This blogging every fortnight or so thing is good for me. It makes life so much more manageable. True, I blog elsewhere, but that’s not really the POINT, thank you.

Aaaanyway. We’ve had several weeks of 30°C or more weather (possibly it was 25 and up, but it was too much either way) and I’ve spent most of my time flat on my stomach on the bed, computer in front of me and cat behind me, both of us gasping for air in front of the fan. I don’t know why I’m unable to function when it’s this hot (actually, I do, it brings back bad memories), but I do know that I hate it. A lot.

My therapist is good. Some things he says are scary, but I think I need to hear them. He’s put another few diagnoses on me, which is a relief because when the psychiatrist said I was ready to work full-time I wanted to cry. At least there’s somebody who sees that I’m not well yet.

Have done a bit of pretendy work, but am now on summer leave. I started quilting over there, to get my project from a few years ago done.

My grandfather’s dementia is getting worse. On my mum’s birthday he kept asking where we were and who everyone was. It’s very sad, and doesn’t even touch on the fact that he can barely hear, see or walk. My grandmother can’t be away from home for more than an hour or two at a time, and has ot do virtually everything for him.

Seeing him like this just makes me feel that I never want to become this old. There are ninety year olds that are perfectly clear and don’t lose their memory, but I don’t think my odds are good. My grandfather, both his brothers, his mother AND my grandmother on the other side has/had some level of dementia. It’s sad and scary.

My parents went away on holiday (Austria!) and wants me to go over to their place and “check up on” my brother. He’s 25. Yes, seriously. I’m not going to and I told them as much. He would act more like an adult if they’d treat him like one. That’s what I believe.

And now my evening meds are kicking in so it’s bedtime for me. See you next month!

(All pics taken at my grandparents’ summer house two days ago.)

I stole all these from my sister’s Facebook. That’s what it’s there for, right? Anyway, probably boring if you don’t know my family, but this is my blog, and thus I post boring picture of faces that tell you nothing. I did, btw, manage a full five hours of socialising, new goal reached!

There was Sangria and lots of cousins and their friends, although half the clan didn’t arrive until half an hour before I had to leave. Which was midnight. Damn, I’m getting old.

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See? We do raise on of these.

And then we dance around it, like madwomen.

Family.

In the evening we sent our parents off to our grandparents summer house, and had our own little party at our cousins’ summer place. And I tried to help in the kitchen, but cousin Frida and her friend Linda were busy arguing about who should do this and that and that and this, so I went outside and had a drink instead.

Industrial size fairylights.

Beer and ridiculous amounts of meat on the barbecue. I brought my own quite delicious tofu, thank you for asking.

Cousin Sofia and I, and something weird is going on with my hair.

Hanging out.

Cousin Lisa.

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Yes, I have a lot of cousins. Yes, they’re all awesome. And this is less than half of them…

I’ve been blogging elsewhere. If you are Swedish, or know how to read Swedish, check out Kaia kommer hem. It means “Kaia comes home” and I’ve actually found that I feel more grounded when I blog in Swedish.

I do want to double post, though, so yes. If you’re a Swede you should head over there instead of reading both, because this might get rather boring otherwise.

Today I walked through the church park (yes, we have a park build around a church, which I believe is rather common in Sweden; the only country abroad I have to compare with is the USA, and they didn’t at all), and the sky was bright blue, almost turquoise, and I found that a story was writing itself in my head. I took some pictures to remember the gist of it, and now I’m tap-tap-tapping it out…

PS. Why are all my stories about death? I have to do something about that.

Around Christmas I promised that I’d talk more about various Swedish holidays and how they differ from elsewhere. I got distracted and never got around to it, as usual, but since it’s Easter now I thought I’d talk about that for a bit…

And I should probably add that this is the view of a very non-religious sort of upbringing. It’s possible that there are those that add church going and such into this, but as far as I know most of them do BOTH. As in, this isn’t considered “heathen behaviour” or anything.

So, Easter.

According to folklore all witches dress up prettily and fly on their brooms to a place called Blåkulla on the Thursday before Easter. Nobody knew where this place was or what it looked like, but they would have a feast and stuff with the Devil. During the witch trials of the 17th century women on trial frequently admitted to having wild shag fests with said Devil, I read somewhere during my research for various writing projects, so I suppose one can conclude that No Good Things happened in Blåkulla ever, and that the tales of the ongoings there differ depending on what stories you heard growing up.

