Speaking of…●8

… a strong finish to the year

I just finished my temp this week.
November has been pure death, so stressful my ears have literally been ringing… (see, that’s what you get for playing Santa’s little fairtrade helper…) - actually to the degree where I was almost glad that there won’t be any chances to continue there next year.

However, the last 2 weeks have been generally nice. We caught up with the workload, stress decreased and there were a lot of christmas parties both for the whole office and the separate departments. Friday was the day where we rounded everything up, with a xmas party at the warehouse (where I’ve been spending most of my time the last months). The salesdep arranged ‘pick’n'pack’-games for the colleagues from fundraising & communication, had pizza and wine and a lot of good conversations and giggeling.

In the middle of this, T - one of my closest colleagues, a guy in his 50’s, looks up this classic Swedish song with my name in it - The dream of E - on youtube and hands out the alternative lyrics he had written the night before, and makes everybody join in in my serenade… I was blushing but truly touched!

A pretty good way to say goodbye, huh!

Speaking of … ☼7

…turning remnants into Good Stuff!

I got my annual report…?

I was sitting at our intimate xmas party sipping on some tea, having just watched a couple of works in progress from the year. I don’t know if I told you but M, N and I meet every few weeks or so in M’s living room. Over tea and biscuits we read each other’s drafts, watch rough cuts and other story things. The bigger the pile of bikkies, the more we need to pat someone on the shoulder. This year there were lots and lots of biscuits, fresh strawberries sometimes too, for when collaborators refused to hand over footage and when computers crashed and swallowed near-finished things whole.

We were an odd bunch that night. There were even a couple of the random but nice young men that always seem to appear out of nowhere in M’s hallways or in the kitchen asking for food - friends of her son, that seem to have just settled into one of the many rooms in the house indefinitely. We were all sitting together in the lounge room when M walked over to N and I with a couple of print-outs.
She smiled as she gave them to us. I scanned the heading suspiciously: “Annual Report 2008, Executive Summary.”

Following instructions, M’s daughter read the report out loud.

She read it rat-a-tat-a-tat-news-reporter style, and suddenly all the scrappy odds and ends of my year took shape and seemed like, well, progress of some kind. It was sort of thrilling to hear it all laid out in front of everyone. And it wasn’t laid out how I saw it, as a bit of a slow, stop-start year. Instead it was all very dramatic, ‘major downfalls’, ‘restive investors threatening to remove all stock’, ‘recent rallying due to support from team members’, ‘investor confidence taking awhile to return to former levels’. We even got portfolio summaries for each of us, I’m glad to say that mine had a “very strong finish to the year,” although “major commitments were slow to develop.” Too true.

Speaking of…●6

… close looks around gardens:

A few weeks ago, I went to visit my brother and his family.

In the garden, I finally got to see what had only been described to me over the phone: the playhouse/climbing frame/(sub)tree house H and my brother built from my grandmother’s old loom.

After my grandmother passed away, the poor old loom had been stored in my parent’s garage for more than 15 years, in hope that maybe one of us would magically move into a really big house and take up weaving. After a very long time, my father gave up hope, and started burning pieces of it in the fireplace during winter. I know it saddend him, because my grandmother was a very crafty woman, who cherished her loom a lot.

My godmother the textile teacher thinks its blasphemy, both putting it in the fireplace and building a playhouse out of the remnants. It might. But I hope my grandmother and the loom likes the new life that has been created for it.

Speaking of … ☼5

… finding things a bit later

From an interview with Chikabo Kumada (what a cool name), “97 year old botanical art maestro” in Pingmag Make. (Image above also from Pingmag Make)

… “I hit the renaissance of my life when I turned seventy. That was when I really bloomed. Up until then it was like I had been like living in muddy water. (laughs) When I turned seventy, my works received recognition at an international picture book exhibition in Bologna, I got a lot of press and requests to speak publicly, and I got more work. When Italians and French people see my work, they say, “Mr. Kumada’s pictures are alive. The esprit is like that of Fabre.” Isn’t that nice? So my 80s were really like the bloom of youth for me. But when you reach such an age, you could really die at any moment. So I felt that it was important that I didn’t miss anything, and I took another close look around my garden. And that was when I realized I was able to see things in flowers and leaves that I hadn’t been able to see before, and my work got more detailed. Now when I look at the work I did when I was younger, it’s so amateurish that it embarrasses me. Most people rest on their laurels once they get into their seventies, but that was when life really started for me. (laughs)” …

p.s I hope this isn’t considered cheating! It’s been too long, my pockets are still empty, I felt like I must bring something quickly, and then I met this extraordinary man on my afternoon internet travels!

