Whole Bunch of Crazy

Okay, I'm behind on my Swedener reportage, so I'm going to give you several items all in a lump today.

1) First of all, I had a little adventure this weekend when I accidentally locked myself out of my apartment. At 1:30 in the morning. Oops! I went to a little cocktail party at my friend Jessika's house, followed by drinks at a bar, and when I got back to my place I found that the apartment code number that usually gets me into the building was disabled. I guess the landlord expects his tenants to turn into pumpkins at midnight. At any rate, because I always use the digital entry, I didn't have the key with me (who has time for such antiquities?) and I found myself shivering on the doorstep, sort of half-heartedly hoping one of my neighbors would also be coming home from a night out and let me in. But, no such luck. So I decided to go to the bed and breakfast down the street and get a room. Well, it's a very small hotel that actually just takes up one floor of an apartment building, and it was closed. I followed a guy into the building anyway, in the hopes of talking the nightwatchman into renting me a room, but the nightwatchmen was sleeping. So I stood there awkwardly in the lobby listening to people snore and trying to figure out what to do. Then I sat down in the hallway and continued trying to figure out what to do, and ended up falling asleep. Eventually, I woke up and called up Jessika, who was just coming home from the bar. (Thank god!) She was generous enough to invite me over and I have never, ever been so psyched to sleep on someone's couch. Except maybe the time that Christine rescued me in New York under almost exactly the same circumstances. When will I learn?

2) I have become absolutely addicted to Läkerol. For those of you who aren't familiar, Läkerol is a brand of very strong licorice-flavored breath "mint." Luckily they're sugar free and almost calorie free, or I would have a serious problem. I've been going through multiple boxes per week—I just can't get enough of that stringent licorice taste. Hopefully it's just a phase, but I guess it's better than doing daily shots of Sambuca, right?

3) After more than a month's hiatus, I decided to resume my Swedish lessons with a new teacher. I don't think I've touched on this in my blog, but my former teacher was really, really strange. No need to go into detail but the guy is a depressed Swede who hates Sweden, speaks English with a bizarrely affected Louisiana accent, and loves Tila Tequila. Plus he never actually spoke Swedish to me and cleaved closely to a mind-numbing text book. All of which added up to a situation where I came to sort of dread my weekly lessons.

Well, the new teacher is a pretty and fashionable young woman with a sunny disposition, and she ONLY speaks to me in Swedish, which is kind of key if I'm going to learn anything. I feel very embarrassed and uncharacteristically shy aboout speaking Swedish, because I'm pretty bad at it, and I hate being bad at things. But she is really nice and encouraging.

So yesterday we spent the lesson reading the daily news, in which I learned about a crazy guy who burst into a Stockholm church on Sunday armed with an ax and a can of gasoline; a famous but as-yet unnamed Swedish actor who beat the shit out of his sambo over the weekend; and of course the most important news of the week—the marriage of 60-year-old Microsoft billionaire and space tourist Charles Simonyi to 28-year-old Swedish socialite Lisa Persdotter.

The latter story would normally just be the usual, somewhat icky tale of an enterprising and nubile hottie snagging a rich old dude —except Lisa Persdotter's not that pretty. Ha! What I really mean to say is, except for the fact that Simonyi's most recent pre-Persdotter relationship was with none other than multimedia publishing, worldwide merchandizing, TV star/DIY queen Martha Stewart. For 15 years. Ouch. I think it would be foolish to say "poor Martha," because she's doing very well, thank you very much, but I hate hearing about men who leave successful, mature and complex women for younger, simpler arm candy (see photo above).

4) Now let's end on a light note. Yesterday Niklas sent me a hilarious video of a German Ikea commercial that was banned, for some reason. Maybe because it paints Swedes in such an unflattering light? At any rate, it's a really funny satire of a rural Midsummer celebration. It's the thick of winter here right now, but I'm wishing I could be here in July—if my friends threw a Midsummer party with a quarter of this much awesomeness I'd be set for life. I love the people just pouring jugs of moonshine and buckets of dead fish andomly all over the table. Varsågod: