Some of these were taken from a car, which posed a bit of a problem. Most of the good pictures, composition-wise, were too blurry to be useful. Some of them turned out really nice, though, especially since people generally stay unaware of a photographer passing in a car. I know one of these people, though.
I make my own food most of the time, generally because the pre-made solutions, save for those from unreasonably expensive restaurants, are way too often icky. However, while I am extremely picky with the aesthetics of other things, like my clothes, my apartment, my friends... I care not at all about how the food looks, as long as it tastes good and does not contain nasty shit.
This is just a close-up of my brie, penne rigate, soy sausage and dark bread dish. I never knew brie looked so revolting! Well, it is mold, so it should not exactly be surprising.
I have never felt more American than when I made this last week. It is a garlic baguette. Covered in mozarella cheese! Mmm... It took its toll, though, after eating it I almost felt like puking from all the fat.
This was supposed to be a chocolate cake. Unluckily, we improvised a little regarding the recipe, so it turned out to become the largest chocolate donut I have ever eaten, and it looked like a turd. Good going!
This was great! Mashed potatoes with some cheese and pepper mixed in, together with chanterelles, carrots and soy sausages. The stuff in the picture is the leftovers, it looked better at dinner.
In some small way, music is like drugs to me. We have all heard that comparison before, I guess (or any combination X is like Y where X and Y could represent love, religion, music, drugs and a number of other things dear to some people), but it was not until I stopped using my iPod (or any other portable music device) on a daily basis that I realized how much it has generally been clouding my thinking.
I am not talking about listening to music in the background at home here, but rather listening to music in the foreground while walking or commuting. Suddenly, I think a lot more, and I think way better while walking than while staring at a computer screen. And most importantly, I come up with new (and actually listenable) music myself, something which I find impossible to do indoors unless I have had at least a bottle of wine and in the latter case the music in question is not listenable when I have sobered up.
So, this evening I will be sitting on a cold and possibly somewhat damp bench in a park close to my home, composing a new song.
In other news, I scanned some of the other old pictures I found. They are as interesting as the others - especially the profile with the purple lipstick. I cannot for the life of me understand what the crew were thinking, but it certainly is a great memento to show the grandchildren.
I was pretty upset today by a debate article in Svenska Dagbladet, one of the largest "real" (as in not only concerned with tv-shows and insane and/or nude celebrities) newspapers in Sweden. Not only was it written by Jan Myrdal, one of the Swedish left's least likable people in my humble opinion, due to his love for dictators and massacres worldwide, but it was also the single worst argument for not allowing same-sex marriages. Disregarding the classic "Think of the children" argument which I can actually see myself sympathizing with to some extent (as long as there is scientific proof to back it up), it was all a rambling tirade of gibberish which only serves to affirm my animosity towards Mr Myrdal. Nowhere did he manage to convey a good reason that homosexuals should not be allowed to marry.
Being neither a homosexual (because of laziness, I use the term here to describe all the various forms of non-heteresexual people who are sexually attracted to consenting adults), nor a hater of homosexuals, I have not had the energy necessary to get a deeper understanding the whole gay debate or the mechanics behind it. My main problem is understanding what the problem is. As long as we disregard the question of having children and discuss only consenting adults (as well as assinine ideas such as trying to force religious institutions to marry homosexuals even though it is against their tenets!), I have never seen a good reason to not allow homosexuals to do the same thing heterosexuals do. Well, gay men usually have abysmal taste in music, but apart from that, they are generally like everybody else. The previous sentence might be illegal under Swedish law.
Speaking of music! I have started digging classical music again. It has been ages. I used to love Dvorak, Prokofiev, Debussy, Bach and many others, but I realized when I accidentally put a (J.S.) Bach mp3 on my phone that I have hardly listened to any in... five years or so. No more of that bereavement, though!
