The Friday before Christmas, I went to a Christmas party hosted by a group of geology and geography students. There was gifts and a Christmas tree, dancing around the said tree and Christmas candy. I danced on the dance floor when no one was dancing yet, as is my wont, and played pool (won two games and lost one, I blame my team mates in the first case and the other team in the other).

It is weird how different constellations of people create different atmospheres at a party. This Christmas party was very nice and all, but not at all with the same kind of spark as the parties that my high school friends usually host. It was very different, and I don’t know how good I was at fitting in. But Lina was there, which was good.

When we left, sitting at the bus stop, Lina was verbally harassed by a guy in a car for telling him that we didn’t need a ride, thank you very much, and would he leave. It still puzzles me, these men, and how they reason. What kind of sick inclination is it that makes a middle-aged man insult one young woman while still trying to hit on her friend? In what head is that an equation that makes sense?

Anyway. Lina is awesome. On Sunday before Christmas, she left for Kungsör, where her parents live, and now I’ve been all alone in the apartment for almost an entire week. And, as if that wasn’t enough, I haven’t seen anyone else either. Except for spending Christmas Eve with one of my aunts, a cousin and a second cousin, and having been to see my dad, stepmom and brother a couple of times, I’ve barely even spoken to anyone on the phone. I really don’t know how healthy this is. Maybe I should have forced myself to meet up with some friends. I could easily have called someone, and I was even invited to play table tennis and eat pizza via text once, but I just didn’t know if I would be able to handle behaving.

So, I decided: I’m on a social cleanse. The day before yesterday was kind of a low point, but today has been great, I’m actually starting to get done with things and soon, I think I’ll be ready for the world again. On Monday, I’ve promised to get a beer with some old geography friends. That’s when I’ll break my social fast. Almost two days left of self-sustained entertainment. That feels good. It really does.

I’ve even had time to do some weird table arrangements: an ostrich egg I found while cleaning in grandpa’s house, some of the Christmas toffees that I’ve cooked, cut and wrapped, and Lina’s hyacinth, on top of a table cloth that I also found at grandpa’s.

 

I’ve been mostly home this Christmas, doing stuff, listening to the radio. One day (I don’t remember if it was Christmas Day), this morning show that I love had invited a psychologist to come talk about procrastination. I didn’t really know what the word meant before, but just thought something like being lazy. However, as the psychologist explained, there is much more in the word than just general laziness. Procrastination, according to her, is the practice of putting off things, both big and small, and thinking ‘I’ll do them later’. This tends to lead to things piling up, some things not being done at all and a general feeling of stress and anxiety in the procrastinator. This can be harmful financially, but also emotionally, because putting off things, being late and not keeping one’s word tends to harm relationships the procrastinator might have with other people. To end procrastination, however, is not easy and can sometimes even require professional help.

I was wrapping toffees, I think, and it hit me: this is what I do. I procrastinate. Not out of laziness necessarily, but because I take on too much. I don’t have the time, or when I do, I’m too exhausted to think clearly – and still I rarely can manage to go to bed on time for getting those nine hours of sleep that I need to be happy the next day. It’s really idiotic behavior, I know, but I don’t know how to remedy it. Mostly, I get done on time with things I have to do, and I usually turn up on social engagements that I’ve promised to attend – sometimes quite late, but still. Things are not really working, though, because I’m stressed almost all the time and usually too tired to enjoy whatever I do. Most of the time, I just want to lie on my bed and watch stupid American TV shows. Not a very constructive way of living.

The psychologist on the radio said making lists can work, and scheduling, for instance, two hours a week for doing things that you’ve been putting off, like paying bills and booking an appointment at the dentist’s. Maybe that should be my new Year’s resolution: to start making lists. It’s not like I haven’t done them before, but, it can’t hurt to make some more. I need to say yes to less things. Go to sleep on time, and stop watching those stupid TV shows. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? At least like this, in writing.

