Today I will have finally decided on a nation to join. The nations are student run groups affiliated with Uppsala University which were created back in the 17th century. The nations represent the different provinces of Sweden and were created so that people attending the University could be with their countrymen. Nowadays they function in a similar manner to fraternities, minus the whole stupidity part. I've narrowed it down to Ostgota (OG) or Vastmanlands-Dala (V-Dala). I post links but they're in Swedish so you wouldnt really get much more out of them aside from the name.

The food here is...different. Aside from the aforementioned coaster bread (which is really quite filling) there's lots of diary products. This morning one of the girls in my hall took out a plate and spread what looked like yogurt onto it, then topped it with cereal. She had a dificult time explaining what it was; it smelled like sour cream and I think it was plain yogurt. I'll have to try this concoction sometime. Speaking of breakfast foods, in Sweden honey nut Cheerios are the most delicious food ever. I think it's because they use real honey or something. Whatever the reason it sure beats the US variety.
Sadly the milk situation is not as wonderful, you can only buy it in 1 liter non resealable cartons. It pours badly, expires quickly and you run out really fast. Apparantly this is also true in Australia, I have regaled them with tales of gallon jugs of milk which they cannot fathom. They asked me how much of that we throw away, figuring that if a liter expires in 6 days a gallon (about 3 1/2 times bigger) couldn't make it to the end before going sour. Mind you that if you can close the container the milk lasts a lot longer. I wonder if the gallon vs. liter usage is a result of measurment mentality or convenience. In Sweden everyone is within walking or biking distance of the grocery store so you can always get more if you run out, in the US people have to drive to the grocery store so a larger amount would save them time and gas. On the other hand, what if it's just as simple as providing products in the largest single unit of measurement available?

Swede: Francais?
Guy: No, he’s American.
Swede: Oh shit.
*laughter*
Me: I was waiting for that.

The nations at Uppsala are all basically centered around drinking. That’s not as bad as it sounds in itself since there are plenty of people who drink with moderation and the pub scene is the primary way to meet people. I just met a bunch of Swedes who were into the more American style of drink ‘til you drop, don’t remember anything and can’t taste the difference between water and vodka kinda partiers. In addition to that, they were listening to all of the weird stuff on the Internet like Gunther or Numa Numa, which I thought was strange since that’s over the web because of people making fun of Europeans. One guy was particularly interested in the goings-on of American dorm life, which he had created an image of based on collegehumor.com and Girls Gone Wild. The concept of spring break was one he was also curious about, from what I gather there’s no equivalent in Sweden. I guess the moral of that story is that Americans and Swedes are more in common than I previously thought, or hoped, really.

I have also been amazing all sorts of people with my ability to eat spicy food with reckless abandon. Truly, as my brother said, this is the land of bland. The international students are caught off guard too; my Iranian hallmate was surprised to see me eat one of his very spicy peppers without reaching for my drink. So thanks Tucson for toughening me up enough to eat stuff that’s considered hot even in Iran.

Things are really starting to pick up now, I got good, sensibly priced bed sheets, my luggage finally came in (you don’t know how good a change of clothes really feels until you’ve lived in one set for 4 days in a row) and there are all these fun shindigs they have all the new students do. I bought a bike today, which makes getting around a lot easier, still have to break it in though. Uppsala slopes down one side and I’m living on the up side, which makes going into town a breeze. First gear downhill you can get there in about a minute flat, but you’re going so fast you die if you hit anything. Going back to my dorm/apartment on the other hand is pretty rough. But hey it could be worse, I could be living in Flogsta, which as I say it I realize that means nothing to you, it’s really far away from classes and the main city center.
Oh, and the place where I got my bed sheets is also real far away, like halfway between Stockholm and Uppsala, no joke. It’s like Super K-Mart or one of those big places that squashes the ma and pa stores in the US. The Swedes have figured out how to fix this, they put the thing out in the middle of nowhere so you only go there if you really need to. Good idea in theory, but the prospect of taking a 20-minute bus ride to get bed sheets under $200 really makes you miss Target.
Yesterday I made my first cultural screw up. OK, so in Sweden there’s this round flat bread that is really hard and crunchy, somewhere between balsa wood and cardboard. This one café had the stuff on a metal pipe just hanging from the ceiling; confused I asked why they just had the stuff sitting out. The woman explained that the stuff never really goes bad so you can leave it out. Makes sense, it’s too dry to mold and too hard to know if it went stale. So I thought this was a common Swedish thing, just have this bread sitting out in a kitchen or wherever. I get back to my dorm/apartment and in the kitchen notice these round things just sitting out, so I ask one if the guys in my hall about them. I said I understood the stuff never goes stale but wouldn’t leaving them out all the time get them dusty after awhile? Confused, he explained that it doesn’t matter if those get stale or dusty you just use them to put under your coffee cup.