Another weekend and another movie. This time I saw Ratatouille and was extremely pleasantly surprised! Granted, it followed all the rules of cheesy (ahaha, I made a funny) childrens' films, but it did so while being fab both visually and storywise. Actually, it is probably the most beautiful 3d-rendered movie ever, though it cannot measure up to the most beautiful 2d work. As long as you are ok with all the overt moral pointers and the completely hackneyed sort of cartoon romance, it is one of the few must-sees of 2007.
I had the weirdest dreams again. I think the initial setting was that I would go away for a weekend trip to London (which I am actually planning to do in a few weeks) and just hang around. However, my time in London was brief, and I found myself instead in a very small country called Rowenia or somesuch. It revolved around a large brick building, which I believe was an old boarding school or customs station. Together with my travel companion, I speculated in the origins of the country, and how it could just as well have been a part of a larger country such as France.
The architecture seemed western Mediterranean enough, and a dead giveaway was that the soldiers spoke French, which led to me having a problem communicating with them. As we took in the sight of the large brick building under an overcast sky, I noticed that a rather large and lively stream with lots of bends ran next to it on one side, which actually lapped the building walls. I said aloud that I wondered how on earth the building was holding against the forces of nature like that, and my companion replied that there was most likely an ongoing process of building and destruction. In some places the wall looked new, and in others you could see the mortar crumbling and falling out from between the bricks.
We continued our tour through the small country, and found ourselves walking over some sort of bridge resembling a drawbridge, where there was a sloped, broad street between some houses which could as well have appeared in Kiki's Delivery Service. Visby-esque, that is. Suddenly, we were ushered away from the middle of the street, as there was apparently going to be a parade. The French-speaking soldiers did their best to communicate with me, but I could not understand their requests. Then a woman appeared, who was quite apparently trying to get it on with me. It went badly, to say the least, as she suddenly accused me of having spit on the back of her neck. I took a look, and sure enough, there was some foamy, slimy liquid there. I told her it must have come from the sky, even though I was not sure whether I had accidentally spit on her while speaking.
The resolution to the situation eludes me, as I was suddenly at least twenty years older and on my way home from this weekend trip, which, it was stressed, lasted from Friday to Sunday. Friday to Sunday. Friday to Sunday. I had a beard which was starting to grey and a big black bag of some sort. I got on a bus down by Stadsgårdskajen in Stockholm but when it arrived at my stop, the bus just passed it by, despite my cries of frustration aimed at the bus driver. My bag also got stuck between the seats, so it was a few more stops before I could get off, next to a motorway. Defying death, I ran over it to catch the next bus in the opposite direction.
The sky was still overcast, and there were no people about, just cars, even though this was just a small grassy knoll in the middle of a city. I started walking in the direction of the bus I wanted to take, just to see it pass me by. I started running, very fast indeed, and the scene changed to one where I think I ran along Strandvägen, from Dramaten towards Djurgården. There was water on one side of the road, at least. I recall the bus being number 55, and I actually managed to race past it to a bus stop where I stood, panting, waiting for the bus to stop to pick me up. However, to my dismay, only bus 51 stopped at this location, and the bus driver just gazed my way with a very sad and distant look. During my whole run, an icon depicting Jesus, in the Russian style, laid in the water, slightly submerged, glowing with a greenish sheen.
Then I woke up.
I saw Stardust the other day. It has been a while since I read anything about Neil Gaiman, and ages since I read Stardust, which I recall being a very good book, though not on par with Anansi Boys, American Gods or Good Omens. Watching the movie, I started remembering bits and pieces, but not enough to say whether it was accurate or not. Not that I usually care too much about a movie following the source, except in blatant cases such as Constantine. What bollocks. I love Hellblazer, but I could not even watch the movie. Anyway, Stardust was a perfect cozy feelgood film.
Also, I finished Sputnik Sweetheart, and though the ending was the typical Murakami thing where a lot of plot threads are just dropped, the book as a whole was very good, and rather different from his other books in that it was much more concise and to the point, for good and for bad. Still, I mostly wish I could read The Wind-up Bird Chronicle for the first time again.
