Springtime for Reinfeldt

This post is going to consist entirely of me complaining.

I miss the constant dark. I mean, yeah, it did get fairly oppressive by January, when I hadn't seen the sun in months and if I slept too late, I'd miss the two-hour window of "dark gray" sky and it would seem like the night just went on forever. And yeah, I like the sun and all, especially since I could probably throw a rock out my window right now and hit three or four topless sunbathers.
But my God, man. The sun goes down at midnight now and comes back up again at 2:30 AM. Even then, it doesn't really get dark: the sky just turns really deep blue. And of course my window is facing the direction of sunrise, so I get this apocalyptic blinding blast of ultraviolet radiation at about 3:00 every morning.

And then the goddamn birds start up! I have never heard such a mindless cacophony in my whole goddamn life. Just in case they aren't bad enough, the fuckers in Flogsta have started having rooftop parties again, with bands and elaborate sound systems, so you can hear their music as far away as Ekeby. The guitar guy who lives below me starts up his Bob Dylan impression reliably at 10 every morning, apparently unfazed by the constant noise all night, since he clearly inhabits a strange and inhospitable musical world of his own.

I haven't slept in goddamn weeks.

Been seeing an Irish girl (I know, but I'm a sucker for the accent, and damn can that girl drink) with whom I have stunted conversations like this:
Her: I miss you.
Me: Want to do something tonight?
Her: No.

Also been making my travel plans and have discovered that shitty hostels in Italy (which, of course, is the one area in which I know nobody) cost about three times what I'd expected. Never thought I'd actually miss working, but what I wouldn't give for the feeling of actually being productive and then having disposable income to show for it. Going to have to start working the instant I get home, which no doubt will entail a long commute into Sacramento proper...and I'm certain by then gas prices will be in the quadruple digits, and the nighttime low temperature will be a hundred million degrees.

Yeah, that reminds me. I was walking to ICA yesterday and found myself realizing that I'm leaving Europe to return to a place that has "Bad Air Quality Days" announced on the news to inform you that you shouldn't go outside because the air is poison. I am returning to acidic suburban hell.

And as bad-tempered as I am, the time here is dwindling all too quickly. I've got two weeks left in Sweden, then about five weeks of travel and I'm home. There are nothing but goodbye parties from here on out, and the nations have started shutting down as classes end and the Swedes are returning to whatever moderate little northern caves they emerged from. Three-Bottle Josh and his weird little brother are gone. Ludovica who always makes pasta after a long night of partying is gone. No more weekly poker games in Building 3. Going to be strange leaving here and returning to my family's house back in the States, where can I drive a quarter-mile to the store anytime I like and buy liquor and have a real television and a video store from which I can actually rent movies, and sometimes eat food I don't have to create myself.

You know what else is going to be weird? I've worked at that university-owned place on T Street every summer since 2003. Summer to me has meant long hours sitting in my car in the parking lot, smelling the pines and listening to the traffic on I-50 directly behind me, sweating through that oddly-cut shirt they gave me and waiting for the shade to mercifully fall over the car. I got paid to read a hell of a lot of books out there, and I found that if I brought a big thermos full of iced tea and a radio to listen to the Giants game, it was pretty much the best way to make money ever. Everyone else always went home by about 10 or so, so I'd be left to close up alone, and it was rather pleasant walking around the grounds on a warm summer night, taking my time throwing all the locks, and then having a peaceful drive home around midnight (since I-5 is always deserted that late) to either pick up some Jack-in-the-Box or make pizza bites and watch whatever crazy movies had showed up in my Netflix that day.
But now the place is closed, the parking lot chained up, and I doubt I'll ever get paid to sit in the shade, drinking iced tea and reading ever again. It's going to be an odd summer without it.

Yeah, all right, I've complained enough. I'm mostly avoiding writing the last few pages of this idiot final paper, and I realized I hadn't put anything up here in a long time, so here you go.

What I'm Reading
Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents
Jagdish Bhagwati, In Defense of Globalization

Notes From the Underground

Instead of writing my last paper, I have decided to drive Tove insane.

