After a hellish week at work (including working until 10 pm on wednesday fixing a crashed server) I was pretty happy when the clock hit 5 on friday to finally kick back, relax and enjoy a weekend without concerning myself about anything. But as I drove home my car started making funny noises, so I guess I’ll have to take it to the shop for a $200 checkup plus fixing whatever is broken. And then it got even worse as my harddrive on my workstation quit on me – 50 gigs of data I’m never getting back, and I have to buy a new asap, that’s another $150 right there.
So what does a normal, sane person do when stuff go this bad and it feels like the entire world is against hime? I have no idea, but I know what I do – I turn it off, tune it out and just watch a couple of movies. Which is what I spent saturday doing. One of those movies was “Shawshank Redemption”. I don’t think I can emphasize enough how incredible that movie is! It’s just awesome! And especially when I was feeling like things were really not going my way, then seeing this movie which is basically about just how much a human being can handle and how incredible life and hope is, that felt like exactly the right medicine at the time!
Thank you Mr. Darabont!
I accidentally saw an interview with the t.A.T.u chicks on MTV and got they came up with a pretty good quote – “we’re not lesbians, we’re just in love with each other”. I liked that quote. Actually I like people who refuse to be labelled, and that quote pretty much summons that up!
Let’s combine two subjects I’ve already covered – prejudice and peoples likes/dislikes. Is it ok to like some artist or something because that person is say… TOTALLY HOT? Not without being very shallow! Well what if that person is very talented, still ok? But the real question is – can other people accept that you may like that person because of his/hers talent, not only because of ‘that other thing’?
Confused?
Let’s take the example that prompted this question – t.A.T.u! When I was listening (yes, I listen to the TV which means the TV is on but I’m sitting in front of my computer!) to the pre-show to the MTV EMA’s last thursday I heard this song that I like, “All The Things She Said“. Pretty good song, very catchy. But I had no idea who did the song. So I turned around to see who it was. Turns out the “group” is called t.A.T.u. They are two teen chicks from Russia (one of which is totally hot). Then they start making out on the stage! Nothing much, hugs & kisses but still surprising. Although I should be if I’d pay attention to lyrics like “They say it’s my fault but I want her so much”… Then my friend Dazza says that’s one of the things they are famous for. So the question I asked myself after that experience is – will people judge me as “superficial, typical guy who likes seeing two chicks go at it” simply because I like their music?
It’s the same with Jeri Ryan (7 of 9 in Star Trek Voyager). I’ve always liked her, and not only because she’s like the apex of sexiness, but because she’s actually a good actress. But everytime I mention that I like her in any forum what so ever, people judge me because I can’t possibly like her for her acting skills, can I?
What doesn’t make this any better is the fact that I do it! A friend of mine likes Pamela Andersson, and I immediately threw that out the window as “shallow guy who likes big breast”. Although in that specific case I might have been right, but it doesn’t make me any better than anyone else 🙁
This weekend I’m gonna do something I haven’t done in a long time – attend a LAN party. Here’s a short description – a bunch of gamers pack their computers and head off to one building, hook everything up and just play games against/with each other for a few days, and there’s usually a tournament. Now I know what you’re thinking – “oh my good how anti-social, pathetic and geeky”. You’re wrong! It’s not anti-social – there’s plenty of human interaction, and you can actually go around blowing up your best friend or anyone else you want to and laugh it off. You get to meet the people you’ve been playing against/with, swap war-stories. Pathetic? What’s pathetic about a bunch of people getting together at one place to train and tune their skills? It’s the same as a friendly game of soccer! Geeky? Just because it’s with computers, isn’t it? Do you know how much a computer, with monitor, weighs!? Carrying all that around builds muscles, and we’re not geeky anymore!… ok, that was a longshot, but I really don’t like how people think “dude, that’s pathetic” when I describe what I’m gonna spend my weekend doing. Or perhaps this is just more of my late teenage rebellion against my mother always saying “why don’t you go outside and play”? (I never said my parents were perfect!)
What a wacky weekend that was! Saturday was a national holiday here in sweden, so we only worked half a day on friday. And I’m not sure I can call that working because I didn’t do that very much there. Then I went “home” (to my parent’s place that is) for the annual halloween party that my sister arranges every year for the kids and guess what, didn’t do anything then either. I actually think friday was the laziest day all year for me. On saturday I actually worked, but to compensate for that I went to good old friend Markus’ to celebrate his 30th. Damn good party, but I had to leave early though, ’cause I have to study for another certification this afternoon. Throw in the arrival of Star Wars Episode II DVD and you’ve got a hectic weekend right there.
