Last weekend, me and Mihai went to Malmö, where we walked across the city to IKEA (it wasn't very far ...). Along the way we came across this house in an industrial zone, opposite of the Olympus office.



Mihai inquired whether I would like to move in there. "YES!", I exclaimed, and immediately started planning what would have to be done in order to get it in shape. Getting window panes, for instance (unless they were still intact underneath the boards). Mihai seemed to agree, and said it would be a perfect place for loud parties, as there was no one near who would be disturbed.



The house must have been beautiful in the autumn, when the leaves of the vines turned red. Now their stems have been cut off. Too bad ...

A detail of the entrance:

Yesterday, I watched the film Monster by Patty Jenkins, a highly socially critical story based on the life of Aileen Wuornos, the highway prostitute who was convicted of the murder of seven men and (incorrectly) labelled "the first female serial killer [in the USA]".

In the film, Wuornos decides to quit working as a prostitute after she is raped, tortured and almost killed by the man who became her first 'victim'. After that, it's shown how she completely went over to killing in order to support her young girlfriend Tyria Moore. The real Wuornos, however, seems to have kept on working as a prostitute during the 13-month period when she killed the seven men, and resorted to killing her Johns only when they attacked her (as she repeatedly said herself) and/or in order to get bigger stacks of money at times when she felt that Tyria might leave her (as suggested by Sue Russell, who has written her biography).

Prisonactivist.org campaigned for "equal justice for Aileen Wuornos", maintaining that the handling of her case was highly influenced by sexism, anti-lesbian and anti-prostitute prejudice. Their campaign article is still online, and presents interesting statistics, which unfortunately aren't backed by any bibliography. But also Sue Russell mentions this kind of bias: "One prosecutor described her at the 1992 trial as a 'homicidal predator', saying she was 'like a spider on the side of the road, waiting for prey-men'."

In any case, Aileen Wuornos 'volunteered' for death after serving about ten years on death row. Maybe she didn't see much point in continuing her miserable life.

A bunch of heart-shaped balloons got caught in a tree next to Klosterkyrkan.

So that's why it was 'dry clean only' ...

Actually, it's not funny.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4481546.stm

In Canada, a 15-year-old girl has died after kissing her boyfriend. He had eaten a peanut butter sandwich nine hours earlier, and didn't know that she was extremely allergic to peanuts.

Imagine what a trauma the boyfriend is going through now.

It's right here:

http://www.kommiekomiks.com/judy-comic/index.htm

If it says 'page not found', it's because my web host's servers are 'under maintenance', I guess. That has been the case now and then lately ... Or at least I think it's that, because they haven't answered my e-mail to their support yet.

In the free daily paper Metro every issue has in one way or another focussed on rape lately. Every time I pass the Metro news bill, it shouts out that someone has been raped, that there are new, 'shocking' statistics about rape, that the paper has a guide for 'protecting yourself against rape', who the typical rapist is, etc.

I wonder if it's some kind of misguided way of partaking in the white ribbon campaign (against violence against women), or maybe the editorial staff at Metro is made up of perverts who get off on sexual violence?

In any case, I would guess that this kind of exploiting overexposure of rape all over the place just makes people more frightened.

This reminds me of a column by Bella Frank in Arbetaren, where she writes about how she has been almost paranoically scared of rape ever since she was in second grade and heard that a girl in her school had been raped.

The first time I read it, I got angry at Bella Frank for being so irrational and letting people scare her that way.
The second time I read it, I instead got angry at a society where little girls have to be scared of sexual violence to the point where they learn to take measures: having parents pick them up from school, sleeping over at a friend's house, carrying weapons (a stone, a bottle or a small hammer) and a mobile phone whenever they have to walk alone, and always being 'ready' for THAT.

I've personally never been afraid to walk alone at night. When I moved out of my mum's house to my own place, I took Aun San Suu-Kyi's quote "I cured my fear of the dark by wandering in the night" literally, and went jogging alone late in the evenings. Since then I've walked around alone in many strange cities at night (Moscow, Tel Aviv, Bucharest ... Malmö) without ever being afraid of sexual violence. I recently worked a couple of months as a morning paper distributor and met all kinds of strange, drunk or crazy people, but I wasn't really scared of anything but perhaps a presumed ghost in one of the buildings ...

I've learned that if you show that you are afraid, people with ill intentions will notice it and see you as an easy target. Mihai's best friend Gusti is always scared of robbers, and so, he has been robbed quite often. While I've encountered some very insistent people who wanted to have sex with me or to grope me (but not in a violent way - actually, no one has ever hit me in my entire life), I was never scared, just irritated and embarrassed. Some of them simply gave up after a while, while one guy who had groped my breast from behind looked somehow startled or even frightened and ran away when I turned around and clenched my fist. (At the time I was a bit concerned with the risk of him trying to steal my camera, while his groping didn't really disturb me that much.)