My corridormates have become accustomed to the eccentricity I develop when left with nothing to do for too long a time. I tend to think of it like a dog left home alone who begins chewing on the furniture...they just say it's like living with Kramer. Back in October I learned of astonishing advent of deep fried Twinkies and, like the luminscant appendage which draws prey into the gaping maw of a lamprey, the thought of fat-battered fried sugar was irresistible to me. Unfortunately, you cannot get Twinkies in this frozen communist backwater, so I was eventually forced to build them from scratch--making my own cream and performing delicate surgery (I assembled all the lamps in the corridor around the kitchen table and wore a little mask) on several yellow shortcakes. A number of the patients did not survive the operation, but no science is exact, and they had to be sacrificed for the greater good.

My corridormates viewed these proceedings with a sort of Swedishly detached combination of amusement and abject horror, sort of like watching a friendly clown throw pies at a pile of dead puppies. But when at last my creations emerged, glistening and steaming from the vat of primordial lard from whence they came, it was I who had the last laugh.

Anyway. We have two sinks in the kitchen, and I've developed a nasty habit of reaching underneath and turning one or the other off when Tove's not looking. The rest of the corridor is in on it now and aids in my guilty transgressions. I can't help it...you see, Tove is very health-conscious and athletic and tends to be getting up for her morning run just as I come staggering home at 5:30 in the morning, and she has this speech pattern where her voice gets really high and shrieky in the middle of words, so I feel after uncountable mornings of that voice stabbing into my hungover brain, she had it coming.
Maybe later I'll find a crosscut saw and lower the legs on her desk by a couple inches.

I don't really have much to report here, but I didn't want to let this blog go too long neglected and I know my strange despatches are the only light in your otherwise muddy lives, so I'm just going to put up a few random things here.

Like, for instance, this recent conversation with Ashley. The timestamp is important.
[14:02] *****: omg
[14:02] *****: did i tell u
[14:03] *****: i had this horrible holocaust dream
[14:03] FailingPiano: That's what I like to hear.
[14:04] *****: okay so i dreamed we were watching schindler's list and people kept coming over and pooping in my toilet
[14:04] *****: i was so upset!
[14:09] FailingPiano: ...We can't be friends anymore.

For the benefit of you non-Facebookians (fools! ingrates!) here's the vague itinerary for my summer travels. If you've been to any of these places or know someone in them or have anything useful to offer about them, do please let me know:

Rome
Florence
Genoa
Italian Riviera
Venice
Vienna
Munich
Berlin
Amsterdam
Brussels
Paris
London

I start travelling 10 June, and I'll be home in the afternoon of 20 July. My birthday is the next day, so expect a party soon after. And yes, I use the term "party" in my usual euphemistic sense, since we all know that my idea of a party consists of sitting around listening to Tom Waits, drinking scotch, and talking about stuff. Should you wish to buy me "Welcome Home"/"Happy Birthday"/"Fealty Tribute" presents (and you should!), then peruse my Amazon Wishlist.

That's about all for now. More news as it develops.

What I'm Reading
Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History.

The Land of Opportunity

So I went to Riga, Latvia last week because some people asked me to go and I mostly just agree to stuff.

The boat trip was much like every other boat trip across the Baltic...this one was my fifth and sixth times transversing that dull gray patch of water. The only difference was a) this boat was smaller and dingier than any other I'd been on and b) instead of travelling with a small (though loud) handful of American women, I was travelling with no less than ten exchange students from the International Media and Communications Studies crew. Henceforth I will refer to them by their self-chosen cognomen: IMCS. They are:

Three Bottle Josh: of Colorado and Napa, wine afficianado, tall and unkempt, rather awkward with a sense of repressed homosexuality about him.
Rameel: possibly the coolest guy in Sweden, a short Phillipines-born San Franciscan with excellent taste in music, a little beard, and an ever-present beanie.
Melaniea: some German girl I don't know at all.
Stevie G: a massive stubbled German, very soft-spoken after having his jaw broken in a fight at a party earlier this year. Claims to have once saved the world "from food poisoning."
Amie: one of the first people I met here, a short, overweight, deep-voiced former ballet dancer, nearly as vulgar as Ashley. Together they have a radio show they call "The Obese Hour."
Ashley: of the frog-tattooed ass, the French girlfriend who speaks Mandarin. She's a walking mass of neuroses and tells the filthiest stories of anyone I've ever met.
Goran: Swedish philosopher with a pipe and the most comfortable chair in Flogsta, apparently lately Amie's boyfriend.
Jesper: some Swedish dude.
Sofie: septalingual Finnish girlfriend of my German buddy Ben.
And lastly, Sarah, bane of my love-life and lunatic extraordinaire.

