Today's headline news is that the country has passed a law giving formally equal rights to same sex couples, including the right to marry in the state church. (The situation was nearly equal de facto anyway, so really the new law is fixing minor technicalities of wording and such, but it's still good progress.) Anyway, this isn't why I like Sweden; no, why I like Sweden is because the (female) leader of the opposition party decided to celebrate by setting up a photo op snogging a woman who's a big shot in one of the gay rights groups. One of the trashy newspapers headlined this with: HOT LESBO KISS celebrates equal marriage law... this refers to two middle-aged, smartly dressed but not conventionally "sexy" female politicians.

In other news, I'm mostly offline at the moment, because cartesiandaemon is visiting, and I am overwhelmed with Pesach prep and other urgent stuff, and because my main computer is dying.

I had a very long and tiring week last week, but at the end of it my experiment didn't yield any useful data, bah. The weekend was fairly quiet; I spent Friday sending out job applications and not doing as much tidying as I'd intended, and the guests I'd invited for Friday night couldn't make it. Saturday I gave the sermon and led the Torah discussion as planned; they both went very well, the sermon especially. I spoke about the ways that the section about constructing the Tabernacle exemplifies building a community and valuing everyone's contribution, which I didn't think was incredibly original, but people went mad for it.

SA was there, and invited me to join her for lunch afterwards. 1:30 on a Saturday is not the best time to be looking for lunch here, because Swedish people generally eat rather earlier than that, and most of the restaurants are only open in the evening on Saturday, whereas most of the cafés are running out of food by that time. Still, we ended up at Nero (not the coffee chain!), which is sort of pretending to be a trendy bar from 80s New York, a bit pricey, but the food is really very good. SA described the place as "yang" in the way that it is all black and white and hard lines and full of motion and very crowded. Weekends they do a sort of set menu where you take a basket containing a salad, a glass of fresh orange juice, a slightly symbolic bloody mary, and two small desserts, and then a choice of American-Italian main course. It's always lovely to spend time with SA, and we talked nineteen to the dozen.

Although the weather yesterday seemed to have the promise of spring, just warm enough for wandering around the city to be pleasant, and the first snowdrops just coming out, it was all a lie, because today it's snowing again. I have to admit I'm less childishly excited about this than the last eight snowfalls this year. But still, pretty.

What else? I have a lot to do with Jewish community stuff, sorting out the services I'll be leading next weekend in Oslo, and then Pesach in Copenhagen and Stockholm, and then in April I'm planning a teaching service and a youth service. And I'm starting teaching at college next week; I can't quite believe all these commitments are looming, I thought Pesach was still far in the future.

( job hunting progress )

Also, friend_of_tofu poses a really interesting question: Who do you turn to first or most often for support?, and discusses relying on your friends, partner(s) or family and how those balance. Recommended.

I am busy at work, scrabbling a bit to fit in enough experiments to have something to publish by April. I don't honestly think it's all that likely at this point, but I want to give it my best shot.

( Apart from that, lessee )

The weather is weird at the moment, temperature swings from -10 to +10 within a 24-hour period, and including several heavy snowfalls which quickly melt when it suddenly gets warm again. I think this kind of thing is not abnormal for the transition from winter to spring here.

I didn't want to count up my nano words because I knew I'd not kept up with it in the last week of November. But actually now I've done it, and it's not as bad as I thought: 47391 words of meaningful communication in the month of November, so only 5% short. And that's partly because I didn't write anything at all over the weekend when cartesiandaemon was here. Chart, as much for my own reference as anything.

I feel pretty good about that, even if I didn't technically win. 50k words felt like just the right level, it was enough to be challenging, but it would have been vaguely possible if I hadn't got cold and depressed and disorganized. And it had the intended positive effect of keeping better in touch, even if I'm still short of where I want to be.

In other good news, I gave a very successful talk to the department today. I cut it finer than I'd like to finish writing it, but once I got up in front of an audience everything was peachy. And I got lots of interested questions which implied people had listened and taken it in, so yay. Also, today I made tasty tomato soup. All in all could be a lot worse!

So, I realize I haven't posted anything since whinging about the cold. I haven't actually died of hypothermia or anything like that!