I’m up at 3am writing this because my bed isn’t very comfortable, since it’s just a mattress, I don’t even have a pillow. The place to buy the stuff is way the hell on the other side of town; so far away it’s not even on the map. I think they said a 20-minute bus ride to get there. They said that it’s a 30-minute bus ride from Stockholm to Uppsala so when I say it’s way the hell out there I mean it. No luggage either. So that’s gonna be 4 consecutive days with the same clothes. I wish I had a spare set of clothes but all the room went to stuff I didn’t want to part with, like books and CDs and such and the stuff that would explode in an unpressurized cabin, like shampoo and hair gel. Nonetheless I am enjoying Uppsala, the people are friendly, and hot. They all speak English, which is good since I don’t know how to say all the stuff I need to in Swedish. I can order food, talk about myself and ask directions and that’s about it. I like to practice whenever I do that but everyone ends up speaking English to me, which is then frustrating. I am really hungry, at night everything is closed. Back in Tucson and especially at the U of A you could always find some place that was open. Damn. I passed through a store today and found a bunch of weird stuff, the kind of things only a European can eat. Figs in cognac for example. There are a bunch of sodas that have the weirdest names ever, like the Marx Brothers’ estranged siblings. Oh, and they have peanut butter and root beer here. I bought the root beer and I gotta say if that’s all they have then it’s no wonder they don’t drink the stuff. It tasted like root beer in much the same way that a lemon starburst tastes like a lemon. Another thing, I’m typing this now, but since I won’t get internet at my dorm until next week you might not be reading this anytime soon. If I’m very silent online now you know why.

Before I start, let me just thank all of my friends for being just so damn awesome. Not everyone has pals who will hang out with you all day everyday for two weeks straight. Plus, I think staying out until 2 am has helped me to adjust to the time zone change much quicker.

Note: all of this was written from my laptop and has now only recently been added, but I fiddled with the posting dates for greater continuity.

As of this writing I am in Newark airport, bored and tired, a victim of Tucson’s weather. Perhaps its last act of spite against me as I leave. Whatever the reason I am left with lots of free time and have been listening to audio tapes analyzing Nietzsche. The lectures are long and as one might imagine full of ideas that one needs to sit and chew on afterwards. So, extending that metaphor, I’ll chew with my mouth open on the blog. Nietzsche’s idea that compassion is a form of domination and altruism is a form of selfishness annoys the hell out of me. It’s along the same lines as the rhetorical question posed in one of my classes “Isn’t a lack of culture a culture in itself?” I ridiculed this paradox and invented silly ones of similar structure, so I’m bothered when I come to such things in the works of a great philosopher. I of course know that sometimes that such paradoxes do occur and that mutually exclusive ideas often have some common ground, but I am wary of them nonetheless. Maybe it’s my own ego that keeps me from accepting that acts of selflessness on my part are actually selfish. Do I have to hate my action and derive absolutely no satisfaction from it for it to be truly selfless? Applying Eastern philosophy to this quandary, Zen koans contain paradoxes, illogical statements and nonsensical parables. These koans are not meant to be taken at face value but to point at some concept greater than the ideas put forth in the sayings. Perhaps the selflessness is selfishness paradox isn’t to be taken at face value but to be used as a starting point for some greater philosophical question. Maybe I’m just talking nonsense. But then again, isn’t nonsense the most sensible thing of all?

