Today was the really awesome holiday Valborg. It’s basically a ’say hi to spring’ thing, where there’s a bonfire and people singing and stuff. The one we went to is on a church, right where a stream bends so that the fire is surrounded by water. I went there with my Mum and my grandmother and the fire was nice and the song was fine but after some time I got bored and went off to look at the graveyard.

I love graveyards. I don’t know why, I just do. So I walked through it and took pics of some graves and thought about this story I’m writing and then it started raining and we packed into the car and left. As we drove away my Mum said “so, did you see Maria’s grave?”

I didn’t. And the moment she said it I wanted to stop the car and go back over there and find it. Just to see if it was true. I mean, she’d told me about it, back when it happened. I just somehow thought that it was somebody else. She had a common name. It didn’t have to be her, really. At least that’s what I told myself at the time. But Mum told me that she’d run into Maria’s mum and that it was really her and I couldn’t believe that I’d been right there, where she’d been buried and I hadn’t paid attention. There were so many graves, all of strangers. I looked at nearly every single one, but I didn’t look at hers.

When I got home, still not believing it, I went searching for her obituary. I found it. I’ve blurred her last name and stuff, but yeah. It’s her.

I mean, we fell out of touch. Once we finished, argh, högstadiet, that’s age 14-16, we went to different schools and she got a boyfriend and I got an eating disorder, blah blah blah. I think the last time we spoke was in 1997, so I don’t know why I can’t stop crying. But I can’t. So, I have to write something about her.

So, Maria.

She was this tiny thing. She was short and small with dark hair that had some strange wavy thing going on. She had freckles, and the roundest face you can imagine, which she hated. When I first got to know her she was taking cortisone for something, and it made her already fat cheeks balloon into insanity. She was so embarrassed about it, and wouldn’t talk about it, no matter how much people asked. But I remember those huge cheeks and her voice which was kind of odd, in the sweetest of ways.

She was funny. Not in your usual making jokes and talking a lot funny. No. It was more that she said things in an odd way, using words that always made you laugh, whether she meant to or not. She always blushed when you laughed, and was more easily embarrassed than anyone else I knew.

She had bad luck too, and things just happened to her, like they might in some kind of twenty minute sitcom. Like the time she was bored and used an ink pad and stamped some silly thing, a flower or a bee or something, in the middle of her forehead. She didn’t know, of course, that the ink was water proof. She had that green mark in her face for days.

Her brother looked just like her, and had the same voice.

She had a moped, and we drove around this gravel pitch with it, really slowly, because she was afraid to crash it into the football goal at the far end. Or was it me who was afraid? I can’t remember.

I was only at her house a handful times. It was easier to hang out at another friend’s place, because her parents let us get away with anything. But yes. I was there a few times, and once, just after she met her boyfriend, she showed me this vibrator he’d given her, and I swear her face was like a fire engine. She turned it on and it vibrated in her hand and we giggled like sixteen-year-olds do.

At the end of that evening I borrowed a book of hers, that I still have around here somewhere.

The last time I saw her I had just gone emo, and wore so much make-up that she didn’t recognise me. I called her name, but she didn’t hear me. I watched her walk away, not knowing that there wouldn’t be another chance to talk to her. To see her blush and scoff when I laughed at something she didn’t mean to be funny.

I could’ve gotten in touch with her. I could’ve called or written her so many times. It was eleven years between the last time we spoke and the day she died. It was breast cancer. She was twenty-seven years old. She had a husband and a baby. A boy. I never met either of them. And really, it’s not the twenty-seven-year-old I’m sad about. It’s the sixteen-year-old. The one with the sweet face and grumbly voice. I still remember her jacket. Her boots. The way her hair curled. I know nothing about grown-up Maria. But oh right now I miss teenage-Maria more than I can say.

And yes. She’s gone. Like so many people, moving in and out of our lives she’s gone. Only this time it’s permanent.

I’m sure you are sick of me harping on about Glee. Sorry about that. Today I am going to do a different angle, though, which I hope will make for a different post altogether.

