Very sorry to announce that my sorry ass is a lazy ass as well, and this is why i haven't been blogging for ages. I have been graduating, reading heaps of books, drinking sparkling wine and watching the hilarious little animated short episodes of David Lynch's "Dumbland" with friends. Can't really say I've been BUSY in other words.
I have a couple of ideas, so I'll be writing something soon. Uhm. Yeah. Truly sorry for the lack of updates. Err.. yeah. I'm lazy. Now I'm off for another cuppa coffee. Cheerio.

Tomorrow I'm graduating. I'm going to be drunk, wear the customary, compulsory and very stupid-looking hat, shake hands with all my teachers. And more. I know I'm going on like crazy about various sentimental issues here but I think I'm enduring some sort of light crisis here, sorry. Some things just has to be dealt with.

So, right. I'm almost 19 and tomorrow I'm graduating. Jeez. Will I remember this in a few years? (Probably not and I'm going to blame the booze, but apart from THAT...?) There is a small chance that I will, though. Considering that I remember all kinds of weird things. Like, I remember my first bicycle. It was purple and yellow and I learnt to ride without those, uhm, supporting wheels (is that a word?) immediately. A natural prodigy. Ehrm. Or not. Well.
I also remember my first classroom. Allt he furniture was green, or so I remember it. Except for the table tops that were in plastic pretending to look like wood. I was the smartest kid but that wasn't necessarily a good thing.
I remember my first demonstration walk. It was against the war on Iraq, I was 14 and it was just a few weeks before my first kiss and my first booze (yes, in that order it was). My first kiss isn't very interesting, but some details can be given: We where both sober and I felt like I was the last person in the universe kissing someone. The first detail is on the plus-side I suppose and the second is perhaps quite common. And yet, I was in love and I didn't kiss just because of being desperate for a kiss. (My first booze is even less interesting. It was the last day of april and I shared vodka and lemonade that tasted of pear (I think), with two other girls.)
I remember my little brother's first girlfriend much better than I remember my own first boyfriend. Is that a bad sign?

Smokers in love
I dreamt about menthol cigarettes tonight. And this was not because I'm addicted to them beacuase I'm not. It was not a pleasant dream. To me, they taste like burnt/rotten Vicks pastilles. Or more exactly; like how I imagine a burnt/rotten Vicks pastille to taste. In addition to this, it's sloopy and geekish to smoke menthol cigarettes. I don't consider myself a brand snob. (Though i wouldn't of course by whatever crap myself: to my mind, smoking is nothing but nice accessory and if I'm smoking to look better I can't heave a cheap Polish carton of smuggled Level onto the table when I'm out, can I? )But there sure are some limits you shouldn't transcend. Menthol cigarettes are on the wrong side of the border. Even if you smoke because you are addicted you should keep up some style.

And this opinion does not run in my family. Either I'm adopted from some other family or I have just avoided the bad bloodlines: Dad rolls his own fags and my brother is just buying the cheapest crap he can find. If I get addicted and start behaving like that, please inform me before it's too late.

Uhm. Yeah. You know that feeling, eh?

Bite me like that
I remember being 15 and I remember "Lover I don't have to love" by Bright Eyes meaning a lot to me. Can't really refer to it anylonger which feels a bit strange. And that isn't just because I lack interest in Bright Eyes nowadays, since an old love of mine ruined the pleasure forever by making" The first day of my life" his theme song. Because I still like Bright Eyes, at least a little bit sometimes. Or, I try. Well, anyhow, I'm now talking about that particular song. It's something else. I remember that song being quoted by all us teenagers and everybody praised it to the skies. I suppose it's still quoted by those who are now that age. But to me, the lyrics in "Lover I don't have to love" has lost it's appeal. I want a girl too sad to give a fuck? A boy so drunk he doesn't talk? No, not any longer. Except for in occasional, intense but brief, moments of regression. Growing up is scary. You don't notice it until it has already happened.

