happy birthday

There is a very apropriate soundtrack to listen to while reading this post. The artist is called Jens Lekman and you can find a pre-listen version of it here. Spencer called and played it to me this morning. You're so sweet! Thank you!

I'm sorry I haven't written in a while. I think I'm living life instead of writing about it right now. I see friends, I regain lost friends, I've gained a few new friends. I'm preparing for two trips. First, I'm leaving for Scotland on Wednesday, where I'll see two new but dear friends and I'll go see Antony & the Johnsons live in Glasgow. I can't wait.

Another thing I can't wait for is December 15. I'm going to Canada. Finally. A lot is going on and Spencer seems to be doing well, despite his impatience which is, if possible, worse than mine.

Today is my birthday (Whopdi-doo!) and I've celebrated this whole week as it seems now. I've had J and Jch over for dinner, I've been at K's house for a fabulous three course meal in my honour, and today I'll go see the Godfather movies and eat italian food with my friend E. His birthday is Wednesday so we're making a joint effort to congratulate each other today.

I found that picture of the cake on google, but for next year I really would like a Pantheon shaped cake...

looking for a lake

Some friends just seem to know by instinct what you need... That, or you've nagged about something for some time, and they chosse the exact right moment to fulfill those wishes.

My friend Jch took me out for a walk in the woods yesterday. Not the tiny almost-civilization-forest-type-areas, but the real thing. Nature.
I couldn't have had a better Sunday afternoon.

I had hardly had any sleep. I had all the wrong clothes on. I loved it. It felt spontaneous. It felt life saving. It was beautiful. And the fact that we laughed our way through two and a half hours of wrong turns and wet toes... We eventually found our lake, and I'll go back there in my mind all week.
Thank you Jch!

cute

I don't usually like to see myself in photos, but I have to share this one. I'm being silly and the colors are... well, yellow, but I still look darn cute. I think.

if you say so

You are Mohair.
You are a warm and fuzzy type who works well with
others, doing your share without being too
weighty. You can be stubborn and absolutely
refuse to change your position once it is set,
but that's okay since you are good at covering
up your mistakes.


What kind of yarn are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

publicity

This is insane. I got an email today, in Swedish obviously, but a translated version of it goes something like this:

Hi Lisa,

My name is [her name] and I am an intern reporter at [a huge, glossy woman's magazine here]. We're making a blog guide for our readers and would like to get some interviews with some good bloggers. I now wonder if you'd be interested to participate? If you want we could do the interview over the phone and I can email you the questions in advance. My phone number is [her phone number]

Sincerely
[her name again]

I have already accepted, but I do wonder what I got myself into. This primarily is about my blog in Swedish of course, but there's a link from there to here, and it's not all that different either. However I have already removed all the links to other blogs from my sidebar. I don't know if this is to generate more readers eventually and I don't know when either (I'm guessing not untilk next month at least), but I just felt as if it was the right thing to do. For now. I still LOVE you who were in that list though. Have no fear.

Isn't this Crazy?

baby got bag

Ace got a new home, and my whole life (yes, including knitting) fits into it.

I don't usually reach for the best stuff, but settle for a budget choice. This time however I got the Samsonite Sahora Expandable. That's right. It can double the size of the outer big compartment. It's comfortable to carry, even when packed heavily and it will facilitate my life a lot. I can now bring my office around. Yay.
Now all I've got to do is to Lisa it up a bit. So far it has a simple, but heart shaped, reflector keychain dangling from the side.

going

I bought it today. The Ticket.

I'll be in Canada from December 15 to January 10.
I can't even begin to tell you what this feels like.

So I won't.

I'm coming to see you!

self image

I went to a knit-along-café at the museum tonight. I had been looking forward to this for weeks, but never did I suspect that major revelations about myself were to be revealed among yarn, strangers and knitters chatting along about needles and patterns... But that’s what happened.
At the museum a guest lecturer is invited to each knit-along café to talk about their knitting. This time Pernilla Svenre was invited, and this was what I had been looking forward to.

