Limits of the Rational Actor Model

Everyone seems to be going to Kiruna, and this seems the height of human folly to me. They seem quite excited, and tell me breathless stories about dogsledding, jumping into icy ponds, and going to bars made entirely of ice. They suggest that this will be "fun,"--a suggestion which leads me to believe I need to drastically rethink my understanding of that word.

You see, the place where I live looks like this:




It's cold here. It's dark. The world is covered in six inches of brown sludge. There are bicycles frozen into the river. All we're missing is the three-headed, weeping , six-winged spectacle of Lucifer himself waist-deep in eternal ice, chewing unceasingly on the bodies of traitors and we will have successfully recreated Cocytus, only with universal healthcare and a strict neutrality policy. Now, tell me. Do you look at those pictures and think, "Man, you know what would be great? Going somewhere even more cold and dark."
Kiruna sounds like the kind of place I would pay to keep away from, and I tend to think of Peter O'Toole's explanation that "my idea of heaven is moving from one warm, comfortable, smoke-filled room to another." I don't care if sitting in a sauna then jumping in an icy lake feels good. You know what else feels good? Not being way too hot or way too cold. Imagine that!
The point of this is that my corridor is having our second party on Friday (I'm already setting up alibis) and damn near half the people I know can't make it because they'll be up past the Arctic Circle, merrily dogsledding.
Twits.

Sanna abruptly gave me the old I-think-we-should-just-be-friends on Monday, which I will freely admit is rather annoying, but mostly because I now have to start pretending to find dull people interesting again. I guess.

Other Surprising Events This Week
Ashley-of-the-tattooed-ass is gay.
Her girlfriend speaks Mandarin and German and insists the former is easier than the latter.
I learned Sweden had no official separation of church and state until 2000.

My next trip is probably going to be Helsinki in two weeks, which means I am going to have to sacrifice my principles and commit the heinous crime of actually buying liquor in Sweden. And that sad fact inspired me to think of

Things Which Are Cheaper Than a Bottle of Whiskey in Sweden
A year of cable television
Having all four wisdom teeth removed
An abortion
Five months of bus pass
A year's fees to the student nations
Twelve hamburgers
Three round-trip ferry excursions to Latvia, Estonia, or Finland
Thirty-six beers

I had some really great jokes, including something really brilliant and elaborate about the rational actor model in IR theory, and I've totally forgotten them. Maybe next time? Eh.

Rugby!

As part of my attempt to become the most European American in the history of all humankind, I have lately been acquainting myself with the strange phenomenon of "European sports."

Football (and I mean this in the literal sense...my Europeanness dictates that there is no such thing as "soccer") is of course the first logical entry in this curriculum. I'm roughly familiar with the game ("Ooooh, so they have to kick the ball...I get it now!") and have watched quite a few games out here, so I felt like I could skip the course and head straight to the final exam, which was the Liverpool-Barcelona game of last week. During it, I made a few anthropological observations:
1. Football is a silly sport. Here we have all of these highly fit athletes running up and down the field, apparently always kicking the ball to the other team and then being forced to run back down the field until someone seems to find themselves purley by accident alone in front of the other team's goal, at which point they tend to kick or head-butt the ball in entirely the wrong direction.
2. The majority of a given game of football seems to consist of people being injured by bumps, slight touches, particularly mean glances, and sometimes by nothing at all. The players writhe about on the ground, clutching randomly at extremities, pounding their hands on the grass, crying, and looking rather like they are furiously deciding not to invite the other team to their birthday party where there will be not one but two clowns.

So I figured to hell with football. I thought of that coup in Fiji last December where the general in charge put off his overthrow of the government for a day because the rugby game was on, and used that as my compass. And you know what? I totally understand his reasoning. I have never been more entertained.