We were in three rooms all next to each other, each with two cases of beer apiece (oh duty-free shopping, how we Swedish veterans love thee!) and an abundance of bad Tunisian wine. It was on sale. We played a lot of poker and pretended to be scandalized by the filthy things Amie and Ashley spout continuously, while instead being quite bored, since we've heard essentially the same things every day since August.

Riga is a surprisingly nice city, though you get the immediate impression the whole place is owned by the Mob. There are a lot of very nice green parks, and lots of trees all over the city so in the spring with the leaves just opening and the sun shining, it doesn't look at all like it's endured seventy years of ComIntern repression. There is more conspicuous opulence than in other Eastern European cities I've visited, though it also seems to be overflowing with short, wide, scarred old homeless women.
Latvian bums, man. Easily set the bar for the most aggressive and deranged group of bums I've ever encountered. My favorite (?) was the woman who ran up to Josh with her hand out and just started screaming inarticulately at the top of her voice and followed along doing it until he threw a latt (the dull currency--the paper bills just have like brown rectangles on them, as though some committee thought "There's no famous Latvians, who are we kidding?") and she chased it.
Anyway, Riga is bigger and cleaner than Tallinn, with plenty of nice quaint buildings and impressive monuments:






It also seems bigger and more interesting than Helsinki, a city which I found to be a decided let-down. I felt like eight hours in Helsinki was about three hours too much, whereas I felt like Riga could easily have offered another day or two. Having now seen the Baltic from more sides than anyone really should (St. Petersburg is really the only Baltic city of importance that I haven't been to) I think Riga comes in a solid second behind Stockholm as the best, though possibly tied with Gdansk.
We drifted along the large park which takes up much of the center city, then along what looked like the main boulevards which branch out from the pedestrian street where that big monument pictured above is located. That's the Monument of Freedom, apparently. We found the central Market Square, the big cathedral, and finally the produce market.
I am not now, nor have I ever been interested in produce in the slightest. I quickly got bored and decided to follow the market and see where it ended. I proceeded down long lines of stalls where wrinkled apple-doll faced women in headwraps sold giant tomatoes and old brown bananas until I reached a doorway into a massive stone building. It was covered in those thick plastic strips like you might see separating the shop area from the retail floor in a hardware store. There was a faded sign painted over the door which I later learned identified the massive building as the city's zeppelin hangars.
Inside half the population of Latvia was selling bootlegs, ripoffs, knockoffs, factory defects, and just plain stolen goods. There was a full-on grocery store in there, complete with glass display cases showing off what I can only assume was bootleg cheese. The building was enormous, echoing, a riot of humanity and hardscrabble capitalism. I wandered for a while till I found a little cafe tucked away in a back corner, with four plastic tables and some plastic chairs and an ancient woman in purple who shuffled around wiping things with a dirty napkin and muttering "Aiyie-yie-yie-yie."
I bought what I assumed was a donut, but which turned out to be filled not with scrumptious jelly but in fact with some sort of incredibly greasy pig gristle. I indulged in a favorite pasttime of mine: stating my present circumstances in one sentence, to gauge the absurdity. So I said to myself, "Self, I'm eating a pig-gristle donut in a black market held in a zeppelin hangar in Latvia."

I hooked back up with IMCS after that and we wandered some more, stopping by the big Town Hall Square, where there's a statue of Roland (wasn't he French?) and a building from 1337 called (inexplicably, as far as I'm concerned) "Hall of the Blackheads."




Then we went to eat, the way you do, and I discovered that Latvian food is the heaviest, most massive and hearty fare on the planet. It consists entirely of meat fried in grease, potatoes fried in grease, and grease fried in more grease. It was a sort of crazy buffet place and the guy kept piling this stuff on my plate until I was reminded of that classic bit of advice: "Never eat more than you can lift."
So I probably consumed a solid kilo or so of grease and a liter and a half of dark Latvian ale and then discovered I didn't much care about the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia anymore. Or about anything, really. I had achieved Nirvana.

