I’ve been thinking about time. And places left behind. People.

I looked up plane tickets to San Francisco today, what if I went there in the summer. Back to the farm in Sonoma, to pick blueberries and spend my afternoons reading Russian classics by the pond.

There was a young man, beautiful, he tried to teach me how to dance charleston. Moving within his gaze. Just that, a place that is enough. The air tangible. So rare with eyes I actually can feel on my skin, tingling.

Maybe not while stepping on my own toes in a poor excuse for a charleston, though.

Still, strange. I haven’t thought about that gaze for ages. Not even while there, at the farm, where he came to visit sometimes. He was young and I have already told you, I have a terrible taste in men. The good ones, the ones that could teach me to dance charleston, they pass me by.

Next time, if there ever is one, I’ll make him teach me some lindyhop.

Working all day, discussing, drawing words and arrows on the whiteboard. After everyone else had left, sitting in the gradually darker and emptier center, spread out, crocheting, reading, rolling balls out of yarn.

It is Friday night and I didn’t leave the SRC until a little to eight. At Gullmarsplan, that is, almost home, a young man gets on the tube in the company of a young woman. The man looks like such a hipster, I don’t usually feel comfortable putting lables on people, but this guy. The hat and the glasses and the jacket and the skinniness, if ever there was anyone who looked like a hipster, that would be him.

Is maybe what I would have thought when he got on the tube, a Friday evening in November, had I not recognized him. Now, making observations that might be considered slightly condesending, or just innocent in general, is really a minefield. I used to have the biggest crush on him. He was an even younger hipster back then and I was seventeen and he didn’t want me and I ended up spending the end of my eighteenth birthday party crying in a wardrobe because that was when I finally gave up hope on being capable to win him over.

Now, he lives one tube stop away from me and he doesn’t even say hello when we run into each other on the over-crowded train at eight in the morning.

Or on a Friday evening when he is accompanied by a young woman.

I don’t mind, not really, he was the first in a long line of men that I, after having gotten past my momentary obsession, have realised actually are pretty boring. Dry and humorless. I really do have terrible taste in men.

But still. I think: Today I have kind of, almost identified a potential regime shift in the boreal forest, a discovery that might be possible to use for the development of more resilient management practices in the boreal biome in a changing climate. Maybe. What have you done, hipster boy, that has made the world into a slightly better place, what is it that makes you too good to say hello to an old, high school-time acquaintance?

Think I, and return to my Bodil Malmsten novel.

I’ve started drinking coffee. This master’s is causing a personality shift in me.

My stomach has been aching all day. A dull, persistent pain. Could there possibly be a correlation?

The path I walk every morning, with the incredible, moss covered oak trees.

After aerobics class, I overheard two men talking bullshit in the shower (the walls between the changing rooms are very thin), I’ve heard them before, they never seem to tire.

“This party in Norway that’s become part of the government, we call them racist, them and the Danes. But I think we’re the hypocrites. We don’t want to touch our own problems. What are they called? … these hipsters, living on Södermalm and earning 40 000 kronor a month. The men are more women than men, while the women are more men than women, so that you can’t tell them apart anymore. Of course it’s easy to vote for the Green Party then, with 40 000 kronor a month and no children, and be environmentally friendly.”

I didn’t stay to listen to the end of that monologue. I left, feeling angry and dejected.

I live on my student loans. I have 9000 kronor a month, no children of course, but an ordinary Stockholm rent and still manage to buy organic, always, and Fairtrade whenever the option is given. I don’t have a car and I rarely drink alcohol. I cook almost all of my meals myself and mend my clothes whenever possible, because I can’t stand shopping. I buy yarn and love to cook dinner to my friends. I give small monthly donations to the Red Cross, Amnesty International and Greenpeace – and still I can put away some money every month into my travel fund.

It’s all about priorities. And what you’re willing to give up. If you think there is anything bigger to put a little bit extra effort into.

Today, November was grey, but also, SRC got a visit from the Swedish.crown princess. Dauphine. Whatever you want to call it. Heir to the Swedish throne. The supervisors for our group paper on regime shifts in the sub-arctic boreal forests were late to our session, because they got held up in a meeting with the Princess.