For my American readers, a rugby union game is like an American football game, except better in every way. Instead of stopping every nine or ten seconds to stand around slapping one another on the ass and having impromptu committee meetings, when the guy with the ball gets tackled, punched, clotheslined, or otherwise beaten to the ground, with his last anguished dying breath, he heaves the ball to one of his teammates who runs past, giggling. This guy will then keep running until he too gets smashed by like nine guys from different directions, at which point he passes the ball again and the whole thing continues. Sometimes (and I have no idea why, nor quite frankly do I care) a bunch of guys on each side lock arms and form a phalanx to pound into each other and shove the other entire team over, possibly for the purpose of standing or sitting on their opponents' heads. The game I just watched was Scotland vs. France, and I have to tell you, if you haven't seen six big barbarian Scots knock over ten or eleven equivocating French guys (who you can almost hear muttering refusals to participate in diplomatic endeavors and wondering where their cheap red wine went), then you haven't lived. These guys don't wear pads, they hit hard and often, and I'm pretty sure that if left alone together, the average rugby team would kill and eat the average football team.

And as though this spectacle weren't entertaining enough, the announcers (equipped with inscrutable Scottish accents) are a goddamn laugh riot. After the first half hour, I was tempted to start taking notes--I felt the high point was when they referred to France's only chance as resorting to a Fabian defensive strategy...which, of course, is an allusion to Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus, five-time consul and two-time dictator of Rome during the Second Punic War. I wouldn't say I've watched all that many American football games, but somehow I doubt Fabius Maximus was ever mentioned by John Madden.

That, of course, got me thinking. While it can't be denied that most Americans are less well-travelled, culturally experienced, worldly, and polylingual than most Europeans (especially in the last six years, when anti-intellectualism has become a perverse point of pride), I think there is more to the usual claim that Americans are just ignorant. Consider, if you will, that our news media seems geared towards lurid six-year olds, that our politicians rarely if ever talk about actual policies, that the general level of our public discourse is so abysmally low...is it not the case that just as Americans in general are apathetic and willfully ignorant (since all sorts of information is available, they just mostly choose to ignore it) but also that this is perpetuated and reinforced from above?
Take the recent rash of Japanese horror films which have been remade by Hollywood. Is this because American audiences can't identify with characters who aren't white? Is it because Americans don't like to read subtitles? I mean, I'm sure there is plenty of disgusting market research to this effect and it was determined that more Americans will go see films in English starring white people, but the stubborn refusal to try anything else is an interesting phenomenon in and of itself. It's too bad there will never be a case of an American remake being in theaters at the same time as the far superior foreign original film for the purposes of comparison.
Essentially, I think to a large extent the myth of the idiot masses is the opiate of the masses as a whole. I think it is perpetuated at least partially to present an immobile monolithic impression of the hopelessness of change and intellectual development. It is after all an odd bit of doublethink that we are supposed to have great faith in vaunted American creativity and ingenuity (which after all is one of the main motors to our capitalist system) but also are instilled with an unshakable belief that everyone else is a gibbering moron. It's an interesting bit of sociological divide-and-rule.

In other news, I have been delighted to discover that the professor for my Advanced International Politics class (a German with an Italian name who studied in France and became a civil servant there before moving to Denmark and now teaching in Sweden) is the author of a rather good book I've read, and that the professors for my History of Scandinavia 700-1300 (henceforth referred to as "The Viking Class") are a married couple from Oxford who have been writing and teaching together for about fifty years. They're absolutely hilarious, and they seem to have written about half the books on Vikings and medieval Scandinavia that exist in the whole world. I am cautiously optimistic that this next month (in which I have all three classes at once, and then they finish and I have none at all in April) will not be an utter waste of my time.

If nothing else, I expect to watch a lot of rugby.