But one thing is certain – I have the best parents in the world! I’m pretty sure everyone (ok, most people) think they have the best, but I know I do. I could write pages and pages about how great my mother and my father, but I’m afraid I’d forget something and they’d make sure I never forget it, so I’m not gonna write a list, I’m just gonna say that I really do have the best parents in the world 🙂
Every time I get into a discussion about violence in movies, in computer games and bad things about the internet I use myself as an argument that most of that is bullshit, because if there was some truth to it I should be a mass murdering, bomb-making anarchistic pedophile. But I’m not, and the reason is that my parents did such a great job with me that I’m not screwed up in any of those ways, they made sure I knew the difference between violence in the movies and in real life and they made sure I got that little switch in my head that says “no, this is wrong”.
So mom, dad – thank you and I love you 🙂
Some people have asked me how I can be this open and expose myself and the weird thoughts that are going through what little excuse I have for a brain. I don’t think I’ve got a good answer for that yet. But this morning, as I was slouch-surfing around the web I ended up on a webpage that made this place look like the Vatican – AsiaCarrera.com! Yes, that tri-lingual piano-playing, HTML-typing woman with a registered IQ of 156 that have done some adult movies. I wasn’t sure what I was gonna find on her very own site, but I wasn’t expecting to end up laughing my shoes off as I read the F.A.Q! If you’re not afraid of a little porno-talk and love humor then please, head over there and take a look!
It was also a bit self-enlightning when it comes to prejudice and being judgemental…
Another thing about me that I’m also pretty proud over is the fact that for the past 6 years or so I’ve been able to plan my economy so good that on the 25th (payday) of every month I’ve had between 0 to $10 in my bank account! No matter how much expenses, or incomes, I have that month, I’ve always ended up with basically nothing exactly when it’s time for the salary. Then I bought a car, and somehow I was actually able to equal that out as well. That is until this month… and this is why I hate our capitalistic society so much – I actually lost sleep trying to make my budget go together in my head! And if I get so out of wack thinking about it, what about people who have a family to support? Like all those single moms you read about!? It actually got so bad in my planning that I was thinking about not going to my friends 30th birthday this weekend because I couldn’t afford anything, and that felt awful! And who do I have to blame (except the company I work for who won’t give me a raise)? Noone but myself! With a little bit of planning last month I should’ve been able to balance it out this month, and with alot of planning I should by now have been able to put some money away for that rainy day! So I guess I’m no better than the people who I constantly harass for doing things they know are bad for them!
Fortunately I have great (supportive) parents, but that sucks having to ask them for a loan!
Oh yeah, and happy halloween to everyone in the states!
Why are people (including me) in such a hurry as soon as they get into a car? One of the first things you learn here in drivers ed. is that your greatest two foes are lack of time and sleep deprivation. I’ve been trying to start 5 minutes earlier when I go to work recently and I somehow arrive at work 10 minutes earlier… anyway, usually I’m queuing all the way into the central parts of Stockholm and in those queues you see som really fun behaviour, most of which are caused by everyones desire to go faster. The funniest example was last month : I come to a roundabout and was going to do a 270, i.e go off on the left exit. Problem was that it was jammed so I stopped halfway through to let the people coming from the other way through. Very nice, right? Well, the woman in the space wagon behind me didn’t think so! She backed up and drove around me and filled the gap in front of me, effectively stopping a pretty heavy roundabout (Gullmarsplan, if you happen to live in stockholm). What was the point of that? She gaines like 3 meters!? People should really take more time when they are out driving!
Right now everyone who’s even been in a car which I’m driving are saying “kris, you’re pretty good at driving fast too!”… true I am, when it’s all clear an no jams, yes I do. Like to feel the small g-forces my car can generate. But I’m not cursing or anything in traffic jams!
How many charities do you support? That’s right, you! One of the few things that I’m proud over in this world is the fact that I support (financially and ideologically (yes, that’s a word!)) Amnesty International, Greenpeace, The Swedish Red Cross and Unicef. And I just signed up for a new Unicef program (“A Drop of Water”) and got a cool pin to put on my jacket for it.
