So, I woke up far too early this morning and thought, well, hey, this could be a good thing. I could go for my morning run, go past the grocery store to buy some yogurt on the way back and maybe even get started with my studying before 9. That’s not happened for at least a month. I’m usually so annoyingly slow in the mornings.

Well, just to make sure, I had to check if the grocery store would be open this early. And yeah, if it had been any other morning, the store opens at 8, which would have been perfect. But today, since it’s Valborg, it doesn’t open until 9. Today isn’t even a public holiday! The public holiday is tomorrow! The irony! And I need that yogurt. I “forgot” to go to the store yesterday, and now I only have ketchup, jam and butter in the fridge. That does not make for a good post-run breakfast.

Someone might say, well, this is a great opportunity to go for an extra long run, now that I don’t really have to hurry back home. But, you see, I’m by far not fit enough for that kind of venture. The 25 minutes run and 100 sit-ups I do every morning are pretty much all I can handle after my long winter of TV show and baking filled exercise hiatus.

Maybe it’s the universe trying to tell me something. Like, don’t forget to go to the grocery store next time. Or, waking up early is not worth it anyway. I don’t know. I’m just too annoyed to care.

It is odd, with time, and how things change and stay the same. How the weather can change your mood and people come into your life without you really noticing at first. And others leave, without saying goodbye.

That it’s possible to like someone, without really understanding them. That understanding someone doesn’t mean that you can stand them. That love and proximity isn’t always the most constructive combination.

That people leave marks in your life, little scars, like souvenirs – and that some of them are so much more sensitive than others. That I’m sitting here with a fresh wound, leaking with memories, that was left there more than four years ago. It doesn’t hurt, but rather, I’m sitting here watching things pour out of it, fascinated. I thought it was healed.

I saw Iron Man 3 at the theater with my brother tonight. On the way home, he started telling me about Silmarillion and it hit me. He just turned eleven. When I was eleven, I moved to Tanzania and had my first crush – both of which were experiences that would change my life forever. And he is there. That little baby who could cry all night through and who made up words for imaginary creatures. I wanted to hug him and cuddle him and sing lullabies for him, but we don’t do that anymore. After all, he is eleven years old.

And on the couch, when I got home, was my roommate, stretched out, watching Game of Thrones. To have someone to come home to. And not being able to stop talking until way after midnight, even though it’s an ordinary school day tomorrow, doesn’t that mean something? This tingling, not being able to go to bed just yet, having to write down these words first – the extraordinariess of it all.

I have trouble motivating myself to dive into the scientific articles I have to read. There are so many other trains of thought that cries for my attention, and they all make me feel so alive. Is it okay to fail? Can I say: I didn’t manage to finish my thesis, because I was busy feeling.

Of course I won’t. But the mere thought thrills me like you can’t imagine.

I’m in Brussels, and there are birds singing everywhere. There are pink flowers in the trees and that constant song. I can’t see them, I only see pigeons, but I hear them. Excited, singing for the arrival of spring. But isn’t it late this year? I think it’s late this year. Brussel is on the continent and we’re in the middle of April. Spring should already be here.

Strange, too, how easy it is to ajust to the life of a traveler. 16 days ago, I was at Stockholm university, planning for my bachelor’s thesis – and now I’m in the capital of the European Union, with memories from almost the entire country of Liberia in my mind. I feel at home, sleeping in a new bed every other night, living this life of exceptions. I shouldn’t be like this. I should finish my thesis and start my master’s and be done with it.

But instead, I want to go back. I want to continue. I want Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Mali and Senegal, the Balkans, New Zeeland, India, Argentina and Chile. I have this vagabond in me, and I don’t know what to do with her.

My plan is to write about Liberia, long texts describing all the odd and amazing things that I experienced with Hanna and mom. My plans rarely work out the way I think they would, though, so we’ll see. I have this thing called a bachelor’s thesis to do too.

They’re playing The wild ones on the radio. The song they played about two times every morning on the radio station that the 21-year-old Germans forced me to listen to while cleaning the stables at Time Out Farms last spring.

