When I was in St. Petersburg back in 2002, someone pickpocketed my camera and my calendar out of my bag. The camera was cheap and crappy, and the film was empty, and it getting stolen only provided me with the necessary push to buy a nice Zenit SLR camera.

The calendar had probably felt like a purse, but there wasn't anything important in it, except perhaps two photos of my babies Mitsu and Sergei. But of course, I still had the negatives. I'm glad my diary, the third item I had in my bag, was just a cheap memo pad and didn't feel like anything valuable, because that would have been a real loss.

This week, when I was getting a print of one photo for my mum, I finally got around to making new prints of these two photos that had been stolen with my calendar.

The photos are from early 1999, if I'm not mistaken.



Mitsu is on my bed, groaning and hitting the mattress with her paws, demanding tummy-rubs, while I'm trying to draw comics.



Sergei is hanging out in the garden in early spring, back when he was just a little porkrell ...

When Tierschutzverein für Berlin und Umgebung called out for volunteers to babysit pets during the summer vacations, I volunteered.
It all functions in a decentralised way through a database of babysitter volunteers, and is not controlled in any way, though the organisation reviews all entries to the database. You should be prepared that not everyone involved will be completely serious about it - many of the volunteers in the database are clearly young teenagers, and some try to do it for money.

Yesterday I got a call from a lady who asked if I would like to babysit her dog, and we agreed to meet first and get to know each other. When I showed up at her door today, no one answered. I stood there for a few minutes, until the door suddenly buzzed open.

In the staircase I met a very peculiar smell, and two policemen who were in the process of knocking on every door in order to find out from where this smell came - it was like something rotting, maybe a corpse. I went up to the apartment of the lady I was going to see and knocked on the door. No one answered.

I buzzed and knocked several times, and no sound came from there. I didn't have the lady's phone number (stupid me who didn't ask for it when she called!!!), so I checked my cell phone's call list. There was one number I didn't recognise, so I tried that one. But it turned out it was someone else - a very funny coincidence, actually, because that number belonged to a guy who had called me for the same reason a few weeks ago. He had my number from when he had been interested in sharing my flat, and had called me in exactly the same way a few weeks ago, since he had this strange number on his phone of which he didn't know who it belonged to.

Anyway, so this lady's number had been masked, and I couldn't call her ... The policemen came by again, and they still hadn't found out where the smell of decay came from. This dog lady hadn't answered the door to them, either, so they became very excited when they saw me and started asking how long ago I had talked to her, and if I knew if she was perhaps elderly. They looked through the mail slot with their flashlights. "Uh-oh, a big aquarium!", one of them shouted, but then they realised that the smell wasn't coming from that apartment, after all.

The policemen went down the stairs again, and I didn't really know what to do. I stood there for a while, listening to them talk on the phone downstairs about how they weren't able to locate the smell, but then I figured that there wasn't really any point in waiting around longer than about twenty minutes for some complete stranger in a staircase that smelled of dead people ...

Oh well. I wonder why she wasn't home. Maybe there was some misunderstanding. Or maybe she changed her mind and didn't know how to tell me. Or maybe she was a murderer who stored corpses in the basement and had to run when the police came.

The first three are what I regret the very most, but the others are just in reverse chronological order.

1. I didn't go out for walkies with Mitsu as often as I could have while she was still alive.

2. I didn't take the time to bond more with Sergei after each absence that made us grow apart a bit, while he was still alive.

3. I didn't get on a plane and come to Sergei as soon as I heard he was ill, even if we didn't know yet how bad it was, and so, I never got there until he was already dead.

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4. Once Quentin called me and asked if I wanted to come over, and I had some work to do, so I said I could come in a couple of hours. Why was work more important than spending a few hours more with him?! Now, a few months later, I don't get to see him at all anymore.

