And gosh, this Alain Mabanckou quote (translated from it’s original French into Swedish and then into English by me – the risk of losses in translation is squared):

but maybe I’ve departed slightly from my own confessions when I’ve talked about you huh, it’s yet again the human part of me that has manifested itself, from the humans I’ve really learned the importance of deviations, they never go straight to the point, they open parentheses that they forget to close

(from Ett piggsvins memoarer)

I might be the most human of them all.

I’ve been cleaning up my computer today. Re-organizing, deleting, back-uping. I found a document named Quotes. In it, I found this:

Children, you must understand, are monsters. They are ravenous, ravening, they lope over the countryside with slavering mouths, seeking love to devour. Even when they find it, even if they roll about in it and gorge themselves, still it will never be enough. Their hunger for it is greater than any heart to satisfy. You mustn’t think poorly of them for it – we are all monsters that way, it is only that when we are grown, we learn more subtle methods to snatch it up, and secretly slurp our fingers clean in dark corners, relishing even the last dregs. All children know is a clumsy sort of pouncing after love. They often miss, but that is how they learn.

Their hands are so big, so big, because they need so much. They reach out and out and you could disappear in their grip.

It’s from “The Habitation of the Blessed” by Catherynne M. Valente. She’s such a master with words. She never ceases to amaze me.

SRC party at a bar on a Thursday night. Dancing with resilience researchers. Sleepy ride home on the last train for the night. Imagine, there are drunk girls on the tube on Thursday nights too. Someone has smoked weed on the Skarpnäck tube station. It is possible that the guy that was sitting opposite from me didn’t wake up when the train stopped in Skarpnäck (the last stop). Now, he’ll have to spend the night on the train. A funny thing to tell your friends afterwards, I guess. It wasn’t my responsibility to wake him, I don’t feel bad. I’m just tired. Next stop: bed.

I started reading Bodil Malmsten again, and suddenly I got this urge to write stuff. On my small laptop, that I generally don’t have internet connection on. So, that’s why they’ve been uploaded after the fact, the posts, all in a bunch.

Otherwise, November has been an exhausting month.

I had julmust. I just couldn’t resist, when they started selling it. The best soda ever. No question. (Except for maybe the South African Appletizer, but that’s a HUGE maybe.)

I think one of the math departments made this awesome pumpkin and put up outside their main entrance. It’s on my way to the SRC, I see it every morning, it makes me so happy. Now, it’s become mouldy and kind of slumps, but when it was young and new (as in this photo), it was one of the most incredible Halloween pumpkins that I’ve ever seen.

 And a weekend or so ago, I took a couple of friends with me and drove down to the summer cottage. As always, eating, walking, days passing without anything really happening. Lighting the fire in the evenings and picking mushrooms in the Sunday sun. It was a nice break, over way too soon.

Maybe it’s November. I’m feeling very unforgiving, not ready to compromise, difficult. I feel: certain things in life are serious, you should choose your seriousnesses well and take responsibility for your choice. Both the one you made and all the ones you didn’t. Not behave as if it doesn’t matter.

Because it does. Life matters. What we choose matters. And right now, I can’t seem to stand people that act differently.

Being difficult, isn’t that my prerogative as a human being?

Some time ago, my mom said I should start writing the blog in Swedish again. Not that she has any kind of emotional relationship to Swedish, if anything, she should tell me to write in Finnish. But, I think what she meant was, I should return to the language I know best. Where the shades and shifts in a word are already there, on the tips of my fingers.

I started writing in English right before going to Canada. There was a plan behind it, I thought I needed to practice my English so why not do it in every possible way, both through speaking and writing.

For some reason, I continued half a year later, when I was back home again. I felt comfortable with it. There is a roughness, a kind of unkempt clarity to writing in a language that isn’t etched on your heart. A freedom that Swedish doesn’t give me. With Swedish, I feel everything, and it becomes hard to write anything at all. It becomes so clear, my unpolished and pretentious way of expressing myself. In English, I can at least pretend to be oblivious to the imperfections. Hide behind the fact that English is, after all, only my third language.

It’s started to feel weird lately, though. This constant Englishness. In school, we speak English all the time. Everything academic I write and read is in English. During my free time, I hang out a lot with my classmates too, and when not with them, Lina’s classmates from Germany or Italy or the Switzerland come over for dinner. All the TV shows I watch are in English.