(image from Pernillas' homepage)

I have admired her designs for years now, but I’ve never had the courage to try anything on. Why? Well, for lots of reasons. First of all they are expensive, and by principle I try not to try things I can’t afford on, since the anguish of falling in love with something you can’t get is easily avoided that way. Another reason is I never thought anything of hers would ever fit me. This is where the insights and revelations come in, but to describe them I need to start at the beginning. Starting at the beginning however means that this will become an entry I’ve waited a long time to write. I’m afraid of the feelings that might surface when the words for this find their way through my fingers and keyboard onto my screen. These are words I think and feel almost every day, but they are difficult to articulate and to throw out there.

In my teens I exercised a lot. I wasn’t very good at anything, but I loved exercising. I was always on the bench at soccer games. I didn’t care. Team sports aren’t my cup of tea, but I loved practice, and eventually I found aerobics, which was the combination of dance and exercise I had been looking for. I loved it.
Then something happened. I’m not sure what and when, but I lost myself somewhere along the way and I stopped everything. I didn’t exercise at all for years and I gained weight rapidly. Obviously.

To me, my extra kilos are like snot to somebody with a cold. It has to do with a disease and it’s something that should go away as the disease is cured. But extra kilos are not as easy to get rid of as snot, and my self-image is nowhere near what I see in the mirror. Therefore, my self-confidence when it comes to looks is not the best. I cover it up with an outgoing attitude, but buying clothes is difficult since I feel as if I’m shopping for somebody else. Somebody I don’t want to be.
This is something all about me. I know rationally that I can be seen as beautiful the way I am, but it doesn’t matter as long as I don’t see it myself.

Pernilla Svenre showed some of her clothes today and talked about how she tries to show femininity and sensuality in her creations. She talked about how clothes are automatically feminine when they show off hips, curves and above all the inward curve of the lower part of the back. These are all things I get complimented on. My extra kilos are still shaped in curves and I am thankful that I’m not carrying them all on my belly. Suddenly while she was talking, holding up a long, thin creation knitted in fine mohair something snapped. This sweater wasn’t designed to hang loosely around a skinny Twiggy sized body. It was designed to show off a body. Curves. Possibly even me.

This sounds absurdly ridiculous, I know, but this was huge to me. These clothes are works of art I have admired and feared for a long time. Feared because I was afraid they could show me my worst sides rather than my best. Afraid that their beauty was not for me.
I might not afford Pernillas’ clothes, but I sure will go and try some on, and if something fits I might actually buy it simply because it would be like conquering a demon.

I sat there knitting along on a black wool sleeve and suddenly found myself on the verge of tears. Silly maybe, but huge to me. I almost cried because I liked me the way I am. If Pernilla Svenres’ clothes can show me as beautiful I might believe that beauty myself. Her clothes could be the compliment I haven’t been able to give myself yet.

This might be part of the new life I’ve been talking about, where working on my self image is a huge part of things. But I’d like to thank Pernilla for showing her image of sensuality in her clothes. Somehow they finally gave me some insights about my own sensuality.

I just wonder when I’ll get passed myself and my fear of me. I know I’m good enough, but that knowledge definitely isn’t anchored to my gut yet if I almost cry from liking myself sitting at a knit-along café.

Anyway, here’s my project. It’s taking forever but I included a sketch of what I imagining it to be eventually.



On another note I also included the X-ray of my foot in the post about feet I made a few days ago. I’m sorry Mandy if I make you look at that text again. I hope you found your skin. It would be creepy to meet you in a month and a half if you hadn’t…

capital culture

This is an eventful stay in Stockholm. The stay at the spa is still the best thing ever with almost religiously uplifting experiences. I'm sticking with these eastern medicine things. I loved Qi Gong, I loved Zen meditation and I loved Do In (a kind of self massage). But since I came from the spa I've been busy, let me tell you. Last night I went to Dansens Hus (House of Dance) with my lovely, cute, wonderful friend N. She's one of the most beautiful people I know. And she took me to this show called Pudel (Swedish for Poodle). A dance theatre with four dancers, one singer. one photographer, one child, four grown white poodles and a puppy on stage. It was magical, absurd, wonderful, scary, eerie, sickening, beautiful all at once. The theme was our superficially focused world, and I must say it was, in its absurdity, very much to the point. I laughed so hard I cried towards the end, but it was the deeper meaning of things that stuck with me. It is sick that people posing dramatically in front of a camera wearing the most absurd (though fascinating) outfits seems like more normal behaviour than a man peeing, or a man and a woman touching each other...