OK, I’m on the plane now on my way to Freedom. And by Freedom I mean France. Anyway, I was thinking some more and the idea that the same trait, in this case selfishness can be used to produce two different results, namely greed and charity. Nietzsche had mentioned something to that effect, using philosophy as a hammer to both destroy obsolete ideas and to allow the creation of new and more helpful ones. One of the things in Behemoth that was mentioned was that the same regions of the brain are used in fighting as in sex. Again, a trait in all humans is used in both to create life and to destroy it. Hmmm… maybe it isn’t so much of a paradox as a double-edged sword.

Moving on, he also said that in order to completely get rid of God we had to get rid of grammar, claiming that the subject/object nature of our language reflected our deep-rooted mindset that a deity presided over all living beings. I dunno about that, I mean I don’t know much about the structure of non-Western languages but wouldn’t an atheist society need to have subjects and objects in their grammar too?
I completely agree with his take on the Seven Deadly Sins and how none of them are really serious enough to be sinful as traits by themselves. They’re basically made to control people. Make them perpetually happy, content, productive and meek. The perfect slaves. I once had a discussion about Christianity with a devout Christian; she explained some real interesting points about the way sins were supposed to work. Apparently, God is prideful but that’s not a sin because He actually is perfect. And since Adam and Eve were perfect it would not be a sin for them to be prideful either (the idea that two perfect beings can make a mistake is something I’ll have to ask about, after all God is perfect too…). So then it’s not so much a sin to be prideful so much as it is to think you’re better than someone you’re not.

The whole getting to Uppsala thing was a real joy. The storm in Tucson made me miss all my connections so I spent hours and hours in Newark and Paris. When I finally got to Stockholm I learned that my luggage hadn't arrived, I had no choice but to go to Uppsala without it. When I got there the office where I would get my room keys was closed so with no luggage and no place to stay I wound up in a hotel.

On a lighter note, since I'm in a foreign country making a fresh start for myself I've decided to change my post name. A nice internet pseudonym, a la Jinn and Bickbyro, whoever they are...


Freyr is the god of sun and rain, and the patron of bountiful harvests. He is both a god of peace and a brave warrior. He is also the ruler of the elves. Freyr is the most prominent and most beautiful of the male members of the Vanir, and is called 'God of the World'. After the merging of the Aesir and the Vanir, Freyr was called 'Lord of the Aesir'. Freyr was also called upon to grant a fertile marriage. The center of his cult was in Uppsala, Sweden.

I quit work yesterday. Finally free of incompetent managers, even more incompetent coworkers and the truly stupid customers. OK, maybe it wasn't as bad as I just made it sound but you all know how work is. Anyway, now that my first job is finally over with a year and a half later I've had my view of the world altered (corrected you might say). For example:
-If people can read, they sure don't show it. A sign that says "CLOSED" in six inch neon orange letters might deter some people from entering the restroom, but many are not so easily swayed. Even barricading the door with wet floor signs won't stop the truly stupid from entering.
-One in a thousand plastic bags is defective and yet some people think that this means that EVERY bag is incapable of holding so much as a head of lettuce. I've triple bagged a single package of marshmallows for someone once. People always tell me " Oh I'm going up stairs so double bag everything" Folks, I've carried a gallon of milk in one of the plastic Sunflower bags across two blocks and up four flights of stairs many a time, I assure you they will hold your strawberries.
-Sunflower Market is geared towards the health-conscious, all natural liberal crowd and yet they attract a fairly large number of right wing fundamentalists as well. Probably because of kosher foods or other such dietary restrictions. It's amazing to me that such diametrically opposed people can be in the same building without killing each other.
-After observing customer food selections, noting the purchases of different ethnic groups I have arrived at some odd conclusions. Eastern Europeans buy several weeks worth of food every time they're in the store, either that or enough food to feed a huge family for a few days. Asians are very big on leafy vegetables and they want them bagged exactly right. God help you if you screw that up. Also, Asians love watermelons, forget the stereotype of blacks and watermelons it's the Asians more than any other group. Crazy. Actually, the fried chicken and grape juice thing with blacks isn't true either. Where do things like that come from? People on the Atkins diet with buy twenty boxes of Atkins shakes and a sack of potatoes. Idiots.
-I used to think that hobos were a victim of society; sad example of hardass landlords, cruel employers and plain bad luck. Now I realize a lot of them are homeless because they're crazy, lazy, violent or otherwise completely unemployable. It's their own damn fault.
-The big thing that I realized that I found the most disturbing in terms of how I had become jaded to the world was pregnancy. Sunflower's cashiers are almost entirely female, some of them are older and are just cashiering as a secondary job. But many of them are young, like my age or younger, single mothers who are supporting one or more kids on a $7 an hour salary. That alone is pretty sad, but it's the fact that they do it to themselves that gets me. Dropping out of high school freshman year and getting knocked up, you can say it's the guy's fault too but only up to a point. There was a point when all of the young cashiers were either pregnant or had kids already. When one of them learned that they were pregnant my mental reaction was the same as if they had said they got an STD. It was only when a married 26 year old college graduate in her dream job told me she was expecting and I had the same reaction did I realize that my job had seriously skewed my view on that subject. "Congratulations!" should be the initial response to news like that not "Oh..."

