Oh no, the French!

After almost six years of complete anglophilia, the past few days I've been turning my eyes slightly south. Oh, what a delightfully perverted expression. All it means though it that I've been experiencing an increasing infatuation with all things French. Like, if you ever saw the brilliant film "All or nothing", when Timothy Spall is driving some crazy French woman to some art gallery? Well, I kind look like her at the moment. Mainly due to my glasses which are a bit arty. Also, I've been going round quoting her, saying "'eee's urr... fat like you?" in a real poncy French accent. On a slightly more sane note I've also started readin Le Monde. That was the only French newspaper I could think of. So I looked it up on the internet. I'm still in the stage where I'm reading what it says thinking "God, I know these words!" but not really understanding. But I have learnt the French word for bird flu, so I can definetly see the progress.

I spent almost an hour, well half an hour, something or other, my watch has retired so I've got no sense of time anymore, on the phone with my mother today. The conversation can be cut up in points and listed as follows; 1) Today is - apparently - the day spring starts, 'cause my mother has found flowers, 2) Despite the fact that we are now without doubt entering the warmer season, my mother has a cold, 3) her friend's mother is dying, 4) I always read the obituaries despite the fact that I don't know any of the dead, I proceed to remark that a lot of people born in the 40's are dying at the moment, 5) another of my mother's friends have sold her house, and her brother has moved to Brazil, 6) I talk about what I'm going to write my paper about and my mother claims she's always been interested in that particular subject, 7) she asks me if I've received my tax return papers, I say I have and that I'll be getting quite a lot of money back (yay!), 8) my parents have separate accounts, compared to my husband and myself who have several accounts but they're all joint, 9) my friend's sister (who is also my mother's friend's daughter) is a vegan, and I try to explain to my mother why drinking milk is wrong, 10) my mother has new glasses, 11) I'm going to buy shoes with pictures of cats on them, 12) I suggest my parents go to Amsterdam, 13) my mother asks if I want to go shopping with her on Saturday, I say no, but what about tomorrow? And then we arrange the details of our shopping trip. I forgot to tell her about how yesterday I was humming the Shaft theme tune for about an hour and then turned the telly on and Shaft was just starting. How cool is that.

Lalala...

I was watching a program about literature yesterday and there was a short interview with some Japanese publicist who said the latest trend in Japan is teenage writers. He said kids today are very much used to expressing themselves in writing, for example through e.mails or whatever. I just find that absolutely delightful. And it's obviously true aswell. All people are blogging, or they're part of an community, an enormous amount of kids join writing-type communities where you can post your poems, short stories, and so on. I think it's brilliant. Also the number of places where people can upload their own music, and the availability of the technical equipment needed to produce music has just brought creativity to new unexpected hights. So there. It's a creative revolution.

Beam me up.

Sailing on top of the WorldWideWeb, I found this little gem of a test that gave me the improbable advice to become a Science Fiction writer.

You Should Be a Science Fiction Writer

Your ideas are very strange, and people often wonder what planet you're from. And while you may have some problems being "normal," you'll have no problems writing sci-fi. Whether it's epic films, important novels, or vivid comics... Your own little universe could leave an important mark on the world!

What Type of Writer Should You Be?

Although admittedly most of above is undeniably and absolutely true, I would probably suck harder than anything as a science fiction writer. Of all the things I do in my life, all the thoughts I have, all my interests et cetera, science fiction has never been remotely connected to any of them. Neither has fantasy. Which is kind of weird, I guess. I just don't like it. Althought I did like Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy, but only for it's dry wit, ya'll.

Return of the Dog!

My grandparents returned Dog to me earlier. He's been spending the weekend with my brother. He was obviously extremely happy to see me again. He was so excited he sneezed. He does that a lot, it's very peculiar. It's like he's gathering energy for about half a minute before actually sneezing. And when he does, it's like a real kick-ass sneeze. I don't know if he's allergic to something or what. Anyway, as Dog is spending the night, that means he'll be sleeping in my bed. For some reason my husband's side of the bed isn't good enough for him, it has to be like the mid-section of mine. Why do we let him sleep in the bed in the first place? Because well, he gets up there anyway and it's just easier not spending the time that should be spent falling asleep telling Dog to piss off away from somewhere he's going to end up in anyway.

Mind your braces please.