My life for once: I move out in just a few weeks. It feels very strange to leave my home of five years, but I suspect that I will be pretty happy once I settle in in my new apartment, with its pretty balcony. The dark cloud on my winter sky will be my thesis, which is still nowhere near finished. Damn you, thesis! Oh, and I have enrolled in a one semester geology/astronomy course. The Devil finds work for idle hands, you know.
Also, I found a lot of pictures from almost a decade ago, when I used to do modelling work for various magazines and designers. In hindsight, I did look pretty silly, and I cannot understand why they coloured my hair pink like that. It was a pretty fun job at the time, though. More pictures coming soon!
So I had the weirdest dream tonight. Yesterday evening, I was sitting at home in my sofa with a bit of a cold, reading Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase. Without spoiling too much of the book, the Dolphin Hotel makes an appearance in this book, just as it does in Dance, Dance, Dance. The funny thing is that the protagonist in the latter book has dreams about the hotel. So did I.
The setting was a large, run-down hotel, which in my dream changed as I walked through it. There were corridors that disappeared when I turned my back as well as wallpapers that changed their colours between various drab pastels. I especially remember taking the elevator as high as it would go, floor eight, in search of my room. I was, for some reason, carrying a lot of bread and vegetables, wearing only slacks. I then took the stairs to floor nine, where there was only a large wooden panel at the top of the stairs. Realizing I could open it, there was another door behind it, which I dared not enter. Instead I went down to the lobby where a tall, blonde man greeted me, speaking softly in a German far too fast for me to follow. I indicated that I did not really comprehend his wishes. He then switched to English and gave me two tarot decks. The cards were identical, save for their size. One deck was much larger than the other. I proceeded to pull out one of my own, a design called Basic Tarot (which I actually own in real life, because I at one point in time thought the cards looked nice for some reason). Having looked at the decks he gave me, I queried him as to why he had not given me Crowley's Thoth tarot instead, and that I would have preferred the edition with three different versions of The Emperor. He then gave me a very strange look.
There was also much ado about some glassed-in area in the centre of the hotel, but I cannot for the life of me remember exactly what it was about, except for the fact that the hotel's owner looked like Chuck Norris.
In the non-dream world, I have been playing some games due to my convalescence. World in Conflict is quite nice. The graphics are good, the story is more or less plausible and the explosions are, for lack of a more subtle description, gratifying. My first impression of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, however, is crap. It is just like Battlefield 2 except it is no fun. Maybe I cannot grasp the mechanics, maybe I am not in its target group. I dunno.
My new Tamron 90mm 2.8 is a very, very fun beast to play around with. Not that I have the slightest idea about how to shoot properly with a macro lens, but since I am quite happy, that can wait. Meanwhile, I am looking to find a cheap ring flash. Not that the results are especially pretty, but apart from looking cool in themselves, ring flashes bring desperation and hopelessness out of any motif you could think of. A bit like Tolkien's ring, actually. And therefore, my precious!
(Please note that I never even bothered to read the Lord of the Rings books, and I only saw two of the movies.)
I started playing the new Company of Heroes game, Opposing Fronts, and found it to be... exactly the same. I was just a little bit disappointed. Especially since the Germans sound like people trying to fake a German accent while being slightly retarded. I guess I should give it a few more missions before being disappointed. However, my hopes for World in Conflict, which I acquired today, are much higher.
This last Sunday, I went to Hötorget to shop used books for silly low prices. I have found some very nice literature there at times, and this day was not an exception. I got a big book about the churches in Copenhagen, complete with illustrations of various details and there was this Polish book about European art in Polish collections, from before the war if I remember correctly.
It has been quite a while, but my business has been great. Apart from having a full-time job, I have also been working quite a lot on my thesis and searching for an apartment. The latter task, I am happy to say, is finished. I found a very nice two-room apartment in central Stockholm, in a house built in the late 1920s. It has a fireplace, a balcony and is damn nice. The problem, as expected, is that it will cost me a bloody fortune to live there.
