A wanted ad

Just something funny I found online.

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So I won’t post the thing I wrote yesterday tonight. Mostly because I don’t have time to finish writing it and reflect on whether I should post it or not. Still feeling partly like I want to strangle someone for no reason or just curl up somewhere where I won’t bother anyone any more and no one will bother me. It’s more fun to feel angry so I’m going for that and listening to Three Days Grace and A Perfect Circle (TDG has the worst lyrics but it’s enpowering).

Number Stations

I’m reading about number station and The Conet Project. It’s pretty cool, especially since it reminds me of the number sequence in LOST. Shortwave radio stations are a way of transmitting information anonymously, a technology that started to be used after the second world war. Supposedly, these radio stations are used to send secret messages to spies. It sounds a bit like a conspiracy theory, but there has been a few instances when spies have been caught who received information from number stations.

“The one-way voice link (OWVL) described a covert communications system that transmitted messages to an agent’s unmodified shortwave radio using the high-frequency shortwave bands between 3 and 30 MHz at a predetermined time, date, and frequency contained in their communications plan. The transmissions were contained in a series of repeated random number sequences and could only be deciphered using the agent’s one-time pad. If proper tradecraft was practiced and instructions were precisely followed, an OWVL transmission was considered unbreakable. […] As long as the agent’s cover could justify possessing a shortwave radio and he was not under technical surveillance, high-frequency OWVL was a secure and preferred system for the CIA during the Cold War.

[…] The only item Penkovsky used that could properly be called advanced tradecraft was his ‘agent-receive’ communications through a one-way voice-link. These encoded messages, known as OWVL, were broadcast over shortwave frequencies at predetermined times from a CIA-operated transmitter in Western Europe. Penkovsky listened to these messages on a Panasonic radio — strings of numbers read in a dispassionate voice — and then decoded them using a one-time pad.”

– Spycraft, by Robert Wallace and H. Keith Melton.

After listening to the Lincolnshire Poacher a few times it begins to sound strangely eerie. And once you get in to that mode and then listen to The Swedish Raphasody you got the perfect creepy pasta.

The Conet project has a bunch of these. Check them out here!

Adventures of Mr Giggly Dick

I’ll add this to the list of things I will subject my potential future children to. If my potential future children survive my upbringing they will definitely be interesting people as adults.

Summer hiatus

This blog is on a summer hiatus for the moment! I might update randomly, but don’t expect too much until the beginning of September.

Death and Cake

I’ve started writing on my summary of my internship in Norrtälje, hopefully I will have finished it by the end of the evening so I can post it before I leave to Crete.

Iris’s funeral was today. I don’t really like funerals because all the ones I’ve been to have been religious, and I don’t believe in Christianity. I understand why people have Christian funerals, but to me saying that someone has been embraced, forgiven and found peace in this “God” person just makes me shrug. Why can’t they say something comforting to those who believe we just end? I know a plenty of comforting things about atheism and death that doesn’t give out the false hope that death somehow isn’t final and that we’ll meet each other again in a place without pain. I can see a lot of beauty in that we have seemingly randomly fallen into existence in this tiny blink of time together and that we during this brief flash of consciousness get to experience and affect the universe before we suddenly fade out again to give place for those who come after us.

Crappy cellphone photo,- very 21st century to take a photo of a casket at a funeral, but I couldn’t bring my proper camera. The ceremony was very small, just 12 people, and neither of us was very good at singing the psalms. Why do they make psalms so very difficult to sing? This is another great thing about atheism: If there actually was an afterlife and Iris WAS looking down upon us, she would have *facepalmed*. Aside from the singing I suppose it went pretty well. I didn’t feel particularly sad since she died a month ago, but my younger sister had make-up running down her face so I felt bad for her. She’s always been more openly emotional than me. We had cake afterwards though which seemed to cheer her up… and that’s my deep insight of today: When everyone’s gone, there’s always cake.

I turn my head back and forth

Some people can’t stand to hear people pop their joints. I grew with a lot of guy friends, and burping contests and joints popping contests was something quite normal, so I’ve never been bothered by popping my joints in public. Sometimes when I twist my body I can hear maybe 10 separate loud pops from my spine. I have an issue with my jaw that makes it go “POP KNACK” when I yawn or push it with my knuckles. I watched this video recently and thought of all those people who freak out when you stretch your neck. I think I have to show it to them.

Internship #2

I started my internship for the neurology course this week. I finished day 3 today. Besides seeing patients we were at a meeting for SLPs treating aphasia. One of my classmates is working at the same clinic, and since it’s in Stockholm we’re both living at my dad’s place… which means we’re practically spending all our time together as we sleep in the same room. It’s a good thing that we have similar personalities, because it could be straining otherwise.