Speaking of… ●4

… needles!

Some time in the mid-thirties, my grandmother accidently sat on a needle that broke. They tried to find the broken tip of the needle, but was never able to find it. I bet it must have hurt quite a lot at the time, but after a while, the needle was forgotten.

Thirteen years later, my mother, age 4 developed a swelling on her upper right arm. She was taken to the hospital to have the arm examined by a doctor. Inside the swelling, there was the broken needle.

How the needle magically wandered from my grandmothers tush, through the womb and to the tiny baby that was to grow up to be my mother without causing any serious injuries, I don’t know. Every time I tell this story, people refuse to believe me… but then all I can say is: Hey, I only know what my mother told me!

———
Additional facts as by November 4:

Correction:

Mother age 1,5 not 4 (I mixed the stories up : 4 was when she almost drowned…)
Now not only Mothers Word as proof - also Dagens Nyheter (one of Sweden’s biggest and oldest newspapers) swears by it! (Because everything that you can read in a paper is a well known truth!)

Translation (excuse my Swenglish…):

Needle wandered from mother’s leg to baby’s arm
From Dagens Nyheters (Daily News) correspondent
Eksjö, Wednesday

A unique case of “needle wandering” through the body has become known in Eksjö. A tip of a sewing needle that 13 years ago got stuck in the thigh of an Eksjö lady has now emerged through the upper arm – not her’s, but her baby girl’s.
In it’s time, attempts were made at Eksjö hospital to have the needle removed. The doctors did get hold of it, but it slipped away and disappeared. Recently, the woman’s 1,5 year old daughter got a black mark on her arm, and during examinations, to general astonishment, the needle that 13 years earlier disappeared in the mother’s body were retrieved.
The doctors don’t see it as impossible that it actually is the same needle. The only explanation is believed to be that the needle got into the girl’s body through the placenta.

Speaking of … ☼3

… when it might have been better not to ask:

A friend and I were walking along a busy city street having one of those conversations where you can only shout small stuff at each other because the noise is such that you can never really be sure of what you’re saying. I was telling this friend how I’d patched D’s jeans last night.

He looked at me and said, ‘What did you just say?’

I said, ‘I said I patched D’s jeans last night.’

‘Oh’ he said, ‘I thought you said you patched D’s dreams last night.’

Just keep mumbling is what I should have done. Then, my friend would have stopped, looked at me and just said really quietly, 'Wow!' I would have taken it in my stride, kept walking and mumbling and let the city noise of cars, and construction, and people shopping their guts out make the conversation all the more interesting.

Speaking of… ●2

…. surreal:

This morning, just a short while after I read your down jacket story, I was biking to the train station to get to work. I was in “no-mood-land”, not happy nor sad. Suddenly, on the side of the bike lane, I see the back of a woman, wearing a large monitor on her shoulders. I mentally rub my eyes and drop my jaw, but this is not a hallucination, she’s there.

I tilt towards happy.

While i ride pass her, I curse my self for not just stopping to take her picture. My first guess (having worked at an art academy…) is that this has to be a performance of some kind. Maybe she’s trying to state that we’re all just locked in our computorized workspaces, or what? I was smiling towards all the people I met, heading the opposite direction, thinking oh my are you gonna be surpriced in 5 seconds…

I got on the train and to work, still a bit bummed that I couldn’t show anyone what lovely morning curiosity I had seen. Going out for lunch in the town I work, I stumbled on her male counterpart… I knew what I had to do, so walked up to him and asked if I could take his picture. The monitor head nodded carefully and slowly. After taking the picture I asked what the purpose was. He mumbled something inaudiable and gave me a card.
To my big disapointment, it was an advertising drive for this recruitment company. Very clever, but I would have liked it way more if it was art…

speaking of which ☼1

Last week for the first time in a long time, I turned on the radio and lay down on the floor to do a few exercises for my back. On the radio a man was trying to describe a jacket he found really special. I always listen closely when people describe objects that mean something to them because they tease out such unexpected detail that the object soon becomes a collection of bits of unbelievable beauty that makes it impossible to picture it whole, even if it’s put right in front of you.

Anyway, he looked for the words but couldn’t find the right ones, he paused and searched, and it was the care with which he paused and searched that I came to understand how exquisite this jacket must have been because in the end the only word he found was ‘beautiful.’ It was down-filled he said, like a ski-jacket.

He knew it was down-filled because when he helped the woman who was wearing the jacket who had fallen into a fire, he remembered how everything seemed surreal as the white feathers floated above the dark pit.