don’t do that just to make anyone uncomfortable but in order for people to ask themselves all those difficult questions we tend to avoid in everyday life.

On a different note…my blog entry from Friday has led to some responses already. I am very heartened by the support people have shown me, and I promise everyone, that despite how down I felt then and…to some extent…still feel about the situation, I will not go under because of this, and I will at least not give up on finding a solution to my financial situation without a fight. I promise that, on this the holiest day of the year for me. There is one person who deserves mention in all of this though. Many of you offered help in one way or another. Some offered to help set up a PayPal account, others suggested Payex instead since my bank frowns on PayPal users. Some have offered moral support in many different ways, and all of this is both kind and deeply appreciated. I needed someone to do this for me, because frankly I feel a bit like the world has taken it upon itself to kick me back down every time I try to get up on my feet. That sounds pathetic, but it all stems back to the years of my illness, when I was literally so sick I can’t remember much of what I did, and many of the things I do remember I really, deeply wish I didn’t…

But out of all these people, one of my readers, calling himself ‘Nameless’ on my forum, made an offer the likes of which I was frankly absolutely boggled at receiving. I won’t give you the details here, out of respect for what he did, but suffice to say that it was something truly generous and helpful. It is good to know that if my own attempts at fixing this mess doesn’t succeed (and believe me, I will not try any less hard for this), there are people out there who has my back.

If everyone would be as helpful and as kind to one another as people have been to me since Friday, the world would be a much nicer place to live in.

And there I was, thinking I had it all down so well this year.

Foolishly, stupidly I thought that maybe this year, I’d actually have the kind of Christmas I’ve hoped for basically since I moved away from home. A Christmas where I could give my family and loved ones some decent presents for once…and not just junk wrapped up nicely or cheap little tidbits that didn’t wreck my strained budget (which of course always left me thinking that my family deserved far better than what I could give them, which again always left me feeling inadequate and cheap).

Not so this year, I told myself! This year, I had more money on my hands than ever before in my life and I could start buying presents in very good time…

Oh yes, this time I could do things RIGHT. I even sent off Christmas-cards for people … some of which I know have arrived safely already.

Gods help me, I even allowed the yuletide spirit to grab a firm hold of me.

I should have known better. I really should. I should have remembered that Murphy has taken up permanent goddamned residence in front of my door, and that he dumps excess workload on me whenever he comes home at night without having spoiled enough people’s lives.

Today, I got told about the application put in by the museum to hire me for four months after my trainee-time with them is done come June 1st. Four months would be awesome. Three months would be just fine too…

You see, to go from the low rate of unemployment benefits that I get, to the full rate (or more precisely going from getting 80 percent of the full amount to the actual full amount), I need three months of actual work. Not spread out over a certain amount of time, but three months of continuous, uninterrupted work. Admittedly, it doesn’t have to be three months of work at the same workplace, but if … say … I had a job that ended on the 30th of January and I had a new job waiting for me that started on the 1st of February…I would have had ONE SINGLE unemployed day…and I would have to start over counting towards those 3 months.

Now…I need to go to the full unemployment benefits once I’m done at the museum. I don’t just ‘need’ it … I NEED it! Why? Because my student loan has to be paid back, starting on January 1st. That amounts to a staggering 2.250 kroner every single month! Over four hundred dollars that I MUST pay every month. Okay, they gave me a stay saying I could pay them 1330 kroner every month until June, but that was on the explicit condition that after that, I would be able to pay them more because I would have a job, and then the full unemployment benefits to help me pay for it.

Now, I won’t have that. So now … I have to pay the full amount from January or at least february. I will have to pay bills so heavy I won’t even be able to pay for my transportation fee back and forth to work every month without getting my bank to allow me to go into overdrawn for a week every month until the money is paid back. Naturally, that too costs money … which I myself will have to pay.

It is one god damned month of work. ONE. But unless I can find a job which is LITERALLY waiting for me the day after I stop my current job, I’m completely screwed. I won’t be able to pay my bills. I’ll barely be able to pay my rent. I have NO idea how I’ll feed myself, and I can forget ANY kind of amusement on the side. No trips to the cinema, no fun with my friends unless it means no expense AT ALL, no online interaction (yes, that’s right, I may have to give up the internet … it’s THAT bad…)

And this message I got on my last day of work before Christmas. Bless my boss for trying to be cheerful while giving me the news. She tried to make it look like ‘well, at least it’s two months. You only need to find one more month of work. It’s better than NOTHING…’ and of course she’s right, but that is no consolation in a situation like this, where we had applied for more … and didn’t get it.

The museum is short on money as it is and can’t pay for that months wages for me out of its own budget anyway…

I am so utterly screwed, especially considering that the Danish economy is officially in recession and our historically low unemployment rates are likely to be bound for the history books within a -very- short while. Some of the more dire estimates suggest we’ll see as many as 80.000 new unemployed next year and mind you folks…at the moment, we have less than 60.000 unemployed and that’s counting the people who are between jobs and those who flat out refuse to work.

What are the chances of a historian getting a job when everyone has to cut down left and right?

Not great, guys.

Not great at all.

I am so down right now that I don’t even want to write. At all. Period. Full stop. End of story. For more than five years, I’ve kept myself going by always AT LEAST having my writing … and right now, at this moment, I don’t even have that.

Hopefully, that illustrates just how awful I’m feeling.

Merry yuletide to you all. I think it’s all I can give you now.