I was sitting on my bed, knitting the beginning of a new pair of mittens. My hands couldn’t take the inaction anymore, they needed the loops and patterns.

I was sitting on my bed, knitting, and I heard birds singing. My window was open and it is spring now, I took a long walk with Jenny today, the sun was warm and the forest floor covered in wood anemones. Still, how strange, I thought. It is after midnight. Birds don’t sing in the middle of the night.

It took quite a while before I realized. It was not birds. It was mom, watching TV in the living room.

The world had not turned upside down. Birds had not started singing in the dead of night. I just belong to a family of sporadic insomniacs.

Maybe I’ve started to believe in talismans. Objects of no particular value, except for them being given to me by a special person at a special time of life. Moments that I want to remember. You know, almost as if I was trying to turn back time. Or just harness energy from those people and those moments by carrying the objects around.

Some strength, when I feel like I’m all out.

There is a ring with a big piece of amber in it that I got from my grandma. Dad’s mother. I might just be making this up, but I think it was the last birthday gift she ever gave me, before she went and died without a warning. My grandma was a very beautiful person and she loved me very much. I’ve been wearing that ring a lot during the last year.

But when I was going through my box of rings a couple of days ago, I found this tiny little silver ring with a small flower with a turquoise, cut piece of glass in it. It is a ring that I got for my seventh birthday from Daniel, a boy in my preschool class that I thought was cute. I have not seen him since, I changed schools for first grade. He is still a little seven year old boy for me.

I’m wearing that ring now. It will only fit on my little finger. Maybe I think that by wearing it, I might find my way back to some of that innocence.

Not that I didn’t know life was complicated and hard already. My parents had just gotten divorced.

I also found a necklace, a piece of bolivianite on a silver chain. It was the gift for my twenty-first birthday from Natalia, Cecilia, Jonna and Edvard. We were in Bolivia, staying in Natalia’s family home in La Paz, and they woke me up by filling my bed with balloons, singing “Super trouper” by ABBA (we had just seen Mamma Mia!) and I got fresh strawberries for breakfast. I had never had strawberries for breakfast. My birthday is in February. I think that is the best birthday I’ve ever had.

I’m wearing that necklace now. It is a very subtle accessory. Maybe I think that by wearing it, I might feel some of that excitement and strengthening warmth from friendship.

God knows I need it.

On my wall, I have a magnification of the announcement my parents put in the paper after I was born. It says “The sky became so blue, so blue when KATJA came to the world”.

I should not forget that. My birth wasn’t easy. Of course, I don’t remember, but I’ve been told. I’m lucky to be here. I should remember that.

And wear whatever jewelry that makes me feel good. Tonight, that’s a tiny ring with a flower and a turquoise piece of glass in it, and a necklace with a small pebble of bolivianite.

Lina bought me an Easter bunny of chocolate a week or so ago. It’s been keeping me company next to the computer screen while I’ve been reading about the merits of aerial photography.

Now, I’m spending Easter with the bunny, a grape fruit, dill flavored chips and Suits.

*

Oh, don’t worry. I’m not that pathetic. I was at a family lunch at my aunt’s today with mom. And I was invited to a spontaneous board game night at Axel’s. I just chose not to go.

Maybe I am that pathetic.

On my way home after a concert, reading on the tube. Lina and I saw Valerie June. Her Tennessee accent sometimes mushed the words together into an unintelligible mess and her voice was nasally piercing. Completely insane. Amazing. She ended the concert by making us sing and then she walked right out into the audience with a tambourine.

I was reading “The old man and the sea” by Ernest Hemingway and all last year high school students were out, making the town unsafe. A man with big headphones and a beard sat down across from me. He listened very intently to his music, conducting an invisible band through passages and even singing along at times. And just when he got up to get off at Bagarmossen, he turned to me and said: “Great book!”.

I just laughed, and then the tube was moving again. Great book, indeed.

Well, I don’t know yet. I’ve only just started.

The other day, someone had exchanged the ad poster for this:

It made me so happy, for some reason. A so much better thing to rest my eyes upon day in and day out on the tube, instead of all those advertisements that invade our minds, constantly.

