procrastinatin' like hamlet

things are working out. i thought they would, but they actually worked out faster, smoother and better than i could have hoped. my australia journey started out low, with the sky opening and massive amounts of rain starting to come down just a minute or two before i was going to leave for the train to the airport. so i had to get my rain gear out of the bag, and i couldn't bring my hat, and i missed the train. i felt like shit when i was running up the stairs to the platform, because if there's one time you shouldn't miss a train, it's when you are going on an interhemispheral flight on a sunday and the next train doesn't leave for thirty-five minutes. i still had decent time, but missing that train meant that i had used up my buffer time for "things that can go wrong" for that part of the trip, and if the next train would be delayed, i would be in serious trouble. fortunately, it was not and the rest of the trip worked out way too well.

on friday, around noon, i applied for a tourist visa for australia. that's two days before i was leaving. now, i already had a working holiday visa that lasted until mid-september, but i would like to stay longer than that and i wasn't sure how difficult it would be to extend my visa from australia. because of this, i contacted the closest australian embassy and they said it was possible to get an extended visa as long as i applied before my current one expired. what they didn't tell me was that applying before going to australia would cost me exactly $0, whereas applying whilst in australia would cost $215 (that's for the exact same type of online application). i didn't realize this until i rummaged different official websites for the third or fourth time, on friday, around noon. my flight was on sunday. i applied for the visa, but for it to be valid it had to be granted before i got on my plane to australia. fat chance, i thought. australia is 8 hours ahead of sweden in time, so when i applied it was 8 pm there and a weekend coming up. then i started thinking. why is it that i can't seem to get things done until the last possible second? i do this with everything. i waited way too long with getting my ticket, resulting in having to pay extra and getting 18 hours in bangkok. i needed to buy an mp3 player and new headphones, but i didn't look into it until wednesday, meaning it was too late to order them online and i had to settle for worse and more expensive options locally. and i only had to buy one because my old one broke and i haven't pushed enough on the manufacturer to get a repair and now it was too late. and i only booked a hotel in bangkok they day before leaving, meaning i couldn't be sure i would be able to get a room at a good place.

when i booked the plane ticket and found out that my three days of procrastinating had cost me so much, i felt awful. when i realized that my procrastination when applying for a visa extension would cost me a totally unnecessary $215, i felt awful. why is it that i can't seem to learn the lesson? why is it that i find it so hard to do everyday stuff like this, that i know needs to be done at some point? and i know i'm not the only one who's like this, why do people just not learn the lesson and start living happier and more efficient lives?

this time, like most times, things worked out better than they should have if i was to learn some sort of lesson. my visa was granted on saturday, i got the e-mail at about 4 pm, which means that it was midnight in australia. my visa was granted at midnight on a saturday in australia. i find this very amusing. my hotel reservation in bangkok came through within a few hours, not that that ended up mattering anyway, because i was able to get on an earlier flight in bangkok and cut down my idle time there from 18 to 2 hours. i spent most of it going back and forth on horizontal escalators (i know that's a contradiction, but whatever they are called - you know those things they have at airports that make you feel really jet-set because you are walking at lightning speed) and then went through the usual security thingamajig before boarding the plane with a giant smile on my face. i had considered the possibility that i might be able to get an earlier flight, but i couldn't count on it, i couldn't expect it or i'd be crashing hard if it wasn't possible. they took care of my baggage and everything, it was really smooth.

i should probably try hard to find some sort of structure to my life that would make it harder for these situations to occur in the first place. i'm not sure how to create it yet, but i need as much assistance as possible with getting things done in time. i'll try to learn the lesson even if i managed to get out of it this time.

so i got to sydney monday evening instead of tuesday lunch, which made everything a lot better. it was also infinitely better to arrive in the evening than at the ungodly time of 4 am, which i did last time. rachel picked me up at the airport, we took a cab home and had turkish apple tea and tim tams and i patted the cat and i felt so at home and so in love.

