Mistakes

I thought I would just write a little about some of the mistakes I've made here in Sweden so I can remember to never make the same mistakes again. Plus, all of you that are reading can painlessly learn not to make the same mistakes I did. :)

I:

• tried to turn my refrigerator on without plugging it in.
• used my bare hands to mix spicy chili pepper flakes.
• used "hade att" to try to say I "had to do something," when this phrase doesn't exist in Swedish. (var tvungen, or using behöver or måste is better, i think.)
• bought Comviq Kompis for my phone instead of Comviq Amigos and had to pay $1 per minute for international phone calls. (curse the company that names two completely different phone plans using the same word just translated into different languages!)
• heard people at Vasakyrkan saying "Kristus, förbarma dig över oss" and thought they were saying "Kristus, förbannade över oss"
• For at least one month, I thought that the tram stop: Getebergsäng was Geteberg + säng meaning "Geteberg bed" instead of Getebergs + äng meaning "Geteberg's meadow." (I still have no idea what Geteberg means though. Goat mountain? Göta province's mountain...)
  

(I plan on periodically updating this post along with other posts that are labelled "periodically updated.")

Nya kompisar

Here are some pictures of me with some of the people I've met here in Sweden!

live & love, bland annat.

Every once in a while, somebody asks me or I ask myself what I would do today if I were to die tomorrow. This is really an interesting question and now that I think about it again, I would have to say that there isn't a specific plan or schedule full of things I have to do on the day before I die. Rather, there would be a checklist of goals that I would want to have completed and a separate checklist of things I want to be at least in the process of doing. I think the lists would look something like this:

Things do make sure to complete before I die:

• Make sure everyone you know knows that you love them.
• Make sure you eat/drink as much of whatever you feel like eating/drinking.
  
• Make sure you listen to whatever music you want to listen to as loud as you want it.
• Spend some time with people. What people? Those that are nearest and dearest.
  
• Spend some time alone.
• Spend some time with the Bible and God.

Things to at least be working on before I die:

• Sharing my thoughts and insights.
• Sharing my love.

Yup, so that's it. Well, I mean sure --- there are also some very specific things I would like to do. These are things like:

• Go to a furniture store when you're really tired (probably after lunch) and take a nap on the sofa/recliner that you didn't have time to take a nap on before.

Well, that's all I can think of right now, but I'll add more when I think of them.

On another note, there is something else I want to take up right now. It's the concept of "love." I've always had a problem with this word and I say it almost never because it is such a commercialized, self-reciprocating word that has a different meaning depending on the context, tone, who it is coming from, and why it is said in the first place. I don't like saying the word, but people who are without "love" in the sense of having love in their own hearts for themselves and the people around them... are just empty. I don't want to be empty, therefore I feel like I need to redefine it for myself, because like it says on the first item on my list, I need to make sure everyone I know knows that I love them.

This is how it is: My life is a life of learning and I will always be a student, whether in a real school, or just in the school of life (as cheesy as that sounds). If I have ever met you or known you, you have added a perspective to my life that I would not have had otherwise. Whether I liked you or disliked you plays no role because this is really just a matter of whether I liked or disliked the things you did and the way you acted. This has no bearing on the way I feel about you as a person and lucky for you, I love you. I want you to know that I love you -- any & every one of you that I have ever known.

Now, as long as I eat/drink what I want, listen to whatever music I want, and make sure to spend some time alone, with the Bible, and with people everyday... I can die happily. Not that I'm planning on dying anytime soon, but now I can live like most people only wish they could live -- like today was my last.

Nowhere Orchestra

So, I'm playing drums in a funk band called Nowhere Orchestra while I'm here in Sweden and I just thought I would give you a little taste of one of our songs. This recording is from a rehearsal we had last wednesday (March 4th). We're not completely polished or anything, but I guess that's what funk it all about. Rawness. Enjoy.

"Hit the tempo" (clip)

not a superhuman, after all...