I can’t write much about the patients we’ve been seeing, as I’m terrified of breaking some sort of confidentiality (which I’ve heard has happened to students and doctors who blogged or posted on facebook about their patients). When meeting a person with aphasia you can’t laugh at them when they say something strange, which is surprisingly hard. Most of the patients so far has a form of aphasia where they can’t hear that they’re saying nonsense, but one man that we met was fully cognitively intact except for the aphasia, so he mostly *knew* he was saying something wrong but was unable to correct himself. At one point he came  close to saying a really crude, vulgar word when he meant to say something perfectly innocent, at which point I practised my “warm, understanding” smile when on the inside I wanted to indulge in childish giggling.

Here’s a photo of me disinfecting my hands in my scrubs:

rape is rape is rape – dear GOP, don’t fuck around with redefinitions.

It is over 10 years ago since a man cleared of rape because the victim had been wearing skinny jeans. The court found that it would have been impossible for rape to happen since “her jeans couldn’t be removed without her consent”. You’d think that 12 years later, rape victims would be better protected by the law. Sadly, they’re still continuously fucked over as a bill by the House GOP’s aims to change the definition of rape for tax-funded abortion purposes. If this bill pass (and hopefully, with all the outrage from women’s rights organisations, it won’t), a woman would only be eligible for a tax-funded abortion if she could prove she’s pregnant from forcible rape. The underlying message seems to be that if your body wasn’t shattered, it wasn’t “rape-rape” as Whoopi would put it. If you got raped while incapacitated by drugs or alcohol and was unable to give consent, or if you were threatened, or raped by your spouse, you’ve got to pay for your own abortion since it was “your fault”. At least that’s what I and many others understood it.
Well, fuck them. The bill will probably not pass, but it’s frightening that these views remain in “modern” society and that suggestions like this are still taken seriously.

If you want to sign a petition against this bill, go here. I’m kind of sceptical if petitions ever work, but they usually don’t hurt and it takes roughly 3 seconds.

Source 1 & Source 2.

To Berlin and back

So, I got back this Monday after being in Germany for about a week. I started writing this when I got back, but school got in the way so I couldn’t post it until now.

I left Stockholm on Tuesday last week. The day before that, I had gone on a 9 hour unplanned detour to Linköping to get my passport, which I had somehow forgotten to bring when I went home for the holidays. I had to get up at 3am, so when I finally arrived in Berlin and went out with my friend Sofia during the evening, I had slept in the same clothes and make-up 4 times. The first time was between 10pm – 3 am, because I couldn’t be bothered to change into pyjamas, the second time was on the bus to the airport, the third on the air plane, and the forth while napping in the hostel room. Sofia and I ended up on the same plane; she slept with her head against the seat in front of her like a slouched beanbag, I slept sitting up with my mouth hanging open in what must have been a very intellectual pose. The flight was just over an hour, and I occasionally woke and heard a guy laugh at our charming poses and I think he might have taken photos of it, although I sure hope not.

I got off at Ostkreutz and walked all the way to the hostel in Möckenbrücke. It took roughly 1 and a half hour, which was fine because I didn’t bring any luggage, just the clothes I had on and a backpack with essentials. Just walking in Berlin is pretty exciting to me. The city definitely has a sort of personality, with it’s mixture of run-down houses, the rivers and the quickly expanded subway- and train networks, and of course the street art that covers everything. I was told that shop owners often spray-painted their shops themselves to avoid vandals scrawling all over them. Anyhow, I checked in to the hostel and took it pretty easy, went to the mall KaDeWa and bought a really nice new bra, then met up with Sofia for dinner and beers later. I think I went to bed around 1 am, which was one of the earliest nights during this trip.

The next day I met up with Camilla at the train station. I think I got up around 7am, but her luggage was lost so she was delayed. I ended up buying a completely new outfit at Vero Moda while I waited. When she arrived we went off to Freidrichstrasse and walked down to Checkpoint Charlie. I had forgotten to print out my train ticket so we once again had a detour to a hotel who were kind enough to let us print it; I think they might have thought we were guests at the hotel. We walked around in the LaFayette galleria and looked at designer clothes we could never afford. One store had a discount on Armani clothes, and among them was a dress that used to cost 2.500 euro that was now lowered to 250 euro. Insane, but still too much for us to buy it.

Our train to Leipzig was delayed so we hung around the Berlin hbf for a while. It was freezing. I bought 5 twix for 2 euro in a shop, which was great. I usually hide away chocolate when I go to visit people in case their food habits doesn’t correspond with mine. I’m irrationally afraid of being hungry for long periods of time. When we got on the train we annoyed everyone by being hyper, and we watched an episode of Sex and the City on Camilla’s laptop which meant they had to endure my laughter. I don’t know anyone who laughs as much out loud at TV and movies as I do. We put tiny hats on our hands and drew faces on them. Her boyfriend picked us up when we arrived and drove us to their apartment. When we made pizza, he got the task of chopping onions and insisted that it was quicker and more effective to put them in a blender… they turned out very liquid, but the pizzas were still alright.We had a chill-out night and watched Easy A and some Simpsons and fired some fireworks.