Somebody has knitted here. I have no idea whether they made the whole thing right there, or if only the finishing touches were made at the site.
This is probably one of the best pictures I have ever taken. I am sure you will agree.
When taking a walk with a friend, I found this nice plank. It says "WE WALK SLOWLY" and I have no idea what it means.
Yes, I have been drinking again, as is painfully apparent.
I found The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle to be the best Murakami book as of yet. Not only was it rock-solid through the whole story, but it also had an ending I did not dislike. I also read Hard-Boiled Wonderland, but it was really nowhere near as good. A Wild Sheep Chase which I am reading at present seems to be more like the former, which makes me pretty happy.
I took a pause in my Murakami marathon these last few days to read the latest Terry Pratchett book, Making Money. I found it to be very easy to read, but a little bit shallow. Of course, we are talking Pratchett here, and his books always tend to be rather shallow, but in a good way. Lots of archtypes and a few real characters, simple but effective stories, wonderful to read. It is not exactly a wonder why Homer (or whoever wrote those books) is such a famous guy. However, Making Money was somehow a little bit more shallow than usual. Only the main protagonist is given any character at all. Everybody else is just a cardboard cutout. Still a very good read, but I would have expected a wee bit more.
Today, I was a bit ambitious and went to Kulturhuset where I ambled around for a bit and looked at Martin Parr and Nobuyoshi Araki photo exhibitions. Parr was rather interesting. No fantastic pictures, no great art as such. However, he seems to be very gifted when it comes to capturing the spirit of a time and/or place, which sometimes counts for a lot more than the perfect composition. Araki seemed to like women who are tied up and have plastic lizards stuffed up their reproductive organs. It was a little silly, but there were some fantastic pictures of flowers and his beloved cat which made me forgive the rather tedious bondage bits.
Hey, I am all grown up, bitter and artsy. Since I have a camera, everything must now be in black and white. Also, I am honestly trying to learn to like jazz of the Bix Beiderbecke kind, but it is not going too well. I always switch to VNV Nation or Einstürzende Neubauten after five minutes.
I found a friend, a flower, a wild strawberry (which was not so wild since it grew on a balcony, so I would call it a tame strawberry, but then I would have a hard time conveying the fact that it is one of those small strawberries, Fragaria vesca, which we Swedes call smultron), a sunglasses-wearing child in a church holding a fish in front of the altar (oh, the symbolism) and a big clay butt next to flowers.
I also found I could fry some Quorn in lots of Kikkoman soy and white rice vinegar, add various vegetables and then throw in a bunch of udon noodles. Needless to say, this is a damn tasty dish which I fear I may get tired of very soon if I continue to make it all the time.
I also finished reading Dance Dance Dance which I felt was strangely familiar at times, I cannot really place it, but it was very much like some other book I read a long time ago. It also bore a passing resemblance to Lolita, which is not a bad thing. All in all I liked Kafka on the Shore a bit better, though. Of course, I have already started on my next Murakami book - The Wind-up Bird Chronicle - which hitherto is decidly better than both of the above. That might change though. The ending is so often the crucial part. The funny thing is that The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is certainly feeling eerily pertinent right now.
So I got the result from my final exam back yesterday, and it was positive enough. A pass, nothing more, but it still means I only have to finish my thesis now, and I will officially be a Master of Science. I like that title - it reminds me of He-Man.
Also, despite my recent horrible experiences with all things electronic but perhaps because of my sour mood caused by my recent break-up among other things, I decided to spend all my remaining cash on a Canon EOS 400D. I had the previous model in the series, the 350D, some time back, but was forced to sell it as I was a bit shorter on cash than I liked. Anyway, I got a 50mm 1.8 lens of questionable build quality which takes great pictures, a decent flash, a 55-200mm zoom and some other stuff, so now I will spend my days trying to freeze the sky. As above.
