To be well-informed is to have the world at your fingers

Things learned in the last 48 hours:
- Cape Reinga, the northernmost point of New Zealand, is frikkin' windy. I had trouble walking straight at times.

- Just because you have an SUV doesn't mean you can drive around on a beach any which way you want.

"Honey? I need to tell you something about your new car..."

- Toyota RAV4s are extremely popular in New Zealand for some reason. On the drive from my brother's place to the airport, which took maybe 30 minutes, I counted ten.

- There's a city outside Kuala Lumpur called Cyberjaya. Only in Asia would a place have the word "cyber" in its name. Its apparently a semi-failed attempt at creating an Asian Silicon Valley.

- Mopeds are popular in Malaysia. On the highway. Preferably with two people on.

- Keeping speed limits is a big deal in New Zealand. My taxi from KLIA into Kuala Lumpur did 100 kph on a 60 kph road. Marvelous.

And I don't know what is more scary. That the taxi driver had a 2 Unlimited ring tone on one of his four cell phones, or that I knew it was 2 Unlimited.

Quotes from my brother overheard in the last 48 hours:
- I have a feeling we're supposed to turn left. Or right.
At a T intersection in Whangarei

- It's very uncommon to see a road sign with distance stated on it in New Zealand.
As we're passing a sign that says "Auckland 164 km"

- Damn you!
After we have passed signs that say "Auckland 163 km" and 161 and 158 and 157 and 152. I was in tears.

To refer to (part of) a statement that has been made by someone else

The best quotes from the trip so far.

1. Drink, drive and die in a ditch
Sign by the road. New Zealand don't mess around with warning signs.

2. Excuse me but it appears that I have imbibed a touch too much tequila and my legs are no longer functioning as they should = Estoy hasta el gorro.
Part of the Spanish dictionary on the menues at The Flying Burrito Brothers. If you're going to Mexico, learn it well.

3. Why you stopping there for? Why you stopping there for? Hey! Why you stopping there for?
Just fuck you.
A taxi driver questioning our taxi driver's decision to stop in the middle of the road outside the train station to let us get out of the car. And his response. Not very New Zealand-ish.

4. It might be that they suddenly find themselves outdoors and in shorts, and start running to get inside and warm up.
My brother's theory as to why New Zealanders run around in a tshirt and shorts when its eight degrees outside.

If you saw a heat wave, would you wave back?

The heat really only got to me a couple of days here and there in June and July. During one week we had to run the AC in the living room a few times, so we didn't melt. Here in the Land Of No Air Conditioning I had to buy a portable one, that we move from room to room whenever the heat gets to us.

Which it does now. The devil we call the sun is casting it's baleful gaze down upon us unsuspecting mortals yet again, and while others may smile at the thought of such a thing and then frolic about in parks and on beaches and anywhere really, I just want to close the blind, crank up the AC to ten and watch TV/play games/read/write/hug the girl.

Nigel Tufnel: The numbers all go to eleven. Look, right across the board, eleven, eleven, eleven and...
Marty DiBergi: Oh, I see. And most amps go up to ten?
Nigel Tufnel: Exactly.
Marty DiBergi: Does that mean it's louder? Is it any louder?
Nigel Tufnel: Well, it's one louder, isn't it? It's not ten. You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You're on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on ten on your guitar. Where can you go from there? Where?
Marty DiBergi: I don't know.
Nigel Tufnel: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?
Marty DiBergi: Put it up to eleven.
Nigel Tufnel: Eleven. Exactly. One louder.
Marty DiBergi: Why don't you just make ten louder and make ten be the top number and make that a little louder?
Nigel Tufnel: [pause] These go to eleven.

Oh yeah. And listen to music. At eleven.

Now I'm going to go out on the balcony, which you can't even open the door to between two and eight without succumbing to spontaneous combustion, and give the sun the finger. And maybe find me a spider I can kill.

Cuz I'm praying for rain and I'm praying for tidal waves
I wanna see the ground give way
I wanna watch it all go down
Mom please flush it all away
I wanna watch it go right in and down
I wanna watch it go right in
Watch you flush it all away
Time to bring it down again
Don't just call me pessimist
Try and read between the lines
I can't imagine why you wouldn't Welcome any change, my friend
I wanna see it all come down
Suck it down
Flush it down

We lean against railings, describing the colours

A moment of clarification. Regarding Flemingsberg as "the New York of Stockholm".

We have a clear view of the heli-pad at the hospital formerly known as Huddinge hospital (some sort of musician ego thing, they tell me), and today, as I almost always do when I hear an ambulance helicopter come in for landing, I sang some lyrics from "This Mess We're In", which is a song of "Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea".

Can you hear them? The helicopters
I'm in New York...

And Mah Girl said "Yeah, because Flempan reeeeaaaally is like New York City". It was just too good not to go with.

That song is my favorite PJ Harvey song, by the way. Check it out.