I haven’t heard it since then. It’s like being back there. And for some reason, I just remember how wonderful it was. Jay and Portia and the dogs. God, I miss the animals.

They are showing the first season of Girls on the Swedish public service TV channel this spring. I’ve already seen the entire season (parts in San Francisco, at Sarah’s with Shanley and Tallulah), but after every episode, there is a short program called the TV circle, where three of my favourite Swedish media personalities discuss the episode. I stream it after it’s been broadcast. Nour El-Refai, super comedian and actress, Linnea Wikblad, radio personality, and Johanna Koljonen, my pop culture guru. And they are so incredibly smart, and funny, and the show they’re discussing is such an honest thing. HBO is doing some really great stuff with TV these days. (Johanna Koljonen did the same thing with the first season of Game of Thrones last spring, when I was in Canada, I’m so bummed I missed that!)

Tonight, in the end of episode 3, Marnie comes home to Hannah dancing to Dancing on my own by Robyn in her room, and they turn it into a wee small hours dancing session. They’ve both had pretty tough nights, but they come home, and they dance, and there is that connection. Nour, Linnea and Johanna all love that scene. As do I.

And I realise: I have that. It is for real. Not just something that happens on TV. I have a person like that. No, actually, several. Persons that I might not be living with, but that I can call, send my odd texts to without them being weirded out, persons that I can ugly dance with. Persons that Get – – – Me.

It’s so easy to forget, sometimes, in all this chaos, in the exhausting search that is life. At times, I feel like it is a constant struggle for air and space. Now maybe more than usual, when things are going so well, tons of stuff happening, me feeling that I have to take advantage of the momentum and also not let all those people down. Among all that, the people that I have to prove myself to, I occasionally feel tiny and completely insignificant – and completely forget that there is a small group of very special people that know exactly what I’m worth, without me having to prove anything.

Despite all the stupid things I say and do, constantly, again and again, as if life has taught me nothing.

I had my 25th year birthday dinner last Friday. Among the eleven guests, six were at my 18th birthday party. Of those, three were at my 8th. You don’t get to keep friends like that if you don’t have something to give.  I am amazing, because they are amazing.

It’s good to remember that, when all the other people in the world seem to be against you – or just seem to think that you are a little bit over the top. Because, like Hannah and Marnie, I don’t need to keep dancing on my own.

I did mine with black currant. It was yummy.

 

I’m home, spending my Friday night editing old photos for mom. Home in Uppsala. This is the last week I can call Uppsala home. Then it’s back to Stockholm again, to the apartment we moved into when I was three. I’m gonna take care of it for the next eighteen months. Because, did I tell you, my mom is moving to Liberia. Things are changing.

I’m listening to favourite songs from years past and am thinking that I should make a mix CD to Sarah. My first room mate at Duckworth Farm in California. She had such a wonderful taste in music. Ben Folds. She’s in Boston now, I guess.

I’ve made a strawberry milkshake, heavy on the strawberry, and am, strangely enough, missing Hannes. It feels strange not to be able to call him and tell him to come over and watch some Scrubs. He’s in Tanzania with his family. And thinking: when he comes home again, I will have moved back to Stockholm and meeting him will require so much more planning. We’ll be going back to our old every-six-month-fika-routine.

No, I feel a little bit melancholy tonight. But Elin called. In two weeks, we’ll be on the same campus again. The lunch walks will be inevitable. And a text from Natalia reminds me how many episodes of Bones we have to catch up with. Stockholm is good too. It really is.

I’m back in Uppsala now, writing the last finishing touches to my last paper for my peace and conflict studies course. But last week, I was working, in a reception, and since most people still were on Christmas holiday, I didn’t have that much to do. So I surfed the internet. One morning, I happened upon Abbie’s blog.