I’ve been spending most of my time this Christmas trying to tick things off that list of mine. Cleaning, trying out that recipe, deleting photographs, finding room for all the new china I’ve suddenly become the owner of, that kind of thing. Which has led me to procrastinate even more, with the blog. I now have a list of 13 post titles that I am to formulate in writing and upload. Saying no to things like a new chairmanship is all well and doable, but how about ideas? Can I tell them to stop forming in my head too?

Well, as of now, I’d better get started with the writing…

It’s raining. I spent my Friday evening doing laundry. First time since the beginning of November.

There is something so incredibly satisfying with that clean smell, and the folded sheets and towels on the laundry room table.

When I came home from eating a decadent Christmas dinner at my aunt’s, I put on the telly and dove right into the middle of Love Actually. It is such a sweet movie – but lying there on the couch, with my calves balancing on Lina’s pilates ball, I realized how incredibly weird some of the stories in it are. Like the one about the writer and the Portuguese maid. People don’t fall in love like that, without being able to communicate, not when the woman is, like, 10 years younger than the man and there isn’t a beach and lots of bare skin involved.  Or the guy who goes to the US to have sex – and ends up hooking up with four gorgeous supermodel women, who just happen to be at the local Milwaukee bar, at once. What kind of a sick story is that?

Most of the stories in Love Actually are actually about older men getting involved with younger, incredibly hot women. And none of the protagonists are gay. 

Among all the characters, I feel I can relate most to the story about the office woman with the sick brother. She’s been pining for the (possibly slightly younger) superhot art director for years, and when she finally gets her chance with him, she screws everything up by constantly answering her brothers calls. I interpret that as her being too afraid of turning her dream into reality. And she does what she thinks she should, rather than what she really wants.

But what’s the point in that, seeing myself in movie characters. The story of the office woman ends with her saying a sad Merry Christmas to the hottie, after which he leaves and she is left to cry by herself in the empty, dark office, and then she spends Christmas with her brother at the institution where he lives. For me, the story never ends. I get new opportunities, over and over, there are remakes and do-overs and “haven’t I been here before?” and I really need to stop writing these after midnight self-pitying posts. They aren’t doing me any good.

I’ve eaten too much, stressed over the cooking and without Lina here (she’s at her mom’s for the holidays), the apartment (especially the kitchen) is turning messier and messier for every day that goes by. I have some serious cleaning to do tomorrow. And photo editing. And writing of serious, thought-through posts. I’d better go to sleep. Like. Now.

I’ve been up baking bread, Finnish Christmas pastries and toffee, and now it’s already tomorrow and I still have Karelian pierogis, vegetarian meatballs and chocolate caramel covered stuff to do. Somehow, Christmas always manages to come as a surprise, and everything has to be done in the last minute.

I was supposed to go to sleep, and continue the cooking tomorrow morning, but when I was going to shut down my computer, I got stuck in front of my Facebook feed. As so many times before.

Lots of Christmas wishes. My friend Ida gave birth to a son two days ago on a mattress in front of the Christmas tree in their living room (only 15 hours after I visited them, had fika and gave Ida the knitted baby hat that I’d made), everyone is well and happy. One couldn’t wish for a better Christmas gift. I guess. Julius’ club in Münich seems to have had some kind of photo uploading session, and being a DJ, he’s on many of them. It annoys me how cool and handsome he is. Luis from Lima seems to have been to a wedding. Abbie has left Ecuador for Christmas in Minneapolis. Katarina and Jonas and Livija and Mattias and Carro were at the anti-racist demonstrations in Kärrtorp yesterday. So was I, but of the above, I only ran into Jonas.

It feels weird, being able to keep track of people like this. Disconnected, somehow. Scary. Stalkerish. And nice at the same time, too. Especially since most of them I wouldn’t be able to contact without Facebook. Of course I don’t know, but I think that’s what happened with all the on-the-road-friends that backpackers made before Internet and social media. They’d disappear, just be vague memories and blurry faces in photos forgotten in an album in a box stacked away in the attic.

