I am woman, hear me ramble

Paradise

2009-07-28T16:46:00.002+02:00

At the moment, I’m in the woods, outside a small cabin that my Grandma and Granda built some time in the early fifties. I spent a lot of time here growing up, and in all ways relevant, it’s still more or less the same. There’s still no water closet, the only running water comes directly from the lake and shouldn’t be used for drinking, and all around are pine trees, wood peckers and squirrels. The strongest sound around is the soft sound of the wind on the lake, about 40 metres away. An enormous bumble bee just landed next to my lemonade, had a look around, then took off.

In short, I’m vacationing in Paradise.

When my Australian friends tell me about their impressions of Scandinavians, there’s always one thing they seem to be especially fascinated by: when Scandinavians encounter the Sun, they all strip down to their undies, lie down on the ground, and don’t move for hours. Or until they have to move because the Sun moves away. Since all Australians know that the Sun is dangerous and will cause melanoma, and is in general a harsh lover, they all wonder how Scandinavians can be so careless. A good question indeed.

In order to answer it, let’s look at a culturally significant object: songs regarding summer. One of the best known and loved summer songs is Idas sommarvisa (“Ida’s summer song” from Astrid Lindgren’s stories of Emil). The lyrics tell of how we shouldn’t think summer’ll arrive just like that: we’ll have to work for it! Another often played song about summer, Sommaren är kort (“The summer is short”, by Tomas Ledin – doesn’t the title say it all?). The song starts (in Swedish, but a quick and dirty translation will have to suffice):

Summer is short
Most of it rains away
But now it’s here
So grab a piece of it
The sun is out today!

So that’s what we do. As soon as the Sun shows its face, we say to each other: “It’s a shame to sit indoors in this lovely weather!”, drop whatever we’re doing, and head for the beach. Or the nearest lawn, as long as it’s big enough for our blankets, and then we lie down, and worship the sun.

I could write about the depressions that spread across the nation when Summer has been grey and rainy, I could write about the suicide statistics, or about our traditions of institutionalised tea lights and cookies to pick us up during the dark months, but instead I’m going to describe what T and I are doing right now.

Right now, we’re sitting outside, computers in laps, in order to maximise the Sun exposure. We even changed into smaller outfits with less skin cover to get a better exposure, more heat, more vitamin D. The past couple of days here in Paradise have been rainy, cold and grey, so now we’re grabbing a handful.

Paradise is beautiful, and warm!

Not home-sick

2008-06-01T19:22:00.005+02:00

I've been in Berlin for - I don't know actually, less than a year, more than six months - now. People sometimes ask me when I'll be coming home. And I really don't know what they mean. I live here now, in this flat, in this city. Surely this is home? But then again, when travel to Lund, I say that I'm going home. And the same is true for Gothenburg.

I'm not home-sick, I'm home-confused.

When there's a post announced abroad that looks half decent, people ask me if I'm going to apply, as if it's clear that I will do just that. Apparently I've become the kind of person who at least some don't expect to really settle down in one specific place. I'm not really sure how that happened. I used to be the girl who played it safe, the girl who was going to marry a safe and secure unadventurous guy, have 2,5 or whatever children, and not really make much of a fuss. That didn't happen. I have no idea what happened, really. I guess I'll have to paraphrase a friend who said: "I just can't go on living like that. I want to laugh. I want to have fun!". I'm having fun now. I'm playing a whole other game, but , boy, am I having fun!

And that all happened at the same that that my feelings of home started to become weird.

For a long time, I pined for Australia. I still do in a way. There's a small emptiness in my chest, which can only be filled by the thought of warm air and gum-trees. But at the same time, there's another emptiness in there, one which can only be filled by Swedish west coast granite cliffs, salt water and midnight skinny-dipping. I also have a small emptiness that longs for narrow stone alleys that smell of roses in a small old university town in southern Sweden. And I'm sure that, eventually, there will be an emptiness there for flowering chestnuts in a large metropolis.

Maybe some day I will even feel an emptiness for this rootlessness.

We'd packed away our sorrows

2008-05-21T20:57:00.006+02:00

The summer before I turned 19, I experienced a short and intense infatuation with K. K and I went to the same high school. We had no classes together, but he had for a time been together with one of my best friends, so we kinda knew each other. I'd be lying if I said we spent a lot of time together, but he was my prom date, and we were very attracted to each other. To cut to the chase, we eventually ended up in his bed, and there we listened to Tom Waits. We did other things there too, of course, but those are not what I want to talk about here. What is the issue is the music. Or more specifically, his song Martha. Because right then and there, in K's bed, I fell in love. With Tom Waits. The story of Martha made me cry then, and it makes me smile today.

Of course, things happened. K left town to do his military service only a couple of days later, and I was broken hearted for a bit, but within a couple of weeks I met the man I was to live with for the next near-six years. As I said, short and intense. I started studying at the university, years went by, I split up from the man I was living with, I began my postgraduate studies and got my first really own home. A part of those postgraduate studies turned out to be to go to Australia for some time. Exactly one week before leaving, my phone rang.

"Is this the Drakona who went to Highschool X? Do you hear who this is?" someone asked.

Of course I knew who it was. Of course I was she. This was seven years later.

Now, another six years later, K is one of my dearest friends. Not one of my most frequent friends, but one of the very, very dear ones. Almost as dear as Tom Waits. Just the other day I listened to Martha again for the first time in a very long time.

It always makes me think of K, for oh so many reasons.

Perty books!

2008-02-10T15:16:00.000+01:00

I'm on a bit of a reading spree at the moment, and what I'm reading is perty books - among other things, I've just had a new batch of books from the Canongate Myths Series. There's a lot to be said about that line, both good and bad of course, but for the msot part, I'm overwhelmed. And the books looks so lovely.

But what's with the nice looking literature? Beautiful books, books that are like soft dark chocolates covered in red and gold wrapping. It is, I find, a joy to open a book that is printed on thick, cream coloured paper, where the margins are substantial, so as to make the lines just so long as is comfortable for the eye. Not the entire page is used up, as is often the case with grey-colour-paper pocket books, where the lines are too tight, the font too bold and the margins too narrow. No, I like well-bound books with beautiful cover-art, books that reach out for me and make me want to pick them up.

But of course, it matters little that the book looks lovely, if the content is bland or uninteresting.

I've recently read not only one, but two books that fill both the form and the content criteria, namely The Stone Gods by Jeanette Winterson and Girl meets boy by Ali smith. They both deal with issues like queer, norms and expectations, feminist and humanist questions as well as environmental problems and what we are doing to our world and to ourselves. Both JW and AS have a lovely, light and direct prose, they are approachable as writers, accessible as texts, and they both are very, very worth while.

And the books are very, very perty.

The wonders of technology

2007-10-04T16:41:00.000+02:00

Many years ago now, the Swedish rock band Wilmer X had a hit with their song Teknikens under (Technical wonders). One of the more significant lines of that song is “du kan glömma dina ensamma stunder – du kan lita på teknikens under” (you can forget your lonely moments – you can rely on the wonders of technology). I was quite young when the song first came out, and I remember thinking that it sounded rather lewd. Nowadays, when I’m in a long-distance relationship, I must say that they were right. And not only in the lewd ways. Thanks to technology, especially the technology of the Internet, of computers in general, and of the mobile phone evolution, I am actually never far away from my other half.

We text each other several times a day, we talk, courtesy of special long-distance telephone deals, once or twice daily, if we both have Internet access, we have each other on each sides of our screens, either via some instant messaging option or via some forum or other. We email each other and we leave small virtual notes lying around here and there. We send pictures from our daily lives, and I’m even thinking about taking up recording voice messages for him to download and enjoy whenever he likes.

There are so many ways of being close, verbally, despite being apart.