Complaining to LJ got me two good effects: firstly lots and lots of friends commented or messenged me with comfort. I still feel slightly guilty about complaining that my central heating was working less than optimally when, since I am in the mood for cliches today, Some People Have Real Problems. But it did me a lot of good, since venting saved me from just giving up and bursting into tears, and then I felt really loved because everyone was so nice, and all those positive things gave me the spoons to contact my landlord and say, look, when you fixed the heating a couple of weeks ago, it wasn't actually fixed, plz hlp. My landlord is lovely and agreed to come the following evening and fix it again, treating any indoor temperature of less than 20 degrees C as a housing emergency. So he did, and now my living space is all lovely and warm and I have amazingly more energy and my mood has totally turned round. Yay warmth.

I've had kind of an awful week work-wise, in that my experiments got absolutely nowhere. Not gave the wrong result, but gave no results at all, and that included a 12-hour stint on Monday. Bleh.

However, now I'm at the airport waiting for cartesiandaemon's flight to get in and looking forward to a fun and relaxing weekend with him. I am going to have a teaparty on Saturday, I think, but otherwise just stay in the nice WARM flat and enjoy my Beau's company. (I am not generally this devoted a girlfriend, to come all the way out to the airport to meet my visitor, but in this case I was teaching in town until 8, and didn't really have sensible time to go home and come out again, and I didn't think I could abandon cartesiandaemon to navigating night transport on his own.)

Other good news: I had a wonderful time at the inaugral Limmud (pluralist Jewish learning day) at the weekend, and didn't post about it because I was too depressed by the cold flat. But I shall post some snippets of learning from that next week. I got chatting to someone I thought I might have offended the first time I met her, and it seems that she's cool with me and is even coming to the teaparty. Also, this evening I taught a really good class on "the future", so I'm pleased about that too.

Between the course I was on last week, and being cold and then stressed this week, my wordcount for Nano has gone to hell. I think I have around 40K, but I'll count up properly after this weekend. Hey, it was a fun thing to do even if I didn't win.

My flat is cold.

( that's pretty much the entire content of this post )

Sorry for whining at everyone; this is getting me down surprisingly much.

This year has started reasonably well, I think.

( diary stuff )

Other than planning the discussion session for Saturday, I haven't really done any spiritual preparation for YK, mind you. I haven't even contacted people to give them new year greetings (which is the Jewish equivalent of keeping barely in touch via sending Christmas cards). I've had good conversations with cartesiandaemon and pseudomonas, and corresponded a bit with darcydodo and lethargic_man. But I still owe lots of people lots of communication. It's always my number one resolution at this time of year, to be better at keeping in touch with people I care about, but it's an uphill struggle against disorganization.

It's very late to be leaving this, but if I've hurt you or you have any resentment against me from the past year, please talk to me and make suggestions of how I can make amends.

So I came home from my committee meeting just after 11 pm yesterday evening, and it was at that point I realized I had forgotten my house keys.

( arrrrrrrgh )

And this is why my email address used to be @dopey.co.uk...

This is my thousandth LJ post. I've been here for just over five years, and I've learnt all kinds of things and made real friends and even found partners. The best reason I love LJ is that it's the anti-geography; it's allowed me to keep in touch with my friends scattered round the world, and really in touch, knowing what's going on in their day to day lives and how they're thinking and actually have a relationship rather than occasional updates.

( LJ babbling )

Anyway. Yesterday I was interviewed by a journalist from the major Jewish magazine (an actual glossy magazine that is sold in newsagents) as part of a project on women's experience of Judaism. It was a very fun interview; the journalist was (or at least gave the impression of being) genuinely interested in me. I emphasized the fact that egalitarianism has always been the default for me, it's nothing new or radical for me to expect to be involved in religious life as a woman. And ended up doing quite a lot of explaining Progressive Judaism, but that's not a bad thing.

Also a good thing: I had a really good conversation with doseybat; she's a post-doc biologist and a very good person to discuss work worries with. Also extremely lovely.

I think I'm starting to be connected enough that July doesn't mean I'm absolutely high and dry with no social contact at all. Partly it's that most people in the lab aren't taking vacations this year, because they're right at the end of their doctorates and can't afford to, or because they took a big vacation at Christmas, or because they're not Swedish and do things differently anyway. But also partly it's that I know enough people that the few who are still around include some of my friends.

