hamburgers

A couple of weeks ago I celebrated my third anniversary in Sweden - significant in that I am now eligible for Swedish citizenship. The event itself prompted all of the usual self-evaluations: did I make the right decision coming here? what have I achieved? etc. and so on. This is not to suggest that I have been reconsidering the choice to live here. Quite the contrary. It is just that the date itself seemed significant, and I suppose I have a tendency towards self-indulgent navel-gazing.

Having spent three rather enjoyable years here, I feel fairly comfortable with the rhythms of daily life in Sweden. There is a trap in this kind of familiarity: the assumption that you understand things here, that you get it can be consuming, leading you to miss things. I think one of the greatest gifts of travel is a new eye. When you see a place for the first time you can pick out the details and unique features that are oblivious to the local. Of course the opposite also applies: tourists rarely experience life-in-a-place-as-a-local. The life of an ex-pat wanders between these two extremes, and I had a moment last night that reminded me of this.

I have spent much of my time here working in the hospitality industry, and during those (brief, but pleasant) occasions when I am not professionally involved in the preparation of food I have tried to experience as much Swedish and Scandinavian cuisine as possible. There is a rich food tradition here. The harsh climate means pickles and preserves abound, while the brief but amazing summers give us a bounty of fruits and berries. Sweden's early marauders brought back food techniques and ingredients that have been added to the melting pot with some unusual, but delicious results. I also have the good fortune to know a couple of people who are gifted at recreating this tradition. Jonas, my head chef, with his hunter's eye for wild meat, has exposed me to some culinary wonders (as well as teaching me how to swear in a thick Skåne accent). Nisse, my girlfriend's father, has shown me the depths of husmanskost (which is badly translated as 'simple home cooking' but what my mother would refer to with great relish as 'poor people's food') and introduced me to some of the highlights of Swedish food: julbord (literally Christmas table), Mårtensgås, (a festival in November featuring black soup and goose), among many others. He has also taught me the delights of freshly caught Mackerel and wild mushrooms.

As such, I feel confident in a Swedish kitchen and familiar with Swedish ingredients. I'm not suggesting that I've seen it all, but I have had a pretty good go at the food here: I've eaten surströmming and lived to tell the tale. So last night as I was browsing in the deli section of the local Coop with Hanna I came across rökt hamburgerkött (lit. smoked hamburger meat) and laughed it off as either a food crime or a mistranslation. Until Hanna matter-of-factly said to me "That's just what we call horse meat."

I'm moving back to Australia.

Which is not to imply that I don't want to live in Sweden anymore. I do. I plan on living here again at some stage. It's just that the right set of opportunities opened up in Brisbane, and it seems to fit our needs at the moment, so off we go.

In making this decision, which took some deciding, we were both aware that there would be some significant costs involved. After all, this is not the first time either of us has had to pull up stakes and move halfway around the globe. There are, of course, two options for this kind of move:

• Sell everything that you own (usually at a loss), and head to the airport free of any material encumbrances beyond a backpack.
• Pack all of your stuff and ship it.

On our way here, which was just over three years ago, we took the first option. It seemed to make sense, because we didn't really own anything that was worth keeping (for the most part). Selling my mountain bike at a considerable discount hurt the most - if I remember correctly it put me in such a bad mood that I behaved like a spoilt child for the rest of the day. Conversely, selling the car for the princely sum of $100 to a wreckers yard on our way to the airport felt liberating and vaguely bohemian.

In the meantime, we have replaced all of the various accoutrements of modern day life. One of the advantages of starting out fresh is that you don't end up with a mish mash of possessions, a conglomeration of dissimilar gifts, found objects and purchased bits and pieces. This time around, we had the advantage of living in a place where good design is considered a human right, a place where clever people wearing rimless glasses create beautiful furniture. I am also blessed with a girlfriend who has a discerning eye for that kind of thing. We had a lot of fun putting together our little apartment.