But what happens to our writing? Back in the day, when great artists wrote smouldering letters to their mistresses, which eventually, long after their deaths were published in great books or at least put into databases for textual analyses, things were kept, saved, to a much higher extent. Will we in the future be able to take part of the passionate and biographically revealing love letters of writer X to her lover Y? Probably not, because it was all done over SMS, and when they split up, he erased all the messages she sent him.

I have a box. It’s a box that I don’t open unless it is to put something in there, of things I could never get rid of. Love letters. Small tokens of affection. Memorabilia from long lost relationships. Little things that were once important and symbolic. One day, many, many years from now I hope, my children will find them and ask themselves what their mother really was up to before she met their father. They’re unlikely to go into any great archives, and I don’t go back to it to read. That’s not what they’re for.

But what with text messages? I’m not able to put those in a small box and keep them forever. And phone memories get full – eventually you have to make choices and delete some of your cute writings. Chat is better that way. Their memories seem to save any amount of conversation indefinitely. And email? Well the servers protest after a while, but I can always save my correspondences on my hard drive. But what if it crashes? What if my back up crashes too? And what if I one day decide to do a big cleaning out? What if Strindberg (NOT saying that I’m Strindberg material, just trying out an argument here. I’d rather be Helium anyways… Misery!!!) had decided that a good spring cleaning was long overdue, and chucked out all his correspondence? What if Harriet Bosse had done the same? Then we’d have no letters of his left, mentioning how he proposed to her by saying “Do you want to have a small child with me, Miss Bosse?”. And I do spring clean.

I know it’s discussed every so often what is actually going to happen with history writing, now with the electronic medium, which on the one hand is very delicate and we have no idea how long different storage media will actually last, and on the other hand lets us keep record of soooo much more than we ever could before! But it’s also so much easier to throw things away. A lot of the really famous photographs of the past century are pics that were taken by chance or by mistake, at a fluke. A lot of the really important pictures are things that went on in the background. Often in failed pictures, the kind of picture that is very, very easy to just erase from your camera right after you’ve taken it. When the pictures were harder to acquire, people didn’t seem to get rid of them quite so easily.

I’m a little uncertain what I’m trying to say here. Maybe something like this: I miss my loved one despite being in almost constant contact with him, and I wish that I had the possibility to save every word he writes me, because, despite my professional opinion that chat and SMS aren’t really writing, but rather text mediated speech, it feels like writing, and writing ought to be saved. I don’t have a nagging feeling about the badness of getting rid of things from not being able to record and review our every conversation. I need to get my head sorted out around these issues, and try harder to stop feeling about it as text. But I guess the product is text, although the process is speech. Yeah, something like that.

But thanks to the wonders of technology, I have no lonely moments.

Berlin!!!

2007-10-04T16:39:00.001+02:00

I’m in Berlin now. For those of you Swedish speakers, that means you can read about my German adventures elsewhere. It’s been rather adventurous moving in – first not having furniture for a week, and then not heating for about the same period of time, and, uhm, still not having a stowe and a sink. My washing machine will arrive tomorrow though, which will greatly lower my weekly spendings on underwear and socks.

They say that Berlin is the capital of decadence – at least in Europe. In America, that would probably be San Francisco. But Berlin is up there I guess. So far, decadence has, unfortunately I must say, played a very minor part in my life here. I do feel slightly decadent in one small way though. My new home is huge, roomy and just renovated. In fact, it’s still being renovated, which is the reason a hairy plummer, who’s only wearing work pants and nothing (yes, I mean it, NOTHING! Oh well, yeah, he did have shoes. And a crucifix. But otherwise: nothing) else on, is rummaging around in my bathroom. I guess that is somebody’s kink, but it’s not mine. So my flat might be way too huge for me, and thus decadent, but there’s not terribly much glamour about it. Yet. I’ll try and change that though.

Our (as in mine and my love’s) plan at the moment is for me to be here for three weeks, and then I visit him for a week. Then in between, whenever possible, he can come visit me. We’ll have two homes for two years. So I guess I’m bi-living. Or something. I tried putting ‘bi’ plus ‘casa’ together in my head, but ended up with ‘bi-casual’, which… Sounds like something very different from what I actually meant.

Well. I didn’t really have much else to say at this time – just wanted to let you know that I’m still out there, but have been swamped in boxes and moving and stuff. But I’m here. And I’ll be back very soon with more rambling and meandering thoughts.

Kiddie stuff!

2007-06-06T12:26:00.000+02:00

Lately, I’ve been reading some fantasy literature, which I believe is often perceived as being aimed at children and adolescents, and I’ve been thinking about even more examples. It’s like… I have no idea how a children’s book is deemed a children’s book. What are the criteria for the classification? That the books deal with kiddie stuff? That the main characters are children?

I think that last thing is quite important to a lot of grown ups. These books that I’ve read lately, His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman and the Abarat by Clive Barker, mainly, have children or adolescents as their main characters. This of course, automatically targets them at audiences of that same age.

I’m not so sure.

One aspect of reading which is important to a lot of people is identification; is it at all possible for me as a reader to identify with at least one of the main characters? Preferably the main character, but some lesser being is quite alright too. Like, if you can’t identify with Harry, Hermione could work just as well.

Or can she?

See, the reasoning behind identification is often (and I’m rambling here, NOT being scientific, you'd better not dream of quoting) based on likeness. I identify with the person who’s the most like me. I.e., with Harry Potter, I ought to identify with the clever neurotic overachiever with large front teeth and bushy hair. Thing is – I don’t really want to do that. I’d much rather identify with someone who I can feel for, someone who doesn’t have all my worst sides. I like Ginny, for example. We’re not terribly similar at all… It’s like… You trekkers out there will be familiar with Wesley Crusher, I’m sure. You know, the rather annoying young man who constantly fucks up? The son of Dr. Crusher? There are whole web pages dedicated to scorning him. Apparently, he was put on the show for young viewers to have someone to identify with. Thing is – do you really want to identify with him? He grows nanites that put the ship at risk – well, to be honest, he repeatedly puts the ship at risk! – and he’s not really much use. He’s annoying (this is an aside: interestingly enough, the actor playing Wesley, Wil Wheaton, has risen to great hights in the blogger community. Oughtn’t the bloggers and the trekkers overlap quite a lot? Really? It’s interesting). Anyway: The younger viewers don’t want to identify with Wesley, they want to identify with Picard! I want to identify with Picard. So, a younger character doesn’t make the book a book for children.

Secondly, are the children really children? *slight spoiler warning* Both in Abarat and in His Dark Materials, the children are more than ordinary kids. *end of spoiler risk* The same in Narnia: The children are ordinary in our world, but in Narnia they are special because of their humanness. They lose their plainness. With His Dark Materials, I’d say that the children aren’t even very credible as children: Lyra’s close to superhumanly bright occasionally, and generally, the children of fantasy either have extraordinary powers (like Garion or are extraordinarily clever, like Lyra, or good, like Lucy. They’re not primarily children. Primarily, they’re super humans.

But: What does seem to be an important feature of all good children’s fiction – not only fantasy, mind you – is that there’s a moral, ethical, scientific and social depth which is mind boggling, and often missing in a lot of fiction aimed at adults. His Dark Materials is filled with quite advanced theology and physics, to say nothing of quantum physics and meta physics. Don’t even get me started on the theology of Narnia. The social realism of Abarat and of Mio, my Son is occasionally plain scary, and possibly not really suited for children. At least not without adult supervision. Seriously. Read the stuff as adults and think about it.

Anyway: Let’s just step away from that narrow classification of books into children’s fiction and adult fiction. There’s such depths there, and we miss out on so much if we dismiss something because we think it’s aimed at another age group.

This is not a way of avoiding to grow up. I love being grown up. This is a way of keeping my mind open, accessible and agile. I’m trying to avoid putting stuff in boxes and labelling it. I’m trying to keep my mind young.