They would hang out with him there and come back to the Earth on Easter Sunday, and to scare them from returning at all it’s said that people started doing big bonfires and such. These days we do these on the last of April and the first of May, for some reason. Rather belatedly, yes, and it’s really more to welcome spring, but it’s still done, actually.

Somewhere around the early 1800s another tradition was started up, which meant to dress your children, boys and girls alike, up as “Easter witches” and walk them from house to house begging for candy. These days the boys sometimes go as “Easter men” instead, but generally people don’t care so much about gendering this particular holiday which is awesome. I feel icky putting somebody else’s kids on my blog, but Google Image Search has a lot of pics if you’re curious what it would look like.

I suppose this is the closest you’ll get to proper Trick or Treating here.

And also, there are of course lots of sweets, most which come in eggs like this one, with crazy chickens printed on them. Possibly people do this elsewhere too? Some families let the kids go on treasure hunts for these, and others, like mine, just hide them in an easy-to-find place.

The thing I remember the most about Easter eggs like this one is actually swapping candy with my siblings, because our parents could never remember who liked what kinds. I gave licorice to A. and she gave me… huh. Something else.

As for food it’s pretty much the same as for Christmas, but with added egg dishes. And for somebody like me, who rarely eat Christmas food because it’s all eggs, is afraid of being glutened AND doesn’t eat eggs? Easter food is exciting, let me tell you!

I think that’s about it. Add your own traditions in the comments, I’m delightedly nerdy when it comes to such things, and love hearing about the difference from country to country.

One of the blogs I read recently did a post asking what exactly makes you Swedish. I believe the person in question was writing a piece on what exactly that makes a person a certain nationality. I chimed in with a few things I’ve found since I returned back here, and rather quickly got questioned (not by the poster, by another commenter), who thought my observations weren’t correct. (And I’m not linking, cos I couldn’t be less interested in an argument.)

I don’t believe that the things I gave as examples are the only truth and nothing but the truth, but to me they are. Of course your mileage may vary, depending on your feelings regarding your nationality, your experiences and what part of the world you’ve been visiting and thus have to compare your country of origin too. But I think there is one thing that is true for most of us, and that is that we don’t realise just how ______ we are until we travel abroad, for any length of time.

I’ve never felt particularly Swedish. Really. But once I lived outside my own little country I found myself say “In Sweden we…” rather a lot, and I was almost always introduced to people as “this is Kaia, she’s Swedish” (except, you know, that it wasn’t Kaia, because I didn’t start using that name until later). And it wasn’t until I returned to Sweden that I realised just how much I love my country, and I still couldn’t pin point why.

I love that this is so subjective, though. It all depends on what you’ve seen, where you’ve been, what you’re used to. I was reminded of this last week, when we (me, my sister, my Mum and one of my aunts) for some reason, unknown to all of us, started talking about fruit.

I said something about being amazed by how cheap fruit is here, and gave the example of being able to buy two twelve packs of Pepsi for five bucks, while in the U.S., and then have to pay half that for a single, usually not that nice bell pepper. My sister pulled a face and said “Not compared to Spain”, which is the country of her reference. And then she told us a story about her Iraqi friend who thinks the prices of dates and figs in Sweden are nothing short of ridiculous, because he’s used to the Middle East and all that.

Kind of interesting, don’t you think?

But when I say that things are so very clean here I think about walking down the street and seeing entire house’s worth of furniture tossed on the sidewalk until somebody could be bothered picking them up. Often less fortunate people snatched them up before the garbage truck came by; I was that person a few times. I think about overflowing trash cans and the smell when the sun baked them for hours and hours, and you could never be SURE when the next pick-up was, because it seemed to change from week to week.

When I say that alcohol is expensive I think about the hole-in-the-wall-bar that was nothing more than counter, a pool table and toilets one could not lock. We paid five dollars for a pitcher of beer (less than ONE beer costs here) and sat out back, drinking it. Mostly we opted to sit outside even when it was ridiculously cold because the white supremacists up front made us nervous; our group was made up by two Mexicans, one Middle Eastern guy, two gay men, one transgendered man and a few white kids.

When I say fika and elvakaffe I think about drinking coffee from dainty little cups and eating cookies by the pound, because God forbid that you say no to something, and compare it to grabbing a tall latte at Starbucks on my way to Memorial Park by St John’s River.