What I'm Reading
Robert Blake, Disraeli (man, these massive bios of Victorian PMs are excellent!)
H.G.C. Matthew, Gladstone
Benjamin Disraeli, Endymion (yes, the Prime Minister was a novelist)

An Alarming State of Affairs

I'm not entirely certain what's brought it on, but I have recently found myself afflicted with the most rank case of Anglophilia. It's somewhat similar to the "Cold War American Statesman" kick I got wrapped up in back in December, but the blame for that lies pretty squarely on The West Wing and my desire to read all those hefty tomes which the President is always opening and closing thoughtfully on that show. This too has manifested itself in weighty biographies: today I ventured to the Carolina to pick up Andrew Roberts' masterful work on Lord Salisbury, which will be followed by Blake's biography of Disraeli, Philip Guedalla's classic analysis of Palmerston, Wendy Hinde on Castlereagh, and H.C.G.'s Gladstone. I'm two hundred pages into the book on Salisbury and loving every minute of it. (Apparently, his daughters were known in Whig circles as "the Salisbury plains"! Oh ho ho!) In all aspects of my life, I find myself wanting to inhabit a world of pasty people who have excellent television reception and who scurry about under dismal gray skies, complaining about housing prices. Do you understand what I'm saying here? I want to know where "Woking" is.

I am greatly concerned about the Arsenal match.

I can think of no plainer terms in which to phrase this. I am already in favor of tea. I spell words like "democratisation" properly. I have been known to watch adverts on the telly in my flat. The off-key, clipped siren song of my at-least-one-sixteenth motherland is calling to me, urging my return to that rain-addled island from which my forebears were probably cast on pain of death. I can only assume this is the penalty for not knowing where "Woking" is.

Anyway. The guy at the library knew me ("So you're Trevor") because apparently I request and return such volume of unusual literature that they actually have a special shelf set aside just for me. This pleased me to no end--perhaps soon I will simply carry my brain around attached via a chain to a handle and will use it to bludgeon simpletons into submission.

Didn't see Sanna this week, since she had to learn every muscle and bone in the entire human body for a test. I start my two new classes Wednesday, which is likely to cut into my reading time (I always think of my grandfather's plagiarism of Mark Twain: "Never let your schooling interfere with your education") and I am down to a lonely half-bottle of Hennessey, so ideally a trip to Latvia is in the making.

What I'm Reading
Andrew Roberts, Salisbury: Victorian Titan
Robin Neillands, The Dervish Wars: Gordon & Kitchener in the Sudan

But I Don't Even Like Peas

I've been thinking about the future recently.

As I believe I've said before, I'll have one year left at that miserable festering pit of mediocrity which is my alma mater. A year of long commutes, probably working as an office monkey (Christ, I hope I get work as an office monkey) inputting ten thousand reciepts or something, slogging through deadening classes and pulling out what few gray strands of hair remain to me as I go through the process of applying to grad schools.
Hopefully, that stint back in suburban purgatory will pay off with admittance to grad school somewhere in the UK. Preferably London, obviously. The London School of Economics is clearly the top choice here, but they only let in about 10% of applicants for the program I want, so backup plans are in order. I never thought I'd find myself in a position to seriously begin considering applying to Oxford and Cambridge, but since the LSE is pretty much the best on the planet, as long as I'm shooting for the moon, I might as well be thorough about it.
But really, the goal is to live and study in London. Seriously thinking about this has led me to the following conclusions:
1. There is apparently some sport in which grown men run about dressed in gaudy costumes, attempting to kick a ball at one another. Perhaps I should be aware of this outlandish custom?
2. By law, all food in the UK (up to and including ice cream) seems to be served with peas. I will need to come to terms with this.
3. Jesus Cartwheeling Christ, everything in London is expensive. How do I afford a place to live? What are my odds for finding a job? How much debt am I going to end up with? Will I even be able to afford peas?

