What’s something you’ve been unable to find? Once in a while I get in a real sour mood over this or that weird obscure weirdo Soviet children's book from my childhood that's inexplicably gone missing. I'm kind of approaching one of those moods right now.
How’s your sense of direction? I'm really bad at actually having a sense of "which way is north" kind of direction, but I think I have a pretty good intuitive sense of my position and my direction relative to where I want to go.
How good are you at sitting still? Extremely good. Probably too good.
What’s something your parents always said you needed to get better at? Not being a space cadet. Can't say I've improved much in that department. Sorry, folks.
In what way are you a better person today than you were ten years ago? Ten years ago I was much more Internet shitlord adjacent than I am today. There but for the grace of God go I.
Happy New Year, readers and friends! We survived 2017 and all it tried to bring us after 2016. You survived New Year's Eve. Take a moment to pat yourself on the back.
Not gonna lie, though, 2016 and 2017 have me feeling like the Black Knight here. I'll bleed on ye, 2018!
This year, I would love for things to quiet down a little so I can do some housekeeping and organizing. It's also gearing up to be a big year for me for other reasons: it's mid-term elections back in the US and my first chance to vote as a Swedish citizen. With any luck, I'll also be starting Stockholm University's Kompletterande Pedagogisk Utbildning program, but I don't want to jinx it. Regardless, 2018 will be a year with a lot going on, and in anticipation of that, the word and concept I chose to steer my life towards in 2018 is:
I don't know how much new exciting stuff will be coming to the ol' Etsy in 2018 as a result. Running an Etsy shop is, like, the opposite of calming. I still have backlog from forever ago to list, but there's a reason it's become a backlog: I have other stuff I need to take care of.
Are you going to choose a word for 2018? I'd love for you to tell me about it in the comments or on Twitter.
What’s the dumbest thing you’ve ever done with electricity?
I generally treat electricity pretty respectfully, so my more clueless moment isn't dangerous so much as impractical. The first time I went to Korea, though, I thought it would be a good idea to bring my Hot Shot with me? Despite the obvious differences in electric outlet standards? I don't know why I thought it would be so hard to find a hot water kettle but there you have it.
How did you last pass the time when your residence was without power for at least a few hours?
There was a huge power outage in Stockholm in the fall, and we were in one of the last neighborhoods to get fixed. I didn't need to do much to occupy myself since I happened to work for most of it, but it did mess with my lessons that day because I needed to print a few worksheets out.
Around how many AA and AAA batteries do you have on standby?
I don't need AA batteries much these days, but we always have one of those bulk AAA battery packs from Kjell and Company around for my optical mouse.
How do you feel about lightning?
I'm a fan, though I resented it growing up because it meant I couldn't use the computer.
When did you last dance the Electric Slide, and if you’ve never done it, what’s the closest you’ve come to dancing the Electric Slide?
It came up at the reception for the wedding I was at in August. I've always thought of The Electric Slide as a collective memory; something I couldn't reproduce on my own but would suddenly remember in a large enough crowd of people. False! (Before that it had easily been fifteen years since I'd last danced it.) And none of the wedding guests seemed to remember it, either. It was up to my buddy and ride to the wedding (pictured above dipping his feet into the Atlantic), who spends a lot of time contra dancing, to coach us all in it. He drove eight hours in one day (four hours there, four back) to attend the wedding, so I hope that moment made it worth it for him. That, and all of the Moxie he stocked up on.
This was the year I joined all of the book clubs. My Facebook book club is still going strong (to be fair, I joined that one in 2016); this year, I've been tagging along with the reads for my friend's Austin-based feminist sci-fi book club and I just recently joined a vaguely YA-ish book club on Discord. Roar was the first book I read for that one (though far from the actual club's first book).
Image courtesy Tor Teen
Considering that this is a book put out by Tor Teen, explicitly and specifically marketed as a YA fantasy novel, and that I'm a woman in my thirties, I know full well that I'm not part of the target demographic for this book. It's not entirely surprising, then, that this didn't really appeal to my fantasy snob sensibilities.
