Category Archives: life

A Swedish Christmas.

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Like always. I keep thinking that I won’t make it home for Christmas, but this year – again – it just happened to work with my travel plans. Nice, but at some point I also want to be dramatically missed. Sweetly told somewhere that ‘is it not difficult being without your family?’ but also surrounded by good enough people that it isn’t, not really. Maybe next year.

(But to clarify, it is amazing being home. I have an amazingly amazing family. Here we are on a frozen lake my grandma later told us not to walk on.)

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And now, writing this, it’s the dark evening leading up to the new year. My head is pounding and I want to sleep sort of, but I think I’ll read some poetry and stay awake the way you’re supposed to. I’ll wait a bit longer. That’s been the theme of my whole year.

(Does it sound like I’m not happy? I’m happy. Just on my period, ya know girls. I’m good.)

New Notebook.

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I switched notebooks today. My parents bought me my previous one when they were visiting me in Florida. It had wooden covers and lined pages, which meant it couldn’t be drawn in and it never looked that good gluing cute notes and memories onto the pages. It was just writing, handwriting that started of nice but then lost it somewhere halfway through. The last page is always an important one, and I wrote on it: this was not pretty, just used. It’s sad, but also not sad, with times like that. Not pretty, just used.

Pink x3

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3 Photos from the past week.

Pink food 
(If you fry literally anything at the same time as beets, it turns pink. You can make pink scrambled eggs, it’s great. They used beets to dye fabric back in the day, didn’t they? I keep wondering if it would work on my hair.)

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Pink baby 
(It’s my friends baby, we didn’t steal it. It’s the cutest baby though, 10/10 would steal.)

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Pink painting
(I’m trying to paint some hands and flowers and stuff, but only one hand turned out good, so now I’m trying to restructure everything to focus on that one.)

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💗

Rest

Posted on by under life, selfies

I didn’t blog for a while and then I felt like I should but then I didn’t want to so I didn’t. But then I felt like I should again, so I planned a day to be productive, but then I wasn’t and in the evening I realised that I was so full from work and then trying to rest myself back to me, that I just wanted input before I could pour anything. Now I’m okay. It’s a bit unpredictable, that. I don’t know if that’s professional, but it’s how it is. (I think a lot about professionalism like that, how you should treat creativity as a business if you want it to be. But it’s really not that simple. And you’re allowed to be much more not simple.)

Anyway, I was working a lot, so here’s a selfies from my cabin (like old times on this blog) of late night painting flowers on my hand, and then my current mood after coming home from work.

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Headache.

July 24th

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I just worked a 14 hour shift on 4 hours of sleep, and I’m like HIGH on something, it’s like time is no longer a concept and I just called my friend because I needed to TALK and then I couldn’t stop DANCING around the kitchen because it’s like my feet won’t stop MOVING. My friend says it’s sleep deprivation. Maybe.

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(Here is where I sat during break today, breathing in the sun)

(Randomly, SONG OF THE DAY is Whatever it takes by Imagine Dragons, the bridge to that song is like ahhhh) (I’m sorry, excitement makes me drop all my adjectives)

(Also sleep deprivation gives me so much inspiration, I need to stop and slow down and go to sleep but I just want to write and do stuff and okay bye)

Height of summer pt. 2

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It’s warm today. Hot and not really humid like Florida, but still so much worse because it’s not like this is a country where we have AC. I couldn’t do anything I wanted to after coming home from work, could barely stand because it all just suddenly hit me and my body’s never been good with radical temperature changes. I was just laying on the couch, not doing any of those productive things I had planned and felt bad about it. But then I was thinking about how much grace I would’ve had upon myself had I for example been sick. Yet there are so many other situations that actually affect me worse than ‘normal sickness’ but where I don’t allow myself to be excused. I think that for some reason – when analyzing myself or my situations – I look so much inside of me that I generally isolate myself from my circumstances. But we live in our circumstances. We shouldn’t be victims of them, but not acknowledging them leads to self pity in a different way. It’s good to sit down and feel what you feel. Disappointment over something. Fear about something else. We need to know our starting point and own up to ourselves, otherwise we can’t go to where we want to be – or even be where we are.

Smultronställen

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DSC_0982The word “smultronställe” in Swedish means a little hidden away place where you can find wild strawberries growing. It’s also used as an expression for something good, maybe like a corner of a dvd store with movies that are good but possible underrated, or a specific destination that you’ve found for yourself and enjoy going to. I think of it like a place in the sun, like a place of unexpected sweetness that is a bit separated from the rest of your life.

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There are so many smultronställen in life. I found a literal one next to the road while I was out walking today. And they remind me of C S Lewis saying:

“Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.”

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But that is not less of an incentive to enjoy it. It’s like saying you shouldn’t enjoy your vacation just because you’ll only be there temporarily. Isn’t it rather the opposite? We have to learn to enjoy our fleeting moments and the frailty of things we love. Not because that’s what makes it beautiful – even though that might be true – but because that is what we have.