So, I refused to watching this show for the longest time, because everyone told me it was so amazing. Yes. It made some kind of sense at the time. When I finally succumbed to it, I obviously fell in love. I do that a lot. Nothing new there. The first time I saw Kurt I burst out laughing, because Tansy had told me there would be a gay boy prancing about claiming to be straight. And really, nobody in this WORLD could think that he is. Really. Except that, yeah, I guess if you wanted it enough…

I do miss the presence of a lesbian or two in the show, although I’m happy with what we have so far. I was kind of disappointed when Sue Sylvester went on a date with a man, because come on. That attitude? That hair? That SWING COSTUME? She’s so a lesbian. Or maybe I just want her to be. Anyway, let’s speak about the queer presence there is instead of that which isn’t, shall we?

So, Kurt. He’s like the stereotype of a gay boy, and at first it annoyed me how much they were playing with stereotypes here, and I don’t mean just in the case of Kurt, because pretty much every character is a stereotype, only in an awesome way. I don’t really know what makes it feel right when normally that sort of thing would make me roll my eyes, but there you go.

And really, I’ll take a Kurt over a gay character that is just some sort of sidekick (or handbag) to the female lead. Because sometimes (a lot of the time), especially on TV, but in books and movies as well, the best friend becomes the expression of a minority. You know, the pretty girl with the fat friend, the straight character with a gay friend, the white character with a black friend, etc. It’s really easy to fall into that, even when you try not to, and I’m not going to claim that I don’t do it myself. Because I totally do.

(The thing I fall for the most? The freaking redhead cliché. I do that ALL THE TIME. Some time I will write a novel that doesn’t have one. Seriously. I will.)

So, yeah. There are stereotypes. Lots of stereotypes. But I’ll take it. I love Kurt. He’s amazing. He’s feminine. He gets the bullies to allow him to remove his expensive jumpers before they toss him in the dumpster. He screeches about day spas and has a whole ipod shuffle dedicated to music from Wicked. He’s pretty much awesome. When he asked to audition for Defying Gravity (link goes to YouTube of his performance) I was really excited, because it seemed to be so him.

And then he threw the high note just to go easy on his dad.

That made me so sad, for so many reasons. Because, okay. I come from a really small place. You could call it a suburb, but it’s way more of a village. We have a school, a small grocery store and a pizza place. And houses. There are cows and horses and sheep grazing only a short walk away, and when the farmers put the manure out on their crops? We can smell it for DAYS.

I went to, um, the equivalent of junior high (7th-9th grade), there. It was not fun. See, up to 6th grade we all went to small, small schools in our respective villages/suburbs. By 7th they collect kids from five or six of them, and bus them to ours, which is actually the biggest of the bunch. The result is a mish-mash of sports nuts, racists, raggare (I cannot translate that word!), girls who express themselves through new clothes and cattyness, and of course, a handful of nobodies. It’s not a pretty picture.

I was a nobody. Actually, I was less than a nobody. In middle school I was just a nerd, and nobody cared much about me. The boys let me play soccer with them sometimes, but for the most part me and my few friends hung out and looked over at the kids that were pretty and awesome and we couldn’t even talk to without them sneering at us. When I started junior high something changed. I think it was because I made friends with a girl from one of the smaller villages. I didn’t know it then, but she’d apparently been seriously bullied before. So, as you can imagine, the popular kids didn’t like that both of us made new friends, even if it just was each other. So they decided that we were dykes and that we were going to pay for it. I got my heart broken when the twat (seriously, my taste was lacking something shocking) I was trying to convince myself I had a crush on (because he was a boy, and girls crushed on boys, right?) played along with these games. We got to hear a lot of stuff, most popular was saying that we “smelled like dykes”, that whatever jewellery we were wearing was a gift from the other person, and that we should just admit it already. It was nothing big. It was just, small minded, un-creative taunts. Had I heard them today I would’ve laughed my arse off at them, that much is for sure.

At the time it was the biggest insult ever, and I was so mortified.

It didn’t last all that long, but it felt like a fucking lifetime. Of course, amusingly, I went on to become just a lesbian, which is a special kind of irony. My friend dropped out of high school, became pregnant and went on to play house with an older guy. I think she was 15 and him 17 when the first one was born. They have five or six kids now, the oldest being 12 or 13. We lost touch when I went on to the typical high school experience while she popped out children. Her choice, and I respect it fully, but at the time I missed her so much, and didn’t quite know what to do with myself.

