If it’s true what galestorm said earlier, that you’re going to spend the new year doing what you did the first day of it, I’ve got a fairly boring year coming up. But it involved sleeping in and getting things done, so it won’t be all bad.
Things Karin has used as attempts to get up in the last hour, after being put in bed and told to stay there: I’m hungry, I’m bored, I’m not comfortable, I’m thirsty, I have to pee, I need a comfort rag, I want my bappas, I don’t want to be alone, I can’t sleep, repeat until strangled by mother…
Anders made Pytt-i-panna for dinner and we are now officially DONE with Christmas ham, say it with me: Hoo-rah!
Tomorrow is the first IKEA trip of the year, with a self-confessed IKEA-addict, (don’t try and deny it, galestorm). It’s nearly as exciting as the first robin of spring, except the robins here in Sweden are lame and have only a brownish-red stain on their bellies so they look more like a purple finch wannabe than a robin. I even have a shopping list, specifically tailored to IKEA. Although the kitchen table and chairs we want aren’t on it, sadly.
I’ve been binging on 3 Musketeers (Whipped up! Fluffy! Chocolate on chocolate taste!) bars this last week (in a pathetic attempt to rid the house of them before New Year’s Resolution #1 starts). Love that creamy goodness. They just melt melt melt in your mouth, I tell you. M&M’s can only aspire to such creamy meltiness, those candy-coated crunchy little bastards. 3 Musketeers are the only candy bar I want that I can’t get here and the only one from home I still crave. Every once in a blue moon, Suzette’s got them in stock at the American store, but how often am I there?! One colleague brought me 2 bags from the States, my boss gave me another 2 packs and my mom brought me a bag so I’m WALLOWING in the ‘sketeers!
Something from Mimi Smartypant’s archives that I loved and which brought out every ounce of writer-envy in my body:
Is language limiting or is it all we have? On really bad days I think about little kids learning to speak, learning to put labels on everything. At first, when you are small, things like the sky, light, and trees are so wide, so liquid, so limitless, so new to you, so directly experienced, and then you learn the words sky or light or tree and click, just like that, the liquid is curdled and the word is forever what you know and there’s a brand-new box around what you see. And then the box gets filled up with associations, and the thing becomes the word the way the memory becomes the photograph. Of course there’s no real alternative, and being a language freak and a teeny bit Wittgensteinian I really don’t mind so much, but remember, we are talking about how I feel on bad days. Sometimes words feel like a pocketful of rocks or crawl pointlessly across the page and I think: Why do I even bother to try and talk to people? Why do I bother to communicate anything? Why can’t we just be like animals and, I don’t know, PEE everywhere as a means of communication? Because this word thing is totally hopeless. But most of the time, of course, I am happy about words, and they feel as big and wide to me as anything. There are certain words that I love so much that I want to put them in my mouth. On the bus today though I revived my childhood fantasy that every thing—not just every category of thing, that we in our ignorance have so clumsily lumped together, but every thing—every car, every bird, every clock, every tree, every brick in a house, every drop of water in the ocean—has a secret, true name all its own. If you knew all those names you would have no need to ever speak again.