Now, I find wrapping my head around a master's degree to be daunting enough--I'm not even going to begin considering a Ph.D. at this point. Cross that bridge when I come to it.
However, there is always The Career Question to worry about. And I think I've just about settled on a backup plan, should a more lucrative Europe-based job not pan out: the Foreign Service.
Now, most of you are aware I've kicked this idea around before and mainly discarded it. The idea of having to carry out policy decisions I disagree with or think are stupid would drive me crazy. I wouldn't want to work to further the aims of the US Government, surrounded by neocons, having had to publicly pledge to support every policy of whatever administration happens to be cheerfully raping the world at the time.
These are legitimate concerns. However, I have also come to realize that all jobs involve carrying out decisions I disagree with or think are stupid. There will be mindless neocon drones in pretty much every field--and actually, all of the blogs of Foreign Service officers which I've read have made a point (either of pride or complaint) that being an avid Republican in the Foreign Service can be damaging to your career, even in a Republican administration. Yes, devoting my life to expanding and protecting the interests of the United States would bother me, but you know...at least it's some sort of service to something greater. And at least it passes most of the Kennedy test: full use of my abilities along lines of (almost) excellence.
Look at the plus sides. Lots and lots of travel, significant time spent abroad. Living and working with people who (hopefully) are intelligent, well-educated, and extremely good at what they do. Learning several languages. As careers go, it's not a bad one. You remember that post with the three options a few months ago? This is the best possible version of Option Two.

Course, it'll be a long time before I'm even close to start really getting ready to apply, and even then, the process takes about a year. This is just a vague backup plan, but the more I objectively consider it, the more attractive it starts to seem.

That's about all I've got for now. I keep meaning to write something about how silly the Swedes are in grocery stores, but....eh. I'll get around to it.

Drinks with Sanna and Other Structural Changes

Tom Waits used to have a standard joke where he said what he was really looking for was a woman who owned a liquor store. That isn't exactly an option out here in this frozen den of godless communism, but in the aftermath of two really excellent dates, I seem to have fallen accidentally into the next best thing. I think I might be dating a girl who runs a bar.

Some exposition is in order. You will recall that I got this girl's phone number when she was tending bar at GH nation a week or two ago. I thought at first that she was American or Canadian--she has literally no accent whatsoever and unlike the other accentless Swedes, she leaves off the ends of words in the manner of a natural speaker. And she knows her liquor. We arranged a Saturday lunch date, and she showed up even after I drunkenly texted her a few days before, which I considered a good sign.

I tend to consider first dates to be sort of like job interviews. This one went well, and we made arrangements for another. I saw her and her drop-dead gorgeous friend (you know that Swedish supermodel Tiger Woods married? This is her cousin) again Friday night, when it became clear that Sanna (the girl) is pretty much in charge of the pub at GH and can get burgers pretty much any time she wants. She has keys to the place. She gets drinks for free, and GH has the most robust stock of beer in Uppsala.

Friday night went (ahem) well. Having gotten through the awkward introductory phases and determined that there is chemistry and that the other person isn't an axe murderer or anything, we seem to be past the initial hurdles and are about to begin coasting on that intoxicating early-relationship buzz. All that's really left (in Sanna's words) is to get seriously drunk together, since you learn quite a lot about someone by doing that.

My point in relating this is not (entirely) to gloat, but more because this has prompted some interesting structural changes in my life here. A friend of a friend once very accurately said that the worst thing about being single is that you feel the obligation to be nice all the time, even to the most uninteresting, self-absorbed, manipulative people. I will add to that by also suggesting that being single can be a source of constant pressure and (if company is your aim) essentially precludes enjoying yourself while in the process of trying to meet somebody. Let me give an example: I went to a party last night, and I'm going to a party in about two hours. Previous parties have been generally uninspiring at best--my cheerfully self-destructive relationship with Sarah has guaranteed that I have been afflicted with all of the problems of being single, but none of the freedom to try to meet anybody new, since I have been constantly fending her off. Parties have consisted of trying to impress people I don't really like (but who are the only ones around) while avoiding Sarah and being ever conscious of the almost anthropological observations of Sarah's Media-and-Communications-Studies classmates. This is not a recipe for meeting new people, starting up things with women, or even having interesting conversations. I tend to retire to a dark corner with a bottle until I eventually get bored and go home. Or until something weird and surreal happens, which my regular readers will know is fairly often.