Afterwards, me and N went to a café and talked and I just must say: I've missed her!


Today I went by myself to the National art museum - again. This time to see the exhibition of the Dutch golden age. Lots of Rembrandts, magically live looking still lifes and so much more. I loved it. Loved it. Loved it. And my foot didn't hurt too bad from all that walking either. Yay!

And I wasn't supposed to shop much but... I found this skirt, and these books, and these presents for dear friends... I'm going home tomorrow night, but first I'll see some more friends, and sleep one hour extra (We wind our clocks back one hour tonight).

Wow, I think I just managed to write an actual blog entry, with a kind of "Then I did this and then I did that" kind of structure to it! Can you believe it?

yasuragi

All photos are clickable. I can only describe the experience as magically wonderful and endlessly beneficial. It was Just That Good.

anticipation

And just to make you jealous; This is where I'm going today.

something's a foot

I have weird feet. No, don’t go all “No, surely not!” on me, I do. I was born with six toes on one foot and five on the other. So was Marilyn Monroe by the way, only she had an extra pinkie toe on her left foot, and I had an extra big toe on my right. For real. Bone, joint, nail and all - An extra toe. I also had little extra pinkie fingers, but not as complete and cool as the extra toe. In fact, the doctor cut those “fingers” off using a bit of thin wire pulled around them when I was about five minutes old. I’m guessing I cried about it, but it was no big deal. My extra toe was another matter…

Since my right foot’s left big toe stuck out at a 90º angle I couldn’t wear shoes until it was removed. This happened in March of 1980 when I was one year and a half old. In the same ward as me in the hospital there was a four-year-old boy with six fully functional fingers on each hand. His parents apparently discussed the possibility to let him keep them. My guess is that he unfortunately wasn’t interested in playing the piano, or we would have heard of him by now.

Anyway, they took my toe away, not knowing which one was really the extra one, the inner or outer big toe. As it turns out it was probably the inner one, the one I kept, because it stopped growing and curled up when I was about ten years old. This resulted in a second operation on my feet when I was sixteen. The story of me influenced by the anaesthesia is worthy of its own blog entry if I ever write it down. Let’s just say I respond to calming blue pills with giggle fits and I slapped a doctor.

During this procedure they brought out the bone saw and made my toe single jointed, putting a screw through it to straighten it out. Ten years later I got to see an X-ray of my foot today, and they weren’t kidding about that screw! It looks as if I had an accident in a carpenter’s workshop.


(It's clickable)

When I woke up after the operation the doctor came to see me and announced happily that they had successfully carved and sawed in my foot. Dizzy from the drugs and the pain in my plastered foot, this was not the choice of words I wished to hear. This sixteen-year-old girl cried her eyes out over her carved and sawed toe, until my boyfriend at that time came to sit by my bed until I could hop home on crutches two hours later. He asked me if I was thirsty and poured me some lemonade. I answered him no, and then drank about a litre and a half. I’m afraid of anaesthesia now.

When all this was done my left foot started to feel jealous of all the attention my right foot had gotten, so it started to act up. Apparently the disfiguration that gave me my extra toe existed in the left foot too. It just hadn’t developed. This meant my left big toe, which by the way was much bigger than my straightened right one, started to bully the other toes. It turned on them and pushed them to lie on top of each other, and formed a big bump on the side of the foot. It looked similar to a foot on a lady who has worn pointy shoes all her life. I haven’t even owned a pair of pointy shoes.

All the same I got a third operation, this time on my left foot, at the age of twenty-two. They took out a bit of bone and cut a string to straighten my big toe. No screw this time, but six painful weeks on crutches. And they also helped me develop my fear of painkilling drugs, even though I wasn’t asleep this time. The anaesthesia didn’t take the first time, so after they had drained my foot of blood and started cutting in my toe, I suddenly felt the knife inside my foot! The pain! I howled. And then they added some more painkillers through a needle into my dry veins. The bruising was… ugly afterwards.

And why am I telling you this depressing feet’s tale? Well, history repeats itself and it’s soon time for my fourth and fifth procedure on my feet. It’s the right one’s turn again. A few years ago, after my trip to Italy, my feet started to turn purple around the ankle. Well… not bright purple like a lilac version of the Hulk, but spotted purple, like a big bruise. And it hurt. After having limped now and then waiting to see the orthopaedist for about a year and a half I finally got to see him today. Diagnoses: Nerves pinched in the heel and something disturbing the joint making it lock and click, and eventually unlock and click every now and then which is really painful.