We dragged back to the boat, drank our way home, blah blah, the usual. Nothing especially surreal happened, nor do I have anything else of interest to report at this time. I give Riga three stars out of four--not worth it's own trip, but if it happens to somehow be on the way to or from somewhere else you're going, it's definitely worth a stop. Or a cruise from Stockholm for twelve bucks.

Oh, Europe...

Remind me to blog about my recent trip to Riga. I'd do it tonight, but I'm a bit lazy and can't be arsed to put all the pictures on here. Next time.

Instead, I'm going to offer up another of my (mildly rare) observations on Life in Sweden:

The Eurovision Song Contest is a big deal over here, and the Europeans get endlessly upset and disappointed to learn that absolutely nobody anywhere else in the world gives a handful of monkey shit about it. I guess it's been around since like 1956. I, with my ostrich-like knowledge of contemporary music, had obviously never heard of the damn thing, but the buzz surrounding it here is of the likes I have only seen during the bandy championships a few months ago. The Swedes have been excited, and that is worth taking note of.

What it is is pretty straightforward: each country sends some band to the competition, people vote, one of them wins. In between acts there are little segments which can apparently be pretty much anything imaginable to fill thirty seconds of film. My favorite involved "Moo Claus" (a cow version of Santa) playing chess against the real Santa in some sort of mountain chalet. Now, apparently Sweden is historically something of a Eurovision powerhouse: indeed, this is where Abba (Sweden's first, last, and only claim to pop-culture fame) got their start. There is a bitter rivalry with Finland, who apparently did something dastardly to win last year's competition. The contest is in Helsinki this year, which has the Swedes quite upset. There's talk of jihad.
This year's Swedish entry is by a band called "The Ark" and has been playing incessantly, non-goddamn-stop on every radio station in Sweden for the last month, thereby ruthlessly supplanting the five songs Sweden usually plays on its radio stations over and over and over (for the record, they are: Shakira's "Hips Don't Lie," that "Everytime We Touch" song, "Destination Unknown," and two other things that sound exactly the same). They're on TV commercials, talk shows, inserted into ending credits of TV shows...they're goddamn everywhere. And they're of a caliber of weirdness that I previously thought only Japan could produce. I will inflict on you an example:



WHERE IS YOUR GOD NOW?

Anyway, the final round of the competition was tonight, and everyone in the corridor gathered in front of the TV to watch with bated breath. And it was one of the weirdest two hours of television I've ever seen.
See, it's strange being an American and watching these things, because you can't help but fall back on the natural assumption that when you see something like this where each country produces one performance for the rest of the world, that these performances are somehow examples of that country's culture. This has now led me to believe that the Ukraine is filled with heavily made-up old men with fake breasts wearing small dresses made of tin foil and large hats with a massive metal star on top, that France is inhabited by bald men wearing tight pink clothes and brandishing dead black marmots around their necks, that in Bulgaria women yodel and pound on drums while surrounded by hairy shouting men, and that all Serbs are butch double-chinned lesbians in black and red outfits which are oddly reminiscent of Gestapo uniforms.
And Sweden...oh, Sweden. That crime against music and fashion up there actually is fairly representative of Sweden. You see, the guys here especially are weirdly fashion-conscious, but they aim for the looks you see in fashion magazines that are on that weird cutting edge, where you know nobody in their right mind would ever in a million years dress like that. But Swedes do, and they are all, down to the last dour one of them, identical.
The uniform of the young Swedish guy is a tight striped shirt with very short sleeves, really really tight pants that are also too short, so as to show off the thick white socks, some sort of arm band or two, and hair with long bangs all slicked down on their heads. I spent a month convinced that the reason Sweden's birth rate is declining is that absolutely every guy in Sweden was gay.
The Swedish girls seem to like that look, though. They opt for about a kilo of makeup apiece and weirdly feathery blonde hair, generally with small dresses and tights.
There are other obligatory things. You must go to Snerikes on Tuesday nights, Stockholms nation on Thursdays, Värmlands on Fridays. There you must dance to the exact same five songs over and over, drinking five-dollar beers in plastic bottles, making out with ten different people before choosing one at random (if you're female) or striking out miserably (if you're male). How they can still get excited about this when they do it three times a week, every week, for years, I dunno. But they do. That is Uppsala's nightlife, right there.