But last night's party? Had a hell of a good time. I don't have to worry if this snidey French girl I'm chatting up likes me or not. I don't have to care if Sarah's making an ass of herself. I don't have to talk to anyone I don't want to talk to, charm anyone I don't want to charm. There's no pressure, no expectations on my part. I don't usually let myself become concerned with what anybody thinks of me, and now that I've realized just to what extent I had done so and now stopped, it's quite liberating.

In what is (probably) an entirely unrelated story, I've also started using more of my primitive Swedish and been eating Swedish food. The former consists of attempting to order coffee and tell corridormates where I'm going in Swedish, only to be met by a) English (since they know my Swedish sucks) or b) a barrage of rapid-fire Swedish (because they are joyless sadists). Swedish food consists of two options. The first is crackers (knäckebröd) with something on top. This is usually butter and a slice of cheese. Sometimes it's a slice of meat and cheese. Sometimes a slice of cucumber. You get the idea. This, my friends, is smörgås, which means "sandwich" and therefore, a smörgåsbord consists of several of these sad little things. Yes, to a Swede, a sandwich is a cracker with something on it. And a smörgåsbord, which we in the States had been led to believe was a feast of epic Nordic proportions, is in fact a pathetic excuse for light refreshments.
The second option is what I've taken to calling Mandi-food, since it's the only thing I ever see my corridormate Mandi eat. Mandi, by the way, is the infamous Kurd of previous posts, and seems to be very worried about the Illuminati.
Mandi-food consists of a plate of macaroni smothered in ketchup with a half-dozen meatballs on top. I'm aware how disgusting that sounds. The real problem is that macaroni (especially when covered in cold ketchup) does not retain heat well and thus starts to cool around the edges very quickly, necessitating that you eat it very fast.
The benefit is that you can get a box of macaroni for about two bucks. You can get a tub of meatballs for about five bucks. And ketchup is about two bucks. That'll get you somewhere around fifteen of these meals, and they take all of ten or twelve minutes to cook. A ten minute meal for under fifty cents? Yes, please.

Also! Starting next week I will go from having one fairly difficult class to having three simultaneously. See, this isn't supposed to ever happen. Trouble is, I'm mixing history and government department classes and masters and undergrad classes, and it seems to have blown everyone's minds. I'm going to continue with this masters course on Yugoslavia till March. The undergrad class on the vikings starts up and goes for a month, which is exactly the same time period as my other masters class on international politics. Yes, that's right. They're letting me take masters courses in two different programs in two different departments. This is unheard of in the entire history of Sweden, and everyone I tell is aghast. If I owned anything, I suspect they would have already called dibs. This means I may actually be busy and (don't jinx it!) intellectually stimulated while saving money and having an independent, interesting woman at the same time.

Now I'm just waiting for the other shoe to drop. Nothing goes this well.

What I'm Reading
Dashiell Hammet, Red Harvest (in Swedish! Ellroy's book defeated me utterly, so I'm trying an older noir, hoping for more simple language. If this fails, I'm switching to Hemingway.)
Basil Davidson, The Black Man's Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State.

Also, finally put up a new blog over at my other spot.