All I want for Christmas is a YA fantasy with incredible world-building and attention to detail that doesn't try to shoehorn a try-hard romance in the middle of everything. As I said in the Discord chat:
moment of silence for every YA fantasy book that's had an awesome world-building idea and then failed to develop it in favor of something else crappier. RIP.
The something else crappier, in this case, was an aggravating romance shoehorned in the middle of everything else and artificially escalated for the sake of...I don't know what.
I'm trying to remember what it was like to be a teenager, horny and hormonal but also thirsty for True Love TM and romance, and the honest truth is that I don't remember that? I remember the raging hormones, for sure, and I remember the agony and heartbreak over initiating, navigating, and ending juvenile relationships, but I don't remember wanting to actually read about romance all that much.
In the end, it's a fine book for people who are into that sort of thing. Cormack is at least a competent writer and avoids a lot of the cringe-y twee interjections and scenes that made me want to throw Long Way to a Small Angry Planet across the room (maybe at the cost of being a bit of a bland-ass, super-white heteronormative, not-particularly-diverse world). The heroine, of course, is flat and uninteresting besides being hypercompetent—well-read (all these fantasy heroines such book nerds! things that make you go hmmmmmm), gorgeous, a fit and capable fighter, and (spoiler) gifted with the most magical and special of all the magics!—all the better for the target audience to project onto, my dear!
It's been a gradual process of going through things for garbage and donation piles, putting them in boxes, pulling them out and going through them again, putting them back in boxes, and shipping them piecemeal across the Atlantic.
What makes popular kids in high school popular, and how were you like or unlike them?
I never understood this. I conceived of our high school's popularity model as circular rather than a straight up-and-down pecking order. Though while there was no real apex predator, so to speak, there were definitely lowest-tier untouchables (if I can mix my metaphors a little). Everyone else was mostly in the middle and it seemed that some groups had more visibility than others, but each group had their own likes and dislikes.
Being smart and a dedicated student definitely did not make you unpopular in my school. My schedule was filled with gifted classes (and then later Advanced Placement classes), and my classmates in there were generally well-liked -- the same core group that regularly won student body elections, homecoming court, prom king and queen, and those other more or less objective measures of popularity. Being at that bottom rung, at least by high school, seemed to be about weirdness coupled with academic struggles.
Nonetheless, none of the "popular" kids ever traveled in my circles (except when our interests overlapped in extracurriculars) and they never really opened up and let me travel in theirs. I admit to being fat and weird; maybe that was enough to keep me locked out.
When you were in high school, where in the neighborhood did schoolmates hang out?
Presuming a "neighborhood" out in rural areas is a bit much, considering that a drive from one side of the district to the other could easily take forty-five minutes or even an hour, depending on the weather and how well the roads in question were being maintained at that point in time. If we hung out anywhere, it was at each other's houses.
What was learning to drive like?
Neither the most nor the least stressful thing I've ever done.
What were your most difficult and least difficult subjects in high school?
I did well in all of the assorted language and "language arts" classes: English, French, and German. I also enjoyed social studies and most of the sciences, though the teachers were hit and miss. I struggled the most with math, despite being in what would have been called the "honors" classes in another school system, and I absolutely resented physics. That said, I think my struggles reflected my attitude towards my teachers more than my own ability.
A recurring goal across all of my 101 in 1001 lists is to read X number of books that I've owned for more than a year. Like most bookworms, I have a tendency to accrue books faster than I can read them and to buy a book that seems interesting at the time and then put off reading it forever.
I picked up Gösta Berling's Saga in 2008 at the very earliest and probably 2010 at the latest, so this one definitely counts. Good ol' Dover Thrift Editions!
Protip for non-Swedes: you pronounce Gösta something like "Yus-duh."
The only downside is that this edition is a translation from 1894 (with a few chapters being a little later, 1918); there have since been two subsequent translations, one in the 1960s and another in 2009. I don't know if it's entirely the age of the translations that sometimes make this a hard slog so much as the age of the work. (JV had to read it for Swedish class and had a rough time with the old-timey Swedish, so.) Outside the language, there are other challenges: there's a huge cast of characters and the structure is more episodic than purely narrative so chapters can feel clunky and disconnected compared to how novels are written today. (I feel like The Wonderful Adventures of Nils holds together a little better, even if it has a similar episodic structure.)
Still, once you get into it, it's still worth reading over 100 years later. Unsurprisingly for a very feminist and pro-woman, pro-women's rights author, there are a lot of women in this large cast of characters, well developed beyond witches, damsels, and bimbos. They do some awful things, and they also do some heroic things. Of course, most of these women have a tendency to fall in love with Gösta, but then again, he's the hero.
The nutshell is that Gösta Berling, a disgraced whiskey priest, is given shelter at the prosperous Samzelius farmstead. The properties are owned by Major Samzelius but they're run and administered by his wife, Margarita, who enjoys an immense amount of respect and power in the village because she's just so damn good at running things. But an altercation at a Christmas dinner sets in motion a chain of events that leads to Margarita Samzelius being outcast from her home, and the maintenance of her property being turned over for a year to the "cavaliers"—twelve vagabonds she let stay at her property, free of charge, of whom Gösta is the unofficial leader. For the next year, Gösta and the cavaliers drink and carouse and go on adventures and generally run things into the ground. A fitting Christmas read, since it begins and ends on Christmas!
The silent movie version (from which the image for that above book cover is taken) is also notable for kickstarting the film career of no less an international star than Greta Garbo.
"I want to be alone." No, not quite yet.
My personal favorite is the ostensible antagonist, Fru Samzelius. While she spends much of the book outcast from her farm and home, pitted against the cavaliers, she begins and ends the story with competence and dignity, and always does things on her own terms.
Another one of my favorite Swedish books, Dr Glas, from around the same time period, has seen a modern re-imagining from the perspective of the antagonist, Reverend Gregorious. I want someone to do the same for Margarita Samzelius. She deserves her own book even more than Reverend Gregorious does. (Behold, the closest I'll ever get to fanfiction!)
Gerda Lundqvist, another stage and screen legend, as Fru Samzelius.
The first line is one of the most recognizable in Swedish literature: "Äntligen stod prästen i predikstolen." It's like the Swedish equivalent of "Call me Ishmael." It still turns up here and there in places, like in this song by MOVITS!
Something like this just seems ripe for the miniseries pickings, to be honest. The episodic chapters would work just fine as standalone episodes, so the scripts would basically write themselves. Come on, Netflix! Otherwise, if you want to dip your toes into classic Swedish literature, I would suggest one of the newer translations, just for accessibility's sake.
I took the bus from Best Chemist Friend's back home and spent most of the day packing up books and running errands for Swedish friends (by way of being a taco sauce mule).
This day was a Wednesday, a day I usually spent at bar trivia with friends. But since it was probably canceled because of Musikfest, and because ex romantic entanglements made it potentially weird anyway, I stayed at home and went swimming with Best Chemist Friend instead, discussing outliving our heroes and becoming grimey hippies. Afterwards my mom took us out to dinner, since this was the first she had seen Best Chemist Friend (essentially an adopted daughter for her) in years.
There are so many new places to eat that didn't exist when I was growing up here, or even four years ago. The restaurant Mom took us to was one had existed when I grew up, but was for sale when I left. Now it's a restaurant again, with new owners and a new name but much of the same atmosphere (from what I can vaguely remember). I finally had my first Yuengling of the trip, and now I was really home.
I pledge allegiance to the beer of the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and to the republic for which it stands, because of its remarkable taste-to-price ratio, with lagers and black and tans for all. // Andrew Mager on Flickr
Day 8
My goal for the next day was to drop off a few boxes of books at the library, and then hit up Musikfest with a friend and former co-worker. My go-to library for book cast-offs, the Quakertown branch of the Bucks County library system, wasn't taking donations at the time, so I had to go on a little adventure to find a home for my books.