When I say that the standard of Swedish housing is superb I think about the kitchens here with their pull out cutting boards and the stainless steel counter and a stove where the burners aren’t spirals that are hopeless to clean underneath. And more than that? Windows with three sheets of glass in them, no drafty corners and radiators in every single room. I’ve never been colder than I was my first winter in Florida; it was as cold inside as it was outside, and I pulled a electric heater from room to room, and pretty much couldn’t get out of bed without freezing to death.

And I don’t think I’ll ever get used to (even though I grew up with it!) being able to walk straight out into the forest and pick blueberries as I please. It’s heaven.

I promised a few people to write a little something about Swedish holiday things. We’ve got a lot of them, really, but as it is December (tomorrow) I will concentrate on this time of the year, and if people like it I may do a second post later on about our Easter, Midsummer and day-after-Halloween. For now, this will have to do.

I remember my first Christmas in the U.S., and how surprised I was at how EARLY they did everything. Tree went up shortly after Thanksgiving, lights and stuff in the gardens at the same time. Also, a warm Christmas was very, very alien to me. But this isn’t about that! This is about how we do it.

	Most people put these kind of electric candles in their windows around December 1st, but the tree has to wait until the 20th or even later. Usually these lights are in the shape of a upside down V, with five or seven candles total. Traditionally these are red, white or just simply varnished wood, so when I found black ones – which are not as common – I immediately bought two of them for my living room. I have a red one in the kitchen and a silver one in my bedroom. Sometimes there are stars instead, but I like these better. At the moment I live in a neighbourhood that is rather high in immigrant population, and it always amuses me to see who has these up and who doesn’t. The ones that do are without a fail Swedes. Some go all out and have special Christmas curtains and stuff too, but I’m lazy. I put these up and called it a day. Although I actually tidied a bit too. Only one room to go! We are big on the idea of advent, which is funny, as most Swedes aren’t actively religious or anything. At least not my generation. Sure, there are those who go to church and such, but it’s very rarely a weekly thing, as it is in the U.S, and people that do are in minority, much as people who don’t are elsewhere. So, these lights go up around the first of advent, but we also have the very particular advent candle thingy that I don’t know how to translate.
	A lot of the time these candle holders are white, red, brass or just plain wood. Most people use white moss to stuff it with, although I saw a picture of somebody filling her candle holder with walnuts. I found this one when I moved; I think I bought it when I was about twenty and totally anti Christmas because it didn’t go with my emo image. That’s why it’s blue and green, and not any more traditional colour scheme. I went with green candles rather than the traditional red or white because it went better with the rest of it, and decorative stones from the plant section of the grocery store. Each Sunday in December, that is, the four Sundays before the 24th, we light a candle. On the first of advent it’s just one, on the second it’s the first (already burned) and the second. And so on. And yes, I said the 24th, because we actually don’t do Christmas Day. Except in the hangover and cleaning up tons of wrapping paper and laying on the couch eating chocolate we don’t really want sort of way.
	But before I get to Christmas Eve we have to speak about Saint Lucia’s Day, which is a bit hard to explain but makes total sense. Really. Saint Lucia’s Day is on December 13th, and you can read about it in further detail at Wikipedia. Lucia was an Italian saint, so I’m not sure why we are so hellbent on celebrating her day. Basically you dress up in a white gown, tie a red sash around your waist and wear candles in a wreath on your head. This is, of course, just Lucia herself, a role which is usually awarded the prettiest or most popular girl in school (although the grown-ups will insist this has nothing to do with it). There are “maidens” and/or “star boys” as well. The “maidens” are dressed the same way, but don’t get to wear the candles. They hold them solmenly in their hands instead. When the boys are conned into playing along they get to opt out of the sash they instead of the tinsel or plain wreaths that the “maidens” (sorry, can’t say that word without giggling) wear, they get to wear these fashionable cone hats. It starts early – even in daycare they have the kids dress up this way. Of course, at that age it’s all electric candles and EVERYONE that wants to get to be a lucia. Except for the boys. Sheesh. Can’t have crossdressing that early in the morning, can we? Generally, at that age, all the girls end up being lucias, because at that age there isn’t any voting, and everyone wants the shiny candles! (Which are electric, when you’re under 12-ish, btw.) When I was in daycare the only “maiden” was my sister – and she only was one because they wouldn’t let a girl wear the funny cone shaped hat!