Intoxicate me

2007-06-06T00:55:00.000+02:00

I’ve written this several times before, one way or other: I’m easily affected by smells and fragrances.

When I was walking home tonight, in the middle of the night after a very warm day, I was overcome by smells. They surrounded me, filled me, took charge of me… I laughed out loud, so strongly did it affect me.

It smelled of flowers and receding heat, of warm grass soon to be touched by the mild dew. Lund is a flowering city, there’s flowers everywhere. I love living here.

As always, when I’ve been walking through the fragrant night, I’m affected. It’s like… Well. I don’t see all my senses as rating equally. I enjoy my hearing. I like music. But I can live without my hearing. Really. Toucch is a lovely, fantastic hting, that I'd hate to lose, but it's not how I primarily percieve the world. Eyesight on the other hand… Much more important. How else to judge text and art? Sooo important to me in the way I perceive the world. Smell though (and taste is basically the same thing) works like a memory trigger, a Madeleine cake.

My memory this time wasn’t terribly specific. It was more a feeling. A feeling that I’ve walked in that kind of smell, in a similar kind of temperature, next to someone I like, someone who I didn’t have the license to touch just yet. Imagine that it’s about half an hour before the first touch. You want to touch the other person, but it’s totally out of the question. For now. You can walk down the street together though. Walk down the street, next to each other. Close. So close that you can feel the naturally generated electricity in the other persons body. You’re the anode, the other person’s the cathode. You’re being drawn, pulled, towards each other. The electricity dancing between you is very nearly tangible. When – by chance – the hairs on your arm brush against the other, you could swear there was a spark… You walk closely together to feel the heat emanating from the other, to try to smell the other person’s body without being too obvious about it…

I’ve been there.

As I was walking down the street, I wished I were there again, slowly being intoxicated by your pheromones.

Sunday habits

2007-06-04T21:09:00.000+02:00

Yesterday I went to church. Usually I don’t, but I had a friend staying with me, and we decided to step into the Lund Cathedral, which was consecrated in 1145, thus being a terribly old building, really. I was starting to think that I was going to have lived here for almost a whole year without visiting he Cathedral. It really is a very beautiful building.

Visit it if you come here – really! Oh – and visit me too if you come here!

Duck and cover

2007-05-21T08:57:00.001+02:00

I spent the weekend in the park. Or, I should probably say “I spent the weekend in the Gardens”. The Botanical Gardens, that is.

Not three minutes walk from my home, are the Botanical Gardens. I go there as often as I can. Usually I bring a book. Sometimes I bring a blanket. Yesterday I brought both, and spent the day enjoying made up adventures while surrounded by daisies and hung-over students. It was nice, slow, relaxing and warm. Summer.

The day before that I didn’t bring a blanket. I decided to sit on one of the benches by the little pond instead. One thing you tend to find near water and people, is ducks. That’s the case with the Lund Botanical Gardens as well, of course. There are what seems to be a couple of different families. There’s one single mother with one duckling – they almost always stay by the pond – and then there’s a couple, a male and a female, who seem to be moving about in the park. I reckon people like to feed them, because they are totally unafraid of humans. Actually, they walk right up to you. If you try to chase them away, you’ll be as close to them as 30 centimetres before they bother to pay you any attention. As I was sitting on my bench, quietly reading, the female walked up to me. And bit at the toe of my shoe! While it was still on my foot!

The nerve of some fowl!

The smell of tonight is the fragrance of tomorrow, and of today

2007-05-21T08:55:00.000+02:00

As I was walking home last night, well after nightfall, the city smelled of summer night. That was the first of this year.

It’s the days accumulated flowers, it’s the laughter that still lingers, it’s the cobblestones eagerly awaiting tomorrow’s dew.

Second Korean Instalment - Wedding Gear

2007-05-15T08:10:00.000+02:00

So. I promised ironic manicure, amazing dresses and Zen poetry. Time to deliver.

After the bride and I had left the Korean spa, we went shopping. We had our nails done, something which I’ve never done before. Well, I’ve done them myself, and Johanna’s done them for me, but it was actually quite pleasant to have someone else take really good care of your hands… I got beautiful golden nails with extravagant pink relief roses on them. I would like to label this “ironic manicure”. We also ended up finding me a very cute little dress. There’s no such thing as too many little dresses *repeats this only a tad manically*. I’d gotten a seriously gorgeous dress for the wedding. Silk, baby blue, baby doll. How much better can it get? Actually, it can. The Wedding Dress. The couple had decided for traditional Korean wedding outfits. Which worked very well for the bride, slightly less so for the groom, as he’s an almost two-meter-tall Scandinavian man… Eventually, he, too, got his silk dress on. I think the people at the Swedish Embassy were probably a little surprised when we showed up: the bride, and the mother of the bride, dressed in traditional hanbok, and the groom in a passable version of the male counterpart.

After the wedding ceremony, we went to the palace Gyeonbokgung, just next to the American Embassy. Here we photographed the newlyweds, and their four-year-old daughter, also in hanbok. We weren’t the only ones photographing them, however. They were also the target of large groups of tourists, who wanted pictures of them with palaces in the background.

Then, we took a taxi up Mt. Inwangsan, to have dinner at a very, very luxurious restaurant. It’s been ages since I ate something that delicious. I really enjoyed the Korean cuisine. I’ll have to learn how to cook Korean. If I’m not mistaken, at least one of the grocery stores around Möllevångstorget in Malmö is Korean, so maybe it’s actually possible to get some kimchi? Before dinner, ,we went for a walk around the restaurant, which was situated on he mountain slopes, with a good view over the city. Well, it would have been good, had it not been slightly overcast. Aka smoggy… Around the restaurant were several small temples, on the walls of which little Zen poems were attached. Very beautiful, although totally incomprehensible. The one on the picture says: I tame a little deer on the moss-covered banks of a stream.

For the third instalment: More palaces, the wedding ceremony and How to Run in a Hanbok.

Priorities

2007-05-14T10:37:00.000+02:00

I need to get my priorities straight.

Saturday, I went shopping for a very nice and useful reference manageing program, one which I could really use, and which I really like. Except for when it makes Word crash, but I have high hopes for the latest version. At my last work place, it was provided to us for free. Not so here. So, I figured I'd just buy it. I mean, it's a program for suffering academics for chrissakes, how expensive can it be? Just over SEK3000 (~€330) it turned out. Do I really need that program just that much?

I left the store, saying I'd have to consider it for a while. And I continued my shopping spree by entering a clothes store, where I checked out a suit, which I really need... I'll have to think about it a little, but will probably buy it sooner rather than later. And after that, I went off to pick up a pair of rather pricy earrings (I would have paid double if I'd had to, though), which I've coveted for weeks. The artist is really, really amazing.

Seriously? What do I probably really need more? A really nifty program to facilitate my job on a daily basis, or another pair of earrings?

Seriously?

First Korean Instalment - Tall and ugly in low heels

2007-05-08T07:54:00.000+02:00

It feels rather good to be back from Korea, to tell the truth. I loved being there, don’t take me wrong. And I’ll tell you all about the good stuff. But it is good to be home. You see, I’m not used to feeling all tall, fat and clumsy. Which is basically what I felt like in Korea. The Korean women are tiny, petite and generally incredibly elegant, with at least 10-cm-heels. I was wearing an old pair of black pants and very comfortable but unglamorous slippers. They are so elegant, in fact, that I had to wear a tiny pen skirt and very high heels to work today. I felt quite clumsy for several days, until Malin and I went shopping for lingerie, and I realised what they do to come across as so slim. Slimming underwear. You know the kind that is more or less just a huge rubber band that keeps everything in place and tucked in. Almost impossible to get into. Or out of. Ha! Tall, fat and clumsy isn’t that bad after all. At least I get to wear comfy underwear. And as comfortable shoes as I feel like.

