Provocative speed

I guess we all have our week spots. I know I sometimes drive too fast, but hey, I like things fast, I like speed and this far nothing ever happened. I never even got a speeding ticket. Another weakness I have is that I, sometimes, am rather easily provoked (hence not only pretty provocative myself...:-)).

Now these things have combined in a quite unfortunate way. On one of the main roads in the area where I am staying, and one that I quite often drive, the police have placed speed surveillance cameras. Ok, that’s not such a big deal. It only takes one ride along the road and then you know exactly where the cameras are placed and of course you slow down in due time. But this is where the provocation comes into the picture. For me those cameras are pure provocation. I feel an urgent whish to drive unusually fast past them to see if they really work! I know it is stupid and irrational and that it also can get very expensive (at about the same time as the cameras came up, they also increased the fine), but I can not help it. One day, when I feel rich, I will just have to try it. I wonder however if “being provoked by the cameras” and “just testing” will be accepted as extenuating circumstances….

Film Stars

To day I and my sister took the first steps towards a fabulous career as film stars! We went to the selection of the cast of extras for a film that is about to be made soon and that will be shot in this area. And of course we must be selected!!!! :-) And as the film is based on the books of a very well-known Swedish author and will be the most expensive film ever made in Sweden of course we will be famous!
I am, however, a little worried I might not look medieval enough…

Ferrari

Today I have been racing a Ferrari!

Not too many horse powers, but still very nice! In fact I think it must be the fastest one horse power and better than any four wheel drive. And I still think it i a very cool name! :-)

The wonderful world of movies

Today I had a typical full film festival experience!

First I just happened to see a film I hadn’t planned to see, and it was a disaster!
Later I saw another film that was absolutely wonderful. The film is called The Fountain, by the director Darren Aronofsky. It is absolutely beautiful, fascinating and extremely gripping!

One big advantage with watching films at a film festival is the audience. Festival audiences know and appreciate the difference between watching film at the cinema and at home. They don’t talk and they do turn their cell phones off. They eat sweets and popcorn, but they do it silently! Just imagine a big theatre full of people but at a moment in the movie, where it is completely silent, it is indeed totally silent! Wonderful!

The reason I watch that much film right now is that I volunteered to help out in the festival Guest centre. It is quite interesting! I get to meet directors, producers and other filmmakers and film-maker-wannabes. Those are almost the most interesting; they are young film students or actors waiting to be discovered. For someone like me, who like film, but never ever considered the idea to work with it and who really don’t know much about the film business, it is very interesting. It is like a complete different world!

The other film I saw today is called Avida and if anyone has seen it and understood it, you are more than welcome to explain it to me….

Stockholm Film Festival

Now it seems I have gotten involved in the Stockholm Film Festival!
My plan was to use the time I now have to see a lot of films I normally would not have seen, but now it seems it will get beyond that.

Anyway, I saw a film today, which I can warmly recommend! It is called “Little Miss Sunshine”. It is about a fabulous family trying to get the daughter to a beauty pageant competition in Carlifornia and everything that will happen on their way there (for those how have been driving from Belgrade to Cortina and back, with a malfunctioning clutch, it will for sure have a added value!)
A wonderful feel-good-movie that I would recommend to anyone! I laughed a lot and I would even recommend it to my mother. I think it is the kind of film everyone will like. Normally movies entered at a film festival can be a bit difficult, but this one...; I think everyone will like. My advice is; Go and see it!

Life Aid?

Considering the fact that the human species has been around for quite some years one would think we would have gotten some training and gathered some experience in how to live life. But somehow we seem to have been better at making life more complicated, than at coping with it.

Ok, we have found a lot of solutions for many problems, but we are also very good at finding new problems. Somehow I now have the feeling we can no longer live our lives ourselves, we need help to do that. Now I am not talking about the need for doctors, psychotherapists, lawyers, technicians or all other people we whose help we sometime might need. I am just fascinated about all TV-shows that aim at helping people live their lives. We have seen so many docu-soaps trying to make stars or top-models out of hopeful wannabes, we have seen loads of extreme makeovers of people and their homes, we have seen tons of different dating shows and we have seen people fight and get married on TV, and we have had the Super-nanny teaching people how to raise their kids. Nothing of this is new. However, lately I have noticed a kind of TV programme that for me seems to take this one step further. It is no longer any competition and it is not focusing on how you look or how your home look but it is trying to tell you how you are supposed to live you life!

I Swedish TV we now have one show running that is closely following a family with small children, while they are visiting other families with children to see how they cope with everyday life. There is another show where professional economists are helping families who are trapped in debts. They try to explain the basics of economy and tell the families how they must change their way of living to be able to pay their debts. Another show is called the Single Coaches. There a group of probably self-elected “experts” teach people how to behave to get out of their miserable single life. They are taught not only how to dress and style themselves, they are also taught how to flirt, how to move, how to talk, how to act on a date etc etc..

