Carry on 2009

Its been a while since I added to this blog...having been a tumultuous month, another new year. We had a wonderful time celebrating new years in Paris. Countdown at the Eiffel tower. Never have I seen so many people converged to one place at one time. My previous record was 80000 people in a Toronto peace demonstration leading up to the Iraq war.

Paris was paris. Wine, cheese, art galleries, c'est la vie! We did a mad tourist dash, not wanting to sit still and think about the future. The highlight was our fortune to couch surf with a wonderful gabonese women who gave us her entire apartment to our selves, and showed us around the city a bit, came out in the evenings. I even got to see my brother en route to Morocco, a delightful coincidence, once in four years. Sadly, it was also the last time I got to see a really good friend from Lund, heading back to the States. Strange thinking she is resuming her "normal" life back in California, that Lund is a bit of a fantasy-land to exchange students. Such is the scourge of international students, so many friends come and go so quickly. Throughout January, it was one after another, a piece of my heart stolen away every which destination they return to, and me carrying on in Lund.

I remember a moment like this, last year, reflecting on 2007. I wrote "I can die a happy man because of 2007", and I think 2008 (minus the broken jaw incident) was even better! The year stretches impossibly back into the stuff of legend, but I recall, as if it were last month, sitting just down the hall, marvelling about the dawn of 2008 and what it would bring. My californian friend reminds me of something I wrote last year: "A heart stretched too thin across the globe, memories too grandiose to believe, mistakes too plentiful to be sad, a future too beautiful to name." And go it goes...

So far 2009 is serious: emotions and missings sublimated into analyzes and script writing. I buy an extra fan for my computer, defragment, optimize and send it humming into hours of computations of theoretical birds in the Swedish alpine. Hopefully, I'll be able to write my masters this semester. It won't be fun, but I've had my kicks in Sweden. I'm already applying for jobs for the summer....

Eurotripping

In scotland on a Marine Biology trip, visiting especially Aberdeen and Oban

I support a Coalition NDP-Liberal government

What do I return to when I land back into the mundane: I never thought I’d live to see this day! A Coalition government in Canada between the Liberals, social democratic NDP, with support from the Bloc Quebec! The conservative would-be Prime-Minister in minority went absolutely crazy, trying to ban collective bargaining, using the financial crisis as a scapegoat. Not having a majority of seats in Parliament, and not having the support of the other parties, he will be toppled!

A liberal-NDP coalition may be a step towards what I see as the most pressing issue of all: reforming our archaic British first-passed-the-post election sham process to a democratic proportional representation, or, what I like to call “one person, one vote” democracy (unlike now).

Despite the high I felt of a united Centre-Left, it was shortlived when I started reading angered comments of (perhaps biased sampling of angered conservatives) Canadians on the CBC. “Coup d’etat,” “Power grab” etc. Many even had the pretension to say we’d look like an international joke when an “elected” prime-minister can be toppled only two months after an election-- unaware that most democracies in the World are made up of coalitions. E.g., where I am now, Sweden has never had a majority government. Rather, I’d say our election system looks like an international joke when a party that the majority of Canadians don’t want (i.e., 60% of Canadians didn’t want the conservatives to win) rules without compromise or negotiations. Most countries have governments where many parties have to come together, compromise and negotiate, while respecting the varied principles of each other and the citizens. This demonstrates a maturity and pragmatism that Harper never had, and its time Canada grew up.

I just came back from Scotland.

The Rankin’s were apparently hereditary pipers for the Maclean Clan, in North-Western Scotland, round the island of Mull. I was fortunate enough to visit these coasts and highlands, being in the town of Oban for a Marine Biology excursion for a week. I can’t say I feel any of what many Eastern Canadian authors of embellished of “returning” to Scotland / Ireland, a sense of ancient belonging. Nonetheless, I did feel I could live there, if need be, more culturally similar than Sweden. I liked their friendly manners and happy disposition. I like not being around tall, handsome, well-dressed people all the time. Seeing the capital B Brats in the Gothenburg airport, well gelled hair, tight clothes, meek and giant… I’m anglo through and through!