Without a soundtrack, human interaction is meaningless

'twas a great party. They don't come along that often, those parties that seem to transcend expectations and morph into something else, some experience that words aren't enough to describe. Nor pictures, though I took over a 100. I do so love my camera phone.

At a quarter to two this morning, I was sprawled over a couch in Drickard's living room, happily singing along to Queens of the Stone Age. Around me, the party was slowly winding down. Not like last year, when it crescendoed around midnight and then mellowed out completely. This year it was more gradual, a more even level of energy throughout the evening, which only made it better.

Music was played. Beer was drunk. An extremely good time was had.

Favorite quotes from the party:
It's smoking that makes me hung over.
Nicklas tried to explain that his coming hangover wasn't due to the ten beers he had consumed, but rather the half dozen or so cigarettes he availed himself off during the night. Right...

Shit. You too.
Andreas I, as yet another Ghost of Childhood Pasts walked in the door.

You can't roll dice to determine when to drink. It's the little voices in your head that tell you that.
Mia, upon hearing some serious drinking games were taking place in the basement.

To describe the taste of Lars, I would use the word “aftershave”.
Erik, having licked Lars' cheek and ear, for reasons unknown.

Three rounds with The Cock is usually enough.
Can't remember who said it, but referring to the basement drinking game, oddly named The Cock (as in not “a rooster”, but rather a penis).

I tried to apply it to my wife. It went to hell.
Andreas K, while hearing the line “you speak when spoken to” from a song by The Editors.

The internet is the trailer park for the soul

Back in July, I found a cool blog using Blogger's “Next blog” function. I just clicked around, and there it was.

So today I figured I would go for a repeat. Click around, and find something out there, again. Something worthwhile, something fascinating, something I would want to read.

You can probably guess where this is going.

I found zilch. Nada. Nichts. Noll. Ingenting. And so on. Or rather, I found a lot of blogs but they were all either in a language I don't read or horribly ugly or complete crap. Or at least two of the three. And sometimes maybe all three.

So I'm asking y'all, point me to some blogs. Preferably in English, but Swedish works too. Well-written stuff, please. Wow me. Pull me out of the trailer park and into high society.

I leave you with this quote:
We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self

Jesper gave me some grief about not writing enough, over drinks on Friday night. Fair enough. See, I'm more of an editor than a writer, really, in the sense that I'm very bad at writing sprees and can't put anything to paper or hard drive without thinking it through over and over.

First thing's first. Writing spree? I'm not sure where the term originated, but it's used within the context of my creative writing class, where it signifies the act of putting pen to paper and just writing, writing, writing. The point of a writing spree isn't to write anything good or worthwhile, the point is writing. Anything. Any words that come to mind, even if it's just “I can't write for shit. I can't write for shit. I can't write for shit”.

Now, as I said, I'm not a writing spree person. Why? Because I can't live with writing something that I don't like. Everything I put down must be worth something to me.

In some ways, I can find the essence of this in a quote from Stephen King's “On Writing”:

You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair--the sense that you can never completely put on the page what's in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.

I don't come lightly to the blank page. I need an idea, or a character, or something, ready in my head, to be able to sit down and write. Usually I turn this one thing, maybe a paragraph or a plot or something, over and over in my head for days before I commit anything to actual words. I over-analyze everything.

I have maybe two or three dozen embryos of stories sloshing about on my laptop. I'm going to let you people decide which one of the following I'm going to finish and polish and try to get published. Yes, published. Not here, on my blog, but for a literary website of some sort.

The stories are:
- Love at Stake. A man believes his new-found girlfriend is a vampire.
- Aquarium. A guy buys an aquarium that includes a miniature Bermuda triangle.
- The Weird and Wonderful Hair of Mrs. Atkins. A woman, with bizarre hair, finds magic in her attic.
- Roof Top. Two strange men meet on a rooftop on New Year's Eve of 1999.
- The Word Thief. A man kills another man, because he believes he is stealing letters and words from the world.

Right. Which one then? Or rank them. Or whatever. Let me know.

This conversation…is over

Snippets of conversation today.

Me: “Are those cows or horses?” (driving)
Mah Girl: (looking over, trying to discern what I’m talking about)
Me: “Cows. Horses. Horses? Cows!”

Once again proof that I do know my moo-cows from my horsieses.

Me: “How come the timer isn’t moving?” (staring at the archaic microwave)
Mah Girl’s father: (walks up and pushes the “start” button. Microwave starts) “Maybe that was too technical for you?”

A rather technical geekboy upstaged by a 65-year old man. Oh the shame.

Mah Girl: “Look at that orange room!”
Me: “Where?” (driving, intent on the rain-soaked road)
Mah Girl: (sighs) “Too late. But it looked like our living room.”
Me: “So not orange. Terracotta.”
Mah Girl: “Yeah. I only said orange to piss you off.”
Me: “I know. I said terracotta to let you know I know you wanted to piss me off.”
Mah Girl: (smile) “I know.”

We’re so much alike it’s scary.

And the quote of the day:

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.
- Ray Bradbury