on a different and more humorous note, someone yesterday found my blog when searching for "+calculon +pirate +hamburgers" from google in chile. i hope my post answered all their questions. at least it's more likely than the personed who found me after googling "bra adventure".

to reiterate, my terrible secret is...

i am preparing for australia. and bangkok. mostly bangkok, really. anyone who's talked to me during the last month knows about this, so if you have, you might as well skip to the next paragraph, where i talk about...god knows what. i sure don't. so, bangkok. right, i booked my trip to australia a few weeks ago, it seemed fine and was both faster and cheaper than last time. then i get to the travel agency, almost mentally prepared to pay over 12 000 SEK (that's somewhere around two thousand dollars) for an e-item, and find out that the bangkok-sydney part of the trip has been cancelled. and it's now sold out on all days in the near future when i was planning on going. except...there is one left, but it's a whopping 18 hours after the plane from copenhagen arrives. and it's 1 500 SEK more expensive.

***aside on terminology used in magic: the gathering***

this year i started playing magic: the gathering ("magic") again. it's a collectable card game that resides somewhere between chess and poker in style, with a decent amount of random factor but where the best player still wins nine out of ten. magic, like most sub-cultures, is filled with terminology that applies to the game but with varying amounts of creativity also to the non-magic world. applying terms from a sub-culture to totally different situations is something i find very amusing, and sometimes there really are useful terms that deserve a wider use. the term that brought this aside on is "stab". yes, that word already has a meaning and yes, the meaning it has in magic is pretty close to that one. there is a playing format in magic called draft, where you sit eight people around a table, each one with three packs of cards, and you each open a pack, take one card and ship the remanining fourteen to the person next to you. then you pick one of the fourteen that are left, and so on, and then you build a deck with the cards you've picked. magic has five colours and you typically play two or three and try to stay out of the colours the poeple next to you are playing. sometimes, in a pack there will be no good cards in your colours but some good ones in the others; taking a good card in a colour you are not playing to make sure someone else doesn't get it is referred to as a stab. switching to a colour after passing a lot of good cards in that colour (thus giving your neighbour the signal that the colour is open) is referred to as stabbing someone on that colour. and we are now approaching the poodle's core of this aside: stabbing here means making someone else's situation worse with no real gain for yourself.

***end unexpectedly long aside***

i like to refer to the eighteen hours in bangkok and added cost of 1 500 SEK as the ticket stab. i was stabbed on the ticket. it was a savage stab. but what choice did i have? i had to have the ticket, the suboptimal ticket, so i bought it and started to think about what to do with my 18 hours in bangkok. all i know about bangkok is that the traffic is horrible and that it's a typical primal city in that it's massively bigger than any other city in the same country (good ol' urbanization in the global south that i took at ubc finally coming in handy), and it's not like i've ever felt any pressing need to go there. especially not for such short time. so i probably won't, i'll try to find a hotel by the airport somewhere and spend the day there sleeping and kicking it back and up a notch and attempt to be decently rested for the second part of the trip and my coming life in the southern hemisphere. how's that for unadventurous?

apart from those 18 hours, i think australia will be great. it may not have saltlaktrits or ernst kirchsteiger, but it does have my favourite person in the whole world, and also other good things such as cheap thai, vegetarian thai and funny thai restaurant names. funny thai restaurant names include:

thaitanic
thairiffic
thai me up

i think thai restaurants in australia are like hair dressers in sweden, the type of business where it is expected from you as an owner to include a witty pun in your name. i love it! i wish all lines of business were forced to use puns for their names. in vancouver, there was a printing/framing shop called prints charming, that is truly the name of names.

anyway, australia. australia will be AWESOME. there's so much i miss that i can't wait to get back to. i find it weird that it's a lot like here, i don't think living there as that different from living here, but it's so incredibly far away. to get to a house that's a lot like houses here except with no heat elements and worse isolation, with cats that look like the cats here and cars and streets and shops that look like they do here, i have to spend 20+ hours in the air. does that not sound strange to you? why would someone do that? it might not really apply here, but i still think of a bit from "love love love" by the mountain goats. yes, the mountain goats. naturally.

