i'm back.

Back in Sweden, Back to writing this, back. I haven't been back in the country for a full 24 hours yet, and I'm already bored, depressed, and feeling... weird. It's not so much that I miss America (but I do, but I do), it's more that I miss my life there, even when it was crappy. Being back in Sweden reminds me all over of why I left to begin with. Getting to have a new life somewhere else being the same old me was just... heaven, compared to this. Don't get me wrong. It was wonderful to hug granny again, to pet my cat Missan (My cat Sammy is... missing. *shrug*), talk while mom made me egg sandwhiches, call a friend. Still. I can't help feeling like it's enough already. Click my heels... take me home. Isn't that pathetic? Over in the US, I'd always be referring to Sweden as home, of course. As I got to England, I began referring to America as home. "It's only 3 am back home, y'know!"

Okay. I am depressed. I HATE THIS. I hate this. I'm going to go to the photo shop here and see if I can save some pictures in my camera. Of course, they'll all end up ruined, leaving me with no trace of having done or been or know anything anywhere anyone. The film didn't rewind in the camera, so it got subjected to a brief moment of sunlight, thusly ruining most of it, and with my luck, all of it. It wasn't a very touristy film, I guess, but it documented a wonderful day just this past monday. It contains pictures of me rollerblading (I still don't know how to brake, I just happily try and slam into soft things), pic's of Jesse's dog (I do believe it's the cutest creature on earth), me with ridiculous roses behind my ears, Jesse trying to look cheesy holding a bottle of milk fresh from a farm we went to, etc etc. All lost, I'm sure. Added note: I went to the photo shop, the woman didn't sound HORRIFIED when I explained what had happened, and we sent it of for developing. I'll know wednesday afternoon how it went. I won't get my hopes up, but maybe, just MAYBE one or three shots are still semi alive. *shrug*

It's so COLD here! I left a hot hot America, dressed in a thin short summer's dress and shorts, felt a teeny bit chilly in England, landed in Copenhagen and... COLD! I had to put on pants. Sweden was even colder, and a bit rainy, and this morning I had to find a winter's jacket because something in me is freezing to death. *laugh* I never thought I'd say it, but I MISS the heat in America! I'd also like to note that I just got a snailmail from NCCU. I have a 3.077 GPA. It said that a GPA of 3.0 is an average of B, so I guess that is a good thing, then. Yey :) This means I can contact the swedish loan agency on monday already and get the trip back in the works so I know for sure that I'M GETTING OUT OF THIS PLACE.