I am not saying anything of this is wrong, but when the hell did life get that difficult that we need someone else to live it for us?? And are we really the first ones who want to meet someone to live with, to have a nice home, to cope with debit and credit, and are we the first ones to have children?? I don’t think so. And when the hell did we get that bored we need to watch other people live their life on TV??

Autumn darkness

Ok, this picture is taken in Stockholm today at three o clock in the afternoon. So if anyone think I am overexaggerating when I say it is dark, here is the proof.


Please, anyone, send me some sunshine!

Important vs. nice and the existence of God vs. the dentist.

Recently I came across the saying: “It is nice to be important, but is more important to be nice”. I immediately liked that idea. As I am not very important, but like to think of myself as fairly nice, it felt good to think that that would be more important.

But then, of course I started to think about it, and then everything, of course, got more complicated. To whom is it more important to be nice? To others? Or to oneself? Ok, it might make you feel good about yourself to be nice, and it might give you a lot of friends. But on the other hand, if you are important, you will get friends anyway, because of course everyone wants to be befriended to someone who is important. And if you are important, you will always get a good job, make a lot of money, have a lot of extras and have access to all the cool places, which will most likely make you feel good about yourself. Nice people don’t really get very far by just being nice! People who are not nice will be able to step over dead bodies to get what they want, they will use other people for their own benefit and they will not care about other people’s feelings and wellbeing. That will get them what they want. Ok, you might say, but it won’t get them real friends. That might be right, but I guess these people probably don’t care and if they are important they will anyhow have people around them who will want to be their friends. And what about how they feel about themselves? I honestly really don’t think they care. So what is really most important?

These thoughts were so depressing that I wanted to believe in some kind of divine justice, that in the long run all the nice people will be rewarded. But as Keynes said; in the long run we are all dead. So this would then presume an existence of some kind of afterlife and some kind of divinity and I guess this is why people get religious; to be able to stand thoughts like these.

Hmmm, this made things even more complicated for me, as I just have decided that dentists are another proof that God does not exist. If there was an almighty God, teeth would have been perfect and we would not have had to go to the dentist…

Everyday glamour!

Now some of my friends have invented the perfect remedy for laundry room fascism, and at the same time brought the Tuesday in November concept one step further!

As you anyway have to set of a day or an evening every now and then for doing your laundry, you have better make something nice out of it! Like celebrating it with champagne and pâté! Or as some friends, with sparkling wine, scallops, prawns, lobster and cheese. I like that!!! Viva glamour!!

I only wonder what the people at the laundrette would think if I brought champagne and lobster there!

Fitness flirtation

If anyone was wondering about flirting at the launderette, I have to admit it does not seem to be too successful. Someone asked me what kinds of people go there, as it is absolutely not common in Sweden. To be honest I still don’t know; you hardly see the other people using the laundrette. I have only met a father with his two sons and two German tourists there. However, today I saw something really mind boggling. In front of one of the washing machines there was a pair of shoes! That makes you wonder where the owner of the shoes are, and what he is wearing. I mean I have seen movies where people are sitting at the launderette in their underwear because they have to wash the clothes they were wearing, but let’s assume the person had to wash the socks and therefore took off the shoes and the socks, but then… It was nobody there!! Did he walk away without his shoes?? Is there something more behind the launderette that I have missed!?

So if the launderette turned out to be a disappointment when it comes to flirting, I recently became witness to flirtation in another unexpected location; the fitness club. I was running on the treadmill and not really paying attention to what was going on around me, until I could not help overhearing the conversation on the two treadmills next to me. There a guy was definitely hitting on the girl next to him. It was quite interesting to listen to. She did not seem to be uninterested and in the end he got her number and they had a date! Amazing! The idea that you could catch a date at the gym never struck me!

Laundry room fascism

Ha ha ha, this is hilarious!!!

Some of you might have heard me lamenting about the Swedish laundry room fascism. Now I have taken that one step further!

For those of you who might yet not be familiar with the phenomenon of Swedish laundry room fascism I will give you a brief introduction. (I will try to keep it brief, for this is a topic I can go on for ages about!). Well; the laundry room fascism mostly hits the urban population of Sweden. The main reason is that most city apartments are not equipped with a washing machine. And as most apartments, and hence the bathrooms are rather small, people do not normally have one installed. Therefore the majority of people living in apartments are forced to use the common laundry room, normally located in the basement of the house. These rooms themselves are not the problem; they are normally modern, clean and well equipped with a couple of washing machines, a tumble dryer and a drying cabinet or some other drying device. The thing is that you of course have to share these rooms and machines with the rest of the tenants, that is; your neighbours.

This interaction with your neighbours is actually another story, that I also could write loads about. In many houses in Swedish towns and cities this is actually the only contact you have to your neighbours, so it is kind of sad that it is restricted to angry notes about un-removed fuzz in the tumble dryer, fights over exceeded washing hours and stolen or missing clothes. I for one have a real phobia for laundry-room-witches, I can assure you; there is at least one in every house. And they are mean!