But it makes me really angry that not everyone can be as fearless as I am.

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Bloggaren Pernilla Karlsson skriver mer om Metro och våldtäkt.

I have a faint memory of the phone ringing at around 8 o'clock in the morning today, and someone asking whether he could speak with the guy who was recently renting my apartment. But then, I'm not really sure if that happened, because I was still so much asleep at that point (I'd gone to bed around 2), and the incident also somehow snuck into my dreams.

When I fell asleep again, I dreamed that I was living together with Mihai in an apartment that resembled my place here in Kävlinge. One day, when Mihai was at work, I found a little puppy playing in the hallway.

I wondered where it came from, and gave it food and drink and played with it. But when I at one point wasn't looking, the puppy disappeared without trace. I couldn't find it anywhere. When Mihai came back in the evening, I told him about it, and he said it was a puppy he had found in the street, and that I shouldn't worry about it disappearing, because"this kind of puppies do that once in a while".

Well, I was still kind of worried, but after a few days the puppy was suddenly there again, and we were very happy and played with it.

I guess that dream was inspired by a comic in a Finnish family magazine from the first half of the 20th century that my sister showed me yesterday. It was called "Penun seikkailut" ("The Adventures of Pup"), and was about a little puppy who had all kinds of very strange adventures ...

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Today I got my new glasses from glasogondirekt.com. As always with new glasses, I had severe focussing problems and nausea when I first put them on, but it's much better now. The size of the glasses is slightly small, so I feel a bit like a horse, who has to move its whole head in order to focus on something. But I'm sure I'll get used to it eventually.

Besides the glasses, I got a sturdy case, a wiping cloth, a little screwdriver and lots of spare parts - all for SEK 445! That's about 30% of the price of a pair of glasses you buy at a normal shop. Yay!

Me, Sergei Jr. and my new glasses:


Well, okay, then ... I'll also post the picture of me, Serpieri and my new glasses, though it's overlighted and blurry:

Today was great. First, a guy sitting next to me on the train almost knocked off my glasses when he accidentally hit my face with his jacket while putting it on. Then, I was almost crushed between the magazine shelves in the library, because this one guy was too stupid to check if someone was between the other shelves before he started cranking apart the shelves he was interested in.

At the incident on the train, I felt like faking a 'karate reflex' that would make me 'accidentally' almost punch him in the face, but since that seemed a bit too violent, I just demonstratively shoved his jacket away and got up, not really caring whether he would learn anything from that experience.
In the library, however, the man's behaviour made me really angry, so I shouted at him that he should perhaps look between the shelves before starting to move them ...

I know all my male friends and relations will be angry now, but I can't help but think about the fact that I personally have never experienced anything like this - people hurting or bothering others out of pure oblivion - happening because of any *woman*, except myself and perhaps one or another teenage girl.
However, I've witnessed how *men* have done this kind of things on quite many occasions. Throwing themselves down on benches so that the whole bench, and everyone sitting on it, shakes, shoving people with their bags, jackets or body parts, thumping their foot loudly at the floor in movie theaters, being loud and noisy and taking space to the point of it being harmful to others.

The emphasis here is on it being accidental, with no ill intention. I've been shoved by quite many girls and women walking past on the sidewalk, but they all did it intentionally (because I'm too good-looking or something ...!?).

It's a fact that boys are generally encouraged to take a lot of space and be noisy as they grow up, while girls are told to suppress those sides. I guess that this in some men and boys has gone to the point of forgetting that someone can actually be hurt if they don't watch out where their body parts are going ... or, as in the case of the man in the library (a middle-aged, well-dressed man in designer spectacles), forgetting that there are actually other people in the world except they themselves.

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Anyway, I recently came across the amazing song "Cold, Cold Water" by an artist called Mirah (with the cool full name of Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn). I have myself been playing with the thought of a drumbeat imitating a horse's gallop, and this song incorporates exactly that. I can neither sing nor play any instrument, so I'm very happy that someone else has had the same idea and made it real. However, I don't know what kind of horses Mirah and Elvrum (her partner with the instruments) have been riding, but the hoofbeat in this song is basically like this:

DU-du-du-dum - du-du - DU-du-du-dum - du-du - DU-du-du-dum

Whereas the hoofbeat in my head goes like this:

du-du-DUM - du-du-DUM - du-du-DUM

That's the way it really sounds (and feels) when a horse is galloping. (Hear for yourself in a movie at Equine Online.)

While the beat in "Cold, Cold Water" is certainly more sophisticated (and is given many variations in the song), I've yet to hear a more monotonous - and more authentic - beat like the one in my head being used in a song.