So, I’m waiting again. I am to be contacted in about three months to get a date for the nerve thing. They’re just going to “clean up” around the nerves and unhinge them from whatever they’re pinched against. Then I have to wait again to eventually do something about the locking joint. The bruising that makes the feet lilac is still there, but nothing can be done until my feet are well again, and then it’s only removable using the same laser treatment you use to get rid of tattoos.

My mother was born with webbed toes and I have all this… If I ever have kids, they’ll probably be born with three arms each or something.

entrapment

You know those movies with impossible endings... Where there are like seven different endings to a story and after fading scene number five the whole movie theatre yells out in chorus: "Enough already!"
The movie that lended its title to this post is one of those (I hated it because of it). That title also reflects what I feel.

I feel trapped in a situation where I'm helpless. Someone or something is messing up my fairytale ending. It's an Entrapment kind of ending. In many ways.

I'm going to Stockholm tomorrow. My mother is taking me to a luxury spa with an overnight stay! It's more than what I need in many, many ways...

I'll be back home Sunday, after having had five days off, meeting friends and spending time with my mum. Hopefully I'll have the energy to write something of substance sometime soon after that.

... and she lived happily ever after... eventually.

NKOTB

The new life thing is working out! Step by step (oooh baby, gonna get to you gi-i-i-i-irl) I'm becoming the new me. I want to emphasize (spelling?) how I'm doing this little by little without expecting overnight change, like I usually do with these things.

And I'm knitting again. I just started a BIG sweater project (not Pilar - yet) and I'll get back to you about that one. And I started another pair of gauntlets / mittens, though another pattern and in red alpaca. I need a green set and a red set of mittens, hat, shawl. It's how I am.
Speaking of which, does anyone have an idea for a shawl, triangular, huge, preferably some kind of easy lace pattern that I could do in red alpaca? For the set. I'm looking at patterns I already have and I can't decide. It could be because I'm insanely jealous of the huge shawl Mandy got from Amy. It looks soooooo amazing. Something like that? In red? Could I make it? Too difficult?

Help?

metamorphosis

My new life starts tomorrow. I just wanted to let you know.

Now it's online, hence official. I'll get back to you on this. Promise. And please feel free to hold me to my word and ask me how I'm doing with this. I badly need it, and finally I have the money to start and the determination to follow through.

This is actually a long and painful chapter of my life, therefore it feels really apropriate to keep it short.

Ace

This is Ace. He's my new best friend. His breeder name is Acer Travelmate 8104 WLMI, but it's Ace for short.

It's my first own lappy and I'm so proud, happy, extatic about it! Now, I'm off to install some more stuff for Ace. And then maybe introduce him to Claire and Harry.

Oh, and I do need to point out that my last post about the stupid wrist watch was blog entry number 100 on visalisa. It's a milestone in my blogging life I guess. And yes, I am on sort of a shopping spree right now. Only sensible purchases though of course. Like Ace. I like Ace.

time

It was time. Though I fought against it as long as I could. Borrowing one from a colleague at one point. Using my cell phone other times.
But I finally gave in and bought a new wrist watch.

I haven't had one in years, and I love the lifestyle that comes with not owning a watch. You don't count minutes. I'm never late. I come places in advance. Now, I'll be able to get there just in time, which probably means I'll be late every once in a while. I know this from experience.

Plus, the constant ticking drives me insane! Leaning my chin in my hand with my new watch on? I don't think so. That lets it come way too close to my ear.

Wrist watch. Though perfectly good looking and accurate.
Wrist watch - damnit.

fast and furious

...at least about making mittens. Or gauntlets as the pattern calls them.

The colors really show in this one too. And you thought I'd give up after one didn't you? Oh, no sir. Look! Both done in four days! And I'm surprised about how evenly I knit!