Apart from that, Korea was wonderful. Especially the food. Kimchi – the pickled side dishes that you get with your meal – is the best invention. Yum.

To save money, Patrik, the other wedding witness, and I had decided to share a room. The first thing we did was what you always do when you’ve checked into a hotel; we checked what was on TV. The best channel – Patrik and I totally agreed on this, but Malin and Johan were a little sceptical – was undoubtedly the channel which showed StarCraft tournaments. We were only sorry we couldn’t understand what the very enthusiastic commentators were saying. The second best channel – and we all agreed on the excellence of this one – was the Pentagon Channel. There are a lot of American soldiers posted in South Korea, and it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to us that Pentagon has its own news show. But somehow we just didn’t expect it, I guess.

As I hinted above, the reason I was in Korea was to attend Malin’s and Johan’s wedding. Up until the trip, my duties as the maid of honour had mostly been about aesthetics: ring design advice and wedding dress design advice. And hen night planning, of course. What we did at the hen night was pretty much going to a spa, get pampered and just hang. Malin and I repeated that the day before their wedding. We went to a Korean spa. I’m absolutely convinced that going to a bath house abroad high lights that you are in a new culture, somewhere where you don’t have all the clues to how to behave. The first time I experienced this was a couple of years ago, when I was in California for a summer school. It soon became very clear that I was doing the undressing and showering in the wrong order after swimming. Going to a Korean bath house was slightly more complicated, and we’re sure we got a lot of it wrong. For starters, we started out in the children’s pool. The sign that said “kid pool” and the bear statuettes surrounding it were somehow not sufficient hints… What you do in a Korean spa is that you take a shower, and then you soak in different aroma therapy waters. The waters not only have different scents; they also have different temperatures. I’m not quite certain what the different temperatures are supposed to do to you, exactly, but it’s an interesting experience. To step out of a pool with 42-degree water with mint leaves, into a 43-degree pool with sea water feels like stepping into boiling water. That is weird. Interesting.

I’m sure there’s a special order in which you’re supposed to take the baths, but we didn’t manage to figure it out. The signs were all in Korean.

The spa doesn’t only mean soaking. There’s also the option to get an full body mud pack, an oil massage or a body scrub. The body scrub is intense. The scrubbing is carried out by very strong, small Korean women. If you use scrub gloves in the shower, or a loofah, you scrub. Sure. But it’s like in Crocodile Dundee: “That’s not a knife. This is a knife”. That’s not a scrub. This is a scrub. I’ve never been this clean. Or smooth. Imagine: first a scrub that takes off all the dead layers of skin and leaves it in grey disgusting rolls on the table beside you, followed by a splash of iced milk on your skin and then loads of body oil. Seriously, you don’t get much smoother. Unless maybe, just maybe, you’re a newborn child. We didn’t try out the mud pack this time around. Maybe nest time. The womb cleansing offered among the services, we didn’t feel the least inclined to try, though.

There will be more. Amazing dresses, Zen poetry and ironic manicures. But not today. Soon, though.

Ms. H

2007-04-30T09:18:00.000+02:00

Anders Ekesiöö and Anna Nygren recently defended their master's thesis at Stockholm University School of Business. They discuss consumer profiles, specifically what they call Mr. H, a person with "high demand on unique consumer products". A Mr. H buys things that he feels are unique and will make him stand out from the main stream. Preferably he should be the only one in the city or the country to possess the item he purchases.

I have a confession. I am Ms. H.

When I read an article about this in today's paper, I could hear echoes of myself saying things like "one of the reasons I'm so happy about this skirt, is that I know that when I bought it, there were maybe five of it, altogether, in Australia, which means, I'm probably the only one in Sweden who has one". I've stopped shopping at places like Designtorget, because the stuff isn't quite unique enough. I've become much more picky with what I choose to stand out. But I make sure I do. It needn't be expensive, but it needs to be one-of-a-kind.

Peter just remarked on some of the men that hit on me online that they seem to have found their lines in some kind of pick-up manual. Not terribly interresting, they don't stand out from the crowd. At all. That's not a good trick. At all. Not if you're hitting on a Ms. H. Inventiveness is an essential part of the attraction.

At least I'm consistent. I want uniqueness all over.

Who, me, picky...?

You see... I get bored. When I shop at H&M or such, I rarely use the stuff very much. Or if I buy items that are very much the current fashion. It doesn't really interest me. But if I find something that is brave or clever enough to stand on it's own, and that specifically suits me, then I'm happy to use the item year after year. I don't grow tired of it. It keeps me curious, interrested, happy.

I haven't read the thesis in question, so I don't know exactly how they define Mr. H, but reading the article today, I have a feeling that there's a little more to it than just standing out and having the stuff that no one else has. That is alittle bit too close to the game of "the one with the most stuff at the end wins" for comfort. No, I believe that the true Mr H can be extremely down played, neutral even. Minimalist. But the stuff that is there, is carefully chosen. Very. Carefully. Others of the same kind will know it and appreciate it, which is the whole point of showing off. Women don't dress up for men, they dress up for other women, to display their place within the ranks. And I guess it is also a form of neo-tribalism, as explained by the very unique Cory Doctorow. I doubt that Mr. Doctorow would agree completely, but I still believe it's in the vicinity.

Anyways.

My name is H. Ms. H.

Poppin'

2007-04-30T09:00:00.000+02:00

In exactly three hours, I'm off to Korea. See you guys in a week!

The times, they are a-changeing

2007-04-28T00:44:00.000+02:00

In 1863, my great-great-grandmother was born. Hm. Is that correct? My father's father's grandmother. Yeah, that should be right... In 1870, her father had been away to one of the nearest larger cities, to work. It was a pretty big deal that he'd been away to do work. Not everyone did. Anyway. He brougt home a novelty for Christmas. Something that the children thought was awesome. The thing he brought home was a stearine candle (is that an English word? I'll edit this later when I have a good dictionary available). A stearine candle. You know the kind of candle that we nowadays buy as an every day commodity from IKEA in packs of 40 for almost no money whatsoever. It was new, amazing, cool.

My father met his great-grandmother. That's how close in time this is. It all took place less than 140 years ago.

On Monday, I'll travel to Korea to attend a wedding. Mostly because it's a very good friend, but also because it's a cool idea.

Compare. A stearine candle. Popping over to Korea.

The times, they're really a-changeing. Ain't it cool? Ain't it amazing?

If nothing else, it's fucking mind boggling.

Show and tell

2007-04-20T20:39:00.000+02:00

I've been having issues with Science Fiction lately.

Not issues as in "it's nerdy" or "it's not realistic" or anything. I'm a total nerd, so I don't mind the possible nerdiness associated with SF. And as for realistic... As long as the internal logic holds up, I'm happy.

I have other issues.

I've noticed that I pass seemingly inconsistent judgement on SF. On the one hand, I've been saying things like "one thing I really like with SF is how a lot of writers turn the genre into a forum for discussing ethics, philosophy, politics, economics as well as the limits - or breaking of limits - of science". On the other hand, I've heard myself say: "yeah, he's got great ideas, but I don't like the way he turns his books into a way for him to give vent to his own ideas about ethics, philosophy, politics, economics and the limits of science".

See my dilemma?

I'm seemingly contradicting myself, which disturbs me. Because I really believe I have a point in both cases. So how can this be right?

Well. There are different ways for authors to pass knowledge to their readers. One way to do this is to have one of your characters explain things to other characters. This is pretty explicit and usually not terribly subtle. Pretty full on. Another way to do it is to show the reader how something works by letting it happen. This is less in your face and is generally considered a more subtle way of letting the reader know how things work. The difference between the two strategies is sometimes referred to as "show, don't tell". Some of the SF I've consumed lately has mainly had "tell" and less "show", which has disturbed me. I love the idea that writers have a plan, that they want their readers to get more from their text than a well told story. But I still prefer the story to remain well told.