Mysteries of Fall 2008

Catch in trawl. Part of the Marine Faunistics Course trip to Croatia, Marine Biology Masters program in Helsingborg, Lund University, Sweden

Animal photos on a course in Croatia, Halloween, Arx and Nimis, X-rays of my Jaw, and other strange things

Cheap is sexy again

My oh so stylish Swedish friend blogs about the mainstream ascension of dumpster diving and freeganism. Unemployment sores. Credit disappears. The nerve of the nation is frugality, again, as it was during the Great Depression. Den gröna vågen gör intåg i hus och stuga...

If so, I’m on the cusp of cool! The air of scorn for flashy bling, a pocket of saved fastfood napkins, and a shirt I found in the laundry room, all suddenly the mark the with-it.

A Spanish friend and dumpster-diving mentor calls it “buscar vidas”, searching to live (she found the sweets in the picture). To her, and many impoverished others, its primarily for survival. To me, its longterm survival: planetary, ecosystem survival. Gaia gives us 2 degrees to warm, about 500 ppm Carbon Dioxide equivalent, until the planetary system is perturbed to an entirely new homeostasis. One without ice-caps, without the Amazon, without the tundra—an Earth unseen in 3 million years. Its not something that “heals” itself, it sits happily and steady within its new nightmarish balance.

There is a bright side to economic slowdowns. An economic contraction, reduction in material standards of living, slows the rate of climate disruption. And I write that recalling the sting of the early 90’s recession--- and how government marine “biologists” faced numerous bomb threats from fisherman during those years.

In the new tradition of frugality, today a friend and I used construction boxes as sleds to slide down Lund’s only hill of note. Its snowy here. Its quite beautiful. There is a sensual nostalgia to the bitting cool of snow: warm smoking stoves, drafts, the laziness of Christmas, swaying craggy trees silhouetted against ghostly snowscapes. I love it! With it too do the Swedes really shine—they just sort of make sense when it snows.

But with the snow also comes a sense of foreboding. Mostly all of my new friends are leaving in January. Oh well, time to get serious with my thesis.

Fractured jaw

I imagine an injury as being a single parent. In this case, my lower jaw is fractured--it no longer "fits" with the upper jaw. Like a little baby, it's always on my mind, always worrying, a little foreign something on the side of my head, me and not me at the same time. The little gnawing and cracking sounds wake me up in the middle of the night. Always so gentle and petitioning to it. It has changed my life: I no longer go out as I once did, feeling stigmatized.

As part of my bedroom activities, I imagine how far in the past an injury like this would equal death? In five days they're going to put a titanium rod in my jaw, to secure it back in place. X-rays and MRI and serious facial surgery. Could they do that 60 years ago, 80, 110? I think around 110, I'd probably be near the end. I'd probably have been a farmer, and I would have let it heal together on its own in a mismatched unalignment, having my farm wife stoically mash potatoes and cabbage into a paste that would be poured through a tin funnel into my mouth.

At some point, the inability to chew and communicate would have equaled death. Thus, I am all to more apparently wedded to civilization, all the more dependent on murderous dams, vicious pit mining, and omnipresent effluent. If I had my dream and industrial civilization did overshoot and crash, I wouldn't have the blender, the plastic straws, MRI's and titanium alloy to make it all better.

Its apparently routine surgery. My face is a bit swollen, but otherwise the same. They say I'll be back home after the surgery, I'll be alright. I plan on going to school monday. I earned this little bundle of joy by trying to stop a fight. I didn't and got hit, hard. The fuckers ran away. Didn't really hurt at the time, just odd.

Hopefully I post the x-rays soon.

Trawling in Croatia!

When the bottom-trawling was first deployed on mass in nineteenth-century Britain, fishermen protested and petitioned for its ban. No manner of fish can escape the trawl, they knew, and the oceans have never been the same. Since then, whole generations of apologist marine biologists have grown up thinking the ploughed, soft, silty bottoms of the Northern shelves are the norm: we have no baseline, we've never known what is natural...

But ain't it cool! Oh, the anticipation as the engines groan while lugging in the haul. The silvery mass of fish n' net rising to the surface. The gulls hovering eagerly. Everyone's face taut and anxious. Is it a big catch? Did we catch anything rare or maybe endangered?

We trawled and dredged nearly every day in Croatia for a week. One of those things, that despite the sun, the roll of the sea, good people, and the inherent interest of a new culture, it made me think: "I don't belong here. This is wrong."

On the bright side, everyone likes my new tan!

I celebrated my 26th birthday in Split, the Croatian capital. I'm now legally an adult. I left my adult life back in Canada. I look forward to graduating.