some things you do for money
and some you do for fun
but the things you do for love
are gonna come back to you one by one

and that might not sound overly impressive, but in its defense the song also mentions sonny liston and raskolnikov. in other musical news, interpol have released a new album and so far it sounds pretty good, it's been a while since i listened to them and they're really good at that big city angst thing. didn't i write about that somewhere? i'm sure i did. right, here. hearing the new album also made me go back to the old stuff and i was reminded of how incredible a song "leif erikson" is. some of their other songs are also positively amazing, but leif erikson's the one that i listen to the most on repeat. over and over. helps me catch up on my mime. i'm a slave to the details. you should check it out.

tmg fan blog

i've tried. i really have. but i haven't found anything i thought would be worth to write about. i don't have much now either. i'm writing this post to declare that "woke up new" by the mountain goats is arguably the best song i have ever heard, but i've mentioned it before so i don't think it really qualifies as "news". anyway, there's this line in the song.

an astronaut could have seen the hunger in my eyes from space.

and i've heard the song before and i've noticed the line and not really thought much of it, but now it's just stuck in my mind. i've listened to the song at least ten times today and that line is the biggest reason. (there are other reasons too, the main one being that the song is AWESOME). just thinking about it gave me goosebumps earlier today, and i don't think that's ever happened before. i know i've posted a link to the video on youtube before, but i'm going to do it again just because i can. the mountain goats - woke up new. maybe the line fits my life better now. it's open for interpretation, it's got a dualistic touch like most of the lines in the song. instead of the "she left me and now everything sucks"-theme that is ever so common, woke up new has lines such as "i felt free and i felt lonely and i felt scared" and i know all of those feelings and i know the ambiguity and confusion and i know that song and i like how it doesn't simplify anything. i like how it sees both sides in a very calm way. i think i'm like that, i try to see both sides way too much. it's a good thing in moderation, but if you do it too much you're never able to draw any conclusions or take a firm stand on anything. this can be frustrating for both you and people around you. but since the song is like that and i'm like that, i like the song a little extra.

in other news, my thesis is just not coming along very well. i can't seem to get working on it. and i don't really understand why. i'm not feeling very good about it and i'm not very proud of myself, but nothing seems to help. i'm not sure what to do about it. i've tried. i really have.

concert invite #2

some of canada's finest, great lake swimmers, will be playing at inkonst in malmö tomorrow (thursday) evening. i think they've made some pretty rad stuff so i encourage you to come along. it's slow, folkish music not entirely different from acts such as nick drake and bonnie 'prince' billy. one need not venture too far from the truth to compare them to damien rice either. check things out here and let me know if you want to come with me. perhaps you'd like to hear some of their tunes before agreeing to dish out a whopping 85:- to go see a band in the middle of the week? no need to cut and paste their name into google, for i provide you here with their myspace page. pitchfork has reviewed their first album here; they were also generous enough to provide a free song!

to completely fit the blog description, here's a link to the only dinosaur comic that mentions lakes. it's also about canada day, and ryan north is from toronto, the same place as the great lake swimmers. i'm really getting into full circle-mode here.

jag vill alltid, alltid gå med dig

helvete. förra inlägget är ju bara pinsamt. all min musik-cred åt skogen, kom kom är ju en imperiet-cover. varför visste jag inte det? jag har inte hört originalet och jag är tveksam till att det låter särskilt mycket som broder daniel. inte för att det måste göra det egentligen, jag bara känner att jag borde ha droppat att det var en cover lite snyggt i en bisats, eller åtminstone antytt att alla självklart känner till att det är en cover och att jag därför inte behöver bemöda mig med att berätta vem som gjort originalet. men icke. jag visste inte, och nu är det korskrypardags.

vagt relaterat så skriver mattias alkberg i sitt senaste blogginlägg att han äntligen hört säkerts skiva och mitt inlägg får därmed en snygg full circle-känsla. kanske kan det balansera historielösheten lite.