A quick note, just to make sure that no one has missed the first-rate-ness of "Meat and Potatoes" by pop's finest Belle & Sebastian. It's a b-side from the Funny little frog single and no, it wasn't love at first listen but it certainly became love later. If you don't like it you are narrow minded and I still think it's hilarious.

And now I'm heading back to Margaret Atwood, with whom I'm a bit obsessed at the moment. Cheerio.

I was so unpopular in school and now they're giving me this beautiful bicycle
Somehow I've always known that I'm going to be a teacher. When I was in kindergarden and during my early school years, I actually claimed my dream occupation was Teacher. That was probably because all the other kids wanted to be the usual, glamorous things. But I knew that I couldn't sing, act, draw or save people from fires or behave like a princess (and if I didn't know before, I tell you they told me a couple of times every day). But I was the teacher's favourite and I could very well count, write and read and I suppose I came to the conclusion that I was good at school-things and therefore teacher was a suitable occupation.
Later I changed my mind, though, and wanted to be other things. As a part of my Deny the Past and your Parents (dad holds lectures at the university, my uncle's a teacher as well as my grandma and grandpa and.. yeah) period I got cross everytime someone said that I would probably be a teacher when I grew up, which happened from time to time. I remember one of my teachers in year 9 who always teased me with predictions of my future, saying that I would soon grow out of my rebel image and settle down with a family, being a primary school teacher. I was furious.
I started upper secondary school, and now I'm about to leave that too behind me. So what do I want to be? No idea.
But I have a quite certain feeling of where I will end up. I am pretty sure of the teacher-thing. I don't say that I very much want to be a teacher, or that I'm going to apply for that educational programme at university now because that is not true. I just have a feeling... I'm going to end up there. I suppose I knew that already in 9th grade when I got angry with people for giving me that future forecast. If not, why should I be so upset about it? Now, I don't find the thought that uncomfortable anymore. I think I'd make a pretty good teacher anyway.
Not in primary school, heavens no. But older kids. My own age, or a few years younger, perhaps. The exciting part of life.

Yesterday I sat down here and tried to write something about Albert Camus and The Stranger, and how that book is connected to a little song by Jon Brion, called Knock yourself out. You might wonder what a thin novel by a nobel prize winner have in common with a song from the soundtrack of a semi-philosophical movie called I heart huckabees. Not much, I'm afraid. Except for that they both remind me of a very turbulent time in my life. Err. Yes.
As I said, yesterday, I pictured myself inside my head, typing away on a very interesting and moving blog post on this particular subject. When I sat down by the computer, all that came out was sentimental rubbish and as you might have noticed I never posted it.
Some things you better not let out of your head, because they look awkward in other coherences, and besides, probably no one's interested.
Should quote Mayakovsky here but I only know those poems in the Swedish translation, so there's no point. What I wanted to say, anyway, was just that sometimes it feels like if you can't pierce someone's heart and pin it to the wall, with what you write, it's better to just leave it.
And stick to nonsense blog posts. There's nothing as sweet as nonsense.

Dream baby dream
A minute ago or so, I was sitting on my balcony wrapped in my giant black scarves, smoking a cigarette in my loneliness.I had Suicide's second album on the stereo and I felt two things.
1. I felt an urgent need for an sms. It was very strange, because I had no reason to. It felt like I was freshly in love and waiting for a text message. That's not the case and it didn't really matter who the sms would be from. I just wanted someone, anyone, to think of me. Spontaneously. No one did and I didn't get an sms. I'm not hung up on that, but for two minutes it just felt very important.
2. I felt like I was very close to The Future. I mean, like standing on the brink of it peering down. That was an even more unfamiliar feeling because I usually feel like I'm stuck in the present and that the present will never come to an end. To me, time always seem to be in no hurry. Which is very frustrating. But now, I felt like I was just in front of the doors to What is about to come. An astounding sensation.

Being all alone sometimes makes strange things happen to your mind, doesn't it?

I think I have got a problem with people. Or I'm just born a freak. Or perhaps I'm just very boring. Know what? I fear that it may be all of it. Yesterday night I had a good booze. I ate tasty cookies and I drank wine and smoked my favourite cigarettes and I sang along with friends, just a little bit to loduly, too pop songs I like and I wrestled with another friend on the floor and crashed another party along with Linn and Ted and arranged a mini dance floor in a bedroom with pristine christine on the stereo and then we went out to a club and then it all got depressing. I fear that clubbing may not be my call anymore. The pre-parties are usually crazy shit but I have barely entered the club before I start to sulk. And then it's never long before I can't think of anything except for how disgusting everybody are. Not to mention the music. And if I have a good time, which is very rare, it never lasts the whole night through. An hour or so before closing time, I'm always sick of it and I always leave by then, after arguments with friends and boyfriends and whatever because they always want to stay.
And alone with my bicycle I always break down and cry and feel like shit all the way home, making myself promise that I'll never ever set my foot on a club in this town again.
Repeat this every other weekend.

I remember when I liked clubbing. What the fuck happened? It's not that I demand my favourite songs to be played all the time or anything like that. I just can't stand the sight of it all, or the feel of it all or whatever it might be, anymore. It feels a bit unfair, all of it. I'm not even old, you know. But still I just want to bring a gun and put everybody out of their misery or something. They all seem so... tragic to me. Guess I'm the tragic one. The boring one. Sigh. Not fair.

I've got the perfect idea for the platform ride! Uhm. It's still just one song but I guess I can press repeat. I am SO going to play Universal Poplab feat. Håkan Hellström's cover on morrissey's "We hate it when our friends become successful". It's quite an appropriate little tune - a fairly boring pop song but with potential, being cross-fertilized with a little bit of pet shop boys in their most tacky moments and then boiled in litres of Swedish electro pop. Apart from having the most suitable title ever of course.

Two or three things I've been thinking about the last 24 hours:

1. One of the charachteristics of Asperger's disorder is a very intense and monomanic interest in something, often a very narrow field. This interest absorbs the Asperger person totally and takes a lot of time and energy, and causes the person to completely lost interest in most other activities. The three most significant pshychiatrists when it comes to the study of Asperger's disorder all suggest similar fields of interest as common among the Asperger persons. These are the likes of: timetables, telephone directories, dinosaurs, military history, meteorology and poison... POISON! Now how creepy is that? This Asperger essay does my head in at the moment, sorry for being tedious, but seriously now - think about it. An Asperger's person has, in addition to this monomanic interest(s), to some extent, behavorial- and emotional disorders. Meaning that they often have problems with realizing that other people have minds, thoughts and feelings. Well, imagine one of those being obsessed by poisons.

2. Why I am not fortunate enough to be born with the magic knowledge of How to Park a Car Properly. I mean, this is not fair. I've been practicing and practicing for hours and hours and I just can't learn. There's a barrier somewhere in my psyche, preventing me from learing. I'm not even close to succeeding. Also, I'm born the lousiest driver on earth. Well, almost.

3. I've also been thinking about what I ever did to deserve to be the subject of the passionate hate of my current English teacher. I mean, yes, I did some grammar mistakes in the last essay. Appearently I'm not world champion in the correct use of all the possesive and relative pronouns. And I'm not fussing about trying to pleeeaaaaseeee. I like to do things my own way. But I ruddy well live up to what the syllabuses demands for highest grade. And, therefore I want my top grade. Do I get it? No. Fucker.

Graduation Day
I'm graduating from upper secondary school in a month. Less then a month, actually. 5th of June and then it's bye bye journalist programme forever. Freedom sweet freedom.
Anyhow. We have this little Graduation Day Custom in Sweden, which involves the class renting a lorry with a platform together. And then they drive around town playing music and screaming and singing and cheering and make a bloody racket. To the unitiated, this is a terrible sight to behold. Every single person that sees or hears the truck with it's loading that epitomizes the word 'booze', hates it. I hate the fucking students, every year I hate them from the bottom of my heart. This year it's my turn. Whoops.

Well. We've rented a huuge hi-fi system. And I am responsible for the music. On my own initiative of course. But still. Now I've got barely three weeks to fix it. I really don't know about this. I wouldn't say that I share my taste with a majority of my classmates. Certainly not. Uhm. I won't try to please them exactly, but I don't want to be thrown off the platform while DJing. I need to find the balance between good music and music suitable for the occasion. Thank god for my widely stretched self-irony.

It is still a problem though. My only safe bet is mine and Linn's DJ anthem Mmmbop by Hanson. I hope that the perfect solution to the problem, complete with playlist and all, shall come to me in my sleep. Hopefully very soon.

I'm stuck in a city supposed to be the third biggest in Sweden. It is saturday and nothing happens, except for a million venues showing the fucking Eurovision Song Contest on wide screen. Besides, it's raining outside. As it has been the last five days or however long it is by now. Soulseek is playing fuck with me and I ruined my bloody I'm-going-to-look-skinny-on-my-graduation-day-diet yesterday. Not that it was the first time. But all the same. I have tons of school stuff to do. I don't wanna.

I think I need a cigarette.

So this is why I don't have a myspace
No, I don't have a myspace. And I certainly do not plan to get me a myspace either.
To get down to the nitty gritty immediately: It's not that I don't like the idea of myspace - because I guess I do. I have nothing against communities, and a site providing free tools for bands and artists to make their music available is of course ehm... honorable business, and all the users being on the same level, be they fans or band and... yada yada. Not that the world wide web is in desperate need of myspace since it's not particularly hard to do those things without it. But I won't complain.

BUT as long as myspace.com looks so hideous ugly terrible younameit, I won't get an account there. Not in a million years, no. Seriously. The whole site looks like whatever crap I can't even think of anything to compare it to. Looking at a myspace page makes me dizzy. Boxes all over the place and everything summoned on ONE page and you have to scroll down and there you'll find a guest book thingie that looks about as ugly as the rest of the page and IT DOESN'T MATTER that you can, err, design your own myspace and pick colours and such because the basic look of myspace in general is APPALLING. Really.

BESIDES the bloody website doesn't work properly for... like, 50% of the time. There's always something wrong. If it's not impossible to download songs that ARE downloadable, the music player fails or half of the pictures fails to load or whatever. And if you are not a band who wants to upload your songs, but want to use myspace for some sort of community... then myspace is actually pretty crappy worthless.

So that's why I don't have a myspace: It doesn't work and it looks like a dump for unwanted fonts, pictures, links and functions from the whole internet.

The relaxation of making a mixtape
To tell the truth, I've got heaps of work to do. I can't even bring myself to start with any of it. I just sit here, stressing myself but doing nothing about it. As usual. Damn it. But, I did three mixtapes the last week. That's about as prductive as I get.

Strange enough, there are things I always find time for. I can tell boyfriends and friends and whatever to stay out of my life because I'm buried in work at the moment, and I can skip school and I can cancel meetings, trips, dinners, and say no thanks to parties and... you get the point.
But I'd never postpone the making of a mixtape.

I swap mixtapes with a couple of persons, not many. Occasionally I do mix-cds to, but these are more rare (and I tend to make cds slower, funnily enough). I usually put quite a lot of effort into planning the tracklist, recording the tape and making a cover (the cover is always the worst part. I'm terrible at drawing). Making a good tape demands a lot of time. It's worth it, I'd say. Even when I'm short of time in general. Why? Well. Mixtape manufacturing is relaxing, in a way I can't really explain. Perhaps it's the focusing-part. I'm rarely able to focus on anything without being interrupted by thoughts of other things. But when making up the playlist for a mixtape, or thinking of a good theme for particular tape, I feel strangely focused. Absorbed. Concentrated. It's weird. I'm not saying I'm an expert or even very good at making those tapes. But still, I find it interesting to muse over which song is suitable for coming after this song and.. yeah. Whatever.