Consequently, we don't want to sell all this stuff that we invested so much time and effort in acquiring. But when I sat down to work out exactly how much it would cost, well, it turns out that sitting down was a good idea. Which is fair enough I suppose, considering the carbon footprint involved. I should probably plant a bunch of trees or something. But it still hurts. In fact, it hurts so much that I have just taken my old job back (in exactly what capacity I am yet to find out, but I can be sure that it will involve either throwing drunks out at 2am, or scrubbing pots/floors/grills). I really thought I had left the hospitality industry for good. While I have enjoyed my various hospitality jobs, they always felt like a means to an end, a way to pay for the other things in my life that I valued more, like travel or education.

So I feel like I have failed in a way. In leaving the industry, I thought I had finally reached a point in my life where I no longer had to take jobs that meant that I worked while others played, where I had to prioritise work over friends and family. Because I never really had the passion that hospitality requires, the passion that inspires people to work 80 hour weeks and invest most, if not all, of their waking energies into an often thankless job. I only had the desperation.

And now I am desperate again, but I hope it is not for too long this time.

olfactastic

I have a terrible sense of smell. This is not entirely a bad thing, and for the most part it doesn't bother me. Like my slightly dodgy eyesight I discovered only a couple of years ago, it wasn't something I thought about very often. Occasionally, though, I would realise just how bad my sense of smell is. Just like those times when I'd be standing at a bus stop and be the last person to work out which bus was coming, my lack of olfactory finesse became obvious when people around would say things like "What's burning?", and "You're not seriously going to put that milk in your coffee, are you?" This can be something of a handicap if you are working with food, for example. I once worked with bartender whose palette was incredible, and I'm pretty sure the guy could smell ultraviolet light.

Generally though, I don't let it bother me. After all, there isn't much you can do about it: being annoyed about not being able to smell much is not the same as being frustrated about my level of fitness, or the fact that I am still barely speak Swedish after living here for nearly 3 years. No amount of nasal push-ups or scent exercises will help me.

In some ways, having a poor sense of smell can even be a good thing. I once shared a dorm room with a guy who was a walking biohazard – in the 4 months that I slept within kicking distance of this little snoring machine, I saw him shower three times, and I once caught him scrubbing the shit stains out of his pants – and I never once wished for a better sense of smell. So it's not all bad. I've been to some really nasty places and never had to vomit, and on those occasions when I have been obliged to clean up someone else's vomit (bartending is a glamorous job at 3am on a Sunday morning), I've not taken a whiff and felt the urge, so to speak.

There are times, however, when I get a glimpse of how evocative smells can be, and feel like I am missing out. Last night as I was climbing into bed I smelt that non-specific smell-of-the-one-you-love, the one that is hard to describe because it doesn't smell like anything at all. It is clearly one of those chemical things where a bunch of molecules latch on to a receptor and send an electric shock straight into the brainstem, hitting all those feel-good, comfort, security, just-got-home-after-weeks-away spots, turning on the endorphins and making it all better. I could manage a better sense of smell if it meant more of that.

living vicariously

In some ways it's to be expected – to quote the song, "the weather outside is frightful" – so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that I am spending significant amounts of time without leaving the house. On top of the crappy weather, my class load has dropped to nil (so as to give me ample time to concentrate on writing my thesis), and I have made the oft-dreamt about (and much maligned) transition to a tele-commute, freelance job. Freelancing, it has to be said, takes some adjusting. It's not just the infrequent (and much smaller) paychecks. It's that I have to exercise some self-control, which I have discovered is something I am not very good at (and which partially explains the small and infrequent paychecks).

So instead of doing paid work or finishing my thesis, I have become addicted to the internet. Addicted in general and to a number of blogs in particular. I only worked this out the other day, when I was on the phone to my mother, and I struggled to find a suitable answer to the question "What's new?" There was very little that was "new", aside from the exciting developments between Brad O'Farrell and his cat, or the new recipe that I found over here.

It's a good thing that winter only lasts till spring, and I start frothing at the mouth if I'm not outside for most of my waking hours. It's also a good thing that I have a wireless internet connection, a laptop, and a relatively sheltered spot on my veranda where I can sit naked in the sun.

a dilemma

It has been a little while since I stopped long enough to actually contribute to this thing, but I haven't stopped thinking about it. It sort of sits there, floating somewhere at the back of my head, occasionally popping up (usually when I should be concentrating on something else, but often enough in the shower for me to wish I had some sort of whiteboard in there). Most of the ideas I have are lost in the noise, which irritates me. I keep thinking I should keep a notebook with me, but I am just not that organized most of the time. There is a collection of notes scrawled on the back of envelopes scattered around my apartment - I must do some of my best thinking after opening the mail - to the point where I have fished old envelopes out of the recycle bin just to keep a supply on hand.