Abbie, you know, one of my fellow wwoofers at Duckworth Farm, the Harvard graduate, the soon-to-be Cambridge student who arrived so full of enthusiasm and wonder. She started reading Proust at the farm, and I talked about Anna Karenina with her. She had studied Russian. And I think we could have become friends, we had so many interests in common – books, politics, architecture, photography, horses – if only we’d had some more time. Or I could have been a bit more spontaneous with my English. I get hang-ups on people. Feelings that are quite similar to having a crush, but without the sexual undertone. Abbie is one of those people.

So I started reading her blog. She started it just before she went to California, so I read it from the beginning and all through her stay at Duckworth Farm. Mostly, it was about her impressions of the farm, but she also wrote some short bits and pieces about the people living there. And it felt strange, seeing myself described, having a supporting role in someone else’s story. Abbie never went into long descriptions of any of the people that she met. Instead, she wrote a sentence here and there that, put together, painted a picture both strange and vaguely familiar. Like the first impression:

First thing Lorri showed me the horses. Cantering into the barn all flight and attitude for their dinner. Her baby, Batage (who is enormous and all quivering bay muscle), and Katja the Swedish girl in messy clothes both intimidated me.

Or a couple of days later:

And it is so warm and rewarding when Katja’s eyes widen and she dips her head and laughs, probably because it seemed so rare at first.

And then, closing in on my last days at the farm:

Katja sang to herself, absolutely flying down the rows, blueberries tumbling into her hands.

On the way to San Francisco:

And after a bus ride of migraines and foggy traffic, Katja’s bright laugh delighting the old drawling men who questioned her in ragged voices, dropped off at 4th and Mission in a stream of people with only a vague sense of where to go, we are here!

And lastly, in San Francisco, when she met Eric:

 Eric, Katja’s leathery bartender friend, leaning against a fire hydrant with his sweet and sour beer in a crinkling paper bag, talking of elderberry and pesto cocktails, the black front of Beretta shining as one more standout in the dirty patchwork neighborhood of exceptions piled on top of one another.

/ … /

We walked past the ponderous, bright-white stucco of the Mission Dolores, oldest building in San Francisco, onto Valencia, where we met Eric and his friend Noah, smelling of beer, Noah pink-eyed and dark-haired and an aspiring chef, Eric tall and sun-wrinkled and with a strange rough Southern accent. One can tell he’s good but difficult, his soul loyal, his life motion and good beer and the confidence of a broad-shouldered man who can banter with anyone on the street without fear. His approval ensconces Katja the competent Swede in something which is irregular and irrational and gritty, American, a caged-bird soul with a cigarette. Or perhaps I know absolutely nothing about either of them. Many other things could be just as true.

I feel like a character in a book. One of those witty, contemporary novels by a young author who is smart and quick, but with almost as much precision in her descriptions as Tolstoy. I was fascinated, and a little jealous. I felt like I should do that too, twist my sentences into as delicate puzzles of words as her. Unfortunately, English makes my writing poor. Maybe I should switch back to Swedish again. Mom thinks I should. Maybe I will.

It was exciting, anyhow, reading someone else’s story. Seeing myself being described in the periphery of someone else’s life. I really hope that I’ll have the good fortune to meet her again, some day. Abbie from Minneapolis.

I’ve been working, as is my tradition, in a reception during the non-holiday days of these three weeks of Christmas. The same reception as last Christmas. And I wrote on the blog then too. I was reading Outlander on my lunches then, now I’m in the middle of A Dance with Dragons. They are kind of the same, those two. More about the adventure and action, long books, twisting intrigues. It’s the kind of book that reads well at Christmas.

I’ve been drinking coffee. I never drink coffee, but now I’ve been drinking coffee. To stay awake. Because I don’t sleep at night. Instead, I knit and watch the fifth season of Grey’s Anatomy. That’s the season when Christina meets Owen. Callie meets Arizona. Lexie hooks up with Mark. Izzie is still around, and so is George. And Meredith finally gets married to Derek – on a post-it! It’s a very important season. And it might be the best. Now that I’ve almost seen it from beginning to end.

And drinking the coffee makes me think of that first morning when I arrived in Seattle and drank a chocolatey Mocha Cookie Crumble Frappuccino at the Starbucks by Pioneer Square. This older man started talking with me and I just felt so welcomed, despite the tiredness and confusion of arrival. I think that was when I decided to love Seattle. Right there, only less than an hour into my stay.

I’m back in the reception where I spent my summer of 2010 and the last days of 2011 and some odd days in between. And Grey’s Anatomy is set in Seattle. They have plenty of air shots of the Space Needle and the ferry boats. I never took a ferry in Seattle, and I never went up into the Space Needle – but see, this is just an example of how everything just goes in circles. We build our lives, piece by piece, and sometimes we come back to the same old stone, to add another memory onto the old one.

Today, I think of life as a round tower that I build in a spiral and now I’m back where I was once before. Slightly different, but still the same. Today, I find that comforting. Because, I love Seattle. And I love Grey’s Anatomy. And I even love coffee, even though it makes crazy like a Disney squirrel.

The last couple of years, I’ve been making these pop cultural year summaries and posted on the blog every New Year’s Eve. This year, I was sitting with my Scenario Analysis instead, trying to make a prophecy about what is going to happen to the armed conflict in Sudan two years from now.

And this Christmas has been strange. Christmas Eve was a mess and Christmas Day I went to Hanna, tried out a recipe for buttered apple cider with calvados, which made gravity seem to slightly loose its iron grip on the world for a couple of hours. We were meant to go to a club, but after an hour in the line they said that they were full and that it was one in-one out. I felt that the 200 kronor entrance wasn’t worth the time it would take to get in, so I took the subway home, still feeling like the pavement wasn’t entirely solid. On New Year’s, I went to a big dinner with at my mom’s friend’s house, as I usually do, and then I was supposed to continue to a party at a friends house – but I ended up spending the first hours of the new year crawled up in a ball on my bed, feeling like cutting my womb out of my body with my own bare hands. This is what I get, for not giving birth to a baby once a year. If how we spend the first hours of the new year are supposed to say something about the year to come, 2013 will be a year of anguish and pain. Not a very uplifting thought.

But I guess I should write something about the year that passed, even though my pop cultur consumption in 2012 was somewhat onesided. So, let me make it short.

The best song was Emmylou by First Aid Kit. I listened to it all the way from Edmonton to Phoenix. You and I by Ingrid Michaelson comes in at a close second.

I refuse to make anything by R. R. Martin into the best book of 2012. I’m frustrated with him. He kills people and lets the wrong people live and he doesn’t give enough chapters to Arya. And, frankly, I don’t really get this lust for a crown, that being king or queen is an end in itself, to whatever cost. No. I’m annoyed, and halfway through A Dance with Dragons. So, if I’m not to choose Martin, there isn’t really anything else to choose than Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. Which actually is a really really great book. I feel good about the choice. But, excepting Martin, Anna Karenina, three Sherlock Holmes novels, a couple of guide books to North America and the course litterature, I’ve barely read at all this year. I doubt I even reached above 20. Which is less than any other year since I started keeping score back in 2001. Is this a new trend? A less book wormy period of my life? I don’t know.

When it comes to movies, I can’t remember anything really sticking out. I rymden finns inga känslor was cute. I saw The Avengers at the theater on Vancouver Island with Lori. That was cool. But I think that, just to honor the nerd in me, I’ll choose The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. Hannes took me to the movies as a kind of Christmast gift, despite the fact that he himself hasn’t got any kind of special relationship to Tolkien. It was too long and they’ve changed it a lot from the book – but I like Bilbo and Gandalf and it was cool and beautiful. The Hobbit.

I’ve taken many photos this year. Most of them in North America. Trees and horses and amazing vistas. Houses, street art and farm sceneries. Birds. But still, there is something about this photo that pulls me in.

It was taken at the Monterey Aquarium. It is beautiful, but deadly. Best photo of the year.

There. I managed to do something this year too.