Well, I'm done with all that, so now my rehabilitation can begin.

Word of the Day: syncretism- Reconciliation or fusion of differing systems of belief, as in philosophy or religion, especially when success is partial or the result is heterogeneous.

ߟehemoth: Seppuku by Peter Watts. In retrospect it probably would have been better to review both books as one as that was the author'soriginall intent, but too late now. First off, if the sadism was a recurring theme in the first half, it's teeming with it in this one. Yeesh. That aside, this half was much more entertaining than the first, both in it's new world and in that Watts brought back arcane little bits from the first book that give you that pleasant nostalgia. The notes at the end were also quite informative, including a site that demonstrates the relative ease with which one could make an EMP generator. Also on that site is a big f*ing Tesla coil that looks like it's straight out of Red Alert 2.
One of the other things that's big in the novel is the idea that the human consciousness and everything we feel and think is simply a matter of synapses firing, endorphins being released and other such things. Chemicals affecting the brain isn't anything new, but the idea that you can chemically suppress (or magnify) guilt is kind of unsettling. That means you can alter your conscience and morality with chemicals; goodness of heart and all of the things that are supposed to be reflected in your soul are reduced to interactions between neurons. Hmm...
Going back to that baby article I discussed the other day, I wonder if born sociopaths, ones who aren't a product of upbringing but of intrinsic faulty wiring in their heads, exhibit sociopathic tendencies as an infant. Would they not be empathic as other infants, or does the brain chemistry of an infant prevent them from expressing sociopathic behavior? Maybe I should just become a psych minor...

Handy Latin phrases. I think it's especially odd that they translated orgasmic moans into Latin too.

This new study on babies apparently changes all the previously established ideas on how human infants learn and develop. The lingual abilities demonstrated by infants isn't really new but still amazing. The study only mentioned that the babies could learn two very different languages with the same ease. I wonder if two is the maximum number of languages an infant's brain can process, so they can understand their mother and father if they speak different languages, or if the study just stopped at two. The emotional properties of babies I found to be especially interesting, particularly the fact that the babies are highly empathic and care about the happiness and well-being of other babies. If humans innately care for one another then it's hatred and intolerance that is learned and kindness is true human nature.

Normally I'd be against schools teaching Creationism but in this case I have to make an exception. The Cistine Chapel drawing is one of the funniest thing I've ever seen.

My roommate and I used to decide who or what would win in a fight by writing their names on quarters. Pirates vs. ninjas is a good example. Now it can be done over computer. I give you Googlefight.

ßehemoth: ß-max by Peter Watts. I couldn't wait indefinitely for the book(s) to come in paperback so I went ahead and got the hardcover. Oh well, more money for Watts. I was pleasantly surprised by this book, expecting it to be one of those sequels that can't live up to its predecessor. Watts goes back to the roots, which is good because while Maelstrom was good it wasn't as good as Starfish. One thing I am left wondering though is what is inside Peter Watts' mind? They say that good writers write what they know (though that rule might be waived somewhat for sci-fi and fantasy authors) and he certainly is a good writer, so is there some dark secret that Watts has? I mean he's a marine biologist that wrote a great novel that takes place on the bottom of the ocean, so clearly he's drawing from some personal knowledge. But why might all of his main characters be sadists and/or masochists? Maybe I'm just reading too much into this, troubled characters are more interesting after all, but I dunno, the detail he goes into seems a bit too much for mere character research.