So, what about the actual trip? 5.30am Woke up, sighed, finished packing. 6.00am. No Jesse (he was to pick me up/Drive me to the Durham train station). 6.30am STILL no Jesse. I nervously waited on the porch, thinking he found another wounded turtle on the road and had to save it (long story for another time... ) 6.45am A Jesse (hehh. I was only getting - um- frantic). Drove off to Durham. 7.43am. Got a bye bye hug from Jesse and left on a train to Charlotte. I kept drinking the view from the window with my eyes thinking "Guess I won't be seeing many more Dunkin' Donuts for a while" (I'd like to note that I've never actually BEEN to a Dunkin' Donuts, it's just... the concept of it.) 10.50am. Step off the train in Charlotte, onto a taxi van. Chatty taxi driver, complained about all the Swedes in Liberia, where he was from. 11.15am. Airport in Charlotte. Walked in with my two heavy suitcases and my backpack, only to be informed that the British Airways checkin counter doesn't open until 1.30 pm. Sat impatiently in a chair opposite their desk and read for hours, while munching on some Reese's Peanutbutter cups I was supposed to bring home. Couldn't leave my bags unattended and go eat, now could I? 1.33pm. Checked my suitcases in. Found a rest room. Oh joy... Wandered off into the shops/food places area. Bored bored bored la la laaa. 2.50pm. Insanely bored. Bought some french fries and onion rings. 3.30pm. After counting how many magazine cover's The X-files Gillian Anderson grace (4), scaring business men (5 different ones) on purpose by sneaking up close to them and start coughing and looking like I had a lethal disease until they started to look frightened and tried to move away, and walking back and forth inside the airport 7 times, I got my spare money into change and called Jesse from a payphone, so I at least had someone to complain to about being bored. After about 5 minutes, I ran out of money, and got rudely disconnected in the middle of a story. 5.00pm. Borded the plane to Gatwick, London. 6.30pm EST USA - 7.30am London time. Was fed dinner (forgot to order veggy food so I got something with a big sloppy piece of chicken I didn't eat. It did contain a yummie piece of cheesecake, though.) Watched Eve's Bayou (Wonderful strange sad movie - rent it, if you haven't seen it yet. There's nothing like some voodoo and cajun speak and Samuel L Jackson when the time is right for it) Broke my headphones. (I think I actually broke the THING you plug the headphones into, but shhh, don't tell British Airways that.) Slept for an hour. Was fed breakfast (lame ass breakfast, with not enough of those tiny little containers that I love opening.) Landed. 7.40am. Walked about Gatwick and found Dylan waiting for me. Yey :) After a lot of walking back and forth, we both ended up with tickets for the bus shuttle to Heathrow. 9.something am. Sat and chattered with Dylan, watched cars from my bus window. A mysterious sleeping childs hand kept ending up on Dylans' knee, causing much amusement. 10.something am. Arrived at Heathrow. After a lot of searching for an atm machine so Dylan could get some money out (I'm terrible. I travelled with only $20 in my pocket, and that was to be for a bus shuttle to Sweden later on), he treated me to a magnificent airport breakfast. Runny fried eggs, mushrooms, baked beans... and a lovely piece of cheese cake to top it off. The waiters were amazing at ignoring us, however. We looked continously at all for them for 10-15 minutes so we could get our check, and not ONE even glanced our way. Eventually Dylan had to get up and ask for it. NO TIP FOR THEM hahahahhaaaa. 11.something am. Walked about the airport shops... ended up with a GIANT Toblerone that Dylan graciously bought me, after watching me drool at the sight of all that chocolate stocked up in a store. 11.30 am. Hugged Dylan bye bye and left for the plane. The lenght of the trip started to bother me, and I actually ended up sleeping most of the one and a half hour flight over to Denmark. 3.15pm (My home time zone). Landed uneventfully. Walked to the baggage place with dread in my head, with memories of my flight over to the US when my suitcases were missing for 3 days. 20 minutes later, they decided to show up on the track, and I omitted a loud cheering noise. Got my last $20 changed into 103 danish money thingies. 3.50pm. Stepped outside and nearly froze to death within the first 30 seconds. It was cold, dreary, not to mention RAINY. I hurried to put on the pants I had put in my backpack, for once feeling like I'd actually managed to think ahead properly when I packed it. 4.10m. A girl also waiting for the bus started to talk with me. She had just come in from Spain after a month there, and she joined me in complaints about the cold, cold weather. 4.30m. Got on the bus. Sat with the girl who befriended me. Heh, whenever I travel, I always seem to end up talking to somebody who I'll never see again in my life, but talk closely with for hours. 4.50pm. Boarded the ferry that was to take us over the water to Sweden. The weather was still quite dreary, and I couldn't stop tapping my feet and fingers anciously. I was very tense, and quite restless after sitting down doing nothing for endless hours. 5.30pm. Arrived in Malmo, Sweden. Exchanged e-mail addy with the girl(Karin), and found my dad. Chattering about my stay in America, we drove the two and a half hours home where I was greeted by my mom. 8.05pm. Been in the house for 10 minutes. Already bored to death, feeling terribly lonely, missing America, Aziza, Jesse, JESSICA, dogs, Bruegger's Bagels, Franklin Street, all the weirdo's that harass me at bus stops, hell - I even miss WalMart. After being awake for 37 hours, I went to bed at midnight, Swedish time... slept 8 and a half hours, and woke up, incredibly cheery. I guess it's hard to suffer jet lag when you don't have a sleeping pattern to adjust from to begin with. *shrug*

Monday, May 25 Make me laugh Say you know what you want You said we were the real thing So I show you some more and I learn What black magic can do Make me laugh Say you know you can turn Me into the real thing So I show you some more and I learn Tori Amos, Jackie's Strenght (From The Choirgirl Hotel)

So I thought I had fooled jetlag. Ha... Ha. Soooo wrong. I now go to bed at midnight and wake up at 8.30 am. Hmm? What's wrong with it? It's... american time. This means that I'm really up until 6 am swedish time, and wake up at 1.30 pm. Not that I have anything else to do, but still. My family's getting annoyed... it seemed okay the first two days I was back, but now they're very much into barging into my room at all sorts of hours to yell "You're ASLEEP? Now?????" until I wake up from my dreams and have to hassle with them to get them to leave. Another great reason to start locking my door, I guess.

Friday afternoon I stumbled upon 80% of the people I "know". I'm getting very sick of the question 'How was it?'. I suppose it's a valid question, but what can I say but 'It was great, yeah...' It's strange. Everything back here is beginning to bug me. Ronneby is one of the cutest little towns around, covered in flowers and history. Now, the people on the other hand... UGHHHH. I wish I could just gather them all up and teleport them onto a small island somewhere, so I could walk about here as I wish without slouching, expecting to get attacked verbally for no good reason at all by people I don't know. I really didn't think it'd be this blahy to come back home. I can't EXPLAIN it. I don't feel comfortable here. Growing up here was just so much of a struggle, a lot of the time. Here I stumble upon people in every corner that once called me a fat pig in 3'rd grade, or worse, in 12'th grade. In four days, my selfconfidence has taken a big dip to where it was when I left for America back in january. Maybe it's all in my head? I don't know. I've grown a lot more hostile, I'm sorry to say. Whenever I am forced to leave the house, it's like I put on a mental helmet too, and I'm ready to bite people's heads off at the slightest indication of a sneer my way. I don't like it at all, but I can't seem to stop it. I'm not trying to glorify my stay in America, I had some crappy times there too, but somehow it seems strange that in America, I was more likely to get a compliment about my hair or something just randomly from strangers, whereas here I'm more likely to get a mean remark about my weight from strangers. *shrug*

I watched The Pillowbook. Amazing movie about a japanese woman who grow up obsessed with having calligrapher's write on her skin, and later - she herself writing on other's skin. Beautiful movie, though it almost made me a little obsessed myself about skin. I don't want to paint it, I just want to touch it :) There's a boy in my head, and dammit, what I wouldn't give to get to touch the skin on his back or shoulders... argh. Heheh. I've begun to use regular soap when I shower, instead of the usual liquid shower soap I'm so used to. There's just something strange happening when you rinse the soap off and your skin reach that completely squeaky clean state.

I called Ninnie thursday night, and asked her to call me back (I spoke to her mum, not Ninnie herself.) Don't think she did... then my brother saw her saturday night, and she yelled for him to tell me to call her... I haven't so far. I don't know. I feel awkward. Heh. I've always felt really really weary about calling people, even when it's friends. The only time's I've felt alright with it has been when I've called Jessica, or Aziza, but they were always far away when I did that. The only person I've called that has actually been closeby around has been Jesse, and even then I felt odd in the beginning. I haven't spoken with Ninnie since august. All of a sudden it feels like maybe we've grown apart, or something ridiculous like that. What if I call and we fall silent after 10 minutes? I dread that a lot, the uncomfortable silences that can occur on phones. I think that that is something I look for - people I can actually sit silent with for longer than 2 minutes, and still not feel nervous that it means they're bored with me. Usually when I'm with people I feel really forced to keep conversation up, because I don't want them to lose interest in me, and so I babble and babble and babble, and then I start to worry that I'm talking too much. I just can't seem to win, can I?:)

I would really really like to be thin and have my long hair back, right now, because then I would be able to wear all sorts of clothes I find beautiful. Right now I'm lost in some sort of awe of the way beautiful women could look in the 1930's of America. Or maybe I've just watched too many gangster movies this weekend ("The Untouchables" for the umpteenth time, and "Hoodlum") I would really really like to own a club with a 1930's theme... Dancer's in skimpy big number clothers, Men in three piece suits and women in long silky dresses, amazing jazz music (oh my god, ME actually acknowledging that some jazz music is amazing... this is a historical day, I must say...), champagne... You know. Like in the movies.

