This thesis has taken over my life. I live it. I sleep it. I breathe it.
But at least some of the indices that I create as part of the process are pretty to look at.
A Tasseled Cap Transformation of the Landsat 8 OLI scene over my study area in early October last year.
I’ve been having this song on a loop in my head lately. Like a mantra. An old favorite, feelings rekindled. A verse in the middle goes:
This is how it works: You’re young until you’re not. You love until you don’t. You try until you can’t. You laugh until you cry. You cry until you laugh. And everyone must breathe until their dying breath.
No, this is how it works: You peer inside yourself. You take the things you like, and try to love the things you took. And then you take that love you made, and stick it into some – someone else’s heart, pumping someone else’s blood. And walking arm in arm, you hope it don’t get harmed. But even if it does, you just do it all again.
Regina Spektor’s “On the radio”. There are those rough diamonds of simple wisdom in her lyrics sometimes. It is good to remember, when it feels like every sprinkle of wisdom I myself once possessed has flown out the window.
I’ve been so happy lately. The sun has been shining, so there’s that.
Also, I started watching Parks and Recreation. I don’t know what more to say, really. Except: I love Leslie Knope.
[Internet theft.]
Someone has started a club in Bagarmossen. Slöjdjuntan, they call it – and now they’ve decorated the light poles and trees along the path between Bergholm and Skarpnäck. A softer kind of street art. It just made me so childishly happy.
Some restaurant owners know their shit.
Getting up early, the sun was shining. Going in to Nytorget and having breakfast with Hanna at a fancy restaurant. Incredible bread, the olive oil on the tomatoes and mozzarella cheese exquisite, good coffee. And the best breakfast company ever.
Hanna, me and breakfast. My favorite new tradition.
It is a long and painful process. The birth of a Master’s thesis. I’ve devised a reward system. I say to myself: After I’ve read this article, I may go and get my sheepskin slippers to warm up my chilly toes.
And after this one, I may go and get a glass of orange juice, the new organic kind that I bought when coming back from my short sunshine walk this morning. The catkins were soft like baby kittens on the willows.
And after I’ve read these two last articles, I may go to aerobics class, sauna, and then have a Skype TV show night with Natalia and eat a little bit of ice cream.
Anything to get through the day of reference reading.
There is something about the light in this building. From the outside, the Geoscience building at Stockholm university main campus doesn’t look particularly exciting. It’s just big and green and kind of blends into the surroundings with the trees and the grass.
But inside. The windows are huge, in the library and the classrooms, and in the entrance hall the walls are basically made of glass. And it must have been a conscious choice, to place the entrance hall, dining area and library facing south. On a sunny day like today, the light is drowning.
Knocking me down. Wiping out any thoughts about feature extractions from my head. I can only stand there, in the stairs, letting the light rush through me. Tidal waves and ocean winds, washed clean from any darkness and frustration.
I recently read this Buzzfeed post named 32 of the most beautiful words in the English language. Most of the words that were listed were long and pretty in that very obvious sense that I find quite uninspired. Like ethereal or luminescent. It’s like photographing flowers or the sunset – so obviously beautiful it’s almost nauseating. So. The list didn’t inspire me very much.
But, something that hit me, was that quite a few of the words described light in some way. And that must say something about us humans? That for us, light is something so essentially beautiful that we even make our language describe light with beautiful sounds.
Everyone I meet in the building today is happy. Victor and Giulio and Alberto, smiling. Sweden, it even turns seasoned sons of the Mediterranean into sun worshipers. And the glass walls of the Geoscience building lets it all in.
Rålambshovsparken.
Vitabergsparken.
Lots of cool things on walls in the city, if you just keep your eyes open.
I just finished a book. “En av oss sover” by Josefine Klougart. For the most part, I didn’t understand it. The story was so evasive, and I constantly forgot what had happened on the previous page. Abstract.
But there were glimpses. Paragraphs that were like poems, thoughts that shot right out of the page and into me. (Now, I know it isn’t ideal, me translating a text that’s already been translated from the original Danish, but it’s what we’ve got and this touched me. So. There you go.)
… but then I also think: that this is how it is with him. That he doesn’t really know. And this: that he presumes that that’s how it should be: that one has to know something.
I think: one doesn’t know anything, one wants something. Maybe it’s that simple too.
The wanting. And taking responsibility for the wanting. Making an effort to make something happen. So many people I meet seem to be just floating along. Afraid to be responsible, in case things don’t turn out well. I can’t do that. I want things. And I make them happen. And more often than not, things don’t turn out the way I expected, and sometimes they even turn out really bad. But what’s the alternative? I can’t just sit and let life pass me by out of indecision.
Or:
To go into the sorrow and be there. Maybe one thinks that the movement backwards into the nostalgic is a harmless movement, and therefore that one can be unconcerned without a body. But it is the most worrying thing I can imagine. To go backwards out over the precipice without one’s own body, tumble without body and die like that. Bodiless. I insist on being a worrying person in a world that constantly lures nostalgia out of me, that sort of battle. To go backwards and forward at the same time. The nostalgia comes from a fear of dying, from simply not living enough, not having feelings big enough. I want to try to see the feelings that exist, stay in the sorrow that is; and only return to be here. In my own body, a frightful face.
I think the book tells many stories. But for me, it is about sorrow. About living with it. That it is part of life, giving texture and depth.
Yes. I did not get it fully, the book. But the glimpses of clarity made it worth it.
Katja Malmborg