I know I’m really patting myself on the back here, but my point is – what do you do? I wanna make you feel bad if you’re not supporting one single charity, so bad that you’ll have to start after reading this. And I wanna make the ones that do give something feel a little better. And I also wanna make a point to everyone who says I’m too obsessed buying stuff for myself (most recently a new $1500 TV) and thinks that I’m too tight!
I would be blood donor too if the hospital that’s close enough to walk to would allow me to give blood there…
This may come off as a bit cold or just asshole-like, but am I the only one who’s tired of all dedications / memorials and stuff that’s gone on over the past year? It seems that when someone, especially if they are famous, dies it has to be made into something huge and special. Two great recent examples of that is Aaliyah and Lisa ‘Lefteye’ Lopez. Both made decent music and they may both have been good people, but with all stuff that’s been done in the media (like the recent MTV VMA dedication to Lopez) you’d think they were up for some saint-status or something.
And then ofcourse there is all the 9/11 (which by the way, we swedes would write 11/9). Naturually it was a terrible event and a huge loss of life, completely over the top and I in no way condone what happened. But why was I asked to hold a minute of silence last wednesday? Anton, a friend at work, got really upset, borderlining mad over this entire thing. At first I thought he was overreacting, but at the end of the day, with all the hype in non-american media, you’d think it was the biggest disaster that ever happened and that the world “owes” america (especially their government) something?! Wtf is all that about? Ofcourse I feel sorry for what happened and to the people who lost a loved one, but it has in absolutely no way affected me or my life, so why should I feel anything about that entire thing? Let’s reverse it – can any one american say why we swedes should hold a silent moment or two next saturday (Sept. 28th)? I’m pretty sure not a single one of them can, because why are they suppose to know that is the date when Estonia sank! Which, if you’ll excuse the cold Vulcan part of me, was atleast 10 times worse, percentage-wise, for sweden than 9/11 was for US of A. “But Estonia was not an act of terrorism against civilian targets” you may say. True, but the Estonia disaster was a random event that killed about a thousand people, which I consider a far worse human disaster than some misguided terrorist who’s been fooled into thinking that USA is the devil. But from their perspective, just how wrong are they? I’m not gonna try and justify what they did, but lets face it, USA has a huge tendancy to play cop in the world. And as long as they have the UN support, that’s fine with me. But I can atleast understand why the islam world are getting upset when the US government is demanding that Yasir Araft be replaced by someone more US friendly!
I, myself, am pretty US friendly when it comes to the people, it’s just their government I object to.
“Dude, if you’re so against it why do you have a memorial for Eden!”. That’s different. That was a personal tragedy for me that I dealt with in this way. I have never ever asked anyone to feel sorry for me or a minute of silence for him. Not even when the 6 month mark came and went did I tell anyone! And it’s not like I’m doing a huge thing about it either, it’s there, read it of you want to. Or not.
Ask me how long it took for me to drive home the other day! Long enough to hear 26 tracks of Moby’s “Play”-album. “But that album only has 18 tracks!”. You’re right, it does, which means that I listened to it almost 1 1/2 times. I don’t know how much time that actually is, should be around 90 minutes. That’s right, I prefer measuring time in what I actually do, or what I would do if I wasn’t stuck in traffic. Because time really is, much like money, something artificial that we humans have created. The only three naturally occuring cycles are days (Earth’s rotation), 4 weeks (the moon’s orbit around the Earth) and years (the Earth’s orbit around the sun), the rest is just made up of a bunch of people. Don’t know exactly where I’m going with this, I guess I just want people to stop and smell the flowers a bit more often like I do. And I still don’t have a wrist watch 🙂
August 25th, you know what that means? 6 months since I suddenly lost my best friend. My spontaneous reaction was “is that all?”, it feels like ages ago since I last spoke to him. Since we shared some jokes, watched movies together, just sat down at a bar testing new beers and stuff. But at the same time it feels like it was just yesterday that this entire thing happened. I remember those weeks as if it was yesterday…
So how have life proceeded since then? Pretty well I think. Although I did suddenly realise that alot of my life has been converted to routines and procedures. Like I’m just going through day by day waiting for something to happen. And I don’t like that. So I’ll see what I can do to change it. And I still find myself thinking “I gotta tell Eden about this” when I stumble on something new I know he would’ve liked. Guess that’ll have to wait until we meet again in Sto Vo Kor.
