reasons to celebrate and other assorted nonlinear thoughts

today i have been married for five years and two days. strange how time flies. 18 years from now i will have been married for as many years as i have been single. it seems distant but at the same time inevitable. it is only a matter of time before i will completely forget what it was like to not be married. which, by the way, is more difficult by the day.

i often meet this man by the allotments that i enjoy chatting to. he knows many things about 18th century gardening techniques, thai cooking and the swedish history of executions. he once startled me by revealing that his girlfriend had ruined his life. the confused frown on my face made him go on to explain all his former plans of traveling, writing and living life to the full (at least his definition of it). then the woman he now lives with, and who is the mother of his child, came along and changed the course his life. to his joy and distress.

it was strange because i could and couldn't relate. commitment scares me. to not be committed scares me. in some ways i can't do whatever i wish because of resa, as i have to consider her in the choices i make. yet, i can't imagine not being married to her. to my surprise i found myself thinking this even in the middle of our most vicious fights.

for our anniversary i was planning to take resa to an art exhibition of Caspar David Friedrich (i'm very fond of the romantics, i confess), but managed to befuddle the times, so we went straight to the movies and watched UP 3D. i'm not usually a big fan of cartoons, but i really enjoyed this one. especially, there were scenes that depicted that the adventure the main character was looking for already had happened, hidden in the clutter and mundaneness of everyday life.
i'm not sure...
perhaps.
what do you think?

happy halloween

both sunny and gray (and cold)

the weather has been gray. finally, almost a week later i saw the sun, only for a few minutes but it was there and that makes me smile.

the usage of the word 'both' in swedish drives me crazy. it grates on me like the language equivalent of fingernails on a blackboard. 'both' is the word 'både' and instead of saying, 'the weather today was both gray and sunny', the way to use it in swedish is something like this. 'today i went to h&m and i bought both the grey sweater, the hat and the scarf.'
nope, thats three. not two. both is two.
drives me crazy everytime.

bono's preach

let me just say one thing

i live in an amazingly gorgeous country. just taking the train 6 hours north was fantastic, with views along a lake and forests. God did well with Sweden.

global warning!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/itzafineday/ / CC BY 2.0

blog action day: today i'm joining 10,000 other bloggers all over the world in blogging about climate change, bringing it up in a big online conversation.

food for thought
there's now a wikipedia entry entitled climate refugee. the term was coined in '85 but i don't think we've even seen the beginning of its usage. there is a lot of environmental news in the media. we know we should change our light bulbs and insulate our homes, but rarely are we urged to make less of an impact on behalf of the rest of the world.

the UN estimates that some 50 million people worldwide could be on the move by 2010.

unlike many of the statistics we see in the media, that's in a just few months time. there aren't too many ways to look at it. most of those people had to leave their homes because of the (comfortable) way we've live our lives. until recently, the average person could say they had no idea that the way they live would affect someone around the world. now we don't have the luxury of ignorance.



living it
i try and practice what i preach when it comes to making my impact on the environment as small as possible. next week i have to travel to östersund for a course i'm taking. it is 550 kilometers, which is a 55 minute flight or a 6+ hour train ride. i really only have to be there from 8-5 on one day. i have always said i refuse to fly in sweden, (even if it is a very long country and going up north can take some time!) but to need to be in östersund for only a day, it was quite tempting to take the flight! i wanted to. it was cheaper and faster. in the end, i booked the train tickets, and on the way home i'm taking a night train, where i board the train at nine at night and wake up in stockholm at 7am. i'm also staying an extra day and a half - i figure if i'm travelling all the way up there i way as well enjoy myself! just one tiny decision in the scheme of things, but it was a decision i had the power and responsibility to make. and i am convinced that all the little things add up.