I actually haven’t touched anything university related for three days. Not even with my thoughts. In the weekend I guess that’s fine, but today it’s Monday and officially I should be reading articles and planning my landscape ecology project. But I have felt I needed this. Or, rather, it has not been a conscious choice. Studying has simply not crossed my mind.

It really was a very tumultuous weekend. Saturday started off well with cafe breakfast with Hanna in the sunshine, and then a very uplifting visit to the library that resulted in me borrowing six books. I am like a child in a candy store when it comes to libraries. Few places can make me as happy. I have told you this before.

But on my way back home some stuff happened that led to my mood spiraling downwards and then an ill-placed text message led to drama-hell breaking loose and all of yesterday was spent trying to handle the emotional mess that I had created (and other people fueled) both for myself and several other persons. But then finally, coming home to Lina, we watched three episodes of Community and I could go to sleep feeling pretty content with life, despite all the drama.

So, today, the plan was to get back to my articles. But. Lying in bed felt so nice, and after waking up and reading a chapter in ”The end of Mr. Y” by Scarlett Thomas, I decided to fall asleep again. So I did, and when the day care children outside woke me up at around eleven, the sun was shining and I haven’t allowed myself to be outside in the sunshine once during the last couple of weeks because I’ve been so busy studying. I’ve been so focused. All that focus is gone now, from the emotional roller coaster weekend. So today I simply couldn’t keep myself from going out to the park, buying an ice cream on the way and then sit down on a bench underneath a tree that had just started to blossom with tiny, milky pink flowers. I finished ”The end of Mr. Y”.

It’s an amazing book. It really is. A bit wacko at times, and some of the popular science physics that is part of the plot might be taken out of context from a scientific point of view, I have no idea, I don’t have the expertise to judge that. But. It is exciting and challenging and also very pleasurable to read. It is an adventure, without being cheap. It is about language and consciousness, what is real and what is constructed by thought, particle physics, philosophy and religion. A thought experiment that goes to the core of existence itself. At the library, it is categorized as fantasy, and sure, it has some aspects that are pure imagination – but it is just the kind of fantasy I like. Way out there, but still very close to what could actually be true.

In the evening, I had dinner with dad and then we went to a concert. Nina Ramsby and Martin Hederos, a 10 year anniversary concert for one of their two albums at Södra Teatern. The venue in Stockholm with the best location of all public establishments in the city. The view is. Well. The most famous passage in any of August Strindberg’s novels is a description of this view. Probably the most quoted first paragraph in any novel written in the Swedish language. It is a heavy view.

I remember listening to Nina Ramsby’s and Martin Hederos’ albums so much during my last year in high school. The spring before high school graduation was very tough for me, I was very unhappy due to people dying and other shit, and I think that one of the things that still got me through it with amazing grades and, you know, no total breakdown, was Nina’s clear, intense voice and Martin’s perfectly attuned piano accompaniment.  And I got my dad to start listening to them too. The two of us even went to a concert with them back in 2007. There was a time when I wrote on my Helgon (a Swedish precursor to Facebook) profile page that the music I listened to was Nina P, Nina S and Nina R (as in Persson, Simone and Ramsby). Nina Ramsby and Martin Hederos has meant a lot to me.

And this concert. On the theater’s big stage, with the golden mid-19^th century decor. Nina’s humor in between the songs. The electricity in the room, everyone in the audience listening with every cell in their bodies. The presence in Nina’s and Martin’s performance. It was overwhelming. Like a flood.

After the third encore was finished, when they said that this actually is the end, every single person in the audience stood up and applauded. Walking out, I could barely get down the two flights of stairs to the bottom floor, because my knees where shaking. All of me was shaking. As if the intensity of the music had rearranged the atoms that made up my body, and now my cells didn’t really know how to communicate anymore.

Outside, stars were showing and the moon was full.

So. I have not studied today. Still, I feel I have spent my time wisely.

