Usually Mitsu is a bit picky about who gets to cuddle with her. But last summer she invited me to her boudoir more than once for some shameless smooching ...









Pictures taken by Eija Elmgren, and later converted to black & white by me. (Next to Mitsu's snow white hands, my face resembled a dead lobster in its colouring ... I had to do something.)

When I looked in the mail today, I came upon a package that had come all the way from Australia. "WTF?", I mused, whilst tearing up the Tough Bag ("strong, yet light-weight bag ideal for packing non-fragile items"). Turns out that it was the new webcomic anthology Bounce Comics, where my comic Driftwood is being published.

I'm writing an essay about the enslavement of the Roma in what is now Romania, and I just realised that almost all my source literature has a cover in red and black. The only exceptions are Angus Fraser's "The Gypsies", which is black and slightly yellow, and David M. Crowe's "A history of the Gypsies in Eastern Europe and Russia" (as if the part of Russia that he describes didn't belong to Europe?!), which is purple. Is red and black a stereotypically gypsyish colour combination ...?

Anyway, today Mihai finally bought his bike, after haggling with the people at the thrift store (he noticed that the switches were broken, while they claimed they weren't, but he got the price down a bit anyway). So, of course we went biking to Löddeköpinge. It was almost windstill (which, in the Skåne steppes, means about 4 beauforts), so it was very nice. We would have gone all the way to the sea, if it hadn't been so late that it was getting dark soon, while we had no lights on our bikes. Not that it would have been any too big problem, but Mihai feared that the Swedish coppers might make trouble if they saw us.

Not many precious days remain until the dreary student's life sets in. I suppose it will be interesting to study Russian again, and I'm actually looking forward to it a little bit (!!!), and I certainly look forward to see how easy Romanian will be NOW, after a month in Romania, but I will miss these days when I can do whatever I want to without feeling guilty about it. Yes, why should someone feel guilty about making abstract paper sculptures and gluing them onto cardboard so they look like modern art? I wish I could do things like that all my life and get paid (enough for food and room, at least) for it.

One good thing is that I seem to have improved my wrestling skills over the past few weeks. It's not *quite* as easy for Mihai to lock me down anymore ... (Which means that it takes about five seconds for him now, compared to one second a month ago. Oh well.)

With my new broadband connection, it doesn't even matter that much that Mårten (my computer) keeps crashing every few minutes sometimes. Because the internet is so nicely fast, and thanks to evil piratey software like Bit Torrent I can download all kinds of nice things more or less illegally. Nyah hah haa!

One of my latest bounties is Hayao Miyazaki's "Zassou Nouto". The scans are gigantic (twice the natural size), so I haven't found out yet whether it's the version that contains the story about Otto Carius or not ... My poor ancient computer is exhausted after five, six pages, and I have to restart him (unless he has restarted himself already).
Anyway, it's in Japanese, so I'd like to make some Japanese-speaking people I know make fan translations of the stories ...

It's not like I always dream of blood, devastation, death, war and horror, but it's just that I think this kind of dreams are the most interesting and the most worthy of writing down.

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Myself, my wife and our adult daughter were eating out at a restaurant. The hall, furnished in mostly red and black, with heavy wooden furniture, was strangely empty, save for a couple of slightly disquieting people at a table further away - an Asian woman and a middle aged European man, both strongly built, with smooth movements and somehow empty faces.
When we had finished our meal and tried to spot a waiter in the gloomy restaurant, the couple from the other table got up and started walking towards us with slow and relaxed steps. The man's face was cracked by a disturbing smirk.

They explained to us that the price for eating a meal at this restaurant was to fight them. And from the look of us, they said, it would be over soon, so there was no cause for worry. They handed us swords from a hidden cabinet in the wall.

I was the first. Nervously sweating and uncertain in my step I clutched the sword, as the man charged. His sword moved so fast I couldn't even see it. My body could hardly sense all the individual wounds he gave me, for his blade flashed so fast through my bodily tissues that my torso and abdomen were one single splattering wound within seconds. It hurt like hell, and I slumped down on the floor. I could barely see from the corner of my eye how my wife came forward, wielding the sword they had given her. She looked desperate but brave. Then, all went black.

At some point, I came to again. My wife was lying next to me, our daughter further away. There was blood everywhere. Strangely, it didn't hurt as much anymore, and I could move. My wife was conscious, as well, and she said she was all right again, too. I tried to get up, and I realised that all my wounds had healed again.

Suddenly, the man who had cut me up before started laughing at the other end of the hall. He said that they had apparently forgotten to mention one detail. The price was not only to fight them once, but to fight them *forever*. The food had given our bodies the ability to always heal up again after being torn apart. And, who knows, maybe at some point we would beat them - "But from the look of you guys - I don't think so."
They lead us into another hall, which was full of people sitting on benches in long rows. All of them were in the same situation as we, and had to "fight" these two people, get killed, come back to life, and do it all over again, time after time.
I glanced at my wife. From the look in her eyes, it just might be that she at some point would indeed beat them.
As for myself, I didn't feel too good about this. Eternal hell was waiting. We would be killed all over again, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. How could I ever learn to swordfight like them? I couldn't possibly beat them.

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This dream might be inspired by a thought I had at some point yesterday, about computer games, and how some of them seem completely impossible the first few times you try them, but after a few months, or weeks, you beat the hell out of the game without effort.
Hey, I could make a fighting game based on this concept ... if I could program games, that is.

Just when I get back most of my pictures from Romania, my scanner is busted. Also, my USB ports seem to have serious problems (it's not a virus or anything, at least according to Panda Software's ActiveScan). So, I'll have to get new USB ports and get my scanner fixed before I can do anything interesting.
(Jeez, where are big sisters when you need their computer?! ... In Japan, of course, gorging themselves with Manga and Yukatas.)

What Yevgeny Yevtushenko has to say about the concept of my comic Kozmopig:

"... Flying over the earth is not enough - the important thing is the thoughts you bring with you. Otherwise we are just like dogs out in the cosmos. Yes, dogs are fair enough - but it can happen that swine, too, end up in space. Dangerous are the armed swine, who grub up the roots of the galaxies with their snouts."

(Actually, these are the words of the philosophical cosmonaut at the beginning of Yevtushenko's novel "ßãîäíûå ìåñòà" from 1982.)

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Anyways, I might escape the terror of 'real life', after all, and study Russian this semester, in order to become a translator. I know they'll take me even if the application deadline was quite long ago, and it might be fun. My new classmates might actually not be such imbecilles as some of them were in my second semester of Russian studies here. Besides, I like the Russian language (more than Arabic), so it will be fun. And it's a candidate course, so it might be more interesting than starting a new subject all over, as I've been doing a bit too often.

I used to think that the job of a translator seemed kind of boring (not least because that's something we always do in the classes when we study languages), but then, it's something I know how to do, and it might give me a nice, steady income. Who knows.

I'm here again, as you can see, and I've changed the layout to a more original and interesting variation. The background is the fabric "Peacock and Dragon" by William Morris, whose colours I've changed slightly to fit in here better.

It was a bit of work - especially when you have a half naked Romanian around asking you all kinds of questions about strange Swedish things all the time while you're doing it - but I'm quite pleased with the outcome. Yay!

I'm in Romania right now, once more. It's quite hot, and I wish mum could get to enjoy this kind of weather, too, as she has been complaining about the 10-15 degrees cloudy and rainy Swedish summer all June.

Anyway, don't expect me to update too often ...