svenska ljud

det blir ett inlägg på gästspråket svenska den här gången. mest för att jag lyssnar på säkert! och därför har en massa svenska ord i huvudet för en gångs skull. när jag läser på engelska byter tankarna snabbt språk. tänk om man hade det så med lite fler språk. jag undrar hur många man kan lära sig innan hjärnan blir alldeles förvirrad? två går bra. förutom en eller annan gång, som t.ex. när jag pratar med rachel samtidigt som jag chattar med någon vän. då blir det för mycket för stackars hjärnan ibland.

anledningen till att jag skriver det här inlägget är just att säkert! (formerly known as hello saferide) är så fantastiskt bra och att jag behöver få ur mig lite åsikter om musik och det är inte så många i min bekantskapskrets som är så intresserade eller besatta av musik som jag är, så ämnet "den här skivan är sjukt bra!" kommer inte upp så ofta som det skulle kunna göra. men tillbaka till säkert!: det var bra på engelska, men det är klart bättre på svenska. varför är det så bra och varför är det ännu bättre nu? för mig är det ungefär så här: annika norlin (som är säkert!:s/hs:s riktiga namn. och hur bildar man egentligen genitiv av ett ord som slutar med utropstecken?) gör ofta trallvänlig popmusik med klatschiga refränger. en bra egenskap. texterna handlar mycket om känslor, då och då om att vara ledsen och då och då om att vara glad. det gillar jag. ibland handlar de om tunga saker, som t.ex. "allt som är ditt", som handlar om våldtäkt. den gillar jag också. för att försäkra mig om att jag inte hade missförstått något i texten så gjorde jag en snabbgoogling och upptäckte då att det finns en blogg. den innehåller meningar såsom "Jag blev så stressad av människans tydliga inneboende godhet att jag var tvungen att gå in på Unicef och hetsskänka 300 kr" och hamnar därför på min bevakningslista. en annan anledning till att säkert (jag orkar inte skriva utropstecknet mer, det blir bara fult) är så bra är att texterna oftast är väldigt välskrivna och ibland har fantastiska rim som "hydman-vallien" på "dricka vin".

för någon månad sen lyssnade jag på emil jensen nästan hela tiden. 2007 har alla en blogg och det har han förstås också. emil. på den står det att han ska göra en cykelturné genom sverige i sommar och mycket bättre än så kan det inte bli. hoppas han orkar ända till skåne, tänkte jag först, men sen kom jag ihåg att han ju trots allt sjunger på ganska bred skånska. hoppas att han spelar någon dag då jag kan komma, tänker jag nu istället. han är väldigt lurig med orden han med och anledningen till att jag tar upp honom här inte någon av hans låtar (men många är väldigt, väldigt bra) utan bara titeln på hans skiva: orka då. jag tänker det väldigt ofta. orka då. det kan betyda både att jag orkar och att jag inte orkar. tanken är nog att det ska förmedla att man inte orkar, men jag känner att det kan betyda båda sakerna. kanske att jag kommer på att jag faktiskt orkar när jag säger "orka då" till mig själv. första låten på skivan innehåller även raden "finns det något mer deprimerande än en läggmatch i pingis på psyket?" och redan då var jag fast.

sedan så hyser jag något slags kärlek till mattias alkberg bd. de är ojämna, men ibland får de till det helt, t.ex. tycker jag att fyllskalle var en grym låt trots att sällan dricker och inte kan relatera till den över huvud taget. nu har jag fastnat för kom kom från deras förra skiva, "ditt hjärta är en stjärna". (jag känner att jag velar mellan att använda citationstecken här och inte alls är konsekvent, ibland känns det bättre med och ibland känns det bättre utan och jag känner att jag borde hålla mig till en standardmall, men det här är trots allt bara en blogg.) kom kom har ett intro som låter mer broder daniel än vad broder daniel någonsin gjort och första gången jag hörde det så funderade jag på om man fick göra ett sådant intro om man inte var broder daniel. nu har jag kommit fram till att man får det, och då särskilt om resten av låten inte låter så mycket broder daniel. nu sökte jag snabbt på nätet för att se om den gick att ladda hem lagligt och vad hittade jag? inte låten, men en blogg. ja, det är klart att de har en blogg. vad inbillade jag mig? jag känner ett framtida, post-ironiskt inlägg om hur alla har en blogg forma sig i mitt huvud.