My main obcection however, isn't to "tell". It's toa very special form of "show". namely show off. There is a limit to how much detail the reader actually needs access to. Seriously.

Please, please; show, don't tell us everything!

Needles and pins

2007-04-17T08:26:00.000+02:00

Growing up, I never used to listen to contemporary music. I loved the music of the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s. You still have to play some of that rock’n’roll music, if you wanna dance with me.

One of my all time favourites is Needles and pins, written by Sonny Bono and Jack Nitsche, originally performed by the Searchers. It’s about a broken heart and the pain of seeing your ex-lover with someone new. When I was in my early teens, I used to listen to that song pretty much every day. It was on a cassette tape which I had recorded off the radio, some oldies goldies show. I loved that tape. For a couple of years, that tape was almost all I ever listened to. Eventually, my Walkman died and I stopped listening to it.

Lately, that song has kept popping up in my head.

While I was busy listening to that old school rock and pop, I nourished a rather serious fear of needles. I didn’t have any problems with vaccination shots in school, as far as I can recall, but I remember making a lot of fuzz about a shot for the mumps when I was eight or ten. Jeez, that hurt. I developed a serious phobia when I had to have a baby tooth pulled to make room for the real tooth, though. You see, in order to reach properly, dentists’ syringes are fairly huge. To cut a long story short, I was sent home after having had three grown-ups fail to hold me down and bend my mouth open by force. I got to come back the next day and get a sedative before giving it another shot (pun intended…). So yeah, phobia.

I spent years making up reasons not to be a blood donor. I was too short. Most likely I had allergies. Blood pressure so low that I’d trip on it and fall if I didn’t look carefully.

Of course, there’s nothing as powerful as vanity.

I my case, it was my belly button piercing. Which, as a lot of you know, has been followed by a number more. I was terrified, but it turned out to be a real thrill. I’ve become almost totally fearless when it comes to having bulky tattooed men sink sharp metal into my flesh. There’s a lot of metal in my body by now, and I fall asleep when I get tattooed. I even enjoy giving blood these days.

Problem solved, obviously. So, what made me think of Needles and pins? Well, I’ll be doing some travelling soon, the kind of travelling where exotic diseases like hepatitis are a risk. Inoculation is called for. So, what’s the problem, with this phobia so obviously gotten rid of? Well, apparently non-beauty related needles, with liquids being put into my body, not taken out, is a whole other matter. I kept putting off making an appointment. I didn’t get around to it until a couple of days ago.

How it turned out? The brutal, honest, truth? Well. It’s no worse than getting stung by a mosquito.

I think I’m over that phobia now.

Talons

2007-04-11T08:37:00.000+02:00

My sister had her nails done the other week. Done as in built – beautifully long and strong, French manicures. I’m doing the low-budget version of it, fixing my own sorry excuses for nails up. It doesn’t look nearly as nice. Although I also got myself little glitters. Real girlie. It’s terribly impractical, but hey… One day I’ll probably have mine done, too. But not today.

There’s something fascinating about long, polished, strong nails. They’re symbols of so much. They signal, for one, that you have a social position where you don’t have to toil, you don’t have to work with your hands; if you did, you could never keep them long and beautiful. Like being pale was a signal of wealth in that you didn’t have to work in the fields, until suntan became a signal that you could afford going abroad and didn’t have to stay in your office all summer.

They’re also sexual symbols, of course, which naturally goes together with the whole not-working-business. If you signal that you don’t need to work, it means that you’re something of a luxury item. And luxury is desirable, no? Also, if you don’t have to work, what do you do? Do you lazy about in your sweats? No, of course not. You lazy about in something completely different. Think lingerie and negligees; jewellery and high heels; Chanel Nr 5 and champagne. And if you can’t really work, then you’re dependent on whoever you’re living with, right? And if you can’t really use your hands, it’s pretty easy to control you, as you can’t really take care of yourself. The same is of course true for high heels (it takes a looong time to learn to run in them, and if you’re wearing stilettos, it’s out altogether), corsets (properly bound, like Scarlett O’Hara, who had a 40-cm-waist, you don’t really breath too well; hence the fainting) and lotus feet (try running with those). It’s sexy to be just a little useless. That’s what luxury is – the stuff that we get that we don’t really have any immediate use for. And dependent. If your woman is dependent of you, you have to show that you’re a real man, who can provide. And she won’t get by without you. Isn’t that sexy? (For those of you who don’t know me: I’m being terribly sarcastic here.)

Then there’s one more thing, that doesn’t really seem to go with the idea of women as luxury items, but bear with me. Picture a woman’s hand, with long, shiny dark red nails. The hand sits on an arm, wrapped around a man’s torso, the hand pushes against the man’s back. Suddenly the woman is digging her nails into the man’s flesh, beyond control… Yes, of course nails are sexual. But why? There are more men interested in long nails than in pain, I reckon. Well… Imagine you have access to this piece of luxury. A piece of luxury which spends a lot of time maintaining it’s status as such. Imagine you have the power – to say nothing of the right – to affect it in such a way that it gives up its control over its attributes. Messy hair, smudged eye-liner, the risk of breaking one of those nails…

To me, nails mean something else.

For as long as I was living with my parents, every night we had the same good night ritual. My mum would come into my room and scratch my back. It always made me calm and relaxed. Like a baby. The best back scratcher, however, was my grandma. She didn’t cut her nails in a smooth half-moon shape like my mum did. She made two swift cuts on each nail, leaving the nails sharp and triangular. Like claws. Actually, that’s what we called them. When we kids wanted her to scratch our backs, we asked her to use her claaaws. Always with emphasis on every single sound (in Swedish: k-e-looor-ö-na – actually klorna. There are phonetic rules behind the weird pronunciation of course. Ask me – or better yet: ask a better phonetician – if you like). I still love having my back scratched. Whenever my sisters and I meet, that’s one way we show our affection for one another; we scratch each other’s backs. That’s what really makes me purr like a cat. Scratch my back – properly, not too hard, not too soft, but just so – and I’m wax in your hands.

This text has taken me forever to type. You see, one way that long nails make you useless is that it gets really hard to type. Especially when the nail polish isn’t dry yet…

Black hole

2007-04-09T12:35:00.000+02:00

There's chaos. And then there's chaos.

I've applied for a netbased course in English, "Writing in Academia" or something like that. To be eligible, I have to present my high school grades, which I haven't even looked at in years. So... Where were they? I was quite certain that they were in my filing archive, presently located in a cottage half an hour's drive north of Gothenburg. So, I went there and spent some time with my sister, and went through all my folders. No luck. Second option: It could be in my parents garage (which hasn't been a garage in years, more like a storage room/work shop).

That's quite a scary option, actually.

You see, my parents have lived in this house for 32 years now. Things have started to pile up. There are toys for three children and 30 years in there. And stuff. And christmas decorations. But for some reason the christmas decorations seem to vanish every year. It's always the same question: "Where's the glitter? And the baby Jesus?". And they're nowhere to be found. Until around Easter, when it's time to look for easter bunnies and coloured feathers.

I found the grade sheet with almost eerie precision. But then I also had to find a couple of books. That's when the troubles began. I knew perfectly well in which box the books were supposed to be. Piece of cake.

If only I could find the box...

Chic music and lit

2007-04-08T08:07:00.000+02:00

Last night, my friend Sofia, her husband and I ended up at Pusterviksteatern, a small and very intimate venue, where the cool and lovely Veronica Maggio was playing. Maggios music is a rather bouncy, poppish kinda style, with emphasis on lyrics, I'd say. It's quite nice, but her style is so specific, so set apart, that there's a risk for the one-hit-wonder-syndrome. She sounds so different that she probably won't be able to simply sound different in the same way for her next album, because then she'll just be doing the same thing all over again. The audience was mainly made up of skinny young men in their early twenties and their equally skinny girlfriends. All looking intimidatingly stylish. We looked like three architects let out from the bureau; all dressed in black, with funky glasses and the occasional non-traditional piece of jewellery. We felt old.

Veronica Maggio's songs seem to be mostly about broken hearts, failed relationships and breakups, so when she played a cover of Offspring's mid-90's hit Self esteem, it fitted perfectly. Actually, it was a very clever cover, she really made it her song. Not quite as thoroughly as for example the Cardigans did with Iron man, but that was what it made me think of. I loved it. One of her songs, Nöjd?, "Satisfied", is about a woman who has dated a thousand and one man, and just finds flaws with them - she simply isn't satisfied with any of them. One's too short, one's too tall, one has too big a moustasche... Well, you get the picture. I always feel a little sting of guilt when I hear it, as I'm perfectly aware that my own dating pattern can be considered a result of the same pickyness. I don't think I'm quite as picky as Maggio though...

My dear friend Johanna suggested the other day that I'd write a book about all the men I've dated. She suggested the title Susanna's little black book. Ah... I'm not so sure.. Firstly, I don't think anyone but my closest friends would find it interesting at all. And they already know all the details. Secondly, it's already been done: Travel journalist Jennifer Cox takes it upon herself to go around the world in 80 dates and to write a book about it. I don't think I could match that. Maybe I could use a different title: Working the Universities of the World: A guide to dating in Academia. A colleague once suggested that I was a parallel to the olden days sailors with a girl in every port; she thought I had a man on every Campus... Slight exaggeration, of course, but a rather fun one nonetheless. Ah well. I wouldn't expose my dates like that though (Cox had gotten consent from her dates of course, but I'm reluctant to call my old dates to see if they'd let me write about them...). I haven't actually read Cox's book, but I've read an interview with her when it was first published, and it seems that as far as chic lit goes, this is right up there! But yeah, she's done it already. Then, on the other side of the spectrum, there's Belle de Jour. And in between there's every girl on the Net and her aunt, telling the world intimate details of their dates. Nah. Unless I can think of an extremely clever way of doing this (like Cox! Only not already done...) I'll probably ditch the idea, sorry Johanna!

I enjoyed Maggio's concert, altough I thought there were some weak moments: 1) She only has this one album out, so she has a limited range of songs to choose from. That's all very fine, but why talk about it? I'd say that's a typically female way of talking oneself down. Look, every song on the record is good. There are no real lows. So don't talk it down by saying that that's all you've got! 2) The institutionalized encores. This isn't Maggio's fault of course, this is what it is like. I still think that those planned-for encores are rather silly. Just play the songs as planned. If there's reason for en encore, do a real encore. Please. 3) The audience sucked. Booooooring. Right, I wasn't any better, but hey, I'm old. Probably ten years older than the average. Some enthusiasm, please!

I'll probably go out and by the album though.

Springspringspring!

2007-04-07T14:57:00.000+02:00

I just plucked my first anemones for the year! Wee!

Gimme a superhero!

2007-04-07T09:19:00.000+02:00

When discussing comics, especially superhero comics, the big question seems to be whether one sides with the Marvel-verse or the DC-verse. I'll happily admit that I prefer DC Comics, because I grew up reading my father's old, beautifully drawn Superman, Batman (I mean, who doesn't love the classic TV-series?) and Justice League comics from like... Well, must have been early 60's. I used to study the outfits of the women very closely. I wanted bouncy hair, miniskirts, turtlenecks and tiny boots, too. Still do. It's a fantastic style.

However, it wasn't that kind of Superhero that made the most impact on me. It was a whole other kind of super, a legend, a ghost... I talk of course about The Phantom, the Ghost Who Walks. I'm not entirely sure why the Phantom mesmerized me so. I agree that for a superhero he's rather silly, and apart from having the strength of ten tigers and a voice that will chill the blood of evil men, his powers mostly lie in a massive fortune and the asset of having a quaint little jungle tribe do his biddings. But... I think his strength lies in the very, very elaborate myth. A 25-generation-myth (if I'm not mistaken, counting Phantom 2040 and the father of the first Christopher Walker, who naturally features in the myth), which gives us numerous opportunities to - pedagogically but fun - learn things about history! And was I ever a history freak, growing up... There is something amazing about reading a story set in shakespearian London one week, and in the next issue you time-travel to our days and exotic places.

My sisters and I have always had a bit of a fascination for the Phantom's rings. You know, the rings with the good mark and the bad mark (I know embarrasingly much trivia about these rings - who allegedly made them, how the Phantom avoids giving villains a good mark when hitting them with the left hand, what jungle berry juice is used to tattoo the marks on the recievers, etc...)? My youngest sister actually wears a trinket scull ring that came with the subscription some time ago. I used to have a good mark key ring, that I loved. We've all talked about how cool it would be to have the good mark tattooed on the insides of our left wrists. Since that's where the Phantom puts the mark when he marks someone as his ally, someone who's saved him or helped him. Alas, the mark is easily mistaken for a swastika, so that's out... I still think it would be cool, though.

I do like other kinds of supers too, mind you. I still am very fond of the old school DC's. And I'm starting to see the point of X-Men, although I'm a movies convert, so I'll have to get into the paper comics eventually, I guess. But lately I've endulged in podcasted short fiction and novells, and I've been ecpecially happy when I've found super-related fiction. At Escape Pod, there are a number of short stories called Union Dues, by Jeffrey R. DeRego, set in a not-too-distant-future, where all kids with superpowers are rounded up by the Union and educated by them. Think Charles Xavier School for Talented Kids gone institutionalized and somewhat askew... And what happens when the "normals" arent too impresed, but rather intimidated and scared? How do you cope? The incomparable Mur Lafferty explores a similar future in her short story Barry Koleman, Hero, featured in the pod collection Voices. What happens if you're a late bloomer? Or if you have a power that you yourself think is cool enough, but the authorities think is pretty low grade? Not everyone actually gets to wear the spandex suits, it seems... Another cool, very X-Men-like, novel is the pod-novel Brave men Run, by Matthew Wayne Selznick. You've always known you've been different. But you've always thought you've been alone...

That'll have to be all for now. But remember to look in again soon - same Drakona-time, same Drakona-URL!

The German challenge

2007-04-06T17:30:00.000+02:00

In about five months I move to Potsdam, just south-west of Berlin. I will spend no less than two years there. I expect to brush up my German just a tad while I'm there. I'm a little worried about the time before it's been properly touched up, though. I've tried to do a couple of things to at least try to think about German a little. Like last summer, when I was in Cologne and picked up one of the best-sellers of last summer, Der Schwarm. Problem is, it's close to a thousand pages long, and it's a little overwhelming as a project, when I haven't actually spoken German properly for about ten years. I consider ordering the audiobook, to listen to it and read it simultaneously.

Meanwhile, in order to get used to the sound and feel of the language, I listen to freely available recorded versions of the fairytales of the brothers Grimm, from LibriVox. It really is very nice! They have lots more of interesting stuff as well. Go check it out!

Vurt

2007-04-06T09:49:00.000+02:00

Jeff Noon, 1993

Jeff Noon is something of a cult writer, who moves in what the blurbs call ”urban fantasy”. While I was reading Vurt, I was thinking a lot about why they simply don’t call it “cyber punk”. You travel the same kind of environments as in Neuromancer, the activities in which you take part are close to those of The Diamond Age, but… You don’t plug in. You take a drug by putting a feather in your mouth. A blue feather for a fun trip, a pink one for a hot trip, black for a scary trip, and a yellow… Well, take a yellow and you might die. If you die on a yellow trip, you die in the real world. The others are more like computer games; you can restart and log off. In the yellows however, there are no safety nets, and it’s all about finding out just how far the rabbit hole goes… I claim that it’s pretty damn likely that the W brothers have read this book. If they haven’t, the random coincidental overlaps between Vurt and the Matrix are quite scary.