SERIOUSLY, I am SUPERWOMAN. It’s way past 2 AM and I’ve finally turned in the last of today’s three dead-lines, one for landscape ecology and two for thesis prep – in addition to having been to a two day conference with the science-faculty-education-committee-whatever that I’m the student representative in, at a spa hotel in the archipelago. I haven’t slept properly for at least four days (again) and I have a very strangely light feeling in my head, BUT I’M STILL GOING STRONG.

At some point, this work load will make me collapse. Full system crash. But not now. Not yet. And finally: Time to sleep.

These double courses are turning my world upside down.

I seriously have no idea of what I’m doing most of the time. Searching for articles, reading research ethics guidelines, modeling habitat connectivities, learning how to handle the stereo aerial photo software without becoming all cockeyed, supervisor meetings, trying to remember to eat, sleep, being made dinner to by friends and family, who have I told what to? Who needs the simple version of what I’m doing, and who can I go into the details with?

It’s not that I’m stressed and that it’s making me feel bad or unhappy or anything like that. It’s that I’m doing things, constantly, (probably being stressed), without ever really having the time to contemplate what I’m actually doing. It’s a race, and I’m still managing to stay with the crowd.

I went to the grocery store today, because I haven’t bought food for more than a week and I’m starting to run out. I came home and realized I had only bought vegetables and fruits. Onions, carrots, haricot verts, kiwis, grapefruits, oranges, physalis, apples. Origin countries: Sweden, Italy, USA and Colombia. I do realize, now, that I might need to consume some proteins at some point too, but while in the grocery store that part of my brain wasn’t activated. I ate butter right from the package. Not very protein rich, maybe, but fat is also important. I have one egg in the fridge.

Somehow, while doing my snowballing article searches, I ended up listening to “Ayla” by The Maccabees. Seriously, man. I will never be able to resist piano scales-whatever-they-might-be-called-in-English. It reminds me of Bach’s Prelude 1 in C major. That was the last piece I played at a recital, before I switched from taking piano lessons to starting singing in a choir. I must have been thirteen. My grandpa loved Bach, and I remember that both he and my grandma was there, at the last recital. After my parents divorced, my grandma gave me her piano, the one she bought with her own money when she was young and also taking piano lessons. So that I would be able to practice in both my homes. Now I own two pianos that I never play on. The prelude might sound kind of advanced, but seriously, it’s so simple it’s almost embarrassing. But so pretty. I’ll always have a weak spot for it. And now I’m listening to “Ayla” on repeat, maybe because it reminds me of the prelude. Everything to connect the dots of our lives, eh?

And speaking of nothing at all, whatever happened to my knitted clothes line? The one Jessica thought I should start? Because Katja said so. I even made a logo, the embroidered acronym of the line. Since I finished the second hat for Jessica in, what, February?, I haven’t started knitting anything new. Maybe that’s why I don’t know what I’m doing presently? Knitting is a way for all my parts to catch up with each other. I think. The sketch of the logo is still lying on my table, waiting to be embroidered into thread and yarn being.

The weather’s been amazing lately. I’ve noticed, through the windows of my computer labs and libraries and bedrooms. The “Ayla” video biking trip looks so incredibly liberating. Or just driving. I helped Anna pick up her new car yesterday. Driving is nice. A road trip would be nice. I need to find someone to fix my bike. It hasn’t been used since the crazy cold and snow overwhelmed it in Uppsala more than a year ago.

I think, right now, I might be listening to “Ayla” for the twentieth time tonight. Time to call it a day. To think of the refrain, as daddy would say.

And when a year has passed, the emptiness that is left. Lena Andersson:

They were standing on the pavement outside his gate. It was snowing. She thought: How stupid can you be, to think that it is about time when people give time as a reason? How can you be that stupid at all, to not see the obvious in what happens. Nothing is chance when things change. No. It is not stupid that I am. I never thought it was about time. I just tried to handle my disappointment, endure, cope with.

One has to love a human being very much to bear her hunger.

Just that. That wanting is not enough.

The words of Lena Andersson, in her arbitrary conduct.