The next day, we didn’t get up until after 1 pm. I woke up a bit earlier (maybe around 10) and tried watching child shows in German on the TV while eating a bar of my emergency chocolate… which was well-needed since we didn’t eat until 3pm. We got most of the shopping for New Years done and went to a bowling bar nearby. We ended up staying up until 5am and I got to play a pretty cool tv-game called Heavy Rain. I also found out that candy wrap sticks to me.

We got up at 10 am the next day, and this was the start of my very sleep-deprived weekend. We had to get some more shopping done before the New Years party. For some reason every single shop seemed to sell fireworks, even a clothing chain that we visited. The guests arrived around 8pm. Me and another dude was apparently the only singles at the party (it was a rather small, personal pre-party before we went out) which caused a pretty awkward matchmaking. The guy knew about it; I didn’t until my friend told me halfway through the night. I thought it was pretty weird. She told me he had asked her to send him pictures of me before we met and that he specifically wanted a Swedish girlfriend… I’m not really sure what they expected to happen since we didn’t get a chance to talk much and I was going back to Berlin the next day. He was also like 15 years older than me and I don’t think we had any common interests. We stopped partying around 6 am, and since my train left during the morning I decided to not go to sleep.

I slept a bit during the 1½ hour train ride, then I went to the DDR museum. Maybe it was because I was still slightly drunk, or maybe because I’m not really a museum kind of person, but I didn’t see what was so great about it to be honest. Since it was the day after New Years, a lot of the shops were closed. I went to the hostel and tried to get some sleep, but ended up not getting much anyway and heading off to KaDeWa, which I had visited the first day. When I got back I decided that I really wanted to go to an alternative bar crawl, and since this was the last night I could to that I decided to get over my sleepiness and go out.  I didn’t think I would stay the whole night, but I ended up going to 7 bars and not falling asleep until 6 am. It was a fun, weird night. I ordered a drink called Absolute Love, but the waitress misheard me and handed me an absynth instead. I’ve never drunken absinthe before. We were to a bar owned by one of the Rammstein members (The last cathedral), which had awesome decorations and music but not so much dance floor. Another memorable bar was the ping-pong bar, which just consisted of an factory like room with only a ping-pong table in the middle and a bar next to it where you could buy drinks and rent rackets. A continuous game of circle ping-pong was played with 30-some people while some jazzy chill-out music played in the background. One of the girls I met there suddenly threw herself at the tour guide and made out with him. I couldn’t decide whether I thought he had the best job ever or the worst. I sneaked off when I started to feel a bit too drunk/nauseous and somehow ended up on the wrong station when the subway had stopped going, and ended up catching a cab for my last money. I almost didn’t remember the name of where I was going, which would’ve been bad, but then something triggered my memory and I could recite the whole address.

Sadly I don’t have any photos from the evening (couldn’t be bothered to bring my huge camera with me). :p

Check-out time was at 11am, so that’s when I got up. I was completely hung-over and could almost not make it to the spot where Sofia and I was going to meet up. I pulled myself together and we went to a pretty good vegetarian lunch place and then to a flea market. We decided to meet up for drinks later when I had gotten some sleep, so I went back to the hostel and lay pathetically in bed between 5-8pm. I met up with Sofia and some of her friends, but decided to go for soda instead of drinks, because three nights of drinking and partying is just what my body can take. I’m glad I managed to get out of bed though. We talked about politics and gossiped about a former roomie and talked shit about the other one and about the bike thefts and accidents we had together back in Linköping. Fuuun times. I told myself I’d go home around midnight, but I ended up staying until 1:30am. I was already sleep deprived, so what’s one more night of little sleep going to hurt? I had to get up around 5:30 the next day to catch my plane home.

I bought 2 litres of tequila and rum at the airport for roughly 30 euros. If I had bought it in Sweden it would have been maybe double that price. I was travelling with Ryan Air and hadn’t checked in any luggage, and I was already carrying a tube of art posters, so I was a bit nervous that the crew would tell me that I couldn’t bring that much on board. I overheard a guy telling his friend that the pilot had told him to stuff the things he bought in the tax-free inside his luggage. I only had a back-pack and it was already stuffed to the breaking point with things, so that wasn’t really an option for me. Somehow I managed to hang my jacket on top of the tube, which then hung in a way so it covered the bags with tax-free stuff. They didn’t stop me, and I don’t know it they would’ve cared, but I’m very happy I didn’t have to pay an extra 35 euros for all that stuff. It probably looked a bit suspicious though.

So, that was it! There’s a lot of details that I haven’t written about, but this is almost 2000 words long, so I think I will stop there. I stayed at http://www.grandhostel-berlin.de/ , which lies just a bit outside the city but is just a few minutes away from a subway stop. It was very clean, cheap and friendly with beer for just 1 euro during happy hour, so I definitely recommend it.

The pub crawl was hosted by http://www.alternativeberlin.com/ (it’s the 666 anti-pub crawl). Also recommended!