5. I never made any tahini sandwiches for Mihai, although he loved sesame in all its incarnations.

6. During an unfortunate party at Mihai's house, where he had invited his ex-girlfriend, she was "demonstratively bored", but I didn't go talk to her and try to cheer her up. (Instead, Mihai ended up doing that, and it made the situation somehow worse, because it looked like we were "rivals" over him.)

7. I came across two tiny puppies on the street in Bucharest, who were too small to walk and too small to eat anything but milk, and I didn't decide to adopt them and eventually bring them with me to Sweden, no matter what. (Instead, I tried - unsuccessfully - to find a foster home for them in Bucharest before I would go pick them up from the street. The next day I went there again and they were gone. Hopefully someone goodhearted had taken them home.)

8. In my home economics class in 9th grade, the teacher was a sissy with no authority, and certain pupils would just go wild. Once they were teasing one girl in a very bad way, but I didn't kick their ass. (I've hated myself for years because of that.)

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That's all I can think of right now. There are other things I've done that turned out unfortunate, but where I couldn't really have done anything better due to circumstances, or which weren't really so bad that I'd be regretting them for years.

This morning I talked to an old friend of mine whom I hadn't heard from for years. At some point he asked if I was "still" a feminist, and started telling me about this book that he had read, called "The end of feminism - how woman is different from human". It's written by a Russian guy called Aleksandr Nikonov, and apparently makes claims such as that white males are in fact the most oppressed group in the USA today, because they are so deeply suspected of being racists of rapists no matter what they do. If they say "nigger", they are immediately labelled racists, and if they suggest to a woman that they want to have sex with her, they are immediately labelled as potential rapists.

To me the whole book looks like some slightly sick kind of humour, but my friend seemed to take it seriously. He started comparing it to Russian society, and said that it's true! It's the same over there! If there is a fight where Caucasians are involved, it's always the skinheads that get the blame! And the documents of Caucasian-looking people are controlled most often by the police, because "they" indeed break the immigration laws most often! And it's true that most terrorists are Caucasians!

Well, he is my friend, so I tried to reason with him and present alternative views to him, and tried to invite him to think about why that kind of things actually happen, but he only answered to the ones of my questions that wouldn't require him to think uncomfortable thoughts, and ended the discussion very soon, saying he had to go.

I didn't remember that he would have been that simpleminded before. But maybe we just didn't talk about these kinds of things?

Sometimes I wonder if everyone around me is changing and becoming terribly insecure and pretending to be idiots. Or is it me who has changed? Have I started noticing those traits in people only now? Has it started to bother me only now? Or am I myself actually provoking that kind of behaviour in people lately?

(More photos!)

Today I was in Potsdam with my recent acquaintance Josef, who lives there. The town looks really bizarre - everything in the old city centre is so cute and small and clean. But as we walked down Puschkinallee, I spotted these lovely dilapidating old villas. Finally something I could photograph!

According to Josef, "potsdam" is a naughty word in Yiddish (which he doesn't speak, but he says he knows a lot of swearwords, as his older relatives always used to swear at each other in Yiddish ...). However, he didn't say what "potsdam" means, and I haven't been able to verify that claim. Oh well.

I've been fangirling the Red Hot Chili Peppers ever since I started reading Scar Tissue (though I can't actually even remember how I got the idea to start reading it). And then I came across this image:



Anthony is fuzzing it up with two wolfdogs at the West Michigan SPCA, an animal sanctuary that, among other activities, provides a lifelong home for wolfdogs, which are today illegal to keep as pets. RHCP have made substantial donations to the SPCA over the years. (Photo via Troublekids in Funk Heaven)

Another dose of Anthony + darling fuzz can be seen at the end of the video for Soul to Squeeze.

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Speaking of fangirling, it would appear that I'm going through some sort of teenager period right now, going to concerts and inflicting tinnitus upon my ears, immersing myself in rock music, fangirling Anthony Kiedis, etc.
When I was an actual teenager, I was a rather serious and 'adult' person, only interested in politics, arts and literature. I stayed like that throughout most of university, until somewhere around this past year, when a lot of people who really mattered to me have kept dying or leaving me. Maybe I'm in the process of being reborn and growing up again, or something ...