I also bought this fabulous white shirt with black cuffs, collar and buttons. It is very, very nice, and I wonder why I have never made one like that. Yesterday, I read a bit more than half of Murakami's Dance Dance Dance, which was fantastic until about where I am now, but now it is not more than great. Still great, mind you, but I guess my expectations are far too high for the poor Mr. Murakami to be able to deliver all the time.
For the first time in ages, since I mostly play Wii and simple web games, I was actually considering going to the store to shell out for a PC game, BioShock in this case, which looks absolutely fantabulous. I had my €45 ready and willing for the Swedish launch tomorrow - and then I learned that this (offline!) game requires online activation. Do these people understand nothing? The crackers will crack, the couriers will cour (?), the "Scene" will be lit with industrial light and magic with the result that everyone will be downloading it via BitTorrent within a week, anyway. The only thing that sort of practice does is put people off from buying BioShock. Pity. It seems to be great fun, and I liked the randian slant to the game. Some Half-Life game I got quite a while ago will stay my latest acquisition for some time to come, I guess.
In other news, I am nowadays utterly girlfriend-less, so I went to a bookstore and got Norwegian Wood, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle and Dance Dance Dance (I just picked them randomly from the books available). All by Haruki Murakami, whose writing I simply love. Equally randomly, I decided to start with Dance Dance Dance. Hitherto, it seems as great as I expected it to be.
I have recently been reading quite a lot of books, and this - combined with a very strange semi-hallucinatory awakening this morning within which I had the main theme of a story presented to me by myself to the tones of Last Train to Trancentral - led me to feel the uncontrollable urge to start sketching the rough outlines of a short story myself. I have no idea whether it will just end up in the trash like all my other attempts at writing, but this is the first time I have actually been able to develop the protagonist (or antagonist, as it were) to an extent with which I am satisfied.
Apart from crying over all my electronic apparel going haywire for no good reason - the holy electronic udder having exploded in my face as I suckled its flame-retardant teats, as it were - I have been to parties. Some are good, and some are not.
Yesterday held one of the former in store. Sorry about the picture quality - another feature of the P1i phone of course. The party started innocently enough, but it might have been the ouzo and the gyoza I brought with me, like a harbinger of wailing doom, that made everyone rummage through the wardrobes to find all sorts of fancy dress. We also destroyed three bananas, did the Benny Hill dance several times and tried vacuuming everything we could reach, including a mouth.
I have now had my (hopefully) last exam ever. Last, unless I someday decide I would like to become a doctor or I feel like studying for studying's sake. Anyway, the subject was real estate finance, and it makes me a wee bit uncomfortable. Studying (basic) chemistry or physics is ok, because it tells what matter will and will not do. Studying economics and statistics is worse to me, because it says what people in aggregate will and will not do. I prefer believing in free will and that the human mind cannot be so easily predicted, actions of human groups modelled like those of ants. Alas, that can be pretty hard.
Statistics in themselves have always been a bit counter-intuitive to me, despite the fact that I have studied the subject quite a lot. Something inside me says that rolling a dice six times should be equally likely to give an average of 1 as one of 3.5. On the other hand, something inside me has always wondered why left and right are inverted in a mirror, but not up and down.
Something inside me might be a little bit daft, or maybe those Machine Elf Gods that people who trip on DMT report seeing are having a little joke at my expense. You never know.
Alright, I have had the worst tech experiences ever recently. I thought I had seen it all over the years, but apparently not.
The MacBook Pro I got for work suffered from a hinge which does not go back far enough. Since I am rather tall, this makes it impossible for me to use it comfortably on a table in front of me without using external mouse and keyboard. Another MacBook Pro owner told me that this is common, and the angle is different for different batches of hinges. When he made a fuzz about it, the retailer told him to wait a bit so that the hinge production stabilizes or some such bullshit. Furthermore, the screen is a wee bit flickery, and has some kind of a white spot which is not even a proper dead pixel. Oh, the enter key was all wobbly too. The store where I bought the computer was nice enough to replace the keyboard, so now I have one with a brand new wobbly enter key. Whoop-de-doo!