mäüd ölöfssön

it's time for a language-related rant.

a rant about something that i'm sure you've all come across. it concerns the difference between swedish and english in the area of vowels. as most of you are no doubt aware, there are more vowels in swedish than there are in english, more specifically the notorious triumvirate of åäö. also, in swedish we consider y to be a vowel whereas those english dudes consider it a half-vowel at best. it's a puzzling letter to be sure, but the point of this rant is å, ä and ö. you see, even though they look remarkably similar to some other vowels that exist in english (a and o, i'm looking in your general direction), they are in fact different vowels. different letters, different pronunciations, different pretty much everything. yes yes, i know that historically the å is an a with an o on it and pronounced somewhere in between, and i know that an ä is considered an a with an umlaut. but i'd still like to claim that they are separate vowels. people here don't mistake å's for a's. this is because they are different vowels. not that hard, is it? even dudes in metal bands should be able to figure this one out, right? well, i'm sure you've all heard of motörhead and mötley crüe and rolled your eyes, but this aspect of the issue seems like it's been done to death already. just check out this for some serious dot-related humour. i tried to find a picture of the tour t-shirt, but didn't in five seconds and then gave up. whilst looking, i came across a wikipedia article with the name "heavy metal umlaut", which indicates that this topic has been adequately covered already, and so i shall waste no more space on it.

in the above paragraph i hinted that dudes in metal bands were of low intelligence; i apologize for this and as we shall soon see, people in other areas do not seem to be smarter. i turn you now to a picture i took in a design store in sydney.


perhaps it is not clear on the small version of the picture, but click on it and enjoy all the glory of a "Stockhölm" teapot. to indicate that it is from scandinavia you have to put dots on at least on of the vowels, right? otherwise people might not understand that we are selling authentic scandinavian design here! because people have no idea what or where stockholm is. now, i'm not swedocentric enough to expect everyone in the world to obviously know that stockholm is the swedish capital city, but i do think it's a name strong enough to hold its own without the help of dots to indicate its scandinavian-ness. also, what is up with only putting dots on one of the o's? if you put them on one, you've already established that you don't care that they are different vowels altogether, so why not go all out with your foreign branding strategy and leave nothing to ambiguity when you name your product? with the name "Stockhölm", most people will think it's scandinavian, some people will think you are an idiot for putting dots where they don't belong and some people will be completely oblivious to all the mighty viking-ness allusions you are trying to convey in your teapot. if you instead name it "Stöckhölm" (or perhaps "STÖCKHÖLM" for slightly more viking-ness) some of the oblivious people might get the hint whereas no one would think you were even more of an idiot - a definite win-win situation.

when i buy shampoo, deodorant, soap and similar products, there are at least twenty different options that will do the job. they all look remarkably similar. they have names like "arctic", "cool", "sport" and so on, and i usually choose depending on what kind of image i want to convey for the day. if i feel sporty the day i happen to be buying shower gel, i will buy the one that says "sport" (as long as it's also cheap); if i feel arcticy, i will buy the "arctic" one. i don't want to waste my time on inconsequential things like picking a shower gel, i just want to get it over with, so i'm using this method just to have something to base a quick decision on. but once, again in sydney, the decision was easier than normal. a picture is enclosed below, enjoy the spectacular setting.


yes, it is a deodorant called "Norscä" and it has the scent "forest fresh". i don't think i have much to add, the picture pretty much speaks for itself. in a kumadude-esque manner i'd like to close off this post with yet another picture, this time of a coffee shop that also sells ice cream, also in sydney. on a side note, the coffee shop was named "coffee t", which inspired an endless number of mr. t jokes between me and rachel. anyway, picture: