In the wonderful collective Trafikken in Copenhagen.

One of the best websites on the internet is in my opinion CouchSurfing.org
That is partially because I’m pretty poor, but it’s just such a good idea to let people share room in their apartments to other travellers for free; It is the cheapest, friendliest and just nicest way to travel or to get to know fun people from all over the world. So simple; you just sign up with what your couch is like and how many people you can host, if they can smoke, if you have pets etc and then if someone needs your couch they will ask you and you can answer yes or no.
I’d recommend it to pretty much anyone who isn’t a total loner or control freak or a murderer or something. Since you always give out little recommendations about the people you’ve had staying with you or that you have been staying with, travellers can check in to see what have beeen said about the people before and make up their minds about if they want to contact the hosts or not. And the other way around of course. We’ve had a bunch of people staying here at our collective now and it’s been pretty wonderful. I got to know a great french guy called Elie a few months ago, we hung out and drank a lot of beer for a few days and I showed him the wonders of Andra Långgatan.

Frej and I also got floor space in the collective Trafikken when we  were in Copenhagen, met lots and lots of other super interesting and fun travellers, like Ted from USA who introduced me to the insane dog book I was reading in the picture, or Stina who apparantly knew my friend Annali because everything is connected.. there were environmental scientists and high school students and researchers and everything great!

I really do think that people should at least give it a chance or three to see if it’s their thing! But I don’t get why it wouldn’t be because meeting locals is the best way to travel ever & hosting people is a lot of fun and you get to feel nice!

If you don’t have any friends on there to recommend you and get you started you can also get your identification verified. That also gives you some other advantages that I don’t know that much about since I haven’t done it myself.

GO JOIN!

And if you’re already on there, please share your stories!

My friend Björn and I were talking about Sonic on MSN today. Best game ever. The game for which my mother messed up her thumbs so that she couldn’t play anymore & the game which I obsessively played until I could go through the entire first zone with the tv screen shut down to dark mode when I was a kid.

Spring Yard Zone

Starlight Zone

Scrap Brain Zone

Green Hill Zone

My friend Bettan has made a Facebook group for the best typo ever*. I think you should join and post more interpretations of what Kurt means to you! I think my favourites are Lemon Curd Cobain, Kurd Cobain and Kocko Bäng.

* Kust means coast in Swedish

Picture Source

Smöjträd or trolltall is the swedish folklore name for a magic pine that is split in two (or has large roots over ground) & that the people used to pull people through to cure diseases, mostly rachitis & aches of different kinds. When I was a kid I used to read a lot about them in my grandmother’s weekly newspapers and in a lot of books on life in the 19th century in Sweden where they practically always seemed to go and pull someone through a trollträd and I was extremely fascinated by it. A few weeks ago I read a story at Frej’s parents’ apartment on how a man had gotten seisures from trying to cut down the one in Årby to conserve it because they were building a road…
I don’t know if there are any left near Göteborg. Does anyone else? Because if so I want to go and visit it.

<3

I miss my darling Adina so much! We’ve lived too far apart for way too long now, it sucks not having her around! Hopefully we’ll get to see eachother for a while over christmas but still! Stockholm is a different world when you don’t have money, or the time to take a break from life either. Other from missing her I am studying a lot, feeling disconnected from the world, am sprouting mung beans and drinking someone elses chamomile tea. & reading. Am coughing through the nights but am otherwise feeling healthy so it’s ok. Going to Copenhagen on thursday!

Ziggy helps me study today!
I’m writing about the pro’s and con’s of consumption from a perspective of sustainable development.. should totally be my thing but I have a hard time focusing today. Oh well.
I know I whine and whine about my arms but my arms suck!! They hurt so bad and almost all the time. Waiting to get an appointment at the doctor again.

But life is pretty good anyway with a cat & Imperiet’s greatest hits & a boyfriend that will massage me whenever I ask for it.

We are living in a mass hallucination.

We think it’s normal to work all day every day at a dead-end job. It’s normal to fight with our spouses and our children. It’s normal to eat and drink and drug ourselves to escape, to veg out and stare at a screen for hours a day just to dull the pain. It’s normal to hate our lives and be miserable, it’s normal to be lonely, it’s normal to feel hollow.

That’s just how it is in the “real world”, right?

No.

This is not normal at all! We’re not meant to live this way, in a virtual cage with clocks that demand our attention from birth to death, with no time to breathe or dance or sing.

We’re meant to be rainbows in our very own color schemes. We’re meant to be raging rivers, shining stars, perfect pieces of the Universe, breathing in connection and breathing out harmony.

What happened? What’s wrong? What’s missing?

We’re stuck.

Stuck in a world where control dominates connection.

Stuck in jobs that stifle our natures.

Stuck in relationships that don’t nourish our hearts.

Stuck in lives that don’t feed our souls.

We’re stuck living this way because we don’t know a better way to be.

We’ve forgotten what it feels like to live in connection. We’ve lost touch with our hearts, with our souls, and with each other.

We can’t live because we’re so tied up trying to survive.

We are lonely. Our hearts cry out for connection, struggling to escape from society’s cage, struggling to make a difference in a numb, uncaring world.

But we don’t have to be stuck.

We can fly free.

Freak Revolution Manifesto (opens as a PDF) is absolutely the best thing I’ve read in a long long time. I really recommend you to take fifteen minutes or whatever it takes out of your day to go through it because it will be worth it. It is love!!! It describes how I try to live and gives lots of advice on how you can make the world a better place.

Image: Sarajo Frieden

And you as well must die, beloved dust,
And all your beauty stand you in no stead,
This flawless, vital hand, this perfect head,
This body of flame and steel, before the gust
Of Death, or under his autumnal frost,
Shall be as any leaf, be no less dead
Than the first leaf that fall, — this wonder fled.
Altered, estranged, disintegrated, lost.

Nor shall my love avail you in your hour.
In spite of all my love, you will arise
Upon that day and wander down the air
Obscurely as the unattended flower,
It mattering not how beautiful you were,
Or how beloved above all else that dies.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution’s power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Mary Oliver

Rememberance

And you wait, keep waiting for that one thing
which would infinitely enrich your life:
the powerful, uniquely uncommon,
the awakening of dormant stones,
depths that would reveal you to yourself.

In the dusk you notice the book shelves
with their volumes in gold and in brown;
and you think of far lands you journeyed,
of pictures and of shimmering gowns
worn by women you conquered and lost.

And it comes to you all of a sudden:
That was it! And you arise, for you are
aware of a year in your distant past
with its fears and events and prayers.

Rainer Maria Rilke