It’s almost as if the only continuous Swedish I encounter during an ordinary day is the one I hear on the radio – and that is just fed to me, without me having to process it.

I almost feel like, if someone asked me to write something nice in Swedish, I wouldn’t know how.

Once, Swedish used to be my favorite thing in the world.

Maybe I should listen to my mom. The problem is, though, that the only people I know for sure will read this wouldn’t understand it if it was Swedish. And somewhere, in my secret author heart, I still want to be read. So, I’ll have to do some serious thinking.

Veronica Maggio released an album some while ago. The last song has a very simple drum machine beat and she sings, with that very desperate voice of hers:

Jag blev säkert kär i dig för det nånannan sa. /…/

För om inte du ska ta över världen, kan väl jag få göra det. Ja, om inte du ska förgöra världen kan väl jag få göra det.

And I will not translate. It’s way too banal, but oh, so simply head-on-the-nail.

I found a document in a folder named blogg 2, containing the following short piece of writing:

This afternoon:

The sun has not been seen all day, but now it is turning the roof of the Stockholm University main library golden. I have problems concentrating, possibly due to lack of sleep, and I would like to eat pasta for dinner.

I don’t remember writing it, and I don’t know where I was going with it. Maybe nowhere. It feels kind of suitable today too, the simple observations. Today, the sun was shining but I didn’t get the opportunity to go out to enjoy it before it disappeared again, in its rude November manner. Immense lack of sleep, yes, and doing everything but. I had pepper and bean stew, reheated in the microwave, for dinner. Freshly cooked pasta with a tomato sauce and parmesan seems like such an incredible luxury.

I have had three cups of coffee today and my heart might actually be beating irregularily.

When a young horse gets saddled for the first time, you never quite know how it will react. One might just smell the saddle and then calmly let you tighten the girth, barely moving its ears. Another might stand completely still at first, just to explode once he’s allowed to move. It’s something restricting, tight, and it needs to be gotten rid of. Around and around the young horse will lope in the roundpen, kicking and bucking, until the fur on his neck is wavy with sweat.

Recently, I’ve been feeling like such a horse. Like Victor, the chestnut youngster at Time Out Farms, who just simply couldn’t accept being restricted by anything. I want to kick and buck and tell everyone to fuck off.

The problem is, if he had just stopped for a moment, taken a proper breath and just felt past the newness of the saddle, he might have realized that it wasn’t so bad after all. Horses, just like dogs and other flock animals, want to cooperate and like learning new things. If he could just have looked past the discomfort of the girth around his belly, slightly restricting his movements, he might have learned about all the fun things you get to experience as a horse, if you have the great luck to be trained by such an expert horseman as Jay. A whole new universe would reveal itself in front of you. Sometimes, stubbornness and fighting back is just a waste of time and harmful.

Am I that horse? Am I Victor, carrying around a damaging fighting instinct?

I’m sitting in the Geoscience building, its eight in the evening and I’m reading articles. I come here sometimes, when the coziness at the SRC becomes to tight. Here, the airiness comforts me. Or maybe it’s just the recognizable and old.

An old professor walks past, says “Lucky them” when I say that I’m doing my master’s at SRC now and I tell him that I feel that my geography background fits perfectly, that I’m thinking of doing my thesis on landscape change using remote sensing. He replies, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, “Well, you can always come back and do your Ph.D. here, then”.

I wonder how I always manage to fool them. Hannah called me a superhero after I tool part in their group discussion on the thermokarst lake regime shift and I thought: I’m just bad at keeping my mouth shut. That doesn’t mean I’m trustworthy.

Around a streetlight in the distance, it looks like it’s snowing. I don’t think it is, though. It’s only me, wishing too hard.

Sunday noon walk in nearby nature reserve, the sun barely makes it up above the treelined horizon. My phone doesn’t capture shades very well, light becomes bleached and that’s what I have to live with, now that I’ve become too lazy to carry my SLR around.

Anyway, what the phone can’t really capture is the sun lining a spruce in gold. My life seems to revolve mostly around spruce these days. And it isn’t even December yet.

And Bodil Malmsten writes (in De från norr kommande leoparderna):

You cannot come back to what you’ve never left behind, you are what you are and you carry your house around whereever you go, your shell of light and music.

What is it that I have not left behind? But, more importantly, what have I? Where can’t I go back?

A gaze in which simply moving is enough.