Yes, I lo-o-ove them.

city furniture

I have finished yet another set of lessons. This time I’ve been on one of the main squares of Gothenburg talking about and experimenting with the city’s furniture together with kids (ages 7-12). It’s been so much fun and I’ve seen so many epiphanies dawn in their curious and interested little faces. But instead of teasing you with what it’s about I’ll just come out and tell you all about it. This is what we did:

In the middle of Gustav Adolfs Torg (The Square of king Gustavus Adolphus) there is a big statue of said king in the middle. I meet the class by this statue sitting on one of four chairs I brought specially for the occasion. On the ground in front of me I’ve placed a cute little carpet, and I have a tiny table by my side as if I just had a cup of coffee but cleared the table. The four chairs stand in a row to form a bench.

My introduction is about the square, the only square in town that’s been a square since Gothenburg was founded in 1621. I tell the class about how the site for the new city was decided by Dutch merchants who built a small port, and since they earned money for Sweden the king let the new city be laid out where they wanted. This is why Gothenburg is situated in the only big mud hole along the granite west coast of Sweden…

I then change direction. I tell them we are no longer in the city of Gothenburg, but the castle of Gothenburg, where plazas and squares are rooms and the streets hallways and corridors combining these rooms. Now, what sort of room is the square we’re in? Most kids agree it’s a salon or a living room. Because, as one kid said, “This is where you take your guests and say ‘look how beautiful’, and then you go hang out somewhere else”. Nobody really uses the fancy room. Clever. They have also come up with the ideas that Liseberg, our amusement park, is the playroom, and a popular square for food carts and cafés is the kitchen…

In the pavement of the square there’s an inlay “map” out of cobble stone and pavement slabs forming the map of Gothenburg as it was in 1644. It’s the fancy carpet of the fancy room. We discuss the map for a bit, about where the city wall was, how small the city once was and so on.

After the history lesson we move on to geometry and math. By holding a rope between them, four kids get to form a square shape representing the living room of one of them. We then estimate how many normal sized living rooms can fit in the living room of king Gustavus Adolphus. The number has ranged in between 180 and 300. The square is huge! But along the edges of the square we only find 13 benches all in all. And they seem to be placed there to work as a border rather than for seating. No wonder people don’t use this square too much. It’s about to change…

We move back to my four chairs and a drama lesson. We act out a scene from a central station where the train is late. One by one three students get to populate my “bench”, and without knowing they all obey the social rules of occupying seats on a bench. You always try and sit as far away from everyone else as possible. Eventually I take the last seat, demonstrating the benefit of forcing strangers on one another on benches, since we now start talking to each other about the train being late, the weather or whatever. Kids ooh and aah a lot during this portion of the lesson.

Then we move beyond the bench. What happens if we all get to choose where to sit? Four students get a chair each and the assignment to find their favourite spot somewhere on the square and go sit there. People laugh and yell “Bye, bye!” as class mates spread over the square. Then we pay each chair a visit, and its occupant gets to explain why he or she chose that particular spot. They leave the chairs where they are and we go back to the statue, and we look at what has happened. With four chairs the square has transformed, since new places have formed around them. And you can see that somebody has cared about being comfortable and feeling at home on an otherwise not so populated place. A funny extra benefit of the exercise is that these chairs often are occupied by passers by in the mere minutes they get to stand around and about… More seats are obviously needed.

Then I tell them about Barcelona where they actually furnish the city by letting people tell where and how they want to sit, and by using chairs rather than benches. You can find chairs standing in groups or by themselves, facing walls or sidewalks. Most of all the chairs standing opposite each other make a difference, since, let’s face it, it’s not easy to spend time together as a group sitting on a line…

The point of the lesson has not been to make kids run around the city with chairs, but to make them start questioning how the city’s design is planned, and can you do otherwise? I really do believe that with combined efforts making kids think for themselves, we’ll live in a more beautiful city in the future, with more people asking us architects “Why?”

I really do have the best job ever… If only I got rich doing it too…
Here's my little company's website too - though still only availible in Swedish.

cute

cutest ever: the bunny. A web comic that today became part of my daily web surfing routine. Gotta love it. It occasionally quotes Eddie Izzard, refers to Tim Burton creations and dismisses the US government too. Cute and clever.


PS: I'm very sorry Erik! I should obviously tell everybody that it was Erik, I mean the fabulous, smart, goodlooking, with impecable taste, fantastic (now I'm just sucking up...) Erik who gave me the tip about the Bunny. Thank you Erik! I am forever greatful! *winks*