I had freaky dreams again last night. Basically, the phone rang as I was taking a walk around the area where I live. The phone was on a table between to other tables where stuff was put up for sale. Turned out the person who phoned was my mate's mother who is currently in Paris with my parents (and well, you know, her husband). She phoned and was really upset because my mum had left Paris after just one night. I tried to defend my mother saying things like "oh, she needed to be back her for work on Sunday". Every now and again the phoneline would go quiet and it was generally like a really bad phone experience. The woman was crying complaining that my mother had left and I was getting increasingly uncomfortable. Then she started talking about the area where I was as being dangerous and whatnot. I said something like "oh, don't worry, the police are arriving as we speak". Which they did. And they run into the house next to where I was standing, still on the phone, all action movie mode. Then two people, a man and a woman, jumped out of the second floor window. He was wearing a wig which fell off, because the woman's braces had stuck in the blinds in the window, and he was holding on to her and they ended up hanging upside down in her braces and he'd lost his wig. They were both looking like skinheads, like the racist kind of skinhead, which was a bit weird. They had to struggle to get the woman out of her braces, but even though it took a while the police stayed in the flat. The woman was arguing, not wanting to run, so in the end the guy took off alone. She sat down on the pavement and waited. Still, the police waited in the flat. I was still on the phone. Then my mother and grandmother walked by, obviously pissed out of their minds, wearing sunglasses and my mother said that I shouldn't waste any time on the woman on the phone and if she wanted to leave Paris, she had the right to do so.

We'll always have Paris!

My parents left for Paris earlier today. They left their dog with me. This dog is a fascinating creature. My mother phoned me last night to ask if I got any bread or if she needs to bring some, as Dog prefers his medication injected in a sandwhich (how I wish this wasn't true, but it is). I don't normally eat bread, but I promised I'd buy some especially for Dog. So I did. I also bought cheese, as I think he likes that aswell. Looking after Dog means I'll have to remember loads of things, like taking him for walks, although he can't actually walk that far. He also needs to be fed. In addition to his morning sandwhich he eats dogfood. I've got a bag in the kitchen now, appropriately with a picture of the Eiffel Tower, with all things dog-related. I do kind of like having Dog around though. It's just that I'm expecting him to die any second, so I'm sort of constantly looking to see if he's still breathing or what. I mean, like, he's too big to flush down the toilet if he dies, so I wouldn't really know what to do with him.

It's on the internet so it must be true.

As I read my morning paper today I was informed in a small article that 80% of Swedish (equivalent to) A-level students are getting half or more of their information for essays, projects or whatever from the internet and not from their course books. Surely this comes as a surprise to noone? I for one think that this is terrific news. Not only does it cripple the monopoly on information that our schools have had for so long, it also gives the students a valuable experience in looking for information, and in extent processing and using information. However. Out of these 80%, 80% (yes, that's 80% of 80% of students total) claim they trust the information they find on the internet. When they hand in their work based on this information, is anyone going to question them on it? "Oh, you found this on the internet, did you? Well, that's fine then." Students are at most required to cite the website they got the information from. In special cases they're required to print a copy of it and hand in as an appendix. This mainly serves the purpose of allowing the teacher to check whether the student have actually done the work himself or if he's just printed it off www.howtoscoreanawithouthavingtodoanywork.com (that's not a real address btw).
In my humble opinion, schools are failing their students here in the sense that they don't teach them the first thing about source criticism. That's hardly surprising either. For years and years students have been given one (1) book on history, one (1) on civic science and so on and they're expected to learn what it says. That in itself is pretty poor, but when it comes to the magnificent, yet incredibly unreliable, source that we refer to as the internet it's absolutely vital that they know that not everything is true. Not even if it looks serious enough. But in a way this feels defining of our society as a whole. We don't like individuals who question information fed to us by various people and institutions. Without disappearing into a little cloud of neo-lefty scepticism, I just want to say that critical thinking is such a useful tool. And today more than ever it's what we need to teach people. The modern man and woman are absolutely drowned in a huge tidal wave of information. Every single day. So yeah, if I ever run for president or prime minister or whatever, I'll introduce two hours of source criticism/critical thinking every week from the age of er... 10 to graduation from Oxford.

Block my calories.