Another thing about December is the julbords. Excuse the lack of a pic here, but this is too long to fit up there with the rest of them!

But basically our julbords are Christmas themed smörgåsbords, which is a Swedish term from the beginning. The worst thing about these is that there is meat in everything, and when there’s not it’s half-arsed meat substitutes that makes me cringe. I hate soy meatballs and soy sausage, so possibly that is just me. But okay. Traditionally there are ridiculous amounts of herring (in tomato sauce, mustard sauce, cream sauce, garlic sauce, with dill, with onion, pickled, etc, etc), several types of salmon, a million types of cold cuts, from ham by way of turkey to REINDEER (okay, we don’t have that, but I’m told some do). Even the potato gratin has anchoevies in it. There are usually some vegetable dishes too, but none I like; beet salad, cabbage, boiled potatoes, and so on.

My family always try to make me vegetarian dishes at Christmas dinner, but I don’t much care for cold meals, especially not if they include beans or lentils, which they always do when omnivores try to cook vegetarian. My Mum always offers to cover a TURNIP in whole-seed mustard and cook it like they do the ham, but I always decline, because come on – just because it vaguely has the shape of a ham… doesn’t make it a ham! I think with longing about the tofurkey I ate while in the U.S. It was amazing.

When I was younger I lived off cheese sandwiches for all of December while people ate this over and over and over. Because, yes, when you make like twenty different dishes and serve them all at once you get insane amounts of leftovers. Come January most people are so sick of this food that they swear never to eat it again. It lasts until Easter time, when you usually get the same damn food all over again, but with more egg dishes (which I don’t eat either…) This year I actually feel the urge to help with the cooking, which is the first time in a million years. I think I want to make American stuffing (sans turkey, but possibly with eggplant instead…), pumpkin pie if I can get ahold of pumpkin before Christmas, southern style baked beans (not British, please and thank you) and something with tofu. Then of course there are Christmas treats, like knäck (a type of sweets made out of pretty much just sugar, syrup and almonds), ice chocolate (which is just melted baking chocolate and cocoa butter) and these toffees my grandmother makes that tastes vaguely like knäck but more chocolatey. And depending on the results on my endoscopy I might need to make gluten free ginger snaps too…

(Okay, so, to me the sweets and oranges and nuts is what Christmas is all about. The food I’m meh about, but oh dear God, the sweets!)

So, we eat all this food, wait an hour or so and then it’s time for the most Swedish of all Swedish Christmas dishes – the lutfisk. It can literally be translated to “lye fish” and I’m not kidding. It’s really prepared with lye, and is, I think, a leftover from back when you had to actually use dried fish for this since going fishing in the winter is a very precarious business.

From Wikipedia:

The first treatment is to soak the stockfish in cold water for five to six days (with the water changed daily). The saturated stockfish is then soaked in an unchanged solution of cold water and lye for an additional two days. The fish swells during this soaking and its protein content decreases by more than 50 percent, producing its famous jelly-like consistency. When this treatment is finished, the fish (saturated with lye) has a pH value of 11–12, and is therefore caustic. To make the fish edible, a final treatment of yet another four to six days of soaking in cold water (also changed daily) is needed. Eventually, the lutefisk is ready to be cooked.

I have never eaten lutfisk in my life, because it smells so bad and I don’t even like NORMAL fish, but it’s pretty much all people talk about around Christmas. It’s crazy.

Of course, I haven’t said a word about regular Christmas traditions, just about the food. Sorry about that. Christmas IS food to us. But okay. Here goes:

My family opens a single present on the morning of the 24th. We used to have lunch with our cousins and their parents while our grandparents went to visit a great aunt, but ever since she passed away and our cousins became with husbands and boyfriends and children we’ve instead cut this short and spend lunchtime with just the family.

If we’re lucky my brother actually wakes up before lunchtime these days.

Later on we go to visit the grandparents, where, up until the youngest of us turned sixteen one of the grown-ups dressed up as santa and came and knocked on the door. We don’t do stockings in Sweden, or rather, those who do are mostly influenced by American TV – it’s not a tradition to us. So, our santa does not come through any chimneys, but rather pays a quick visit during which every child in the house and the grown-ups too, usually over playing to an embarrassing degree, have to go greet him personally, shaking his hand and saying something polite.

(Swedes are all about the hand shaking!)

And then we get to open all our presents and then we eat all over again.