So. I don't know who won this year's contest yet. Considering every entry seemed to consist of finding the half-dozen most outrageously dressed gay guys in each country and hopping them up on amphetamines to caper around the stage for a while, yodelling more often than not, I'm afraid I can't muster up the same degree of life-altering concern as my corridormates. And to think they enjoy nothing more than harassing me about contestants on American Idol.

Anyway. In other news, we had a corridor party last night. Nothing especially amusing or noteworthy happened at it, I'm afraid, except that I was the last man standing at about five thirty in the morning (surreal now, since the sun goes down at 11 PM and comes back up again at 3:30 AM) and that some bastard stole my Tunisian wine. Otherwise, it was The Usual.

Oh, and I put up something lengthy and cranky over at the other blog.

What I'm Reading
Thomas L. Friedman, From Beirut to Jerusalem

Valborg and the Future

So Valborg, the infamous Last-of-April celebration, was this Monday. I'd been hearing whispered legends about the accompanying debauchery since I first arrived in this strange land, and I don't mind telling you, I was rather looking forward to it. That trip to Helsinki was undertaken primarily to secure provisions for the marathon imbibation I was assured would take place.

Apparently, Uppsala and a tiny town called Lund are THE places to go for Valborg. Tens of thousands of Swedes flock to these two places and cut loose, since Valborg is the only day of the year in which it is legal to both drink and pee anywhere you like in public.
The way Valborg is supposed to go is this: you start with a champagne breakfast somewhere, then head to the river to watch idiots on homemade rafts try to race. You go to Ekonomikum park for a while and have a sort of giant picnic thing. Then you pay to go into a student nation and buy some champagne to spray all over other people. In the evening there are barbeques, and at night, there are bonfires.

My Valborg went like this: I started with a rye breakfast (it's a grain, right? Nutrition!) by the river. It was cold and I seemed to be surrounded by small children and old people. The boats were a tremendous disappointment--nobody fell in the river, none of them sank, and there was no piracy. Disgusted, we fled to Ekonomikum, where my corridormates had mounted a plastic clown on a big stick, as a sort of flag. We sat under it and ate chips and drank a whole lot, until Sarah and I felt rather as though we had fallen off the floor (loyal readers know well this is my requirement), then managed to stagger home to lay in bed, generally being too drunk to move and annoyed at the world.

So, essentially, Valborg was just like every other day in Uppsala, only it started at ass-o-clock in the morning. Add to this my habitual distaste for celebrations (a combination, I suspect of years of work in the hospitality industry and an attitude of "fuck off, I'll party when I like, I'm not going to enjoy myself because I'm supposed to") and Valborg was a bit of a disappointment.

Lately I've been considering becoming a Belgian. No, no, bear with me.

I've been considering the general shape I'd like my life to take. I'm pretty well settled on Options Two and Three of that post of mine months ago, and am quite set on living in Europe. I'm toying with ideas of citizenship and permanent residence; to that end, I'm eyeing Brussels, Zurich, and Geneva, mainly out of the vague sense that I really should have been born Swiss and that "Belgian" is kind of a funny word. I think I'd like to speak French and quite possibly German so fluently and idiomatically and for so long as to nearly forget my proletarian American roots, and perhaps to work either in lucrative consultancy or in a maddening UN post. All three cities are ideal for this. Belgium gives you citizenship after just three years of residence; Switzerland requires twelve, and a much more thorough knowledge of the country, language, and culture. All three cities are ideally situated near to larger, more complex places and systems and structures, not to mention nice vacation spots.
Of course, it would profit me a great deal to actually, you know...visit these places before renouncing my citizenship and joining the Foreign Legion or something. It's a bit of a passing fancy, I know, but compatible with the vague sense of direction my life seems to be acquiring.

I am heartened by the fact that in one year I will have my degree and hopefully will be planning my move to either London or Brussels, to pursue my Masters. Light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel feeling, you know?

Also, here is a recent photo of me in my natural habitat: