On Friday, my classmate Jonas had a release party for the book of poems that he had just published. The book is called Lantmäteriet, which means land survey, basically, and his poems are about mapping reality and our relationship to landscapes. Kind of. Among other things. Or I don’t know. I haven’t read all of it yet, but there was a line in one of the poems that he read, that he had borrowed from somewhere else, which said “if it isn’t war, it’s land surveying”. And that’s the kind of logic, the kind of humor, that I’ve been trained to appreciate. More than four years of geography training has made me susceptible. I was sitting there on the stone floor, while a toddler was crawling around between our outstretched legs in front of the stage, and my thoughts latched on to the words of the poems that Jonas’ recited, gathering speed onto words of their own, sentences, metaphors, out of control.

The weather was incredible that day. An uncommonly warm mid-May evening in a Stockholm suburb, the lilacs and bird-cherry trees giving the twilight their smells. My Portland shoes got a lot of attention, as did my Orion’s belt tattoo. People were happy at the party, there was dancing and talking and Jonas’ poems about traveling, about European highways and movement made me think about my own words on the road. That’s where I seem to write the best. I always think ‘If I just had time’, you know, ‘then I would write’. But when I sometimes do, it’s rarely that anything good comes out. It is not solitude and time that makes my words come. It is traveling. When the new impressions come at me from all angles, sights, smells, sounds, tastes, weather, people. It’s when I actually have no time to write at all, but have to anyway. Some of my best recent writing has been done on the road. From Bolivia, North America, the European interrail. Warm nights in cluttered hostel common rooms. Overheated internet cafes. I should remember that, for next time I feel the need to write. Just buy a ticket to somewhere new, and the words will start flowing.

Jonas was reciting his poems, and there were people standing outside, talking. I could see them through the window. A reflection in the glass door made it seem like a girl with long brown hair was standing inside a tall man who might have been smoking. I thought: I want to stand inside someone, be contained. Jonas read

had gladly shared ice age with you love

And I just miss it, I guess, being able to put words to. My English is poor, and my Swedish is rusty. Jonas had a wonderful party. By the time I left, I was carrying almost more than I could bare. Bursting from seemingly seamless places.

I was there, despite the rain, to see my friend Kirke start and finish the half marathon on Kungsholmen. Seriously, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to have that kind of resolve.

On the way back home, we ran into this fine piece of street art, just by the base of Västerbron.

Last week, I went on an excursion with my landscape ecology course, and for the first time ever in my geography studies history, I did not bring my camera with me. I don’t really know what I was thinking, maybe that there won’t be anything new there for me to photograph, we’ll only be driving around just north of Stockholm for two days anyway, I will have seen it all already. And the camera is so heavy, it will only be a nuisance.

As if Stockholm and its surroundings aren’t beautiful. What kind of Swede am I, to forget how amazing the Swedish spring is?

So there I was, with only my less-than-satisfactory cellphone camera to help me capture some of the middle-Swedish springtime beauty.

 

A wooded meadow in Vallentuna.

An out of focus cowslip.

Some pasque flowers on a 3000 year old grave mound.

 

A pretty typical deciduous tree grove, something which is pretty atypical this far north.

A dryish oak-maple forest patch, the ground covered in soon-to-flower lilies of the valley.

And a fallen oak, lying leisurely like a naked woman in the afternoon, in an oak pasture near Norrtälje.

You have no idea how frustrating it was, not having a real camera. I know it might have been beneficial for me, I should be able to experience beauty without a camera too, but – gaah!

So, last Friday when the sun was shining and we had planned a surprise picnic for Dries’ birthday, I even went back home in the middle of the day when I realized I had forgotten the camera. And I think that was a good thing, cause I managed to capture some great Kodak moments there, in the national city park.

Lots of laughter, and a portrait in hippie colors of me and birthday boy Dries.

I’ll never forget my camera again.

 

 

I’ve had rants at a couple of people lately, all related to food. In particular, about what an environmentally friendly diet is. I’m basically a vegetarian (even though I occasionally eat lamb and fish if someone has prepared it for me) and I avoid eating too many vegetables or fruits that are out of season or might have been transported by plane. Whenever there’s the option, I buy organic and Fairtrade.

I had this period when I was 19-20 when I felt anguish every time I entered a grocery store, because I could not stop thinking about all the ways almost everything there was bad in one way or the other. Sometimes, the only thing I could make myself buy was Swedish organic potatoes. But then I got past that. Everyone has to eat. I might as well do it with a good conscience.