My cat Sammy is still missing. Isn't that typical? I've missed him like crazy all semester, and then he disappears, 4 days before I manage to come home. My other cat Missan attacked my arm, as always... it looks like a really clumpsy vampire tried to suck blood from my right wrist, because there are two sets of puncture wounds right over my veins.

*laugh* I just looked up, and this boy I had a crush on back in ninth grade is in here. It wasn't so much him I had a crush on, as the fact that he looked like Edward Furlong who played the boy in Terminator 2. Alongside with my then friend Helena, I wrote a few notes to him and put them in his art folder. He actually replied to them, providing much amusement to me and my friend, but of course I'd never let on who his secret admirer was. He never did find out, either. It's so funny whenever I see him nowadays, because that memory always flashes by in my mind. I wish I could peek inside his head and see what his memory of it would be, who he suspected the girl writing him the notes where, and heh, if he remembers at all.

I reorganized my cd's last night. Instead of piling them up here and there after how much I play them right then, I aplhabetized them and stacked them all in one shelf. All of a sudden it looks like I have an actual small cd collection, as opposed to just cd's laying about. I also begun to organize my paperback books, but that task bored me to no end, so now my room is a mess already for no good reason at all. I suppose that's something I can spend my time working through tonight, as I doubt I'll manage to sleep until 6am tomorrow as usual. I'm insanely bored, can't you tell? And missing... people.

Tuesday, May 26 you sh-sh-shock me sane Tori Amos, Cruel (From The Choirgirl Hotel)

I'm really really uninspired today. It doesn't make any sense, because my head is swirling with conversations and topics and lines to say, only they don't seem to be too eager to be typed. Strange.

I'm slowly typing this entry, while I have another window open for CN, Jessica's diary in a third window, Tori lyrics in a fourth, a list of Tori pages in a fifth, a PJ Harvey page in a sixth... trying to think of something to do. Maybe I should join a mailing list? It seems a lot of people are involved with at least one mailinglist these days... Maybe I should join one again? A few years ago I was subscribed to a Phantom of The Opera mailing list, but unsubscribed as the mail load got too overwhelming, and I'm mostly interested in the swedish version anyways.And I never dared to actually post. After that I was subscribed to the Depeche Mode mailing list for about half a year, but unsubscribed because I got limited time for online stuff, and 200 e-mails that weren't for me a day just got too timeconsuming. That and the fact that I never actually dared to post anyways. I don't know why I don't dare to open my mouth in written form anywhere, unless it's a chat/talker, or some one way communication like this diary. It just scares me, and I'm convinced I'll come off as some ... idiot ... and I'm not, but there's no way they can tell that if all they have to judge me from is a half incoherent mail with typoes I didn't catch, and so I best not post because I don't want to be an idiot. I always get jealous reading the mailinglists or news groups anyways, because I watch newbie after newbie pop their little head up, introduce themselves and become an oldbie and friend of all, whereas I can't even manage to delurk. If these people only knew I've been reading them for months, and in rec.music.tori-amos' case, years, I've followed them through marriages and quarrels, silliness and stories of abuse, new album releases and being fired from job's, I can even name some of their pets' names, and yet... I'm not officialy there. You know, sort of like these online diaries.