In the afternoon, we were sitting in the lobby, master students, papers and computers spread out all over, and the Princess walked by. Looking exactly like you’d expect. My heart reacted instinctively, despite me not being fascinated by royalty at all, not at all.

It’s not that I really care. I’m not a royalist. I was kind of just as star struck by Johan Rockström, the (in certain circles) world famous professor who is the head of the SRC. He isn’t around very much, but today he was showing the Princess around.

It’s just. It felt kind of good. The fact that. That’s the kind of place I study at. A research center that has the Heir of Sweden as its patron.

These last couple of weeks have been far too intense for me to even properly formulate words to write in my head. But I’ve done things, and I photographed some of them. So, I’ll just show you that instead.

I went to an exhibition at the Swedish National Museum. They were showing paintings by Carl Larsson, a Swedish artist who was active about a hundred years ago. Probably one of the most famous Swedish painters, at least in Sweden. It was a really nice exhibition.

 

I also went to my second croquis class, this time with a male model. And turns out, it is so much harder sketching a man. More edginess. Lina thinks it’s because we’re not as used to the male body, because it isn’t as exposed in media and culture as the female body. She might be on to something.

 

On a field trip to Reimersholme, while searching for ecosystem services, we found some awesome street art.

 

And one Saturday, I met up with almost all former classmates from the Tarfala course by Tyresta National Park, and we went on an autumn hike. Big parts of the park burned down 14 years ago, and the burned site has in no recovered, covered in pine skeletons and successional birches.

 

We grilled hot dogs by a lake, and I learned that soy hot dogs are worthless to grill on a stick. They fall apart.

Hopefully, I’ll have some more time to write stuff during the upcoming weeks. Life is simply not that fun when it’s too busy.

The perfect Saturday morning:

Waking up, eating leftover cupcakes for breakfast in bed and looking at the pictures of last nights escapades with my lovely lovely classmates, having a house guest (strictly speaking not mine, but Lina’s) who plays on the piano in the next room.

I really really don’t want to start working on my Final Assignment Module 3. Sometimes life should just stay this simple.

The heroine in Spill meets the Beautiful Man, he is a friend if her brother’s and he lends her a pair of socks when she accidentally gets invited to watch silent movies with them, because the floors of his apartment are cold. There is a hole in one of them, she says she will take them home and fix them, as thanks, but he says it isn’t necessary.

But she insisted, she was already in love and  didn’t notice how she revealed herself by trying to turn the period into a comma. 

And later:

He didn’t need to “love” her. She was beautiful enough for him to desire maybe, but that wasn’t necessary. This was enough. Already her feeling for him (whatever it was) gave courage for life.

Sigrid Combüchen’s way with words. And what she describes.

To be honest, I don’t know if I’ve ever been there myself. The trying to turn anything into a comma, yes, but a feeling being enough? I’m too impatient. And now, I’ve become a cynic. I would like, though. It makes me think of snow.

I feel, I want it to snow. Crystals falling from the sky, it always makes me feel clean and light.

The smell of fall is good too. The little things. When there really aren’t any big to get excited about.

Later, in Spill:

It is sad to live, one acts capable and isn’t. On the other side of the violet clouds there isn’t anything. Why these thoughts?

I have them too, sometimes. Most people seem to find me capable and well organized. And I like that, even though there is a little itch. Most of the time, I feel like a mess, barely keeping up. Especially lately. It’s not generally a problem, I don’t mind, it’s just. Sometimes. It would be nice to know what I’m doing. 

I’m still reading Spill by Sigrid Combüchen, she writes (in my rather inadequate translation):

To illustrate how hard it is to be completely true toward oneself (to look oneself in the mirror without piling together the features that belong to the person one knows and recognizes), I read through a couple of self-interviews on the web. Why publish such things? To give justice to oneself, or to love oneself like other people don’t understand to love the one you want to be loved as. Maybe.

Isn’t that what all this blogging is about too? Creating this image of oneself, the person I feel I am, but that others might not always see. Sometimes it scares me, this need I feel to correct people, tell them : ”Hey, just so you know, this is not who I am, not all of it, just a little part, there is so much more”. But of course, it’s the same with everyone and always having to explain myself is probably not a very sympathetic feature. As if I can control what people think about me. I should just let them decide for themselves.

At least I haven’t forced anyone to read this.