This probably didn't make any sense at all. It's all because I'm under a lot of pressure! I'm not focused! I'm very stressed! Remember that. Err...

Kill yr idols
Right then, on the Sonic Youth concert (because I really can't come up with anything else right now and besides it certainly IS quite an amazing little story).

It was 2005 and Sonic Youth was part of the the touring one day festival Accelerator that year, along with Teenage Fanclub, Cocorosie, Joanna Newsom and a handful others. The tickets were terribly expensive and even though I weren't exactly listening to SY very much right then, I wanted to see them so badly. I mean, they were and still are part of my Oh-shit-there-IS-good-music!-awakening and I have Bad Moon Rising on LP ... But there was no way I could afford it. I worked at a home for old people that summer, but that didn't help me since I had bought ticket both for the Hultsfred and Emmaboda festival. Speaking about that job, I just have to tell you it wasn't precisely a dream job either. In addition to the pay being so riddiculously low it was out of this world, none of the oldies liked me. I suppose the pastel pink hair I had back then played it's part... Oh well. Doesn't matter.

Where were we? Oh yes, Sonic Youth. Nope, I couldn't afford a ticket, but I summoned some friends and we had a picnic outside the fences so I'd at least be able to HEAR some noisy Sonic sound. Strolling over the lawn, suddenly, I stopped in my tracks, staring at the grass in front of my feet. For what do yout think was lying there on the ground, right in front of my friggin' eyes? Yes, exactly. Two tickets to the festival. And they weren't used. Nope. I kid you not. I bent down. I picked 'em up. I looked around. Not a soul to be seen. I walked back to my friends and let them fight over the other ticket (not that any of them were very much into Sonic Youth).

At the entrance, two guys in their twenties were having a fierce discussion with the security guards. I caught the words "...we had 'em in here, look, here's the envelope you get tickets in when you buy them, you see? Yeah I promise, please..." and a glimpse of their very empty ticket envelope from ticnet.com. I thought over it for half a second. Then walked up to the security guard, asked if he could just let me in before continuing the discussion with the two gentlemen, and yes of course, he took my ticket and gave me my entrance bracelet in bright pink vinyl and I walked past and a few hours later I watched Sonic Youth and it was fucking ace and I didn't feel bad for a second.

So this is why I'll probably be reincarnated as a pismire or some awful little bug.
Nevermind. I saw Sonic Youth live. That evens things out.

I feel like damaging somebody, killing someone or just destroying something. That is not very twee but then again I never claimed to be very twee myself , either. It's for times like these, when I am immensly angry, I save my Sonic Youth records. There are too little aggressive pop so I just have to turn to other genres. Tomorrow I will probably tell you about when I saw Sonic Youth live. Or about something else more interesting. I'll spare you the details and I will go to bed now before somebody/something gets hurt. Myself included. G'night.

Young and deranged
I really, really shouldn't be writing this. I should be writing my essay on Asperger's syndrome and its similarities with other types of High Functioning Autism. Now, not that I'm not interested - I sure am. Psychology and psychiatry are highly absorbing topics, seriously. And the case I've chosen to study is Mark Haddon's "The curious incident with the dog in the night-time", a novel I don't at all mind reading once more. But still. I need a bit of a break and so I'm writing this instead.

I just did something I haven't done for ages - I googled my own name to see what'd show up. It's usually not much fun, and it was't this time either. But I scrolled down a bit and found a school-webzine our class did like... two years ago. We did.. three issues, or perhaps four, of the webzine. I read through the pieces I wrote, and I both smiled and squirmed in agony. A poor consolation but a consolation still, is that I wrote a bit better than most of my classmates.
I am a bit intrigued by my own imagination, actually. Where did it go? I never know what to write about nowadays.

I wrote an article about the director Wes Anderson and his movies. Or it was more of a column actually. The two other texts I wrote was even further down the causerie-path; one was a totally freaked out half prose half I don't know what about the cunning, evil dust of our school that got stuck on my shoes and clothes and clogged everybody's minds . I stared at the computer screen for half a minute or something, the words "Young and deranged" whizzed by, and I worried seriously about my mental health. But I figured out that I probably wanted to compose an allegory dealing with the conservative opinions of the school management. Fair enough.

The last of my texts had the headline "His got the worst taste in music" after a, back then, brand new Radio dept. song, and it dealt with what a fatal turn off a horrible record collection is. The punch line, concluding and finishing up, read something like "Besides, you can't screw to just any racket." Jesus. Still I haven't changed my mind about it. No way I could stand a guy that haven't heard of Belle and Sebastian.
Well. I was provocative. I don't feel too bad about it. Not at all, in fact.

Julie, meet me by the vending machine
I just got one of those revelations you get. Or a re-revelation I guess it was, since it's just a re-discovery and not a first time experience. Anyway. I realized how great our own, swedens finest Jens Lekman actually is. And with that realization comes a bunch of memories growing several years old by now.

In his early career Jens Lekman released his music under the alias Rocky Dennis. This was... let's see, it's got to be the year I wasabout to turn fifteen. Anyways, he released an EP, "Maple leaves", that my still very beloved, but back then also my bestest, friend Alex, bought. And she got a 100 percent obsessed with it. She first played it to me at a party I still remember very clearly. A childhood friend from north was visiting and I had brought her. The host of the party was named Erica and I had black hair and I was wearing baggy worn out jeans and a bright orange Trainspotting-tank top and someone threw up on the living room floor and the hosts boyfriend chased me and threatened to whip me with his leather belt because I had teased him for something I've now forgotten. We drank cheap wine from Germany and I had not yet smoked my first cigarett... I'm not sure anybody cares, so let's move onwards. We sat on the carpet and occupied the stereo and she played "Maple leaves" and "Black cab" from the EP over and over again and I asked her to make me a Rocky Dennis-tape.

She did. He hadn't officially released anything except for that EP yet, but she found songs enough to fill a little more than half of a 60min cassett. Most of the songs were demos. She also made a cover that was red with white stripes, and put a Hello Kitty sticker on the tape. I still have the tape, but it's all worn out and it's impossible to listen to.

We saw him live a couple of times. I don't remember when or where first. Somewhere along the way he dropped his stage name Rocky Dennis. I didn't mind, but it was a bit hard to get used to it in the beginning. I also realized that another friend of mine, Jenny, was totally into Jens Lekman. She's still one of his biggest fans, I reckon. And so he released his album. And it was of course good. We saw him some more times. At Emmaboda, for instance. After that, a couple of EP's, more or less rare. I lost my interest in Mr Lekman somehow. Not that I thought he wasn't good anymore. I just... forgot about him. They played "You are the light" on the radio but I rarely care for what radio stations play.

Occasionally when I'm going to clubs, they'll play "Black cab" or "You are the light". I know the lyrics and sing along without really thinking about it. Haven't cared for or thought of Jens since last summer when I was in London and "Black cab" poured out of the loudspeakers at a club. I remember discussing with Englishmen the Swedishness of Jens.

But now I suddenley remember - he's really something. The hard part is to describe why he's that fantastic. I've never been good at explaining what's so good about particular music. It just is. But if I should try anyway, I guess that for my part, Lekman's appeal lies in his sincere modesty. The simplicity. And the flair for making music that reflects the Sweden I know. Just listen to" Julie". Or "Maple leaves". Or "A sweet summer's night on hammer hill". Or "Psychogirl"" I mean, that's... me. It's MY life! And it all feels like... home.
I suppose it's different for other people. But I can only speak for myself.