Fear and Loathing in Uppsala

We were around Rejkaviksgatan on the edge of Ekeby when the Bushmills began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel a little strange, maybe I better sit down," when suddenly there was a great roar and the bus was surrounded by giant bats.
I jest. Mostly. But I've just finished reading the Good Doctor's magnum opus for the first time, and I'm going to be making references to it like mad in this post. It's appropriate to the week I've had, believe me.
It is highly apt, for instance, that the book opens with a quote from Dr. Johnson, who himself was a strange, ugly, probably drug-addled man. It goes thusly: "He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man."
You see, I think I'm out here, in the fringe of the Frozen North, looking for reasons to be alive. In response to my bitter reflections on love a few posts back, I have been repeatedly asked what the point is of living if I don't believe in love. "What indeed," I tend to reply, and while I realize I probably sound flippant, I mean it honestly. What genuinely is the point?
Perhaps you've read Proust? (Incidentally, someone please tell me how to pronounce his name. I've heard credible people say it both so it rhymes with "soused" and so it rhymes with "juiced," and have no idea which is correct. This is the great trouble with being largely self-educated: I'm always saying "Alcibiades" and "Xerxes" incorrectly.) A sizeable chunk of his Remembrance of Things Past is (in my opinion) an examination of whether or not love makes life worth living. He ultimately rejects this proposition, and examines ritualism and structured social relationships instead. This in turn is likewise rejected. Art and expression is considered, but while it is certainly close to the goal, it too is found wanting. Ultimately (in my view at least), he settles on memory as the solution, that we are what we make of our memories, and that control over defense mechanisms which alienate ourselves from our memories is the only way through which we can take away the pain of being alive and focus only on the good.
While I don't agree with Proust, I think I've embarked on sort of the same undertaking. I too have rejected the ideas of living for someone else, living for love, living for financial or material success, or any of the other things which our Buddhist friends and the unnamed Preacher of Ecclesiastes have long since told us are impermanent and only lead to further suffering.
So then what? What's the point of it all?

With that, I turned to the suggestion of Dr. Johnson and considered the various people whose lives and works have been impressive and inspirational to me, and noticed that they were unanimously loaded to the gills most of the time. So after writing my last blog post, having been more or less intoxicated for five days straight, I figured I might as well keep rolling and see if I could make it to a solid week.
That Wednesday is a bit vague. I know I went to class and was impressed by the difficult, specific, and direct questions my professor asked. I remember eating the little mandarin oranges to which I have become addicted (for the purposes of warding off scurvy, mainly) and sitting out in the living room with a bottle of Beam and a pile of orange peels, watching Jeopardy in Swedish.
Thursday I staggered downtown to a lecture being given by the head of the International Criminal Tribunal which has spent the last decade prosecuting Rwandan war criminals. I ran into Loufer and Aisling there, and went out for more drinks with them at Östgöta nation. We picked up a new Irishman whose name I do not know for the very good reason that I didn't understand a single damn word he said.
It was somebody's birthday there, so the place was full of Irish people and that one Scot who I see everywhere and who never remembers me. I had just taken out a 500 kroner note, and I felt bad about making the bartender break that big of a bill, so I just bought six beers at once and sat in a corner talking about democratisation and mass violence, drinking them in fairly rapid succession.
Everyone insisted that we go somewhere else (why do people always do this?) and of course that somewhere else cost money to get into, so I went home with Aisling, made a failed pass at her, and was given a CD of Tom Waits reading Jack Kerouac as a consolation prize.

I really intended to sober up on Friday. Really I did. It'd been exactly a week, which seemed like a nice, round period of time, but Emma and Tjis insisted that I go out with them and since I always say no and feel bad, I agreed.
We went to a place called Birgerjarl's (BJ's for short) by the river, where there's a long line of shivering Swedes and two Turkish dudes with a hot dog cart. We met up with Tjis's friends, all of whom do some sort of fabulously boring research regarding blood properties, and who are either gay, Kenyan, or both. Yes, Stan-the-Man-With-the-Tan was there.
BJ's is pretty much the world's most typical club. Think about a club. That's exactly what BJ's is like. Except since it's not a student nation, beers cost about six bucks. Fortunately, Tjis and I had split a half-bottle of Old Bushmill's on the way over.
I stood around for a while listening to the terrible early-90's dance music, watching the Europeans look like idiots. Let me show you what I mean:
Stand up from your chair. Now bend your knees a bit and raise your forearms so that they are perpendicular to the floor and your elbows are bent 90 degrees. Now shake your ass. Are you doing this? Because if you look like a goddamn idiot, then you're doing it right. This is how European guys dance.
Needless to say, this got dull pretty quick, so I walked home and crashed a corridor party over in building 4. Got home at around sunrise.