The first diary I ever read, and the only one I actually followed ever since was Cara's Journal. I found it by 'mistake' one day back in 1996 as I was doing a web search for 'ribbons' (I was trying to locate the lyrics to an old folksong I remembered from my childhood), and found a poem on her page mentioning ribbons. I kept clicking around her page, and all of a sudden ... huh? A diary? This person is keeping a ... DIARY online ... ?? I started reading that days entry, and all of a sudden I found myself wrapped up in a stranger's life, amazed at her honesty, dullness, intelligence, normalness, language... She became very real in my head for a while, I even e-mailed her a bit and got a nice response back. During a few months there I couldn't wait to get to a computer and learn what she had had for lunch that day, or what was playing in her stereo a few hours earlier, or what book she had picked off a shelf... And then I sort of lost it. Well, to be fair, it wasn't like she was less fascinating, it was just that she stopped posting as regularly. I think that little thing called in real life got in the way. Or maybe it just got too much, like I've seen other diary writer's complain about (oh, I have too on occasion, I know)... what do I know. Last I recall about her was that she was happily pregnant, and doing well. It's sort of like saying goodbye in your head to a character in a tv-show you really liked, only this time they weren't ed off because they demanded a payraise, they simply decided to move on. I hope she's doing well :) After Cara, I had some ideas in my head that I wanted to make something different of my page too. I started adding pages and learnt how to scan things, and whoop ... the birth of this webpage happened. I still didn't know exactly what I wanted with this, though. And then one day late april of 1997 I was having a funky day, decided to start a journal of my own and ... well, I guess you kind'a figured out the rest, eh? Nowadays the only diary I read is Jessica's, partly because she's my friend, mostly because I'm madly obsessed about her. She's almost like a celebrity to me, I don't know why, she's just ... it ... to me, and sometimes when she mentions me in her diary I'll feel like Tori just mentioned me in a new song. Is it really Healthy and Normal to idolize your friends? Maybe not, but she's worth it. Heh. (Jessica, are you blushing yet?) Well, that, and the diaries' I'll stumble upon while hitting the random button provided with the Open Pages webring repeatedly. Nothing like a peek into complete strangers' heads every now and then, right?

On an actual personal note -- We're getting a kitten in a few days! It's from my aunt's cat, which just happens to be a snowy white fluffy angora cat... We're getting a fluffy white KITTEN arararagh! I'm so excited! I don't know its gender yet, and it's supposed to be my mom's cat, but I wonder if it would agree to be called Stella or Dweezil ... I doubt my family would agree. Hrmph. (KITTEN KITTEN KITTEN argh a KITTEN! I'm not sure I'll survive with so much cuteness around in the house!) Don't take much to get me excited these days ...

ARGH, why is it that every other journalwriter always seem to be reading a zillion books I've never heard of, quoting all sorts of intelligent people, and listen to obscure music out of their massive music collection? (No, I'm not whining, I'm envious, in some way :) Okay ... in case you want to know, I'm trying to read my way through The Witching Hour by Anne Rice right now (heh, since JANUARY... ), and when I get home I'm thinking about putting on some Nina Simone. *shrug* I'll probably just end up with another listen through of the Tori album. I'm just not very good at seeming smart, hip and with it. So much for deep thoughts today. Deep? That was deep? Well, not really, but that is because you missed out on 90% of my thoughts on the subject that only wanted to talk to the other braincells that live in my head, instead of being typed.

Tomorrow I'll get the pics back I sent for developing last week ... I hope there's at least one or two they could save =( I want to have some evidence that I actually were in the US... It's so much like always back here, that I sometimes doubt anything else ever happened.

Lilacs everywhere. I walked over here, and passed maybe 30 gardens doing so, each and everyone contained at least one lilac bush. White, purple, lilac around me in luscious masses, it was enough to send this girl off on a dizzy twirl, trying to walk with closed eyes for as long as possible without looking suspicious... I ended up half throwing myself into three large lilac bushes, almost mad with the scent. Unfortunately it was raining ever so slightly (and I'm wearing shorts, for IPU knows what reason), so all the thousands of flowers and leaves let off their droplets onto me and into my hair... I must have looked quite silly walking about, with a few flowers still caught in my hair, trying not to laugh loudly and madly because sometimes, this world is so beautiful.

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