And I’ve really been thinking that I could, you know, eat at least. But for some reason, I’ve been confronted several times lately with that the choices I have made regarding food might not be very good either. That the increased demand for quinoa has led to poor people in the Andes not being able to afford to buy it anymore, which has led to their diet becoming much less nutritious. That the production of soy is making the Amazon rain forest shrink. That also milk cows release a lot of methane.

Well, I knew the thing about the soy already, and am still of the opinion that at least it’s better that I eat the organic soy protein that I occasionally buy, than that it is fed to factory cows and chickens. And I kind of feel like the issue about quinoa is not vegetarian’s fault, but the world economy’s. If the local farmers in Bolivia got the money from the increased global sales of quinoa, they would not be poor anymore and could buy whatever food they wanted. Right now, the middlemen make all the money in the global food market.

I’ve had rants, making these points to people. And it’s not fair, not at all, it’s not their fault that eating tofu is not wholly unproblematic. I feel bad afterwards. I just don’t know what to do. It is a frustrating situation, and with the globalized market looking as it does, it is so incredibly hard to control what it is that you’re actually supporting by buying certain goods. It’s making me exhausted. Utterly and completely exhausted.

What are we to do with the food?

I’ve been in the weirdest mood today. I haven’t been able to concentrate – instead, I’ve been sitting outside in the sunshine, staring out into space. I sat with Dries for a while under some cherry trees, and he even commented on it, “Katja, you’re so deep in thought”. The thing is, I don’t remember what I was thinking about. I just wasn’t present.

I’ve been having the feeling that I wanted to cry all day. I guess I know why, but it isn’t at all a dignified reason and I should not be walking around feeling weepy like this. But I am, anyway.

It got worse once I got home to the empty apartment. Lina wasn’t home, and I was supposed to start cooking, but the only thing I could manage was not to curl up in a ball on the floor. But then Roweena came and I started cooking nettle soup and risotto for her while she played Einaudi on my piano.

Something let go for a while. Cleaning nettle leaves and listening to the music forming out in the living room. Things can be simple. Music and food. A cure for weepiness.

During lunch, when the morning study session has been extra tough, we all walk over to the farm just off campus in the national city park. The season’s children are running around in the meadows, lambs and kids and there is one lamb in particular, he has been named Stig, who was rejected by his mother. He was fed from a bottle by the farm people, and now he thinks he’s more human than sheep. He always comes running, whenever anyone comes to visit, leaving the eating sheep flock behind.

The cute overload makes the thought of going back to the computer lab bearable again. I’m sure Sandra and Johan would agree.

The week has been, well, nightmares and sleep deprivation, but otherwise quite fine. Anyway, I decided to be kind to myself this Sunday. I slept in, and was woken up by the sun shining outside. My cousin Jonatan has been staying with us for a couple of days, and we brought out the deckchairs and sat outside in the sunshine, Jonatan, Lina and I, eating breakfast and enjoying the occasional small-talk. I read “Orlando” by Virginia Woolf.

And it is amazing, how good things can be. A comfortable chair, a bottle of water and sunshine, a good book and the smell of warm skin intermingling with the sweet fragrance of the blooming trees and the faint smell from someone grilling downstairs. Verging on perfection.

When the sky slowly started filling up with clouds, I went inside and fell asleep on my bed. After reading in the sun, taking a nap in the middle of the day might be my favorite way to procrastinate.

The Natalia came, we made an amazing risotto and we watched two episodes of Twin Peaks. Life is good.

So, I’m done with the mapping. For four days, I’ve been going through and if necessary correcting the classes in an automatic land cover classification based on satellite data. We have a common study area in the class, that was divided into 16 pieces (one each for every student enrolled in the course). I’m still on overdrive, racing like a maniac, so I was done with my segment after two days, and since a girl was sick, I took on her segment as well and mapped her part too. I went through 2038 polygons in total. Checking the classified polygon against the color infrared stereo image, changing class if necessary, on to the next polygon, in a flow, polygon after polygon after polygon. I can’t seem to stop working.

But there is a satisfaction in it too, of course. Every checked polygon turns purple, and eventually the whole segment is just a mosaic of purple and green polygons (the forest classes, the green ones, didn’t need to be checked – they were too detailed). So I guess there is some enjoyment to be gained from that too. Maybe I don’t need to be too worried.

