www.whirlwind.nu/2009/09/28/usa-isnt-the-world

That wasn’t what I was going to write about. I was just going to write a short update on what I’ve been up to this week. For the past few days I’ve been studying political history and I’m not quite as overwhelmed by school as I was this Monday when I read about the three assignments in three subjects that I need to finish in three weeks. My reaction reading about the hundreds of pages I have to read, the essays I have to write and the 3D graphic I need to create was something along the lines OH MY FUCKING GOD WHAT THE FUCK JESUS CHRIST. Of course everything felt a bit more overwhelming before I had opened the books. I’ve still only began studying one of the three subjects since I’m going to focus on one at a time, but getting somewhere in at least one of the three has calmed me down. If I can handle political history I should be able to handle 3D graphics and IT as well.

Studying is actually what I’m doing tonight. I just took a short break to write this post and should get back to the Swedish union movement after WW1 now. It’s very interesting, reading about how the working class of Sweden first got organized, formed unions and finally got into a political power position.

It’s 1 AM and I’m at my parents house. They’re coming home today after spending eighteen days in the northern Sweden visiting relatives. I’ve been spending a lot of time here while they’ve been gone, watching their 90 channel cable TV, downloading stuff with their fast internet, enjoying berries straight from their garden, eating their food and ice cream.

I’m not sure whether we’ll celebrate me today or tomorrow. Depends on what time they’re home and how tired they are I guess. The fridge is rather empty and unless they pick up a cake on the way home there’s nothing suitable for a birthday celebration in the house.

I’ll be back with a blog post once I’ve got my presents. It’ll be another “look at my new stuff”-post which I’ve been so fond of lately.

Time flies and I’m surprised at how fast! It’s been three weeks since I last blogged but it doesn’t feel like it. I guess it’s because it’s summer and this time of the year time moves way too fast. It’s now it should move slowly, it’s now that you should be able to feel every moment, look at the time and think “Only one hour passed since I last looked, it feels like five!”. But of course the only time when that happens is when life is boring, in the middle of the winter when we’re stuck at work or doing something else equally boring. I can’t believe July is coming to an end. How on earth is that possible?! Summer will be over in about a month and I feel like it was May yesterday! This is such a horror to me since spring and summer is the only time of the year when I’m truly happy. Like I’ve told you before I can’t cope with the darkness of fall and winter. Seasonal affective disorder is a bitch and living in a country where fall and winter takes up half the year isn’t ideal. Because of this I’ll try to make the very best out of what’s left of summer. I’ll spend more time outside, take longer walks and pay closer attention to the beauty of nature – while it lasts. And I have bigger things than that to make something out of the remainder of summer since I’m going to Stockholm to see a friend and then on a cruise with my family in early August.

Since I last blogged the big thing that has happened was “Hultsfred-ändå-festivalen” (The Hultsfred anyway festival) as I call it. You might remember that I blogged about the fact that the Hultsfred festival was cancelled but that people were coming here anyway. Well they did. I’m not sure how many but at least 200 people came to Hultsfred, stayed at the camping (which is part of what used to be the festival area), partied and had fun as if the festival had never been cancelled. Of course there was a big difference. Instead of six stages with some of the biggest bands in the world there was a travel trailer with a sound system and local bands playing in the grass in front of it. Sure, the festival was smaller than it had ever been before but the energy was the same just as the attitude of the people. No, the attitude was even better. Here were people who came to Hultsfred without the big rock festival. Not many people except for German tourist do so because this is a really small and really boring town. But here they were anyway, determined to not let the festival go without a proper goodbye. I love them for that.

An era of music, fun and party in Hultsfred has come to a end. This is sad for everyone who visited the festival but especially for us who live here. Hultsfred is a small town with only 5000 inhabitants and the festival was pretty much the only thing going on here. This is what Hultsfred is known for. This was what was good about living in this town. This was the thing you looked forward to every year. But no more.

There’s a Facebook group called “Vi som åker till Hultsfred ändå!” (We who are going to Hultsfred anyway!) though. It’s a group for people who are planning to come here to camp and party anyway, even though there’s no festival. I’m obviously a member of the group and I’m looking forward to participating in some kind of party during this weekend and next week. Like I said, no festival is especially sad for us who live here so it’s wonderful that people are still coming here. It would have been horrible with a week of absolutely nothing going on when there was supposed to have been a big festival taking place. Of course this will be nothing like what the festival would have been but at least it’s something. A last hurrah.

To those who made the festival possible: Thank you for the five wonderful years of festival fun I was lucky to be a part of. I will miss it a lot.

I think it’s especially silly when people (Americans, it’s always Americans) complain about how it’s hard to follow a movie in a language they don’t understand with subtitles they do understand. Personally I think it’s harder to follow a movie in a language you do understand with subtitles in another language you also understand.

The things is no matter how good the subtitles are not everything can be accurately translated. Take humorous puns like this for example: “What did the grape say when it got stepped on? Nothing – but it let out a little whine”. Translated to Swedish the words “whine” and “wine” have no similarity to each other which means that directly translated the joke no longer makes sense. The usual solution to this is replacing the joke with a similar one. It works but when you understand the spoken English and get the joke it’s a bit annoying reading a completely different joke in the Swedish subtitles. That is what you could call hard to follow. Hearing one thing in one language and reading another in another language. Yet here in Sweden where almost everyone understand English we don’t complain because we’re used to this.

What do I want to say with this? That people who think subtitles makes movies hard to follow should think about how we do it in Sweden and how we manage well despite the fact that most of us understand both the spoken language and the subtitled one. Dubbing makes movies look weird and re-makes… well isn’t that just extremely unnecessary? Just read the damn subtitles.