At half past one in the afternoon the phone rang. Being a very paranoid person I'm always trying to figure out who's phoning before answering. Yes, I know that the obvious solution to this problem would be to get a number presentation thingy, but 1) so many people have secret or unknown numbers anyway and 2) I like being unfashionable when it comes to technology. That's not the point though. I couldn't figure out who would possibly phone me at that hour. When I answered I found out it was a woman probably my own age, and in a very solemn voice she declared that I had been chosen by whatever company to try their calorie-blockers free of charge. I quickly informed her (unlike my mother I'm habitually polite to whoever phone me, even if they want to sell me stuff) that I didn't need any calorie-blockers, but thanks anyway and have a nice day. But as I sat down with my books again I immediatly regreated letting her go that easily. I would've loved to hear her explain to me what the hell calorie-blockers are and why she thought I needed them. Basically, the aim of these blockers is to prevent the body from digesting and absorbing calories, starch or whatever. I'm no expert on metabolism, digestion or whatever, but I mean... The reason I eat is because I need these things. I need my calories. Calories are energy, right? The day I wake up the size of a small house I'll consider blocking them. Until then I'll just continue eating and excercising whenever I feel like it.

Let it snoooooooooow!

As I was sitting on my sofa playing the guitar I looked out the window and saw how suddenly immense masses of snow started falling from the sky, like so fast. I mean, snow tend to sort of lazily fall in a hardly-moving-almost-snowing-upwards-type of way, but this snow had obviously been caught in a really alert wind and was forming interesting patterns in the sky.

On a less snowy note I'm reading about WWI. I've never really understood why that was such a horrible war compared to most other wars, but I guess I've never really understood the number of casualities. If the battleground is slimey with the blood and flesh from your friends and enemies you're not going to forget it anytime soon, are you? Well, now I'm going to do some more studying and then I'll write a fictional story and post it on the internet and see how many people are going to read it in say... 24 hours.

What is it about owls?

I absolutely adore owls, but I'm not sure why. I've got a lot of owl-related memories. Like when I was a kid and my teacher forced the whole class to go to the birdmuseum to look at stuffed birds and eggs and such, and there was this huge stuffed owl on top of one of the cabinettes. I was shopping around for an owl when I lived in England, you can keep them as pets there but you can't in Sweden. Although, I don't actually think it's recommended anywhere. And having spent a lot of time looking for an appropriate pet owl, and reading about them and so on, I must admit that well... they don't seem to make very good pets. You need to live somewhere where you can let them out so they can search for mice to eat, and how the hell you're supposed to teach an owl to come back to you once you've let it out on a mouse-hunt I have no idea. But in theory. Let's say I'd become a multi millionair one day. I'd buy an old abbey and I'd have a few cool animals. Like an Irish wolf hound. I love those. So one of those. Maybe a monkey. And definetly an owl. I'd let it fly free in my library. Get it a little stick to sit on. Actually, I think I'll write a song and call it "what is it about owls?". Or maybe not.

That'll teach you not to bring men back from the pub.

I had crazy dreams again last night. But for once they weren't of the morbid kind, which is weird seeing as I spent some time yesterday looking at pictures of third world burials, decapitated people, people who'd shot themselves in the head (boy, those are nasty wounds), and people who'd decided to end their life by standing in front of a train. Hm... Anyhow. I didn't have dreams about this, although at some point there was a detail in one of the dreams concerning someone getting decapitated by a helicopter. In the beginning of the dream I was staying with my paternal grandparents in their house in the middle of the forrest by a lake. I can see where this come from. Wednesday night I shared a room with mindthelacuna and I made the comment that it smelt like my grandparents summer house. But anyroads, I was living there with them, and they weren't really treating me that well. I can't remember exactly why I was living there, but it was for some practical reason, like my parents had died or my grandparents house were closer to school or whatever. Then I went to school, like, the level you're at when you're 17-ish. I was there with mindthelacuna, and we both thought that after the break we'd be having a double-hour of finances and then something else. But after hanging around for a while, we realised that both those courses ended last term and that we had the rest of the afternoon off. So we went to Kulturhuset for coffee and on our way there we met our band's drummer, so he went with us. We sat down and I was the only one who wanted coffee, Drummer and Mindthelacuna were drinking something else. So I went to the counter to get my coffee, but there wasn't enough, so I had to ask for more. That's when the counter turned into the reception of a police station, and I got a job answering the emergency calls. The problem was there was no one there that I could ask for help and I didn't really know what to do. But I answered the phone best I could anyway. The first person who phoned was a girl who had brought two men back from the pub to her flat and they refused to leave. It wasn't that they were actually doing anything or bothering her in any other way than refusing to leave her home. I told her that I'd send a police car round to her house as soon as I could, although I had no idea how I'd do that. And then I told her in my politest voice that "well, that will teach you not to bring men back from the pub", and we were sort of laughing together and then we hung up. Then two people came in to my little office and started answering the phones that were now ringing hysterically, and they were being über efficient and asking loads of questions whilst at the same time getting in contact with police people to go and help all these people. And then I woke up I think. Busy night.