Later I would date a girl who was still in high school, while I was 20-21, and got a taste of it all over again. She didn’t want to come out, which I was hurt by at the time, and in retrospect it was fucking stupid, because it wasn’t my choice to make. But I went with her to school once, telling everyone I was her friend, and did what I could to play cool. Possibly the fact that we locked ourselves into the loo and snogged during the lunch break helped a bit.

She would come out during her last year, and we went to the high school prom together, getting no shit whatsoever for it. So, ironically, I got a ton of taunting and teasing for being a lesbian when I wasn’t, and then when I was… I didn’t get any.

But I can say one thing, and that is that not singing that song makes no difference in the big picture. People will always find a reason for yelling “dyke” or “fag” in your direction, if they want to. And throwing a note and thereby making sure that you don’t get to fulfill that dream that you have? Really doesn’t make that much of a difference.

Then again, people are generally tougher on boys in this aspect. Just today I read this horrible post about the murder of Jorge Steven Lopez Mercado, which made me want to write this post in the first place, and it’s just… sickening. So maybe Kurt did make the right decision. I don’t know. But it just about killed me seeing him doing it.

I’m at the part of the book that feels like running downhill really fast, which feels like a bit early. Can I keep that up for another 15,000 words? Not sure. What I do know is that I’ve only done about half my plots yet, so maybe I need to re-think. Later. When it’s not November.

And for something else entirely… It’s a million years since I did one of these, so I thought I should give it a go.

When I was about ten my grandparents lived in this house out in the middle of nowhere that my grandfather built without help of any contractors. It was big and it was build to incorporate the small, two room cottage that my grandmother grew up, which became the living room and a bit. Upstairs grandmother had a weaving room, and grandfather had his office. It was this mystical room with creaking floorboards, an enormous desk, lots of little trinkets on shelves and most importantly, a typewriter. It was an electric one, a fancy thing that I could spend hours just writing my name on because I loved the sound.

When they grown-ups got tired of me spending all my time visiting in this room they dug an old, manual typewriter out of storage somewhere and let me take it home. It looked something like this, but was green. It had ribbons that were half black, half red, and you had to use all your strength to push each key down or it wouldn’t leave a mark. And if you didn’t land your finger directly on the right key it HURT.

I spent so much time writing on it that it’s amazing my parents didn’t murder me in my sleep. Seriously, the sound of a manual typewriter is loud, monotonous and it never ended. Ever.

Of course, because it took so much strength to write just the simplest sentence, I still covetted a typewriter just like my grandfather’s. An electric. It was like, the fanciest thing you could imagine, back then. I read the books about Mimmi by Viveca Sundvall and was jealous of her typewriter, because even though it was pink and lacked the Z-key it was electric and thus awesome.

I started to save up for a nice one. When I had about 500 SEK (which took forever, my weekly allowance was like 20 SEK) my grandparents took pity on me and gave me the other 500 needed to buy one. And so I had A REAL TYPEWRITER. My poor, old-fashioned, much more aestethically pleasing manual typewriter was put back up in the attic, and I wrote up a storm. Because somewhere in betweeen the two I had started writing stories. Mostly I wrote about girls with long, long names Jessamyn “Jess” Martinsson was a favourite, thanks to Sweet Valley High past generation book, the title which I have repressed) so that I could shorten them and therefore get to use the “-sign, which was my favourite key.

And then I started junior high (ish, age 14-16, what oh what should I call that?) and we had old, old, old school Macintosh computers, which were then embarrassingly out of date (about ten years old). I think it was the 128k, but I’m not entirely sure.

And that, my friends, was when I first discovered the joy of using italics in my writing.

My dad grew up in the middle of a city. When he talks about it he makes it sound like one of those old movies from the 50s, where people sound all brisk and cheery and the boys play tricks on the fat mums while they do the laundry and gossip. Andersonskans Kalle, ftw!

His parents were in their late thirties when they had him, so we always thought that they were really, really old. They had a two bedroom flat in the middle of the city, and when we visited grandma always made stew with that sort of meat that feels stringy when you chew it. She served it with potatoes that had cooked for too long and fell apart when you tried to pin them down with your fork, brown sauce with whole pepper corns in it and blackcurrant jelly.