The plot. Yes. Scribble has lost his beloved sister to the Vurt, the looking-glass world where you go when you do a feather. She remained when they took one containing a touch of yellow. The balance between the world and the Vurt has to be constant, so if you leave something in there, something else will come back out with you. And vice versa. Take something out and something of like value will be drawn into the Vurt. Scribble is desperate to get his sister back from the Vurt and return the Vurt creature he got instead, And he rises to the challenge.

A lot in the set-up is classic quest fantasy. A mission, a group of people, a young man with hidden talents he doesn’t even know of himself, but has to master to carry out the mission. It’s quite interesting to see it in this environment.

This is definitely a very, very good read. I strongly recommend it. But – as the Game Cat would say: Be careful. Be very careful.

Spring cleaning

2007-04-05T14:16:00.000+02:00

As some of you might have noticed, I've done a bit of cleaning up in here. I don't expect anyone to actually remember the stuff I took out, but for privacy reasons, I figured I should take them down if I wanted to keep this blog going.

Which I do.

I like the URL, Drakona having been my nick since I first set a metaphorical foot on the Internet, in... 1994 maybe? I'm not about to give it up just yet. But, this blog will most likely be linked through presentations to a more serious and work related blog, why I prefer to clean this space up just a tad. I've kept most of the texts up though, as I'm actually quite fond of some of them.

Eventually, I might end up turning this into a Swedish post. Or I'll keep it in English. I'm undecided at the moment, but I guess there will be the occasional post in Swedish at the very least. The idea of keeping two separate but parallel posts makes me see the little word "hassle" skip and jump in front of my eyes... Ah well. We'll see.

You should be seeing more of me here though. For real, this time. I might use this space to republish some texts I have published elsewhere. There's so much to do, with just a little, tiny bit of space!

Movement

2005-10-09T11:44:00.000+02:00

Watch how people live their lives, moving in and out of the lifes of others, sometimes only touching briefly, sometimes leaving a deeper imprint. Sometimes even becoming entangled, causing a long, involved, parallel movement.

The department store clerk.
My kindergarten teacher.
My parents.
The person next to me on the tram.
My partner.
The bus driver.

Brief and not-so-brief encounters, people moving in and out of my life, I moving in and out of theirs.

Like the warp and weft of an elaborate tapestry.

Another take on Proust

2005-10-08T12:49:00.000+02:00

I experienced a smell related memory today.

As I sat on the tram, on my way to work, a little old, very grey, lady sat down next to me. She is probably one of those little old ladies who constantly smoke. She was all grey; her coat was grey, her hair was grey, her skin was grey. Grey like smoke.

She smelt like smoke too. She was covered in the smell, the smell was so strong, it was like she had marinated in it for a very long time.

She reminded me of Denmark.

When I was little, I used to go with my family to Denmark for the holidays. We used to stay in small hotels and B&Bs. They were all brown (it was the late seventies/early eighties, after all) and smelt in a particular way. Of cigarettes and very pink Danish salami. The smell was very distinct.

The grey lady reminded me of that.

Swedish Midsummer

2005-06-27T09:18:00.000+02:00

There are so many traditions surrounding Swedish midsummer. Here's a list over some of them, to give you a feeling of what it was like here, a couple of days ago:

- You resign to the fact that, despite it being the day when you celebrate the height of summer, the summer solstice, light, etc., it will probably rain. Actually, you'll be very surprised if it doesn't rain. (This time though, it was incredibly sunny and warm. I even got sunburned!)

- Despite being convinced about the rain part, you plan most of your food around the barbie... (We had excellent barbie! It's amazing what out doors cooking can do to make very simple food very enjoyable.)

- Aside from the barbie, you also have pickled herring, new potatoes (the Swedes are a potatoe worshipping people, in Summer), sour cream, chives, and maybe meat balls. You can always have meat balls. With this, you have beer. And schnapps. (I didn't have any schnapps. It was way too hot. I had heaps of potatoe though.) Dessert: Strawberries with ice cream or whipped cream. Or milk and sugar.

- Traditionally, you will dance around a Maypole. However, since it's been many many years since Midsummer was considered a fertility rite (there should be no doubt about what the Maypole is made out to resemble), mostly small children and their parents dance around the pole, mimicking frogs. Yes, frogs. You have to see it to understand.

- If you've reached a certain age (say, 20-ish?), you develop a deep nostalgia concerning certain waltzes written during the first half of the twentieth century, strongly associated with Swedish summer. You will probably not remember any of them very well though, and you will certainly not own any records where they feature, so instead of singing them, or listening to them, you do some soft humming. (A fair bit of humming was going on where we were...)

- If you are thus disposed: Get roaring drunk, rape, beat, knife and indulge in some general pillaging. (We only got slightly tipsy, and didn't do any pillaging at all, and no raping. The fights were stylized: we played cards instead.)

- Okay, forget what I wrote about it not being a fertility rite any more: Make babies (Hrm. No comment.). Pretty much every Swedish school class experiences an increase in the number of birthday parties by the and of March...

It's a rather good time of year. Especially if you spend it in the countryside, with some good friends, your loved one and a dog.

Life is looking very fine right now.

I hope you all enjoyed the summer solstice as much as I did.

Be nice!

2005-05-19T16:07:00.000+02:00

I enjoy giving people compliments. I've realised that it's a risky business though.

Women seem to simply enjoy that someone notices that they have put some effort into their hair, their nails, their jewelry or their less conventional body art. Or the design of their web page, or their photos, or their work effort. Or their behavior. A really small thing, such as saying "you're nice!" can make people very happy.

Men, on the other hand... Say the same things to a man, and they think you're coming on to them. Is it so, that men don't get enough attention? That they would do well with more compliments? I think so.

Actually, I think all of us would benefit from more compliments. As long as they're sincere. No smooth-talking. Only real, true, from-the-heart compliments.

It doesn't cost much to be nice. And you get so much in return.

Madeleine cake, Japanese style

2005-05-14T12:43:00.000+02:00

I just had a Proustian moment.

I was sitting at a bench, outdoors in the sun, lots of lovely spring sounds around me, and a smell of grass. The water lilies in the pond in front of me were just opening up to the sun.

I was having the miso soup that came with my take away sushi lunch, straight from the cup. I was enjoying it, very much, but suddenly I thought: "Why aren't there any little pieces of tofu in here?". Then I remembered that they never put tofu in the soup, and realised that it was a taste triggered memory. I was remembering the first time I had miso soup. It was in a lovely flat in Potsdam, outside of Berlin, round about this time of year, a couple of years back. I was visiting my then lover, an amazing man, quite a few years older than myself. I remembered how much he taught me. About me, about him, about people, about life, about food, about enjoying the moment, about living, about yoga, about sensuality, about crying, about laughing, about beauty, about minds, about bodies, about touching, about taking pleasure, about giving pleasure, about dancing, about courage, about work, about play, about giving, and about taking. I was better at certain kinds of giving than others, and certain kinds of taking than others, so there was a bit of an imbalance between the two of us.

At the time, I didn't have a very good idea of who I was, I as still finding out, and didn't take to kindly to his attempts at showing me these things, as I felt that he was trying to influence, change, me. I wanted to do the changing, the finding out, for myself.

Today, I can see how much he really did influence me. And what a good thing that is. That was a lovely spring. And lovely miso soup.

Green

2005-05-13T12:16:00.000+02:00

There is a smell of grass outdoors. Newly mown grass.
It smells like my childhood.

It almost brings tears to my eyes.

Take me home

2005-05-12T16:56:00.000+02:00

Pick me up, like a flower.
Take me home, put me in a vase.
Feed me, water me.

Carry me in your arms, like a child.
Take me home, put me on a chair.
Feed me, bring me wine.

Put your arms around me, like a lover.
Take me home, put me to bed.
Hold me, bring me sleep.

Grace

2005-05-12T13:11:00.000+02:00

I don't have an elegant bone in my body.

I laugh too loudly.
I swear too much.
I walk too fast.
I stand too straight.
I have too wild hair.
I cry too often.
I don't turn away when you meet my eye.

Sometimes I wish I were cool, sweet, calm and odourless. That I could wear a pale summer dress without staining or wrinkling it. That my hair would stay in place for more than five minutes. That I were tall and slim, fine limbed. That I could walk gracefully down the street.

But only sometimes.

This is one of those days...

2005-05-11T08:29:00.000+02:00

...that calls out, screams out for rock 'n roll. My body craves it.

So... Put another dime in the juke box, baby...

And dance with me.

Every breath is unique

2005-05-04T08:48:00.000+02:00

Lie on your back. Still. Perfectly still. Your body doesn't/can't/mustn't move. Inhale. Exhale. Calmly. You're not moving, it's not you breathing. The air is pressing/squeezing/seeping into your lungs as if though it wanted to go there/had its own will/on its own accord. It probes/wanders/lingers, visits every crevice/rounded surface/wet warm spot of the walls of your lungs. You experience how the air inside of you is part of/not separate from/the same as the air surrounding you. You are wrapped in/filled with/merging with the air. When you exhale, it's not you exhaling, it' s the air growing tired/curious/satisfied, moving on to a new pair of lungs. Soon, very soon, new air, previously unknown to you, will fill you/examine you/experience you, just like the previous air. Only different. It's not you moving through the air, it's the air moving through you. Lie still. Lie perfectly still. Let the air breath you.

Inhale. Exhale.

(Thanks BKS and CMIII)

Hypnos

2005-05-03T08:59:00.000+02:00

I spent the night with the God of Sleep.
He took me by the hand, walked me to my bed,
and he laid down beside me.
He touched my face, touched my eyes,
kissed my forhead, and I was his.

By morning, he had vanished,
as if though he had never really been there.
He had left no trace,
only the lingering feeling
of him gently stroking my skin

Cave and fire

2005-04-21T09:33:00.000+02:00

I wake up next to you, every morning. I fall asleep next to you, every night. You are my partner, my husband, my wife, my teacher, my student, my guide.

Yet I have never laid eyes on you. You are not a tangible entity. You are elusive. You are a figment of my imagination. You are the platonian cave dweller.

There are so many reflections of you in this world, but they are not, cannot be, you. Still I keep looking. They are all flawed, being reflections.

Their imperfections make them all the more beautiful. Perfection is for the gods, not for me.

When I woke up this morning...

2005-04-08T08:07:00.000+02:00

...I laughed out loud. I had been smiling all night. There is so much joy built up inside of me, and it needs to get out. This feeling comes with a Busby Berkeley scenography, ladies in tiny glittering dresses and men in tails, dancing, smiling, whirling their top hats.

Oh, so much joy!

In a blur

2005-04-04T12:42:00.000+02:00

My glasses lie on top of my coffee table, in my living room. I, however, am at work. That's not the way things ought to be. At all.

Life is a blur.

Water is thicker than blood

2005-04-01T18:29:00.000+02:00

A water nymph has moved into my home. A naiad. She is beautiful, and she sings to me. Her songs are about spring and ice breaking open and melting, about tender rains and fogs. Her very being is moisture. When she isn’t singing, she’s talking. She has the loveliest of voices.

She resides underneath my window. That way she can watch the stunning view of the valley covered in mist in the morning. She loves the mist. The mist is her kin. I think one day she will leave me for it, and I will be broken hearted and my life will be dry, wither and fall apart, when I no longer have her humidity to rely on.

She mistook me for a naiad, that’s why she moved in. I spend most of my evenings soaking in the tub, I must have had a watery scent. She noticed me from afar and when I approached her, she placed a soft, wet kiss on my forehead. I drowned in her eyes.

I am no naiad. I am flesh. I am blood. I don’t have the loveliest of voices. I am not moisture, nor mist. She knows this, now. Her mistake lasted but a moment. Still she came to me. Still she tells me I am a naiad too.

Serendipity

2005-03-29T18:20:00.000+02:00

The other day, this really attractive guy recommended me a movie. I wasn't going to rush out and get it straight away (wouldn't want to come across as too keen, you know, wouldn't that be dreadful...), but I certainly intended to get around to watching it one of these days. I asked my sister, who is very reliable when it somes to having watched just about any movie you can think of, if she had seen it, but she hadn't even heard of it.

She must have forgotten all about it, and I wasn't thinking about it much either. Then, during the Easter holidays, she came home from work, bringing with her a movie that one of her colleagues had insisted that she'd borrow. They hadn't planned it ahead, he had just happened to have it in his pocket, and she just happened to glance at it, asking him what it was. It wasn't until she came home that it occurred to her that it might actually be that very same movie that I had asked her about, only a couple of days earlier. We agreed that it was a rather spooky coincidence. Two sisters, a movie neither of us had ever heard of before, both having it recommended to them only a couple of days apart. Not quite the Twilight Zone material, but close...

We watched it together, and we both loved it, although she fell asleep towards the end. That, however, is quite normal.

I am Selina

2005-03-24T07:47:00.000+01:00

Living in Gothenburg is not so bad, really. It's on the ocean, and by Swedish standards it's a big place, however more of a village by international standards, which leaves us with pretty much the best of both worlds.

One interesting thing about living in Gothenburg, is that, when travelling abroad, you will inevitably end up chatting with someone or other who asks you whether Gothenburg is the place where the Batman lives. The first time this happened to me, I was 15 years old and staying with at family in Hastings for a week, on a school trip. My host father had pasted a huge Batman sign on my window, to make me feel at home. I found that very odd.

Since then, this has repeated itself time and again. Not the signs on the window, but the mentioning of the Gothenburg-Gotham link. Unfortunately, Gothenburg has very little in common with Gotham City. Very few hig-rises, and the few there are are 1980's style mirror facade or red-and-white plastic facade buildings. Very few gargoyles. Not very well suited for Batman to climb, in other words. And there has as yet been no sign of the police making use of a Bat-signal.

However, from time to time, I wake up with a feeling that there might be something to it after all. This morning was one such day. The whole city is covered in mist. When I looked out through my bed room window, I could see nothing. Or rather, I could only see whiteness. It was as if someone had removed my home from where it's located and placed it in an enormous bowl of whipped cream. It was lovely, and not a little gothic. You could almost hear the Dark Knight swooshing past.

No, no, Gotham City isn't really New York. This is where Batman lives.

Hunting and gathering

2005-03-23T16:27:00.000+01:00

Today I've been doing some hunting, however not too much gathering. I've been hunting a book. The book should - according to some pretty trustworthy sources - be in the library. Or possibly in my professor's office. Or possibly in my supervisor's office. Or possibly in my professor's home.

Step one: Search the university library. Nope, the book has been borrowed.

Step two: Search the department library. Weeell... Yes. But no. It should be there. However... Well, let's just leave it at me having made the librarians look for it for over an hour and we still didn't really find out on what shelf it ought to have been placed, shall we?

Step three: Ask supervisor. Well, no. She has another book by the same author though. Close, but no cigar.

Step four: The office of my professor... Ah, this is interesting. Some years ago, Chaos set up camp in there, and has refused to leave ever since. We could soon conclude that there was probably no book to be found in there either. Actually, there were heaps of books, but unfortunately, I'm a picky girl. I wanted a particular one. He promised to have a look at home, maybe it's there somewhere...

I have a distinct feeling that this book has not simply been borrowed, or mislaid. It has vapourised. Most likely something to do with atoms and half-life.

Approximately 27 years, what material would that be?