Ha! Finally I got my neighboor to speak again – at least a few sentences. The occasion this time was that I had forgotten a frozen pizza outside of our door in the hall way. “Is this yours?,” she asked – thereby breaking several weeks of silence. “Ehm… yes” – I had actually been looking for it for several minutes. She gave me the “you are freaking weird”-look while handing me the pizza. But of course that was not all cause the next thing was that she was about to enter the bathroom: “If you need to shower, just remove those,” I said while pointing at the five wet pink all-body suits that were hanging in the shower. Apparently that was no weirder than leaving a frozen pizza in the hall way, so she just said: “In fact, I do have to shower.” And after another few words exchanges she moved into the shower, putting away those pink suits.

Now of course, you might ask, why did I have five pink suits in my shower? And how do I communicate with my neighboor without using words? And why does the picture seem to be completely unrelated?

The no-talk communication actually works quite well, although it sometimes takes a while to get a message across. For eample, 2-3 weeks ago, we were running out of toilet paper, and she thought I should buy some more. However, instead of telling or asking me, we communicated in the following way: First time I go to the toilet, there are only like to small sheet of toilet paper left. I use them, and I can see that there is nothing lying around, at least in the bathroom. When I enter again a few hours later, there is an entire new roll, so I figure she bought some. The next time again, it is gone (and I notice that way too late). The fourth time I enter the bathroom, the roll is back. But now it’s not hanging besides the toilet. Instead it is placed on one of her to shelfs in the miniature metal cupboard we have hanging on the wall in there (and yes, I made use of it anyways).

Of course, now the challenge was for me to communicate back in the same manner. So I went out and bough not one 12-pack of toilet paper rolls, but two 12-pack toilet paper rolls. In addition I bought some toilet cleansing crap (a spray or something) and a set of 12 dish rags. Now, we didn’t need any of the last stuff, but this was my way fo “throwing money at the problem”; I was showing her “hey, I don’t have a problem investing in common goods here.” After returning home, I used some of that bathroom cleansing stuff, just to make sure it was noticable for anybody entering the room. And I placed the two packs as prominently as possible and put one roll on the hanger besides the toilet.

So, as you can see, you don’t have to use your mouth in order to communicate – even though that is what you’re supposed to do with it. 🙂

And in the case of the pink suits, to make a long story short: I was trying to turn five see-through white synthtetic painter suits in to five orange Guantanamo prisoner garnments. However, my personal garnment coloring adivisor told me that 60 centigrade would be enough for the coloring process, although it said 80 centigrade on the package. So instead of orange, they had turned very light pink!

That was two days ago, and the action was supposed to take place yesterday afternoon. So when I bought the chains yesterday morning at 9AM, the suits were still pink. At 10 I handed them to one of the other Blindern Fred activists, who is a real expert on paint. I had a four hour obligatory assignment from 10:15 until 14:00, and at 14:30 we were to take the subway out to the place where the action would take place.

Around 12, our expert still send me mobile messages asking whether he should or shouldn’t buy one particular color, so I was sweating like hell for the rest of the time in class for the remaing two hours! I could just see on the evening news as this pink wannabe Guantanamo prisoner.

Luckily it all went ok, and as you can see, he did manage to spray paint them orange – and in addition, what you can not see, he even managed to spray paint a message on the back “Against War – blindernfred.org”.