After we ate we always walked down to the shop on the corner and bought candy for the bank note we got as a present when we first arrived. Twenty kronor, the smallest note in Swedish currency, is roughly three dollars, so it wasn’t a lot of money, but we were still all excited. The shop was on a street corner, and when we were really young it was still one of those places that only sold candy, newspapers and magazines. It grew as we got older, became a proper convenience store and lost some of its magic in the process.

When we got back to the flat it was time for afternoon coffee – Swedish people do coffee, not tea – and while the grown ups drank coffee we ate Mariekex, with a slice of butter – she sliced off a piece from the baking margarine with a cheese cutter – and a piece of cheese arranged all artfully on top. They tasted nothing but butter of course, but it was so strange that we ate them anyway.

My grandfather died when I was barely eight, so most of my memories are of my grandmother. She would pour water from the tap into glass bottles and keep them in the fridge. She kept the milk carton on the counter, and if anyone needed milk she’d jump up and get it for you. She was a housewife, which in Sweden went out of style in the sixties or so, and we always thought it was really odd that she just went home and cooked lunch to her boys, who both came home from work and school to eat, and left her with the dishes. Our mum always worked fulltime, and our dad worked even more. We spent a lot of time in daycare and after school-care, and wondered what she did all day if she wasn’t working.

She did the dishes religiously, as soon as you had finished your food. She slept in a fold-out couch in the small bedroom behind the kitchen, even though she had a room twice as big, that used to be dad’s room (and his brother before him, he was sixteen when my dad was born). The biggest piece of furniture in the room was a dresser, so tall that none of us could reach the beautiful ship on top of it – a dark red miniature of a real ship, that our grandfather had made.

We grew up in the country, and thought it was really cool to live in the middle of a city like that. Sometimes, when we felt brave, we snuck out on the balcony and peered down on the cars that whizzed by really, really fast. When we stayed over we slept on mattresses laid out on the floor in dad’s room. We had special sheets that they had bought for us – mine with Snow white and my sister’s with Snoopy. I remember laying on one of the mattresses, feeling the wooden floor through the all too thin mattress, and letting the sound of the cars lull me to sleep. It was always completely quiet at home, and it was hard falling asleep with all the noise.

My grandma was always very neat. She had her grey hair perfectly curled, and she didn’t rearrange the furniture a single time that I can remember. Their couch was really hard, and uncomfortable to sit on, and their TV was one of those old ones that has fake wood panels on the sides. There was a fireplace, but it was just for show. She had lots of siblings, but I only remember a couple of them. She had a brother who was a socialist, and when we ate Non Stop – like chocolate M&Ms – he would tell us to only eat the red ones, because the blue were conservatives, which was bad. When the red were gone we would eat the green. They were environmentalists, and not as good as the red, but not evil like the blue.

Sometimes I ate the blue ones anyway, but only when he wasn’t looking.

I always got the feeling that my grandma was lonely. She had one friend, who was the sister of my grandfather. They were friends long after he passed away. Then she passed away too, and my dad’s brother had to start shopping for grandma, because she was afraid to go out by herself. She said that she got dizzy spells and was afraid to fall, but sometimes, over the last year, I’ve wondered if she really had problems being around other people. Like me.

The last few years before she died she changed. She started seeing and hearing things, sometimes saying that she had our grandfather over for dinner, even though he’d been dead since 1988. She said he had a new woman. Other times she taped her mail slot shut because she was sure that people were going in through it while she was sleeping. She had always taken a pride in keeping a neat home, but one of the last times my parents visited they realised that the kitchen cabinets were full of old rubbish she hadn’t taken out. It looked like she hadn’t eaten anything but oatmeal for weeks.

Things like that really makes your stomach hurt. When you’re far away in a different country, and you get a birthday wish from your grandmother and it’s written in a handwriting so shaky that you can barely recognise it. And then your dad calls and tells you she passed away, and how just before she called and chewed him out for missing her birthday, when it really wasn’t until the coming month. And you realise that she couldn’t remember what month her own birthday was, but she remembered yours, just a few months before.

And then she’s gone, and all you have left is the memories, because the flat was a rental, and the big red ship went to your uncle, because he had a cottage by the ocean, where it would fit with the furnishings.