I only once celebrated American Christmas, which was a emotionally difficult time, as my past relationship disrupted right around this time of the year. I still went to this “friend” of ours with my partner at the time, and watched them laugh and had people asking me why I was so quiet. The reason for this? Should be fucking obvious, if you knew the whole story. So, I don’t know American Christmas all that well, but love to hear stories from other cultures, so feel free to add something in the comments. If you want.

In all, Australian Christmas sounds more fun, because I’m told they don’t do this insane guilt ridden food thing, because it’s too hot to do that. Because you know, they have SUMMER when we have December.

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 bitch about Swedish health care a lot, don’t I? A lot of the time it’s warranted, I have to say, but this morning I woke up with a kitten curled up on my chest, which meant that I stayed and cuddled her and thus got to listen to a bit of radio while I did so, and that together with a conversation I had with my doctor the other day made me appreciate what we have going here.

I have my clock radio thing (hard earned by selling Jultidningar when I was eleven!) over on the bookcase, because if I have it within reach I’ll never get out of bed. So, all laid up with Ash purring away I listened to what was on when it went off. It’s always set to P3, which is one of four channels we have that have no commercial breaks. Generally it’s more fun and not as boring as the other three, but today they were talking about something serious, namely abortion.

And let me tell you; it was amazing to hear people call in and not preach that women who makes this choice are going to hell. There was a girl calling in, who had done it twice, and felt ashamed about it, because she didn’t want people to look down at her for “making the same mistake twice”. That is, MAKING THE SAME MISTAKE TWICE. Not for killing something. Not for putting her own needs before that of the fetus. But for simply having birth control that wasn’t perfect.

(I know at least two people who have what they call Ortho-kids, that is, children that were conceived despite the pill being used properly. So really, no form of birth control is perfect.)

The second person that called in was a guy, and he was remarkably in tune with the whole thing as well. He answered the worry of the previous caller with “I’ve done a lot of mistakes twice”, or something to that effect, and went on to use the phrase “the thing growing inside the girl that is going to become a person”, rather than the whole “it’s a person from conception” angle that pro-lifers use. And that right there made me so happy to live in Sweden. Somewhere that abortions are safe and available for whoever may need one. Now, I am pro-choice, but I will admit to never having made that choice for myself. Comes with the whole not sleeping with biological males, I told. So really, what do I know?

Anyway, I’m getting off-topic.

The fact that these procedures are nearly free, is amazing, and so is the fact that an emergency room visit costs you no more than that. It reminds me of the bill of E.’s that we got, back in the U.S. Her emergency room visit, including an EKG, some blood work and nothing more, cost way over 1000 USD. When my mother had to go in because of her hernia (we are a family rocking hernias like they’re going out of style, both my parents and my sister has them!), it cost her 300 SEK, a bit over 40 USD. And then, when she had to go back for an x-ray (which admittedly took three months, because the queue is insane, which is one of the downsides to socialised health care), it was free because she had already paid her 300 SEK.

Which is why it really pisses me off when the American right says that Obama is Hitler because he’s proposing a health reform that is vaguely (but not really, the differences are still enormous) reminiscent of socialist type health care. You know what? I live in a socialist country. To me the term “liberal” is more of an insult than the word “socialist”, because it speaks of a political stance so far to the right of where I stand that it’s not even funny. And really, even our most conservative party is eons to the left of Obama. Yes. Seriously.

With that said, our health care system is far from perfect. Mostly because the downside to government funded health care is that when the politicians decide that we need to save money, health care is the first thing to go. It means that most people working in this field overworked, stressed out and seriously underpaid. It means that you have to wait and wait and fucking WAIT for your referrals to come through, for that x-ray or evaluation or what-have-you. And it’s really common that doctors take three days or a week or something to call you back, because they are simply drowning in patients and of course, because they’re working public health care they have to see everyone, and often the patients most in need gets thrown aside for the not so sick people, because it’s a lot easier to be loud when you’re able to get out of bed in the morning.

Which is why I was AMAZED when my doctor personally called me back, only two business days (and a weekend) after I went to get my bloodwork done last week. I don’t know if that was because things are better in a smaller town than the big city where I lived before, or if it was because the results were a bit, erm, alarming. I have always, for years and years and years, had problems with anemia and all that stuff. So, I didn’t exactly notice this time. It’s just that in addition to the regular anemia (which I knew I would have) also had a pretty sizable B12 deficiently. And apparently that alone can cause “tiredness, a decreased mental work capacity, weakened concentration and memory, and irritability and depression.”

Huh. Who would’ve thought?

So, I am currently on a quadruple dose of B12 supplements to fill up, next week I get to see him again and he is suspecting that I am gluten intolerant in addition to all of the above. Which makes me want to cry, because OMG I LOVE CARBS. They are awesome. Really, really awesome. And I want my pasta damn it. I’m not so fussy about bread, but I love pasta and baking is so much fun. Possibly I shouldn’t eat my weight in pasta and bread until my appointment, just in case. But I totally am.

Now I just have to (for the millionth time) convince my mother that my vegetarianism isn’t the reason that I have this. Which, I suppose, in a manner of speaking is correct, since the reason meat has B12 is because it’s carried through from bacteria in their own digestive systems (yum!). You can get protein and calcium and all the other good stuff from vegetables, but not B12. Sigh. I suppose I will keep taking my bright fucking red pills and hope for the best.

PS. Am attempting this cross post thing, despite having very few readers on LJ. Just as an experiment, to see if I get more comments that way. I don’t think I will, but … I do love a good experiment.

Swedes take few things as seriously as their tvättstuga, that is, the laundry room. There is one in every apartment complex, using various ways to book a time slot. Older ones, like the one I used to live in, has a calendar outside the laundry room where you write your name on the time you want to use. Newer ones use fancy computerised systems. One thing they have in common, though?

They’re free. And there’s several washers and driers and (which I was absolutely gleeful finding out) sometimes a whole ROOM to hang your clothes in, with a fan thingy to dry them.

I don’t know if it’s a sign of me finally growing up, finding the existance of a tvättstuga so exciting, or if I just need to, you know, get laid or something, but oh man. The American laundromat has nothing on the Swedish tvättstuga. Let me paint a picture for you to illustrate the difference.

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Exhibit A, an American laundromat:

First, there’s a room (obviously), filled with washer and dryers. More often than not it’s so hot that you’re unable to breathe, yet the only form of relief is a ceiling fan, moving so slowly that it barely stirs the air at all. There are layers of dust on top of the washers, the ceiling fan and every horizontal surface in the room. And some of the vertical. If you’re lucky it’s an attended laundromat, which means that you can exchange money for rolls of quarters with a (usually) cranky old man, who will shoo anyone out that lights up a smoke while folding their laundry. Yes. I’m not kidding. It happens. All the time.

Of course, most laundromats are unmanned, meaning that somebody comes there to unlock it in the morning and take the quarters put in the various machines during the day. Most of them have a high ratio of working vs. useless washers and dryers. Sometimes you can tell, because somebody has taken the time to carve DON’T USE or SUCKS ASS or NO HEAT into the door of said machine, using a key or a knife. A lot of the time you can’t, until you return, find your laundry still dirty (if it’s a washer) or wet (if it’s a dryer), and realise you’re out four to six quarters and about 45 minutes.

There are a few mostly clean tables to fold your clothes on, and usually there’s a gas station next door, which means that you have somewhere to buy a drink. People go sit in their cars with the AC cranked up while their machines work, because it’s too hot to exist anywhere else. This means, of course, that the air is thick with car fumes, the whole time you’re there.

I didn’t realise until I returned to Sweden that you’re actually not supposed to dry all your clothes in the dryer. There, you don’t have an option. If you want them dry, you toss them in the dryer. End of story.

Some laundromats have people with various mental impairments hanging around near them, because it’s the only way they get to talk to people. I still remember the one guy who spoke to me for three hours straight, his speech so garbled that I didn’t realise until the end of those three hours that he had been repeatedly asking me if I had a pretty cunt.

(I’ve always had a hard time understanding people with heavy accents, strange speech patterns or odd sort of turns of phrases. Even in Swedish.)

A lot of the time it’s just women coming to these laundromats, yelling at their numerous children through the (always open) door the entire time. Once, though, I saw a thug help his mama fold the clothes of his entire extended family, or so it seemed, judging from the amounts of clothes. The only part I liked about laundromats was that – you always saw little glimpses out of people’s lives, the smallest little snippet, and it made me want to make up stories about them, hoping that they were at least somewhat accurate.

I never found out if they were, of course.

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Exhibit B, the Swedish tvättstuga:

As Swedish people love their rules the inside of the door is usually plastered with rules, warnings, and in some cases passive aggressive notes about the tenant who dared not to clean the lint out of the dryer after they used it. Because oh my God, if you don’t clean after yourself you will bring down the wrath of everyone in the house.

In my current building these notes are in Swedish, English and a tricky alphabet type language, I am guessing Arabic. Persian, possibly. Because I live in a suburb with a lot of immigrants. It made me oddly happy to see that. I don’t even know why.

But. You do get the laundry room to yourself, provided that you have remembered to book a time slot and don’t accidentally go there on the wrong day. (It has happened, let’s just say that much.) There are no damn quarters to feed the washer and dryers and if one of them stops working it’s more or less required by the landlord to replace or repair it.

Some places have this rule that if you don’t start doing laundry within 30 minutes of your time slot’s beginning, anyone else can snap it up. And don’t you dare using even ten minutes of the next person’s time. That will not be appreciated.

So, it doesn’t cost money, there are no broken machines, you have to follow the rules or so help you God. There’s no buying drinks, no hanging around for hours because you can’t trust somebody to not steal your laundry while you turn your back and there’s most definitely no smoking indoors. But… it’s kind of boring. Really boring. Nice, efficient, ordered. Very, very Swedish.

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And I kind of love that I know that it’s not like that everywhere. I can appreciate the calm and the un-broken machines, the lack of cigarette smoke and dust and loud children, yet somehow wish that my clothes-folding would be soundtracked by music or a storyline I never would’ve thought about, had I not seen this person or that come into the laundromat while I was sitting there. Because Swedish tvättstugor (yep, plural looks like that) are always quiet, void of people and you get shit done, but it’s not exactly entertaining while you do it.

Two very different worlds. And I love you, dearest tvättstuga, I really do. I just find it really hilarious that Swedes have to be so strictly ruled at all times. Sometimes in three or more languages.

Okay, so I very rarely post twice in one day, but somebody on Twitter linked me to an article on the current debacle about the Swedish national team, and I’m sorry, I can’t shut up about this. Not even until tomorrow. Even though it took me probably three hours to write this, as my brain is all over the place.

Links to Swedish articles are noted as being in Swedish, for the rest of them, click away!

I don’t really follow Swedish soccer, because generally they are kicked out of the tournaments before it gets interesting and it’s just, um, depressing. But apparently the current coach of the men’s national team is resigning after they didn’t qualify for the World Cup. Or something like that. And immediately there are articles in every newspaper about who should get the post next. And somebody (article in Swedish) brought up Pia Sundhage, who is a (female) Swedish soccer player and coach. She has an insane amount of merits (article in Swedish), and is currently coaching the United States women’s national team, one of the best women’s teams in the world. I believe they wont the gold in the Olympic Games last year, playing Brazil in the final and winning. Before that she was an assisting coach for the Chinese women’s national team, and before that there was… many, many other teams.

And yet most people seem to want Henrik Larsson, who used to play for Celtics, Manchester United and Barcelona among others, or Sven-Göran Eriksson, former coach of Machester City and the English men’s national team, instead. The latter I can understand, he has a long career (even though coaching Man City makes my Arsenal self go “ewww”), but in reality it is not likely for him to leave Britain and the shiny shiny money he gets for coaching there for our little national team that is beaten into the ground more often than not. Henrik Larsson, though?

Let’s start with his coaching experience. Because that’s the thing. He doesn’t have one. None. He’s been playing soccer for 15+ years, but he’s never been a coach. Whatsoever. In fact, he’d have to apply to UEFA to even be able to accept the position, as you normally have to have finished certain coaching courses to be able to become a head coach for a national team.

Yet, people are “concerned”. Many, many of the players on the current team want Larsson or they might not keep playing (as seen here, also in Swedish). I mean, what are we, five years old?

One player, Tobias Hysén, says the following, trying his best to be diplomatic and failing rather beautifully (seen in Swedish here, I have translated it for the love of my blog readers):

“It’s a bit early for female coaches in men’s soccer. Unfortunately. There are far too many prejudices, still.”

“How would you react if she was appointed coach?”

“I’d be skeptical of course, and find it a bit strange.”

Other people, managers of teams in the Swedish premier league (which I have no idea what to call in English, and thus I’m translating it clumsily like that), also says a few nice words about it. I can’t for my life find the original article with these quotes, but they have been saved by various bloggers, so you’ll just have to trust me on this one.

Sören Åkeby, coach of Sundsvall:

“I hope he (the journalist suggesting Sundhage in the first place)’s kidding. What she did in the U.S. is good and all, but it’s a totally different thing to coach a men’s team.”

Tom Prahl, tränare Trelleborg:

“That doesn’t sound like a good idea. There’s a big difference between men’s and women’s soccer.”

Correct me if I’m wrong, but how can a woman who has coached the best team in the freaking world be a “bad idea”? Whereas calling up a bloke who has never coached a day in his life and whose biggest merit is that he captained the national team (for just over a year, before deciding to retire from playing on a national level for the THIRD TIME) is a good one?

Really.

And if this is the stuff that makes it into the papers you can imagine how the comments to these articles sound. They are full of blokes scoffing “soccer and ladies soccer are two different sports” (and yes, that is exactly the terms they use here – ’soccer’ and ‘ladies soccer’), “our boys would never listen to a woman” and “seriously, Larsson has over fifteen years of playing experience, drop the Sundhage thing already”.

The fact that she has eighteen years as a player, and eighteen years as a coach, they seem to conveniently forget.

And sure, women’s soccer and men’s soccer are two different things. Men play more on strength, they can kick harder, run faster and play rougher, harder. Women tend to be more about technique, and putting a men’s team against a women’s team is a bad idea, because their skills just can’t be compared. Just as in every other fucking sport in the world.

That doesn’t mean that it’s a different sport. That doesn’t mean that women are BAD at soccer. It just means that our bodies are different, and that a woman has to work so much harder to be able to keep up with a male soccer player.

And that’s not even taking into account the fact that men can live off soccer, if they play on pro level, while women have to work all day and play soccer in their spare time. Perhaps if women could live off their sport, like men do, it would be more even. Maybe it wouldn’t. Thing is, we’ll never know for sure.

This whole discussion reminds me of playing soccer when I was younger. It reminds me of all the little injustices and how much they grated on you after a while. In general the teams here are as follows: there is an A-team (haha, that makes me think of the 1980s TV show, ahem), where the best men of the club play, there’s a women’s team that works in much the same way, and below them there are kids playing, from roughly age 8 up to 16-17, at which point the ones that are good enough gets drafted into the A-team, and the rest generally quit. That means that there are the same amount of youth teams, usually one boy and one girl team for each age group.

Despite this, in my club, the girls had two locker rooms while the boys had… oh, maybe fifteen. Ours were always cramped, the line to the four showers (yes, FOUR) were ridiculous and sometimes you had nowhere to put your stuff because it was so damn cramped, especially during cups and such when we had to share with any number of visiting teams.

The best part (sarcasm, how I love thee) was that because the boys had so many locker rooms, with a shower room for every two, they never had to share a shower with the team they played, but our two locker rooms lead into the same shower room. You have no idea how much it sucks to stand in line to shower with your opponents after they kick your arse on the pitch. (Or maybe you were also a soccer player when you were younger, and you do know.)

We were always given the smaller, out of the way pitches, while the boys played on the bigger, central ones.

And then there was the stuff that didn’t even concern us, things we just saw from afar. Like the fact that the men’s A-team people paid money to watch, when they played. I don’t think there was a charge for the women’s team’s games.

There was always all this stuff surrounding the men’s team’s games. We sold hot dogs and drinks and stuff for those games. I don’t remember there ever being something like that arranged when the women played. Mostly because I never went to one of their games. Because all this acticvity was centred around the men’s game.

So, really, I guess it’s not so weird that they are looking at this as if women are from another planet. There really is no conclusion to this sort of thing, except that it fucking sucks to be a soccer fan and love soccer when apparently most of your fellow supporters feel that women have no place on the pitch.

Three things I learned while researching for this blog post:

1) While women aren’t capable of coaching men, men are apparently fully capable of coaching women, because of the nine coaches that the women’s national team has had since 1973 only two were women.

2) After the U.S. team won the Olympics in 2008, Pia Sundhage was invited to the White House to celebrate the victory with George W Bush. She, um, declined.

3) In an awesome article (also in Swedish, sadly) I read the following:

“I’ve been asked at least a hundred times if I’d be capable of coaching a men’s team. I find that kind of pathetic.”

“What do you say to those that think it wouldn’t work out?”

“How do they know? Nobody has ever tried.”

Yes, people. A woman has never coached a men’s team. As in EVER. And that goes for every sport out there, I’m sure.