But right now I keep coming back to this idea of contribution. This whole Web 2.0 caper is based on the idea of unstructured and open contribution (for more on this I thoroughly recommend anything written by Lawrence Lessig or Clay Shirky). Which is fine, great really. I think the real potential of the web and this sort of communication in general is in allowing and encouraging people to express themselves and connect with each other - great ideas don't come out of nowhere, and really great ideas don't come out of one individual. Of course, I am well aware of the enormous amount of crap out there. The web is full of garbage, but really clever search algorithms help to sift this out, and that is why Google is going to take over the world. And besides, who am I to say that there is no inherent value in 4chan, goatse.cx, that annoying Boxxy girl or any of the other memes that clog up the interwebs?

So contribution is great. I love twitter, and while I might be a little late to the party, last.fm is my new toy. I started a tumblr site. I would like to think that this little rant is a small contribution. But the other day when I was describing some of these things to my girlfriend, she pointed out the fact that I am incredibly paranoid about privacy, identity theft and putting anything about myself online. So I am faced with a dilemma: post inane bullshit that has nothing to do with myself or what I think (which I kind of ruled out in my last post), or pony up, lose some of the paranoia (which may only be a smokescreen hiding my suspicion that I don't actually have anything interesting to say) and start writing.

Or I suppose I could post pictures of lolcats.

text

There are a lot of things that I think about adding to this blog. I find myself spending increasing amounts of time screwing around on the internet, and there are plenty of things that I think deserve more attention, but I am reluctant to turn this into just another list of interesting things I found. I'm pretty sure that particular niche is well covered. Similarly, I have resisted the urge to post photos (partially because I am a terrible photographer), or talk about any of the other things I do when I'm not doing this.

I have eclectic tastes which would make for a confused theme if I were to include (or even reference) them here, and I think theme is important. I suspect this is a manifestation of the compartmentalizing side of my personality, the same side that is responsible for my slightly manic filing habits and the almost obsessive list writing that I indulge in. Life is full of distractions, and if I can keep one small corner of it free of clutter and at least a little organized, I feel better able to cope with the rest of it.

I am by no means an effective multi-tasker, but (and I am loathe to jump into the cliché, but here goes anyway) modern life is increasingly demanding this of us. Email, SMS, social networking sites, twitter all encourage the expectation that not only are we always available (before mobile phones, and yes I can remember that far back, who would make a phone call after 9pm?), but that we are also always on top of whatever is going on.

So this is my little protest. My little calm corner of the world. I am not going to talk about the US presidential election. I am not going to post links to marathon training plans. I am not going to show mouth-watering photos of amazing food, or talk about what album I am listening to at the moment, or which books I am reading.

Which leaves me with a fundamental problem: what am I going to talk about?

bachelor life

In keeping with the extended gaps between posts, I thought I was about time that I added something to this increasingly neglected blog. Little has changed in a metaphysical sense, but that is just a reflection of the state of mind I am in when it occurs to me to jot down some random thoughts; generally I am avoiding doing something that is at once important, but essentially boring. Tonight's tasks: write a shallow little paper about some international conflict or other, edit a small mountain of very dry policy documents, and clean the apartment before my girlfriend gets home. That last one is looking especially enticing. I normally jump at mindless cleaning tasks when I am procrastinating, but recently my dearly beloved has been spending two nights a week in Stockholm, an event that unleashes the hidden sloth inside of me. No longer am I washing windows or dusting the bookcases. Now I have proper cleaning to do: collecting a veritable mountain of beer cans that seem to collect on every flat surface in the house, and picking up the underwear that I apparently leave all over the place, telescoped into little hollow stumps. From this I have determined that I become naked almost as soon as I get home, and I must be about 70% beer by volume.