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*Edit the day after:*

Now I remember the course of events that led me to Scar Tissue.
One day, I watched various bass guitar tutorials on YouTube, and among them were tutorials with Flea from RHCP, who is one of the greatest bass players ever. It struck me how he radiated such goodness and sweetness throughout the interviews. Sometimes he'd mention stuff about the other band members, and that led me to watch a few interviews with them, too, and they all seemed like such nice and sweet people despite having gone through a lot of harsh things in their lives. Somewhere someone mentioned Anthony's book, and I got hold of it and started reading it.
Somehow they remind me a bit of Gipi, who has also gone through a lot of heavy drug-related shit in his life, but creates amazing art and is a really nice and sweet guy. The Red Hot Chili Peppers are the Gipi of rock music ... >:(:))

The concert yesterday was a lot of fun. The whole room was - literally! - vibrating with the sound, the bands were playing like it was the last show on earth, and the audience was stagediving all over the place and running/dancing into other people on purpose. I haven't been to that many concerts, and certainly none where the audience let loose like this. It was a good way to get a bit of nice and healthy physical contact for someone like me who spends all her days working alone at her computer. ^_^

Oh, and my hearing is slowly but steadily getting back to normal again. Maybe I should have used earplugs.

Here is a photo by Flickr user "MY BEST PRIDE" from a recent concert with FC FiVE in Italy, that catches a bit of the spirit ...



Unfortunately, they didn't have any merch with the boar design, and they didn't even have their CD with them (for which they apologised).

Last night, someone from Rocky Point (or adjacent), New York State, USA, accessed this blog through the search string "tinet+elmgren+mihai".

It felt a bit weird to be exposed to that association again, after such a long time (almost a lifetime, it feels like). Especially when I have no idea who did it and why.

(Was it my own brainwaves?? Yesterday, I finished reading Anthony Kiedis' autobiography Scar Tissue, and so much in his descriptions of his romantic relationships reminded me of the one I once had with Mihai.)

Tomorrow I'll see if I can get into the concert of these two hardcore bands (+ a third one) at Cassiopeia. FC FiVE is from Ibaraki, Japan, and for some reason, they have a wild boar on the cover of their latest record.

They are on tour together with a band called Ritual, and in the tour poster, the boar motif has been combined with Ritual's wolf motif, creating interesting associations - it's as if the boar is a spirit or something, and it's "huffing and puffing", and the wolf is frightened and angry at it. I saw it somewhere completely by chance yesterday, and I instantly knew that I had to go to the concert.

FC FiVE play a slightly 'melodic' kind of hardcore that I like. And, of course, they are cute. Though they should sing more in Japanese ... :3



I hope they'll have merchandise with this motif!

I've had dreams that unfolded like prose on paper, word after word, and I've had dreams that were in comic book form, where I saw panel after panel with speech bubbles, captions and drawings.

Last night, or, more accurately, today before noon (I stayed up all night working), I had one of the latter. As I was waking up from it, I could still remember every last detail, and wondered if I should perhaps write down this awesome synopsis that I'd just had a revelation of. But for some reason I kept making up excuses like , "oh, it's too complicated, it would take hours to write down", "I could never make it justice with my humble skills", "it only seems that great to me now, but when I'm fully awake, it will seem ridiculous", and even, "even if I could make it great, no one would want to read it anyway". By the time I was fully awake I realised I didn't remember anymore how it ended, and other details just kept fading away very fast.

The only things I still remember about it now are that it was about a mother, her child, and a man who might have been their distant relative. They lived in a big house in a park-like neighbourhood, which might not have been their house originally. There was a war. Enemy troops were first bombing the area, and then they marched in. These people hung white flags from the windows.

There was a very particular story that unfolded against this backdrop, but, frustratingly enough, I can't remember anything about it now.