( relaxed but fun )

Also appreciating lots of good connections with friends using telecommunication. I managed to talk to rysmiel on the phone earlier in the week; this is noteworthy because it requires so much organization to deal with timezones and so on that it only happens about once a year. But the rest of the time we keep up a lot by IM. Also I've been talking to hatam_soferet regularly (and she's coming to visit in August, yay!); on Thursday night she taught me some really cool stuff about exactly what aspects of holy texts are holy. I should post about that properly, partly so that I get it fixed in my head and partly cos it's interesting. And writing emails to lethargic_man and just about managing to touch base with compilerbitch as well as my beau.

Communication is good. Please do get in touch if you'd like to arrange some real-time conversation; I've started using VoIP again, but I'm happy with phone or IM if you prefer those media. I have lots of usernames in my profile. And I'm not so madly busy that long chats mean I don't have time to keep up with my life, at the moment.

I've noticed that I haven't been posting much recently. I should do something about that.

( social )

Not much else. Getting on with work, fairly steadily. To make up for my lack of content, have a fantastically filthy poem that I happened to run across in a random feminist discussion of sexuality. It's theoretically NSFW, but it's plain text and Elizabethan English at that, so you can probably get away with it. Also, hilarious.

I am having a slightly frustrating couple of days, but whining is boring and there are many good things in my life, so I'll talk about those instead of the boring stuff:

( things that do not suck )

I spent the weekend at A&A's summer place, getting a little taste of the idealized Swedish summer experience. Going out to the countryside to sit in A&A's beautiful garden, or stroll through the forest picking berries. Eating herring with new potatoes and breathtakingly delicious homegrown strawberries (I didn't even like strawberries until I moved to Sweden!) Sleeping in cute traditional red wooden houses, which are just rustic enough to be cute, but modern enough to be convenient. (Well, fairly convenient; they have electricity and heating but no plumbing.) It was even sunny, and I'm really flattered to be invited there, cos by custom you go to your summer place partly to get away from people you have social obligations towards but don't personally care about.

But not a whole lot, to be honest. Yesterday I attended the bar mitzvah of one of my pupils, and realized that that was the first time I'd made it to shul in a month. That pretty much means that I've barely socialized at all in that time. Well, not completely, but I have been far more hermitty than is good for me recently.

( stuff )

I had a busy schedule today, but still didn't do a great job of getting out of the house.

( mild work whining )

It started sleeting heavily some time mid afternoon, and the yucky weather continued. I'd dressed for the spring which appeared to be firmly here when I got up this morning, so I was a bit cold and miserable coming home.

On the way, I overheard two women having an earnest discussion of Latin verb conjugations.

I got home at 10:30, and completely failed at putting chocolate spread on a cracker. It turns out that the state of "oh look, I appear to be covered in chocolate" doesn't have many fun outcomes available when you're on your own.

Well, at least I've got a fair bit of experimental work done. And now I have tea, and don't have to deal with today any more. So that's positive overall, I think.

Things that are pleasing:

1. I have given my two lectures with a degree of success. That was believe it or not the first opportunity I've had to give university-level lectures in my own professional subject. A good group, tiny (officially 6 people but not all of them show up), but really keen. That meant that the lectures were more or less large tutorials or small seminars, but I got lots of good and interesting questions. I'm generally proud of myself.
   
   
2. This means I can now catch up on sleeeeeeeeeep and start attending to the rest of my life.
   
   
3. I had lovely friends supporting me through the painful process of recovering from the worst deadline mismanagement I've ever committed. Thank you all so much, especially darcydodo and cartesiandaemon and rysmiel, for holding my hand and for refusing to accept that needing my hand held makes me pathetic and worthless.
   
   
4. I am blessed with a particularly wonderful beau, who is very cuddly and fun to talk to.
   
   
5. I have lovely, accomplished, enthusiastic bar mitzvah pupils, and generally an excellent Jewish community.
   
   
6. I have booked flights to come to England for Pesach.
   
   
7. Teeeeeeeeeeea

( whining about unpleasing things cut )

I have about a dozen posts I want to make, lots of book reviews, talking about the fun social stuff I've been doing, thoughtful essays about things like the future of LJ, ageing, stuff from Limmud that I still haven't caught up with... However, I am in a bit of an uncommunicative mood, and it's not helped by feeling overwhelmed with all the stuff I need to post about before I can post about other stuff. I have several emails that I've started and am not really making headway with too.