I thought, for a moment, of sending them to the huge thrift store in Hellertown, but I like to give books to "book places" before "generic stuff-unloading places." I decided to try the Riegelsville library next, since it was closest to home and near a new cafe that's supposed to be pretty good.
When my brother and I were still really small, my mom took us on a drive to try to find this same library. It's easy to see from the main road, but then actually getting there isn't exactly intuitive. (And, of course, she was doing this in the age before GPS and smartphones.) She drove around for a while before giving up, and from that point on she just patronized bookstores with us instead of the local library. I don't remember this at all, though; it's just a story she told me once when we were driving through Riegelsville for some reason or another.
I thought about that story while I drove around the back roads of Riegelsville, looking for the same library, wondering if I'm following the same random no-outlet residential streets Mom did when she was trying to do exactly what I was doing. I had been to this library twice before, for library sales, but years ago. My memory was dim, and this time there weren't any helpful signs up or large crowds of people and activities going on. I pulled into the only non-church, non-residential parking lot around and then realized this was actually the library—it shares space with the all-purpose Riegelsville Municipal Building.
And by sheer luck Thursday was of the three days of the week that the library was actually open. With some help from the library staff, who were setting up an event in the community room on the first floor, I maneuvered a cart out to the car and unloaded the first round of boxes.
I stopped a while to wander through the nearby cemetery and look at the familiar landscape, and also snap some pictures. There was a driver here delivering other books to the library; I absentmindedly watched him take a photo of some butterflies hovering near the flowers. It was just a damn nice day.
A Civil War memorial outside the Riegelsville Public Library
After I had my fill of sunshine and cemeteries, I stopped at the Someday Cafe.
The building that now houses the Someday Cafe and Roastery had been sketchy and abandoned for my entire life. It started life as a car dealership back in the 40s or 50s, then became a dance studio, but all of my memories of it were as a sky-blue vacant building that was perennially for sale. At some point, someone tried (and failed) to turn it into an antiques shop (despite there already being another antiques shop right across the street), so I remember lots of junk sitting in the windows.
It's really gratifying and cool to see the empty, abandoned space I remember from childhood turned into something like this. And I would have killed to have this kind of not-at-home space during high school. It's just three miles from my house; it's not completely inconceivable that I could have walked there if I really wanted to, except that the roads between here and my house have no shoulder and are not at all made for pedestrians. But still.
Also, the crepe I had was really, really good.
Not everything is better, of course. The abandoned paper mill across the street, which I'd always wanted to sneak into, is long gone. :( So is my favorite used bookstore, which is now a bridal showcase, of all things.
After packing up a few more books, I meandered into Musikfest. This time I planned to spend the night (as opposed to accidentally doing so the last time I was here). I had my Musikfest mug in hand, complete with drink, and wandered around Main Street and the venues down by Monacacy Creek while I waited to meet up with Kelly and for SsingSsing to start. SsingSsing was the group I was easily the most excited to see at the festival. Glam rock + Korean folk music = WHAT THE HELL BUT ALSO YES.
This is the band warming up; it's not an action shot.
Kelly and I enjoyed the show a lot, but unfortunately there was no merch table at all, so we couldn't pick up an album or t-shirt or patch to sport our love. After show, we walked around for a little we disappear back to her place to use her bathroom and refill our mugs.
Back at the festival, Kelly grabbed some kind of cheese steak in a cup thing from a vendor and we sit and talk about Life, the Universe, and Everything. I love the work I do now, and I love the students I have now, but there is always a level of professionalism to maintain that isn't the same as being coworker-buddies with someone. The conversations I have with my students are rewarding and interesting in their own ways—I learn so much about other cultures and traditions and food—but it's hard to be someone's teacher and be someone's friend. Of course, I also have the privilege of dictating my own schedule and doing the vast bulk of my work in my pajamas, so you know, swings and roundabouts! Talking to her and then Best Chemist Friend is the perfect way to round out a day full of errands and music.