Having actually been around since the first Mac was released, even though I was just a wee kid at that time, I am appalled at this complete damn lack of quality control on Apple’s part. With the risk of sounding like an old geezer capable of predicting the weather by means of his swollen knee, the early PowerBooks worked for ages. I had one which was ten years old and ran just fine. My LC worked forever and so did my LC475. I have an SE and an SE/30 in the attic which both work perfectly well twenty years later. Now, both my MacBook Pro and MacBook have various issues. My mother's MacBook has had to have its hard drive replaced twice within its first year on this earth, presumably due to heat issues, as she never even moves it from the desk. Her Mac Mini also failed once or twice. So did her Airport Express, on a hot day when the temperature reached 30 degrees celsius.
Granted, computers have become cheaper and are now more of a perishable good than a durable one, but is it actually worth it for Apple and other producers to have so many faulty units? The shipping alone must cost a fortune, never mind the repairs.
Speaking of that, I saw the funniest ad in a while today. Some assinine picture trying to convey luxury and the catchphrase “Shopping turns up the heat.” This was no Al Goresque message, but it was situated outside fancy Sturegallerian where people certainly do not shop because they must, but because they can. Maybe they should have used some more appropriate wording due to the recent global warming and over-consumerism debate. I would have posted a picture if I could, which brings me to the next point.
My new phone works like an employee in a Soviet factory. That is, slowly if at all. The menus are a pain to navigate, feeling just like surfing the ‘net on a 14k4 modem. This is supposed to be a powerful unit, mind you, yet it performs much, much slower than any other phone I have ever owned. It should have synced with my equally infuriating but infinitely faster MacBook Pro, but Sony Ericsson decided that they will no longer offer the required software for download. Bravo. Just to add another little tidbit; the phone will not sync through a USB cable unless a driver is installed. There is no reason at all to give it this “feature”, so I wonder whether the Sony Ericsson engineers are just horrible, spiteful little goblins, such as those featured in the accounting department in the Dilbert comic.
Furtherdamnmore, I wanted to unlock my old phone to be able to sell it. This, the store clerk at 3 (the operator in question) told me with a straight face, would take SIX WEEKS. The procedure is such that I tell them “I want to unlock!” and they say “Sure, we’ll send you the unlocking code!” However, it takes them six weeks to do so. Do they need to assemble the high priests of the covenant of arch-traitors to summon the code? Do they let sloths carry the letter from Nepal, through perils unimaginable? Or are they just completely incompetent? I honestly have no idea. I get so very tired sometimes.
At least I got a nice tank top.
I would be writing something right now about the upcoming presidential election in the United States or my newfound love of the Holland Esquire brand. However, I have a meeting in nine hours and I want some sleep and a little bit of time with my books.
In other news, I got the new Sony Ericsson P1i. For some reason, I never buy anything else than Sony Ericsson phones. It is not that I perceive the brand as "trustworthy", "exclusive" or any such bull. I guess I am their dream customer. Needless to say, buying an advanced phone a mere week after its release is almost bound to end in disappointment. The software is so buggy it could ride dunes! Apart from that, the phone seems great. The next system upgrade will hopefully iron out some of the creases.
I was out partying with this crab. He had the sparkly wine, the cigarette and the chili peanut.
I also found this old mask I once made. It is made mostly out of snake skin, metal and very old computer parts. I was certainly more creative a decade ago.
Ah, the things people do. Especially considering that the car is quite expensive and it is parked in the most upscale area of Stockholm. The man with the mischievous grin is not related to the car - just a friend of mine.
This guy drove me nuts some days ago. He is some kind of night butterfly, and those tend to become pretty sleepy during daytime. Since he would have been crushed if I had opened my door, I had to get him to move somehow, but he simply refused. I had to carefully blow on him so that he finally crawled out of harm's way and fell asleep in a corner instead. I cannot for the life of me understand how these creatures survive.