Pondering over the Internet Effect.

Ok, this is going to be part repetition, part new boring stuff, but this is my blog and I can write whatever the hell I want. Within limits and legal restrictions, obviously. Right. It's my firm belief that one of the most defining features of modern society is the introduction of the internet. If, for a moment, we consider writing throughout the ages, it's always been concerning pretty much the same stuff. Things that are written down tend to belong to either one of two categories; either it's written down for practical reasons, for example calculations, inventories, to do-lists, things like that. Or it's storytelling, fiction, plays, generally stuff written down for people's enjoyment. What is stopping people from reading really ancient stories is usually not that they're "boring" or whatever, I think it's more often to do with the language it's written in. We as a society suck at updating classical works, and we end up with things like the Iliad, which is terribly difficult to understand, but underneath the tricky form and words there's a fascinating story. Errr... My point here is that fiction throughout the ages tend to deal with pretty much the same themes. Infidelty, love, hate, the relationship between parents and children, between lovers et c. Works of fiction always reflect the society in which they were created, thus we can draw the conclusion that these subject matters are somewhat permanent in society. Look at any soap opera these days, or Big Brother, or any movie made or book written, and compare it to an ancient Greek tragedy. People have had the same problems always, since we stopped pissing about as hunters and settled down in little villages. Uhm. To be continued.

Taking the piss.

"How do you like it?"
I gazed along the invisible trail the voice had left through the cold November air. It led to a bench by a bus stop, and belonged to a man in his twenties. He was looking a bit rough, a couple of days growth on his chin and a tattered hat on his head.
"How do I like what" I asked, looking in to his hollow eyes.
"Being dead, of course."
"I'm not dead" I said, my left foot creating semi-circular patterns in the snow.
"Of course you are, dear" he said and lit a cigarette.
"No I'm not."
"How do you know?" The smoke from his cigarette travelled towards the sky.
"Well I... I... I don't know."

How do you actually know you're not dead?

Death for relationships?

A hectic few days. Thursday was pretty cool. I spent most of the day studying, and finishing a project a few days ahead of time. Friday, I don't really remember much of apart from going to my friend's house for veggie lasagna and loads of wine. We spent most of the evening talking about death. She told me about a friend of hers who had died. The service in the church had been for everyone, but when it was time to lower the coffin into the ground only the family had been present. As my friend was walking home later that night, she decided to walk past the cemetary to see what the grave looked like. When she got there, she could see the whole in the ground, but the coffin wasn't there. Is there some sort of tradition/routine/whatever here that me and my friend are unaware of? After you lower the coffin in the ground, do you get it back up and store it somewhere over night?

Any old road, my friend has broken up with her boyfriend. He sent me an e.mail today saying something about wanting to tell me about it before he moves out. I really got the feeling as I was replying that we were talking about someone who'd died or something. And also, I felt a bit bad, because he started the e.mail going "I'm not going to do like [another friend's ex-boyfriend] and spend the next to hours telling you about mine and [my friend's] relationship". I mean, it's not like I wouldn't have listened if he would've wanted to. In the end, I replied in the shortest terms, along the lines of how I'd not yet spoken to my friend and didn't want to say too much, but wishing him good luck for the future and whatever. A bit sugary, I admit, but it kind of seemed polite at the time. Well, my friend's visiting next weekend so we can get pissed, talk about what's happened, gossip and just generally waste a bit of time together. So there.

Enough of this gay banter!

Right. I have this creepy gift of thinking of things/dreaming of things/hearing of things for the first time and then being haunted by information about these things for no good reason. I can only draw the conclusion that the CIA are somehow monitoring my brain and presenting bits of info accordingly. Example from just minutes back. In the middle of my daily media consumtion (extremely intense at the mo) I'm reading at the Guardian's website about how the Saatchi gallery is deep in debt. As I'm reading this I'm thinking "oh, who the bloody hell is it Charles Saatchi is married to again", but I'm not really interested enough to google him. Having finished my reading of the online version of the Guardian, I'm moving over to the Mirror. Force of habit I'm checking out what the 3am girls are up to first, and what do I see at the bottom, under "surveillance"? Following; "NIGELLA Lawson and husband Charles Saatchi sending back a red wine for being too cold during lunch at Cipriani's..." Eerie? Yes, it is. As hell. And I knew it was Nigella really, I'd just temporarily forgot.