I have little to no memory of Saturday. I had a lunch date with the bartender mentioned in the last post. She showed up, despite my drunken texting of her earlier in the week, and we had a good conversation. We'll see when/if there's a second date, and how it goes. I believe I went to three corridor parties that night. I believe a snarky German named Bjorn gave me two mugs full of grog.

By Sunday night, time had become fluid and viscous. I had started to percieve the world in a manner which I can only term unique. I have disjointed memories:

I was sitting at a table in a corridor that wasn't mine. Tom Waits was shuffling on an iPod. I drew to an inside straight against my friend Rameel and won two hundred kroner.

I spent several hours talking with Caroline, watching her flick the ash of her cigarette into a cup which contained the desecrated corpse of her 3.5% beer. It soon was filled with that black, gooey, foul mixture of cigarette butts, tobacco, and other less-identifiable substances which will always make me think of that hellhole of a houseman's office in the Philly airport Ramada. I'd showed up to Caroline's place about eight drinks ahead, split a six pack with her, and she was already blasted.

I stood in Caroline's doorway not long after, making a pass at her. I don't remember what I said, but I probably deserved the formidable right hook she nailed me with. I straightened up, smiling around a mouthful of blood, and said, "You know, you can always tell when a girl likes you because she hits you with a fist instead of an open hand."
She punched me again.
"I rest my case," I said.

On the way out, I came across Loufer, who was bent over the back of a car, vomiting something bright yellow into the snow. I slid down next to him, our backs against the curb, trying to keep away from the rapidly-freezing puddle he'd made. He ate handfuls of snow to wash out his mouth and I offered him a drink from my flask.
It turned out his Morroccan hash connection had produced about a dozen tablets of mescaline. Loufs had eaten two and proceeded to watch Requiem for a Dream for the first time, which officially won him the award for Worst Idea Anyone Anywhere Has Ever Had in the History of Everything. I dragged him back to his building and left him in the elevator there, mumbling things and trying to grab something that wasn't there.

I got back to my corridor in time to watch the last fifteen minutes of the Super Bowl with Benny and Rikard and Robert and Jonah. They didn't know quite what to make of me, drinking my whiskey from the bottle, spitting blood, with a bruise shaped like Pakistan rapidly developing on my face.
"Find what you were looking for?" they asked.
"Christ," I said. "I hope not."

Bat country!

My excellent Berliner friend Ben left yesterday. His first going-away part was last Friday, and coincided with Alexander's going away party, and a toga party that Jim and his short British sidekick were having. It was sort of like a big Venn diagram, but with drunken Europeans. I sat at a filthy table in building 9 (which is on the "other" side of Flogsta--the place is organized sort of like a bow tie, and nobody ever goes into the buildings on the other side...we're convinced they're full of morlocks) with Josh, who I forgive for being American since he knows a lot about film and about wine. He was on his third bottle of the night.
"Josh," I said, which was the perhaps the only truthful thing I said all night. "Ben's next going away party is on Tuesday. I propose, sir, that this is the pre-party. I have nothing whatsoever to do between now and then. I suggest we simply continue drinkin."
Josh was all for that, and told me something about Duesenbergs. I'd been hammering Old Bushmill's straight from the bottle all night, and was feeling agreeable.

I have learned many things over the past few days. I have learned that when you've been four sheets to the wind for three days straight, the process of taking a long walk in the cold to sober up for class is sort of like scaling a ladder to a blinding infinity and leaves you with the hope that whenever the world catches up with you, it will simply be so astounded by the state you're in to hammer down on you further. I have learned that the older I get, the more I travel, and the longer I stay drunk, the more I understand Tom Waits' later music. I used to be pretty strictly a "Heart of Saturday Night" through "Heartattack and Vine" guy, with the pinnacle at "Small Change," but by now I've swayed down enough badly lit cobblestone European alleys with enough strange people from strange places that I absolutely get the "Frank's Wild Years," "Rain Dogs," and "Swordfishtrombones" corridor. I know exactly what he means now.