The other day some person called me trying to sell a subscription to a newspaper, DN. As usual when this happens I just reply “nah, I read everything on the web, it’s all there”, and they just take that excuse and that’s the end of that conversation. But there’s one thing that is NOT published on the web – obituaries. I wonder if there’s a law prohibiting it or why, but they don’t publish them on the web at all. It would make things a little easier having them on the web so you could just send the link to everyone instead of telling them to buy the paper… (yeah, I know, there are bigger problems to dwell on than this)
I had a perfectly good reason for not updating this place, but I guess I have to now – yet another couple made in heaven, Sandor & Josefin, got a son two days ago. Huge congrats and all good fortune blah blah to them!
>Remember my rant about how James Bond never has trouble parking his cars? Well I found out this weekend that atleast Natalie Portman has trouble with that, as this picture shows 🙂
Another couple made in heaven, Tomas & Jenny, also had a happening weekend and adding to the “world is already overcrowded”-problem by having a daughter.
CONGRATULATIONS!
(and there were much rejoicing)
And so I’m back from a rather enjoyable weekend. Started off strong on friday evening with doing… my laundry. Ok, that wasn’t even an inch amount of fun (hey, if some can use lightyears as a meassure of time, I can use inch to meassure fun!). But I did get a chance to learn Warcraft III a bit better.
Then on Saturday it was time for a wedding. My friend Markus finally tied to knot with his “dude, she’s 16!”-Linda. When they met, Markus was around 22 and Linda was only 16. Now, 9 years later, they finally married. And out of all the couples I’ve seen, some of which have made me realise the upsides to being single, these two have been the complete opposite – making me realise that girlfriends aren’t mean and guys can still do their thing. We’ll see if that still applies now that they’ve taken it to the next level. The wedding was over and done with very quickly, less than 30 minutes (and last a lifetime. Hopefully!). Then it was time for the dinner afterwards. And that complicated things for me!
My “Rules of Conduct” include some gentleman-rules, like opening the door and picking up the bill at restaurants. Some gentleman-stuff I’ve ignored because they… in all honesty – make women seem incompetent. But during this dinner all these rules applied. Pulling out chairs, making sure her wine glass was never empty (I thought this rule only applied when you had other intentions in mind?) and so on. I didn’t know people still did that… Anyway, nothing happened that I’ll regret later.
Sunday arrived and off to the big city of Stockholm to take a walk down chick-lane (Drottninggatan). This is the kind of street that’ll make you twist your neck, especially in summer time. And then to O’Learys sportsbar to enjoy a Formula 1 race and the company of my two sisters and one of the Pauls (the other one is not into F1). Oh, and Jocke was there too. And for the first time that I’ve been there they got my order wrong. But me, being the “I’m not afraid of new things”-kindaguy, ignored that and just went ahead anyway.
So generally speaking – a very, very great weekend indeed!
I saw the documentary of why the WTC collapsed, the one told from an architectrual point of view. And I found myself, every time they showed a replay, wishing that the second plane would miss. Am I the only one who does that?
Fortunately, I had taken a vacation day today so I’ve been just relaxing all day, looking at movies. And one movie gave me an idea for a new feature on this site – top 5 lists. Inspired by “High Fidelity”. I know it’s real “wanna be”-style to take after a cool thing from a movie like this, but I really like their quote “it’s what you like, not what you are like”. So over the next weeks you’ll be seeing a lot of “top 5”-lists on this site. Hope you’ll enjoy it.
This weekend I set a new standard in great timing. Unfortunately, I also set a new standard for bad timing 🙁
It all started on friday evening when I got a little stomach ache. Nothing serious, or so I thought. Then I woke up on saturday morning feeling even worse. But a Neurofen or two took the pain away so I could enjoy the saturday morning Formula 1 practice. After that my sis calls me up and tells me to get my ass down to my parent’s place in Ösmo (about a 40 minute drive) because they had to see the F1 qualifying. Trying to live up to my “never say no to women”-rule I obliged, and after my brother Jocke was done playing his round of Warcraft III on the ‘net I averaged 120 kph going there and sat down in their soffa and turned on the TV exactly when the pit exit light turned green. Talk about excellent timing!
But then my stomach ache started up again and I slept a little, hoping that’d help. No such luck, so by Saturday evening I had to go home and tried to go to sleep again. Sunday morning comes and I can’t even sit up. I managed to walk the few meters from my bed to my TV soffa and from the soffa to my cola fridge, other than that I’ve spent all this day tucked down in front of the TV.