On a practical level, I have the first of my bar mitzvahs this Saturday, and my first ever opportunity to give a real lecture in my actual professional field on Tuesday. Both of those are things that I'm hugely looking forward to, but both require intellectual and logistical preparation, and I'm really struggling with procrastination. So as much as I am capable of getting my act together in this mood, those have to be the priority.

Many apologies; I'm not really managing my own life very well just now, let alone being there for friends. And I don't even know what's brought this funk on, there is plenty of light (bright skies over snow) and I've had lots of highly social fun in the past couple of weeks, and I have interesting things going on at work, and I've been enjoying plenty of really positive chats with friends. But I'm not entirely coping.

Got invited to a Friday night meal, by someone who is, guess what, not originally Swedish. Had a very convivial evening and got on particularly well with another of her guests, arguing about Jewish history and Jewish-Christian relations.

Helped out with a Progressive service, though I was mostly hovering in the wings in case I was needed, rather than doing anything active.

Ran a successful discussion about this week's Torah portion, which has so much to talk about I was spoiled for choice.

Spent about five solid hours chatting to rysmiel, yay for geography-slaying telecommunications! Also had some good though slightly more sane conversations with other friends.

Observed the first snowdrops of this year's premature spring.

Finally submitted my colleague's paper that we've been working on since before Christmas.

Today I spent the afternoon attending a couple of lectures on the northern campus. ( fun things )

The lecture finished at 4:30, which is too late for it to be realistic to return to my lab in the southern campus, but earlier than I usually get out of work. So I walked home as the sun was setting, which suited the pretty suburb very well. And I walked past the carpark shaped like a giant teacup, and various pretty buildings reflecting the golden sky, and across the pretty estuary, to the station. There I saw a girl who looked as if she'd walked out of an audition for The little princess, and I was covertly looking at her to figure out if she was in costume or if this was some new and esoteric form of goth (I supsect the former), when she gave me the most beatific smile.

Days like this make me think I should carry a camera around, but you get verbal descriptions.

This is what I saw from my front window a few minutes ago:



I grabbed a snap of them in the last 30 seconds before my camera batteries (which I haven't charged in months) gave up. It came out better than most of my attempts to photograph the deer that periodically visit, but it's not exactly brilliant either. The deer usually try to run away if you take photos of them, so by the time I got the shot they were the other side of the garden and not keeping very still. But hey.

Other than that, I have just realized that the file I need for my work was saved on the network, not on the work laptop which I cunningly brought home. So I shall either brave the snow and the Sunday transport and go into the lab, or see if I can work from a slightly older version.

Apparently Sweden is marking Holocaust Remembrance Day. Seen on the way through town this afternoon:

a series of large bonfires arranged around a central pavillion with banners proclaiming "Holocaust"

a bunch of Christians holding a service in a public square, surrounded by people carrying Israeli flags

While I appreciate the sentiment, neither bonfires nor Israeli flags strike me as a particularly tasteful way to remember the Holocaust...

I am in a foul mood, because I've got next to nothing done in four days. This is making me want to hide from everybody, because I don't want to have to answer the question "how are you?" Hiding from everybody makes things worse, so I have a cunning plan: I will humiliate myself in public by making an announcement to the effect that I suck and have no willpower.

Now I can talk to people again, because you don't need to ask me how things are going and I don't need to feel even more wormy when I have to answer. And if I can talk about some other topic than this, I will hopefully be distracted enough not to be a moooody cow at you. But if I am snappish, I apologize in advance.

PS If you think hugs are the appropriate response to this post, you're an idiot. Sorry, I warned you I was in a bad mood.

So, I'm back in Sweden. The journey was pleasingly uneventful, and I even managed to bring all my bookies and birthday presents with me.

I was going to write a post about linley's book and the privilege meme, but I have run out of energy and brain, in the wake of travelling, a procrastinate-ish first day back at work, grocery shopping, and period pains. So that, and all the emails and LJ comments I want to write, will have to wait until the weekend.

In romantic landscape news, between waking up in the night to go to the loo and actually getting up this morning, so much snow fell that my ankle boots were insufficient to keep my feet dry. Wet feet were rather mitigated by the prettiness though. Not many people are back at work yet, including, it seems, the people who clear and grit the roads. So everything was still pristine when I set out for work this morning, and my town at the side of the fairy lake was absolutely gorgeous, even by the standards of a pretty part of Stockholm just after a snowfall.