Ben's last party was at GH nation (pronounced "Ghee-Ho" and stands for Gästrike-Hälsinge, which I bet clears everything up for you), a place reknowned for its prodigious selection of beer. I showed up two hours before everyone else, drinking slowly and alone in a dark corner, exercising my formidable powers of table-imperialism (it's basically a derivative of couch-fu, you see, at which I am an undisputed master) as a I annexed larger and larger tables in the name of Trevordom. I also got the bartender girl's phone number, since I am sort of a drunk in the classical sense of the word and can manage to pull off saying horribly objectionable things like this:
"So, what d'you say we get out of these wet clothes and into a dry martini?"
"But my clothes aren't wet," she said, laughing.
Slowly, letting the voice positively drip: "I bet you're wet somewhere."

Anyway, everyone showed up and the usual stuff transpired. I developed an appreciation for Bavarian hefeweizen, and learned the trick for pouring it into the giant undulating glasses it comes with. I cleared up some misconceptions a Dutch guy had about the Battle of Cannae
and developed a suspicion that Josh has a bit of a crush on me. After a while, the place began to look like this:




I met three Serbian guys and a Russian dude named Vladimir who promised to give me a call and invite me to their party next week. Once again my freakish knowledge of geography endeared me to them: Europeans are endlessly thrilled when they meet an American who can promptly place Vojvodina. I have high hopes that their party will involve invading smaller, weaker parties, ruthlessly attacking a couple members to drive out the others, and then seizing the beer left behind.

Anyway, eventually we spilled out into the street, the way you do. I have learned that I have little to no drunken patience: everyone else wanted to spend an hour standing around, smoking cigarettes, throwing snowballs, talking nonsense, locking and unlocking bikes, and so forth. I was not entertained:



See, my thinking is "It's cold. There is nothing to eat or drink here. There's nowhere to sit. Why are we not going somewhere warm, where we can sit and eat and drink? My plan is better in literally every way."
We also saw things like this:



Eventually we drifted over to Sofie's. She's one of the people who stripped and jumped in the river on New Years, and she and Ben have sort of been having a thing for a while. She lives about halfway between the center of town and Flogsta, so it's an ideal rest stop.
We sat around in her room, listening to Tom Waits and John Lee Hooker, while my good friend Rameel tried to make moves on a short Italian chick. Sarah sat on the floor in front of me and a massaged her neck while she passed me glasses of this clear, vaguely sour stuff that I guess is just called "Martini." I kept downing it in one gulp and shouting "Bah, anything less than 40% is a chaser."
Eventually I got bored and had the impression Sofie and Ben would like some time alone, so I managed to drag everyone out (by now our group had dwindled from about twenty to five or six, and the survivors were tenacious indeed) and started walking home. Sarah and I took a left about halfway there, because I walk a LOT and know a shorter way, but nobody ever believes me.
And then we proceeded to have the biggest, stupidest, most vicious fight I have ever had with anyone at any point in my entire life.
Many among you may be mildly amazed at this. I tend not to have fights, and I have trouble remembering many times I have ever actually gotten angry with anyone about anything. Annoyed, certainly. Frustrated, frequently. Exasperated, definitely. But genuinely angry? Not much, no.
Sarah has a remarkable ability to bring that out in me. And what is genuinely astounding is that I have absolutely no idea whatsoever how it started or what it was even about. Nor, honestly, do I much care. I got home furious and cold around six in the morning and poured myself a glass of bottom-rack bourbon and haven't looked back since. Hunter S. Thompson would be proud of me.

What I'm Reading
Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations (finally, and yes...it's amazing)
Robert Gilpin, The Political Economy of International Relations
James Ellroy, White Jazz (in Swedish! Noir is great for that, lots of short, simple words, but compelling)
John Lampe, Twice There Was a Country: Yugoslavia as History
Tomislav Dulic, Utopias of Nation: Local Mass Killing in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1941-1942. (This is my professor)
Ernest Gellner, Nationalism