From the collection Written Proficiency Comments, by A. Kostia
You cannot write an essay
just by taking sentences
from other sources and replacing
one or two words in them. Sources
are for information, not for
copying sentences from. Write your own
text. Use your own
words. Write about why you believe
these inventions are so significant. Focus
on their role rather than on
random facts about their history.
This should be your own
essay, not a rehash
of a Wikipedia entry.
Though the weather has been terrible in Falun this summer, nature is giving me a birthday present. Sitting in downtown Falun, drinking Swedish cider, which is so sweet I can only bear it on a hot summer day, listening to these great teenage street musicians who don’t even have a hat out because they are COMMISSIONED BY THE LOCAL GOVERNMENT. Ah Sweden.
OK, I’ve finally gotten my phone all hooked up. New use of technology = blog revival.
I am in the process of getting my Twitter up and running. Check the sidebar for updates. I am also thinking about blogging regularly again, but as we’re about to go on vacation for three weeks, don’t expect anything until mid-July.
The vacation, you ask? Taking the ferry from Stockholm to Riga, renting a car, driving around the Baltics for a week, dropping off the car in Tallinn, taking the bus to Kostia’s family’s dacha, going to St. Petersburg, and then flying back to Sweden.
From mid-July to mid-August I’ll be teaching a course at the university. After that the plans are a little hazier, but there will be some more admin work for the university and some more freelance editing and translating, at least.
There’s plenty to bitch blog about with regard to international politics, but thinking about it makes me tired. Maybe after vacation.
I can’t seem to make the embedding work, but if you didn’t see The Daily Show’s bit on Scary Swedish Socialism, click:
http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=225113&title=the-stockholm-syndrome
I miss blogging, but still don’t have anything to say really. April in Falun has been beautifully sunny and chilly. Even though Obama’s been taking a lot of heat, I think he’s doing a pretty good job considering the enormous pile of shit he inherited. I had to define “existentialism” in Swedish this morning.
I’m thinking the next incarnation of my online life will be to actually start using this Twitter thing that all the kids are into these days. I started an account a year ago, but never did anything with it. Maybe it is, in fact, just the right thing for me. I often dream up mildly amusing one-liners while I’m on the bus or something and then forget them before I can change my Facebook status or artificially inflate them into a blog post.
This week I’m way too busy to get the Twitter all hooked up to the phone and the blog and the Facebook, but check back in a couple weeks’ time to see if I’ve gotten my act together.
Even though it still looks like winter out, albeit definitely late winter with its crusty dirty snowbanks, I’m changing the header to a spring one in an attempt to will spring to come soon.
I think I’ve figured out why I haven’t been into blogging lately. I’ve mentioned some of the reasons before: life is pretty uneventful in small-town Sweden, I’m quite busy right now, and the readership seems to be a lot less interested in hearing about life in Sweden than they are about life in Russia. But the other big reason is that Facebook seems to pretty much do everything (and more) that I hoped blogging would do when I started, which was to let friends and relatives all over the world know what I was up to without filling their inbox with possibly-unwanted mass e-mails. Facebook is an improvement on this because it is much more interactive and ostensibly more private.
I’m not going to quit blogging. This has been a major project of mine for the past four and a half years and I don’t want to just abandon it. But I may just keep the personal stuff on Facebook and use this blog for my political rants and travel stories. Feel free to friend me on Facebook, though I’ll warn you that my (somewhat flexible) criterion for friending someone there is that I’ve actually had some kind of friendly dialogue with the person, whether online or in reality.
Kostia and I spent the weekend in Prague. It won’t be any news to you that it is a fantastic city and we really enjoyed it. Pictures to come…
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