I'm still being swept by the Colin Farrell wave created by that dream a few days back. American Outlaws tonight @ 9pm. Yay.

Tales from the crypt...

Last nights dream was scary. It started as a film, but ended with me sitting in a room in a crypt holding a rifle, prepared to shoot any living dead trying to open the door. Scene 1: a young boy is turning a key in what looks like a pretty normal, although admittedly huge, mausoleum in a graveyard. The turning of the key causes a load of other little keys and stuff to turn, and a man -thought to be dead- trapped within the mausloeum is slowly spinning around. At this point in the dream/film I understand that he's not dead at all, he's trapped there by mistake. As the keyturning comes to a halt, a sort of door opens, and the man walks out. He goes looking for his wife, who lives with the young boy (their son, I would've thought) and some other people in a house close to the cemetary. He finds her and explains that he's not dead at all. Suddenly they're back in the mausoleum, which has now turned into a giant crypt and is located in the cellar of their house. It's quite a weird crypt, consisting of a long hallway, and on the sides of this hallways are either rooms created for the dead, or just holes in the stone where the dead are resting in various states of decay. When they get back to the house, the man is no longer looking dead, and they think that they've overcome some sort of curse that caused him to be in a sort of limbo in terms of life/death. His skin is no longer grey, there's no cobweb in his hair, his eyes are alive. They go to sleep. In the middle of the night, the wife wakes up, and notices that one of her eyes have disappeared completely and the other one is definetly rotting. She realises that the curse has moved from her husband to her. In the morning she tells him this. He seems to be fine with it though, but the wife is not, so she goes to the crypt on her own. She running around, tearing a few of the corpses out of their in-the-wall-boxes, I especially remember a husband and wife, where she's a complete skeleton, and he has still got skin and a bit of hair, although all moist has long dried from his body. She finds some sort of well, something, that her husband left in the crypt as he returned to the living world, and she shoots it. The following night, her eyes have grown back, and by this point I turn in to the wife. I wake my husband, turn on the lights next to the bed and pull back my hair from my face to show him my eyes so that he will understand that he's now the one dying. He gets a bit... angry... or whatever, and we decide to go to the crypt and try to sort things out once and for all. As we open our bedroom door, there are three obviously dead men there, eyes a watery shade of greyish blue, and their bodies grey from decaying and their clothes in rags. When they see us they start chasing after us. We try to shoot them, I'm now equipped with a rifle and my husband's got some sort of pistol. They don't seem too affected though. We run down to the crypt, where the bodies, our family I guess, are in absolute uproar. We try opening the rooms, that have been built like a sort of morbid hotel, but in all of them there are people - dead people - trying to get up and kill us. In the end we find what we think is an empty room, so we go in and my husband is running around trying to make sure that we are definetly alone. I sit down on a chair with my rifle and wait for the living dead to find us, knowing that there's no way out. And then I woke up.

Father Postcard...

Right. I had lots of weird dreams last night, and I remember them with unusual clarity. It was a set of three dreams, the most interesting of which I'm going to write about now. It's got depth, it's got drama, secrets, lies, religious questioning, it's got it all - I dreamt I married Colin Farrell. The wedding was to take place in the church closest to where my parents live. Especially for this occasion it had been transformed into a Catholic church. In my dream, this meant that everything was cleared out of the church and replaced by white fabric, a few scarlet red cushions for me and mr Farrell to kneel down onto during the service, and the seating arrangements where somehow located to just outside the church. Me and mr Farrell where walking from the altar to outside, through the gathering of people, so that we'd sort of reach starting point to walk back in and get married. This dream was in English, which isn't in itself unusual, but I did speak with an Irish accent, which is just plain stupid 'cause, well, basically I don't normally and not that I've tried but I don't think I could pull it off to save my life. Funny thing was, Colin Farrell in my dream was really really shy. He was sort of almost shorter than me (which I guess could be true, because I'm pretty tall), and seemed scared by it all. Also I got the sense that he married me as some sort of cover-up. As we were walking away from the altar, I asked him about the Catholic priest that we'd replaced the Lutheran one with, and he went "oh, yeah, that's father Postcard". To which I replied, Irish accent intact; "Father Postcard?!?". He told me to be quiet so we could get on with it. After the service, which I don't actually remember much of, we stood on a mountain, looking out over Greece. Pretty weird. But nice at the same time. When I read my morning newpaper this morning, there was a huge picture of Colin Farrell on the front page and an articel about the Pocahontas film. Weird.