Having been quite impressed by the Murakami book I mentioned previously, I got one of his novels, Kafka on the Shore. It was actually one of the best books I have read in ages. Granted, it sometimes becomes a bit too... referencish, for lack of a better word, but it was fab anyway. I somehow found it to be a bit of a mix between Coelho's The Alchemist and Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach (I like the former much less than the latter, mind you, but that is another story). However, I guess Murakami is far more intellectual and well-read than I am, and there are likely much more fitting comparisons that can be made. I can even confess that I cannot remember listening to the Beethoven trio mentioned in the book, even though I have doubtlessly heard it at some point in my life.
The book made me think of my old washed-out t-shirt which reads "Kafka didn't have a lot of fun either" and has a stylized picture of him in black and white - much like the classic Che motif but a lot more tasteful. I should probably get a fresh one.
So my life has taken a bit of an unexpected turn. I am now creative director at a company dealing in net-based psychology - quite far from the investment banking career I was considering. Also, there is a (rather misleading) "director" in my title. Sweet!
I have been reading some great books, too. For instance, I was delighted to find that Neil Gaiman had released a new collection of short stories, Fragile Things. This one was definitely more uneven than his previous collection Smoke and Mirrors, but a few great stories made it well worth the read nonetheless.
I also scoured the thrift stores for used books and found The Queen of Spades by Aleksander Pushkin which was a nice change from the stuff I usually read.
Having previously been quite disappointed by Hanteringen av odöda (loosely: Managing the Undead) by Swedish horror writer John Ajvide Lindqvist, I decided to give his critically acclaimed debut novel Låt den rätte komma in (loosely: Let the Right One Enter) a try. I guess it was worth it, but I got the same sense of half-bakedness. Certain parts of both the story and the writing are great, but others feel no better than some Naruto fanfic. Lindqvist certainly shows potential yet should probably get more feedback before releasing the end product. Speaking of that, I really wonder why so few fiction authors ever release a "2.0" of their books.
However, the most interesting read I have had in a while is Haruki Murakami's Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. I bought it on a whim at the SF Bookstore in Gamla stan. While I was looking through the new releases shelf, I noticed a book with a very nice cover design, so I decided to ask the clerk whether she knew if it was worth reading. I tend to let chance have a chance to influence my reading habits now and then. Either by looking for a book with a nice design, or just buying something by the author next to one of my favourites. Anyway, the clerk told me that this was actually one of her favourite authors, and she continued to sing praise for at least a minute, which I guess was my cue to buy the book. I did, and I did not regret it. The book is filled with strange, wonderful and horrible short stories, ranging from describing strange situations to life stories. This is the first book in quite some time that has, at times, been a bit moving. Highly recommended!
As regards things that move, I really liked the anime film Paprika, same director as Tokyo Godfathers which is also great. Paprika was like a mix of Lain and Spirited Away, and whereas it did not reach the levels of either it was good fun nonetheless.
A completely unrelated matter: eBay Germans make me so happy. Other people's replies I get are usually "yes" or "no" or some measure/price. When I ask Germans, I almost always get replies which include things like "Einen guten Start in die Woche wünsche ich Ihnen" (Loosely: "I wish you a good beginning of the week"). Sure, it might just be formalities, but still!
Midsummer was nice, by the way. The girls raided the closet full of 80's stuff.
Also, I wonder why there are three bridges next to each other, and whether someone lives in the house inbetween them.
Goddesspeed.
It has been a while, to be sure, but today I felt I really needed to publish a bit of absence of content. I now have only one more exam to write, ever. My internship has come and gone, as has summer, apparently. Today is quite a dreary day with incessant raining. Yesterday, however, was much nicer, and the evening was spent with scores of friends, most of whom were bent on getting copiously drunk.
I think we all succeeded.
On another note, Horst is out and about as usual.
So are animals! The peacock screamed at me when I got too close, whereas the duck happily ate out of my hand. The squirrel was mostly silent and aloof.
Running around in the grass is not so bad, either. I love summer.
Now I just need to write that bloody thesis, which I have postponed far too long.