However, that is not the subject for this story, here it is about the time one has to book for using the laundry room. Often you only can book for two to four hours at a time. Considered the fact that most people work Monday to Friday until, let’s say six o’clock; that you are normally only allowed to use the room until ten and depending on the ratio tenants to washing machines, this can mean you might have to book the room two weeks in advance! This of course means that if you have booked a time, you don’t want to miss it, as that might mean you have to wait another two weeks to have your clothes washed. That, again, means that people plan their lives according to available times in the laundry room. This is the laundry room fascism! The availability of laundry rooms, rule peoples life!

You will notice this if you try to make an appointment with someone living in an apartment in Stockholm. These are examples of typical conversations
.
-Hey, long time no see! What about a drink after work today?
-No, I am sorry, I can not. I have the laundry room.

-There is this great class at the gym Wednesdays; would you like to join me?
-Oh, I’d love to, but you see, I normally book the laundry room Wednesdays, so I really can not.

-They say the whether will be nice this weekend, what about a trip out of town?
- Sorry, I can not. I have to do the laundry.

And then, if you finally manage to get an appointment with some of your friends, booked well in advance (presupposed you don’t have a booked time in the laundry room yourself!), you are sitting in a bar, having a good time, chatting and catching up and considering if you would order another drink, then you can be sure there is someone who has to leave to go home and take care of the laundry! This is what I call laundry room fascism.

Now you might get very surprised if I tell you I will miss going to the laundry room. I just found out that the key to the laundry room, where I am staying right now, happens to be in Congo!! This means I will have to investigate something I haven’t done before. I will have to find out if there are any launderettes in Stockholm. This far I have never had to use one and for me this is something out of a British movie by someone like Ken Loach or Steven Frears. But, hey, maybe that matches my life as homeless and unemployed! And to be honest I think it is a bit exciting. Just think of all the interesting people I might meet there, that I for sure would never have met anywhere else. In the movies they are always very funny and spiritual. Maybe it is even a good place to catch a date! Maybe I will meet the man of my life at the launderette! Wow wouldn’t that be romantic! I promise you, I will keep you updated.

Well, I continue my way of “borrowing” other peoples lives. This time in Stockholm. I somehow started to get a bit restless in the country side. Or…, rather actually I didn’t. I got completely comfortable. Really started to like life as unemployed. There you are never alone, there are always people around, which I like, and there are always someway you can make yourself useful (hence the working on the roof!) and it seems somehow quite normal not to go to an office every morning. You also don’t need that much money so not having a regular income is not so worrying. But somehow I realise it will not work in the long run. Therefore I am now in Stockholm borrowing an apartment from a friend who is abroad. It feels bit strage to stay here. I have only been here two or three times before, and then there always was a party! But the appartment is quite close to where I used to live so it still feels kind of like home.(I am not really borrowing his life though. Don’t worry Johan if you read this :-)).

Here I will be more inspired to look for a new job. Here I will soon get bored after a while. As all my friends are working it does not seem as normal not to work. And seeing your friends in the evening and everything you do here somehow is connected with a cost, so you will soon start missing an income. But I have to admit, it was quite nice to have a slow breakfast and then go for a long walk in the park before going back and sit down in front of the computer.

But to everyone who starts worry that I am getting lazy and living off you, the working part of the people, I will just say, as some way of justifying myself, it has only been two weeks and considering that I really haven’t had much holiday this year I think that is ok and this far I am still supporting myself!

At first I didn’t know why the hell I called this blog Normal life. I have never felt really comfortable with the concept of “normality”. Now I know! Normal life is of course the Swedish Goodrun version of Paris Hilton’s and Nicole Richie’s Simple life! You know, from the glamorous jet set life of international diplomacy to a life as homeless and unemployed on the Swedish countryside! :-)

Odd things happen here too! Yesterday I found myself at a countryside auction and found myself buying a HUGE chest of drawers with a mirror on top of it. Exactly what one needs when one doesn’t even have a home of your own! Well, if it hadn’t been for the fact that the piece of furniture was built by my great granddad we wouldn’t have bought it and it will be placed at my parents’ place for a start.

Those auctions are quite an interesting phenomenon. There you really can find anything and the people you find there are also rather fascinating. Many of them are pretty old but nevertheless witty. I overheard a conversation between two octogenarian men talking about repairing clockworks and an old acquaintance who used to do that. The one man explained that this man had died, the spontaneous reply from the other man was: “then there is another lady available!” Today the same auction hall appeared in a TV-series!

Today I found myself in another interesting and completely new situation. First of all I had to drive a horse transport to pick that chest of drawers up from the auction. For all the years I have spent with horses and riding I had never driven a transport before. No crashes or scratches! Yhohooo!

The most interesting was however that I have debuted as a roofer. I have spent the whole day on the roof of my sister’s house, helping my brother in law removing the old roof cover and replacing it with new. I have never done anything like that before, but I must say it was quite fun and I think the result was quite good. However I am not sure if I will be able to get out of my bed tomorrow, my whole body feels rather sore.

Well as you see, I don’t really need a job, but I could do with an income. So I guess I will soon get started looking for a job. Soon! Cheerio!