I rarely put up anything on my Facebook page that then can end up on other people’s feeds. Except for the occasional photos that others upload (which I don’t mind at all), I think I’m pretty anonymous on Facebook. No possibilities for keeping track of me there.

However. I have this blog. On Saturday, four people viewed it 99 times. Someone must have been having a slow day and reading through it all. Today, seven people viewed it 40 times. That’s a lot more traffic than what it usually gets. I’m curious. Who are these people, reading stuff from my trip to Canada two years ago? I write stuff here with the feeling that no one really reads it now that I’m not travelling, and mom and dad and my closest friends meet me on a regular basis. I only know of two people that have actually told me that they read it. But maybe I should change that perspective. There obviously are others. 99 views in a day is not an accidental Google search gone astray.

Oh, well. In this digital day and age, I guess this is something that should be embraced, not worried about. Both my late night scrolling down the personal gossip tabloid filled with news about my circle of acquaintances and friends, and the fact that my blog is being comprehensively read by people without me having the faintest idea of who they are. Development is not likely to go back to old ways anytime soon.

Now, I need to sleep. Merry Christmas!

I was listening to the radio and they were talking about the music business, that LA is where most of today’s big popular music is being preduced. The guy said: “I’ve always wanted to live in LA or San Diego – they have the perfect, Mediterranean climate, beaches and everyone lives in houses”.

And it made me furious.

Why did it make me so angry?

The music journalist is allowed to have his dream, he probably lives in Stockholm in a small apartment like the rest of us. But this ideal, of living in southern California, in a house, promoting it on the radio, it just makes me sick.

Southern California has no water, it’s a completely artificial landscape to be living in, and they’ve completely drained the Colorado river, just to mention one thing.

And these growing, wide-spread suburban communities around major cities, where LA could be seen as the king of urban sprawl, are incredibly bad for the environment. They require so much space, land that is turned into residential areas with lawns and swimming pools, decreasing the areas of “natural” vegetation, and therefore also decreasing biodiversity for every new house that is being built. And all this space creates huge distances, forcing most people to travel everywhere by car instead of walking, biking or using public transportation.

Of course living in a house, in a warm, sunny climate sounds like the perfect life, but I can’t help thinking about the consequences of such a lifestyle. And when influential people on the radio talk about it like that, without even the smallest hint of criticism, I just … no. It makes me want to write an e-mail to him and call him an idiot.

These things that annoy me. So incredibly misdirected. I should put my energies into changing things instead.

These last couple of weeks, yet again time has run away with me. Mom came to visit for a week, over her 60th birthday, and we had a little party for her.

Before the snow came, I walked past the frosty allotment gardens every morning, just getting more and more annoyed by the broccoli and cabbage getting frost damaged there without anyone salvaging them. The gate being locked and the fence to high to climb was the only reason I didn’t go in there and take them myself.

Vivi and Kate in the sun, on a Monday lunch walk through the snow. On Tuesday, the snow started melting.

On Friday morning, December 13th, the whole green line decided to not run, and the trip that usually takes 45 minutes took two hours by several different buses. The walk across the Skanstull bridge was beautiful, but I almost didn’t make it to our Lucia breakfast, where the little choir I’d put together was scheduled to sing. Luckily, I arrived with five minutes to spare, just about enough time to put glitter in my hair and tie the red ribbon around my waist.

On Friday afternoon, I went shopping, and found my new favorite store.

It’s a real, old school style spice boutique full of bags with spices, essences, herbs and bottles of I don’t know what. I was there to buy glycerin for my toffee, but I couldn’t keep myself from buying a couple of flavoring essences as well. I’m so looking forward to baking all through Christmas.

Outside the boutique, just by the next door gallery, someone had installed this incredibly cute bead-covered bike. Pretty pretty thing.

And this weekend, I’ve cleaned and organized, seen The Hobbit II at the movies with dad and brother, and watched some British TV shows. Now it’s way too late and it’ll be a nightmare getting up tomorrow. I see several cups of coffee in my near future.