But it’s nice to look at. The color infrared photos. This is Drottningholm, where the king lives. The oak trees like red broccoli. Pretty.

After my parents divorced when I was seven, my dad and I started this tradition. When my parents were together, I would take a bath almost every Saturday morning. I would listen to them fight in the kitchen while I played with my rubber ducks. In my memory, the fighting happened almost every Saturday, but I’m probably remembering it very selectively. Well, anyway, once my parents got divorced, I changed my bathing day the weeks I was at dad’s place. Every Sunday evening, he would pour a bath full of water and bubbles, and I would build bubble castles while listening to music until the bubbles were all gone and the water was cold. As I remember it, the music was mostly Robyn. “Do you really want me (show respect)” and “You’ve got that something” were playing from a scratchy cassette tape.

So, one could say I’ve been a fan for quite some time. I’ve got all her CDs. I even met her once, in Tanzania, when she visited the Swedish school while doing her duty as a UNICEF ambassador. I have her autograph tucked away somewhere in a folder. So now that she has done an advertisement for Volvo, of course I needed to check it out.

Visually, it is a typical car ad, and the music is one of the new Robyn and Röyksopp tracks. But the focus of the ad is a silent voice-over, a phone conversation that Robyn has with another woman in Swedish. Mostly, it’s just a quiet conversation you might have with a really close friend or partner, were you sleeping? did you dream? that kind of stuff. But then, in the end, when Robyn gets out of the Volvo, leaning against the car and watching the sun go up over the city, she says

Hello? Are you there?

[I’m here.]

What should you do? Should you choose to see the world, or should you choose to keep it?

Would you even want to keep it if you haven’t seen it?

Seriously. Wow.

In those few sentences, she captures maybe the biggest dilemma of my life. My strong sense of we REALLY HAVE TO DO SOMETHING to salvage whatever we have left of our ecosystems and take care of the planet that we are living on, conflicting with the traveler I was raised to become, with a never-ending thirst to see the world. All the carbon dioxide that traveling releases. I just can’t get those two to fit together.

And Robyn, with her soft voice, just saying those words. I’m speechless.

The ad is for the new green car initiative that Volvo is making. Of course their message is that if you buy one of their green cars, your strain on the environment will be much smaller and therefore you can use it to see the world and still keep the world. It isn’t that simple.

But still. I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve experienced something big tonight.

Now that one of my courses are over, and my mom has gone back to Liberia, I suddenly find myself with bucketloads of time that I don’t know what to do with. For the first time since I started my master’s program, I actually have nights off. It’s not that the course that I’m taking now is easy, it’s just, right now we’re doing aerial photo interpretation and mapping, and once I leave campus, there isn’t anything more I can do. The software and the data is at university and here I am, at home, rolling my thumbs.

This is what I’ve been waiting for. Having free time. But now that I have it, I seem to lack the ability to handle it. My thoughts start going in circles, I have to stop myself from sending weird text messages to people that really don’t deserve to be harassed by me, I have nightmares. So, I decided I have to put my energy into something. And for some reason, that led me into putting up a profile on an internet dating site.

Honestly, I don’t know how I ended up here. I am single, but it’s not as if I’m looking for something actively right now, I’m quite casual about these things, and the internet is really not the place I think I would find someone anyway. But at a dinner last week, some of my friends were having so fun looking at other people’s profiles, messaging with them and it seemed like an interesting thing to do. Like an experiment, kind of. Something to do just for fun.

But now I’m sitting here and am actually feeling quite sick. The incredible superficiality of the thing. You fill in lists about your personality, looks, job, political opinions and interests, and write a text with max 2000 letters, upload a photo, and then people start writing messages to you. As if a person can be captured in a list of single word statements. You get notified when someone has visited your profile, and you can even see how many times they’ve clicked on it. It makes me feel stressed. It is like some kind of meat market and there is no casuality about it what so ever. It’s giving me performance anxiety already, and I haven’t even started using it yet.

Well. Let’s see what happens with it. Maybe I’ll get used to the transparency of it all. I also changed the status of my couch on Couchsurfing to maybe available again, so the couch requests are going to start dropping in soon too. I am pretty sure I will get more out of that, life experience-wise, than my new internet dating profile. But we’ll see. Testing new things is always beneficial.