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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 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.
…whatever.
From the 1 euro shop in Rome
The sun was out today, for about the second time in a month. Here it is around noon:
It’s been a rough week. I spent three days in bed with a nasty cold and three days after that I still have a head full of snot. Kostia’s also feeling ill, which is unusual with his iron Russian immune system. I had been mentally preparing myself to get sick on our trip to Russia, and got sick here in Sweden instead.
We leave for Russia on Tuesday. We’re taking a bus, a ferry, and a train and it will be about 40 hours door to door. We could have taken a two-hour train ride and a two-hour flight, but we decided to go the cheaper environmentally-friendly route. Anyway, I like the train and the ferry. We’ll take full advantage of all the amenities, like the wine bar and the sauna on the ferry, and make the travel part of the vacation.
I thought I would be way too cranky if I set my alarm for 3 a.m. to watch the Biden-Palin debate, but when the cat woke me up at 3:45, I decided to watch the second half. Sarah Palin may not have the facts and she’s definitely got the wrong policy positions, but damn, is she a skilled debater. She knows how to artfully duck a question and use her time to say what she wants to say. And since those undecided voters in the heartland don’t really pay attention to the answers themselves, but how the person talks, she did as well as she could possibly be expected to. That said, Joe Biden did well too. He really did follow the tips in this Slate piece: be affable, don’t patronize, take her seriously even when what she says doesn’t merit it. Every time Palin gave an answer that was nothing but folksy platitudes, he responded with clear facts. I haven’t really been a Biden fan but now I’m pretty glad that he’s on the ticket.
Edit: Oh yeah! Something I just saw in a friend’s Gmail status reminded me: What is up with Republicans and the inability to pronounce the word “nuclear”?
I seem to have run up against a limitation of WordPress: the inability to use iframes. I didn’t even know what this meant until I tried to embed a map of my latest run from MapMyRun and it wouldn’t work. I thought it would be fun and motivating to post my maps. I can post links to the maps but who wants to click on links to look at other people’s runs? That’s boring.
About the running: I’ve gone through phases of utter laziness and super sportiness in my life, and in mid-June I decided to sign up for a 10K to motivate me out of a phase of utter laziness. The training is going pretty well. I ran 8K today and it didn’t even feel difficult. The 10K, Tjejmilen, is in Stockholm at the end of the month. “Tjej” is Swedish for, well, not “girl” or “woman” exactly — I suppose I would translate it as “gal” but that sounds stupid. It’s like “devushka” in Russian except I think a female can be a “tjej” at any age, while “devushka” is kind of limited to females aged 15-30. “Mil” is the same root as “mile”, but it’s not a mile, it’s 10K. “En” at the end of the word is the definite article. So “Tjejmilen” is “TheGal10K”.
I arrived back in Sweden on Sunday morning. Had a small problem at passport control for the first time in my life. They of course noticed that I had a residence permit which expired last month and asked me if I was still residing in Sweden. When you’ve applied for an extension of your residence permit you are allowed to stay in Sweden but you aren’t really supposed to leave and come back while your status is unclear. I figured it wouldn’t be a big deal since Americans can enter Sweden as tourists for up to three months, but fortunately I had brought a printout of the e-mail confirming that Kostia and I had applied for extensions. They disappeared with that and my passport for about 20 minutes while I entertained thoughts of being deported. When the officer returned she gave me a very gentle scolding in Swedish: “You’ll get to go in now, but you aren’t supposed to do it this way and if your extension isn’t approved you have to leave Sweden.” I didn’t say that she didn’t need to worry, if our extension wasn’t approved Kostia would be out of a job and we’d have to go somewhere else anyway. I just said thanks and went to collect my luggage.
Poor Kostia’s been stuck in Sweden all summer for the same reason – unlike Americans, Russians need a visa to enter Sweden, so there was no way he could leave and come back. Of course, Sweden is not the worst place to be stuck for the summer, but he does want to visit his friends and family and dacha. He’s been calling the migration board regularly, but the person in charge of our case has been on vacation for all of July. That sounds like an idiotic way to organize things, rather than just having the people not on vacation process applications on a first-come, first-serve basis, but I’ve reached the conclusion that migration boards the world round are able to operate in completely idiotic ways because the people who have to deal with them are usually not citizens of the respective countries and therefore there is no political incentive to listen to their concerns and complaints. Not happy with being in limbo for months and months? Stay home, sucker.
In any case, the person in charge of our case returned yesterday and Kostia phoned her. Apparently she was not very friendly and said that she couldn’t promise to speed up the process for anyone, but when Kostia checked his e-mail later in the day, he had received notification that our extensions had been approved! So tomorrow we’re off to the city of Västerås to get our stamps, and next week Kostia will squeeze in a trip to Russia before the semester starts.
In the meantime, I returned to beautiful weather in Sweden. Kostia and Dima met me at the train station on Sunday with Dima and Lenka’s car. While I was gone, Dima had passed his Swedish driving test – no small feat! We drove straight to the ICA Maxi supermarket to get picnic food, and after stopping at home we went to a secluded spot on a nearby lake where the water was crystal clear and the perfect temperature for swimming. Kostia and I biked to another spot on a different lake yesterday, though it wasn’t as idyllic, since it’s a popular destination, with camping and boat rentals and a cafe. As long as the weather is this nice and the lakes this warm, we want to go swimming every day, so I think we’ll return to the secluded place today. It’s quite a life of leisure we’re living. Ah, Sweden.
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