After not blogging for weeks I should probably start this with an update on what I’ve been doing. I’ll summarize it for you: fear of cancer and too many doctor’s appointments, angst about money, web design, a bit of shopping, taking long walks on beautiful summer’s days and being depressed inside on rainy summer days when all I want is to take long walks on beautiful summer’s days. I’ll now explain everything in detail.

1. Fear of cancer and too many doctor’s appointments
Like two months ago I discovered a lump above the knee on my right leg. I googled the problem and read that basically either it wasn’t dangerous at all or cancer. Being someone who’s not easily scared of course I assumed what I had wasn’t dangerous at all. Hahaha yeah right… I immediately assumed I had cancer which led to the conclusion that I was dying. Knowing that I was dying I imagined saying my farewells to my family, cried and then started imagining (planning) my funeral. After deciding on the ceremony, music and type of flowers to lay on my casket I cried myself to sleep that night. Eventually I went to see a nurse who sent me to a doctor who sent me to another doctor at the county hospital. Turns out it’s just fatty tissue, one of those nice tumours that does no harm. Obviously this was great news and I immediately stopped planning my funeral.

2. Angst about money
I’ve been a university student since January. It’s a well known fact that it’s now June. That means school is over for this term and so is my student loan for this term. This leaves me without a income and that means I’ll live on government welfare money this summer. I’m not sure exactly how much (little) I’ll get but it will be a few hundreds of dollars less than what I’m used to. I’m trying hard to focus on the bright side of this which is that at least I get welfare money which means I get to keep my apartment and don’t have to sell my computer, body or left kidney to feed myself. Alright I wouldn’t have to sell my left kidney if I didn’t get these money but I would have had to move back to my family’s house. That would be traumatic for both me and my family. Traumatic for me because I’m almost 27 years old and have lived on my own for four years and traumatic for them because I’m almost 27 years old and they thought they got rid of me for good when I moved out of their house four years ago. Anyway, that was the bright side of this situation; I get to keep my apartment. Unfortunately focusing on it is hard when there’s also a not so bright side which is the fact that I won’t be able to afford a vacation this summer. Bye bye bike vacation on Öland! T_T

3. Web design
Since I’m being witty about things that I in reality find no humour in it’s only logic that I’ll be dead serious about things that I’m happy about. So here we go, here’s me not being witty but serious. I recently finished a web design commission I’ve been working on for a while. It’s a site for the town’s karate club. I got the job because two of my siblings are active within the club but that doesn’t mean I can’t take pride in it. This is the first time I’m doing a web design job for people I don’t know because obviously there are more people in the club than my siblings. They liked it and I feel very accomplished. Take a look at it here: www.whirlwind.nu/1 As you can see the layout is still located on my domain since I want to finish a few small changes before I upload it to theirs.

4. A bit shopping
You know what, I’ll leave this to another blog post. Partly because I don’t have the energy to edit photos right now but mostly because that means I’ll have something to write about in my next blog post.

5. Taking long walks on beautiful summer’s days
Say what you want about Hultsfred but during summer several areas of town are quite beautiful.

6. Being depressed inside on rainy summer days when all I want is to take long walks on beautiful summer’s days
And say what you want about Hultsfred but on rainy summer days most areas of town are quite depressing since grey skies and rain makes an alredy depressing excuse of a town look even more like a depressing excuse of a town.

Yes, I’ve done it again. Totally neglected my blog. I haven’t neglected the site though. The reason to my absence is that I’ve focused on getting my Ego gallery with self-portraits up and running again, which took me about two weeks. I’ve gone through thousands of photos dating back to 2001, picked out and edited more than 700 of them, then re-edited half of them because I came up with a better way to fix sharpness and finally coded more than 300 pages for the gallery. So yeah, all that took a while to do.

The gallery is set up in the same way as the old one used to be. There’s a big difference in the coding but that’s not something you’ll notice. What you’ll notice is that the photos are much bigger. The old ones were a pitiful 320×240 px while the new ones are 500×375 px. That means you can now actually see the colour of my eyes in the photos, for example. There’s still some very small photos in the gallery which I don’t have in a bigger size but I came up with a somewhat satisfying solution to that. See the first half of 2004 and you’ll see what I mean.

Anyway, if you check out the gallery please let me know if something’s not working like it should or not looking quite right. I might not look quite right in some photos but please ignore that. That’s all good. I just happen to be quite a weirdo and quite a poser at times. And by “at times” I mean whenever there’s a camera near. There’s basically two kinds of photos of me. 1. I’m doing a weird face. 2. I’m doing some pose which I at the time thought made me look cool or pretty.

Oh well, that’s it for now. Don’t expect me back on the blog scene just yet. I might be done with one gallery but there’s two more (Photo Blog + Art) to go.

All three new lamps I’ve bought (online) have arrived and I love how they’ve added elegance to my home. I took new photos of my home yesterday. Of all rooms but the bathroom since the only thing that ever changes there is the beauty products on the shelves and the colours of the towels. My bathroom is really hopeless. There’s just not enough space so it gives a messy impression even though it’s in perfect order. Anyway, you can view the photos of my home here.

And I’m ending this post with something I wish everyone would realize. Calling someone else a slut doesn’t make you a saint. It does however make you a bitch.

I just thought I’d let you know that no, I’m not dead. My lack of blogging and activity on the blog scene is due to dealing with a lot of school work. Expect me back some time next week.

I am still active on Twitter though. Follow me there if you like: http://twitter.com/cherienoir. Yeah, I made a new account. If you’ve been following my old one (B147CH) please follow my new one instead.