It feels like Christmas: the snow came and went, I started reading “Nyckeln”, an urban fantasy novel for teenagers about a group of witches, it’s exciting and consuming. We drink julmust and eat gingerbread cookies and spend time with family, mom visiting, gifts, I have kind of taken time off already. How will this last week of term work out, when I’ve already started my Christmas holidays.

On Thursday, around midday, my grandfather died.

I was in school, dad was with him when he took his last breath. When I arrived at the hospital, he was still quite warm.

A dead body is a weird thing. It was as if he had lost his features. An empty shell. Which is what he was, I guess.

I didn’t cry. The only thing I could think about was how incredibly hot the male nurse intern was. He came in with papers for us to sign. He was tall and blue-eyed and I thought that either he must be such a door-mat, gay, or simply the perfect man. I like to think of myself as deep and intelligent, but then I find myself in a room with the body of my dead grandfather and all I can do is start fantasizing about the hot nurse. I am shallow and have inappropriate reactions in sad situations.

 

Now they’re all dead, my grandparents. Both the Swedish ones and the one I had in Finland. I wonder what they imagined their future life together would be like, Lilian and Lars, when they got married in the early 1950’s (I think). Sweden must have been so full of promise, everything pointing in one direction: forward. I don’t know, of course, but I imagine seeing that in their clear eyes and bright smiles. Great hopes for the future.

Times are different now. Couples don’t take wedding photos in black and white anymore.

I remember one morning at the farm in Sonoma, Abbie coming late out to the blueberry field. She told us that her grandmother had just gotten really sick and the doctors didn’t know if she would get better. And then Abbie started crying, in her straw hat and gardening gloves, in the bright California sun. I’m not good with emotional things, but somehow my instinct told me to hug her and I think she appreciated it.

See, that’s appropriate behavior when you get news of death or sickness in the family. Abbie is going to Berlin in the spring, she might be able to pass by Stockholm on her way east. A HUGE maybe. But I hope she will. I really do. Not only because she could teach me some proper grief behavior.

Not that I think my grandfather would have minded. He wasn’t big on showing feelings. He was a very straight forward kind of man. On Tuesday, the last time I saw him alive, he complained about everything on TV being about Mandela, eulogies and praise. Mandela was one of his biggest idols and the only time I’ve seen him cry, except for when grandma died, was in an overheated van during a family holiday in Capetown, Christmas 1997, when he held a monologue about how incredible he thought Nelson Mandela was. I guess that means that you can even get sick of your heroes.

Shit. I really don’t have a point to this story, more than. Now he’s dead. And in a way, I got to say goodbye. The last memory I have of him is there in the hospital bed on Tuesday evening, him holding my hand, squeezing it and smiling – and then I had to run, to babysit my brother while dad and stepmom went to see a play.

And so, life goes on. I’m knitting baby hats. All my friends seem to be getting pregnant these days. Well, maybe not all. But still. Life. The eternal cycle.

Oh, nothing can come between me and my love for books.

I reminded myself: when a book lies unopened it might contain anything in the world, anything imaginable. It therefore, in that pregnant moment before opening, contains everything. Every possibility, both perfect and putrid. Surely such mysteries are the most enticing things You grant us in this mortal mere – the fruit in the garden, too, was like this. Unknown, and therefore infinite. Eve and her mate swallowed eternity, every possible thing, and made the world between them.

 

from “The Habitation of the Blessed” by Catherynne M. Valente

I have a weakness for short, fragmentary novels with observations from life. Like Elin Ruuth’s Fara vill, that I read ages ago, I found this quote while cleaning my computer:

I am taught that you can hear where the lungs start and end by patting yourself lightly along your back. I am not taught how to pat my own back. One theory is that you are dependent on other people to fully understand your own anatomy. In all possible contexts, dependence seems to be a completely legitimate phenomenon.

Lately, I’ve been feeling so disconnected from my body. And I’m not sure that I’ve ever known where my lungs end.

I wish winter would come now. The cold always turns breathing into a conscious activity. If not fully giving a sense for their beginning and end, filling my lungs with freezing air makes their volume feel so tangible.