So, I found out yesterday that I'm really not a superhuman after all. I feel like most people my age or younger have this feeling like they are invincible or something, but we're really not and it's sort of an important realization to have... Not that you should let anything limit your goals and aspirations, because I'm still a firm believer in "if you put your mind to it, you can do it," and "most people are reasonable, that's why they only do reasonably well," but one should at least be aware of the sort of physical boundaries that exist. You know, the ones that determine your health at least.

Basically, what I found out yesterday was that I cannot go a full day just eating chocolate and cakes, and drinking only coffee, water, and orange juice. Actually, in some cases I think I might be able to handle this, but I think in combination with my lack of sleep and all of the running around I do all day... this was not a good and I paid for it yesterday.

I was over at my friend Mira's place studying Swedish after a long day of running errands, going to a short-film exposition, and hanging out at a coffee shop. I had only been eating sweets all day because I woke up late and didn't have time for breakfast... AKA: I bought 100g of dark chocolate before heading to the library. My mind was working very hard, as I was doing some very intense linguistic work with the Swedish.

My goal was (and still is) to create subcategories within the group 4 strong verbs where the subcategories actually fall into subgroups that follow a certain pattern (namely, ablaut or umlaut). In doing this, I need to know roughly what the vowel space looks like for Swedish so I can decide whether to call it ablaut (vowel reduction) or umlaut (vowel fronting)... basically. This has been something that has interested me for a while, and now it is useful because I'm taking a Swedish course again. Hopefully if/when I finish this, I'll post it to my Swedish website so people can see my work and use it to help them learn Swedish. I'm a huge advocate of shared knowledge and all things that are "open source," if you haven't noticed. I just hope that what I create is accurate and valid. If it's not, I'll at least have had good practice with the verbs. :P

Anyways, I just had some rice with kimchi and two fried eggs (a true Korean meal) and I'm making some 보리차 (barley tea) right now to fill and calm my stomach. Then, I think I'll have fully recovered and I can't help but thinking God is so kind for giving me such a mild scare. Finding out that I'm not invincible could have involved breaking my leg or getting hit by a tram or something like that, but instead I just felt faint and disoriented and just threw up a few times. God is great. And so is rice, kimchi, and barley tea.

:)

Good thing I'm well now though, because I'm hosting a meeting for this Swedish-Language student group I formed last week. We're called "The Swedish Language Alliance." Pretty bad-ass, I know.

Ice Breaker

This is how we break the ice in Sweden:

funny, ha ha.

So, our Scandinavian Studies class went on a tour of some old houses in Slottskogen today and this really funny thing happened. Well, it was funny to me at least, because I had slept a total of about 5 hours in the past two days before going on this field trip and I didn't eat breakfast before going. Yes, so I was basically running on empty. Here's one picture:














Anyway, we were at this old house that was renovated to be used as a folk dance hall and the lady there was telling us about provincial costumes and stuff (not the house in the picture).

This lady was flipping through a book and showing us pictures of things and she said something like, "... and this is a picture of when the pope came to Sweden," but it sounded like she said "...and this is a picture of when the poop came to Sweden." I'm fully aware that Swedish vowel sounds can be and are in most cases very different, but I guess I never heard a Swedish person say the word "pope" before.

I die when I hear funny language jokes, so after a few moments I started cracking up!! It was so hard to hold in this laugh, but I felt like I needed to or else people would think I'm laughing at the provincial costumes or something, which I was not!! I started coughing to cover my laughter and I almost left the room. Stupid thing was, I kept thinking about it off and on for the next 15-20 minutes that we were there and I almost started laughing again every time I thought about it. You know when you're trying to hold in a laugh and you basically have a body spasm and expel a bunch of air through your nose? Yeah, I was having these spasms and I hope Akane, who was standing next to me, didn't think I was just blowing air into her ear or something.

Well, here's a few more pictures before I end this post.