current swedish language learning stack

• daily duolingo (i'm on a 434-day streak)
• reading a novel (den förlorade liljan) for pleasure
• reading and listening to easy news articles on 8 sidor and looking up unfamiliar words with the native dictionary and translation features on the site
• watching hundarna, a drama series on svt play, with swedish audio and swedish subtitles, with much pausing and explanation from my fiancé whenever i don't follow something 
• watching love is blind, with english audio but swedish subtitles (this one is the most passive, but helps a lot to just increase exposure and also helps with what one would say in swedish in specific circumstances; this is how i learned the phrase "låta bli," which i had seen a lot while reading, but didn't know the specific way it's used)
• watching this interview with zara larsson in swedish (side note: i love her dress and kinda want to pin it on my pinterest). i haven't seen much of her but like her in a general sense, and got a video recommended on youtube of her talking about what makes her proud to be swedish. i noticed i liked her voice in swedish and wanted to hear a full conversation, so i found the aforementioned interview. i'm watching it without any subtitles to practice listening comprehension (she speaks very clearly, as opposed to the oft-mumbly or faster/less clear dialogue on hundarna)
• workin through form i fokus, a language workbook my fiancé got me for my birthday <3 

don't cry over spilled radlers

after the gym today, we stopped at the grocery store for a few things, including our beloved alcohol-free radlers. our favorite kind was sold out, so we got some blood-orange flavored ones to try, and some regular flavored ones from a different brand than usual. 

we checked out and started to leave, when suddenly one of the paper bags bottomed out and bottles came crashing to the floor. we stared for a second in disbelief, then sprung into action mode, moving our other bags out of the way and salvaging what we could from the broken bag. my fiancé reentered the store to get new bags, and alerted a staff member on the way. 

the employee appeared with a hand broom, dust pan, and trash can, sweeping up the bottle shards. my fiancé returned and asked if they had any paper we could use to mop up the liquid. the employee shrugged and said it's fine, they have a mop (which turned out to be a big industrial zamboni-esque mop device). 

then we re-bagged the loose items, making sure to distribute the remaining bottles adequately, and went on our merry way home. as we were walking, we remarked that things like this just happen sometimes, and it's nice how we can just accept that and treat it like no big deal. 

maybe the coolest part of being an adult is accidentally breaking and spilling things and no one yelling at you. though my fiancé pointed out it would still be no big deal even if the employees had been sour about it—we're still adults and it's still something that just happens sometimes. 

when i was kid, i was notorious for spilling things. which sounds kind of funny now that i say it; it's like saying, "when i was a kid, i was notorious for being a kid." anyway, i was even dubbed "the spill queen." i never got in super big trouble for it, but it definitely could put everyone in a bad mood, which felt awful. 

something about this identity stuck with me as i grew up. whenever i spilled something, i'd chuckle to myself and say, "long may she reign." but lately i've been realizing just how much spills and messes are simply something that happens sometimes, not a special idiosyncratic flaw of mine. 

i hope when we have kids, we can hold on to this ability to not cry over spilled radlers. i don't think it's the end of the world for a parent to get upset about a spill, but it sure does feel amazing to remain chill, and just clean up the mess and move on. 

the broken blood-orange radlers

 

every day feels like my birthday

i used to care a lot about my birthday, to the point of having a days-until-my-birthday countdown as soon as christmas ended, and wearing a designated birthday dress for several years in a row. 

this birthday and the last, i find myself caring about my birthday less and less. i think part of my lingering enthusiasm for the day, after accounting for the childhood passion for the occasion, was enjoying feeling special and prioritized and extra extra loved on my birthday. 

but now, i feel extra extra loved every day, so my birthday stands out much less. of course it's still nice to have a day to celebrate me, but my fiancé loves me so well, i already feel celebrated on a daily basis. 

i keep thinking about a lyric from taylor swift's song i can do it with a broken heart: "i'm so depressed, i act like it's my birthday every day." 

i feel the opposite. my version would be, "i'm so in love, i feel like it's my birthday every day." 

my fiancé on valentine's day last year

ideally i'd add a photo to every post

in an ideal world, every blogpost of mine would have a photo accompanying it. as you can see in the photo below, it's much nicer when the thumbnail for each post is a photo, rather than just a placeholder letter. 

some days i don't have a relevant photo to add. i guess i could just put an unrelated photo and specify "photo unrelated." or try a bit harder to see if any photos i have could, by some stretch of the imagination, be relevant. 

but you see, try being the operative word here. any extra trying means more friction, and i generally try to reduce any and all friction on the road to hitting publish. 

we'll see. perhaps as i get more comfortable with the process, adding a photo will feel less and less burdensome, such that i end up able to add one every day. i did also consider retroactively adding them to past posts, but something about that feels dishonest—i guess, again, i could just specify "photo added later." 

it's my birthday!

i'm now the age that my parents were when they had me. which also means i'm exactly half their age. i think. this morning when i first realized this, i spent a good thirty seconds making various befuddled facial expressions, to my fiancé's delight, as i tried to work it through in my head: would being the age your parent was when they had you always mean you're exactly half their age in that moment? but wait, my fiancé was half his mom's age last year...why are we having this experience so close together if we're more than one year apart? working through mental math problems is not my strong suit. 

it's my last year being in my twenties. it's been a good run. next year, my fiancé and i will both be thirty-somethings. something about that makes me emotional—as if we're joining closer together, rather than reaching our arms out to each other across decades. 

my late twenties have been great so far: my first serious relationship, moving in together, getting engaged. having a resurgence in religiosity after feeling the unconditional love we have for each other. moving to a new continent and starting two new languages. 

twenty-eight in particular was a very good year. true love and sheer determination brought me into being a functional person: no longer wracked by immovable procrastination, persistent lethargy, and general household chaos. 

may twenty-nine bring even more blessings!

birthday flowers from my fiancé's parents <3

crazy how inspired i get by interacting with other people

i tend to feel like i have to invent everything from first principles. but when i talk to other people, i'm like, "wow! that's a lot of surface area for new ideas!"*

with my writing, my impulse is to isolate, and only write things that come from my own mind and aren't colored by anyone else's thoughts. well, maybe that's not exactly true, i do like being inspired, but i often feel like my mind is too spongy, and if i don't take care to do otherwise, i'll absorb others thoughts and then not be able to articulate my own without mentioning theirs. which isn't a bad thing, but feels...less than ideal. 

it's not that i believe anyone has to or can be entirely original without ever being inspired by others. in fact, i think the opposite. but it's like when i self-produced a little album on bandcamp back in high school: i did every single part of the process myself, because figuring out how to give credit or payment—i didn't have any money and wanted to sell the album to raise money to study abroad, and it felt bad to profit on someone else's work without paying them, even if they would agree to it—was more trouble than it was worth. 

i think another reason i try to keep everything "in-house" so to speak is that naming others feels...personal? vulnerable? i'm not exactly sure why. this blog, for example, is under the same pseudonym as my twitter account (and so is my youtube and tiktok). but for some reason, naming twitter people in this new context feels quite strange. i thought maybe writing that out would illuminate some more reasons why, but that's all i got for now. it just feels weird. i guess one other point is that despite being so active and open on the internet, i'm actually quite a private person, and lots of things feel oddly uncomfortable to bare to an unfamiliar context. 

because of this approach, i can get super in my head and lost in my own ideas, in a way that disconnects me from lots of other things i might have new thoughts on. or in other words, i may stray from articulating things we all experience, which is an area i definitely would like to articulate. i do love describing my own stuff of course, but there's something particularly delicious about connecting it to a more universal experience. 

when i hear others' thoughts, and especially when i get a chance to riff with them, it's like entire new domains open up in my minds, with entirely new thoughts and connections and feelings. and all of a sudden i have this entire idea for a blogpost that just spills out of me, rather than trying to pull it out with effort. 

the impetus for this post, by the way, was a comment left on my previous post, in which i asked for comments if anyone is actually reading my posts. ege replied and shared some of his own blogposts where he had mentioned my writing. he has been experiencing similar things in his blog-writing endeavor, noticing as i have that less than daily frequency results in ever more friction, aptly stating, "Pausing harmed the process and only cure was doing more." it was great to read another blogger's thoughts about the process, and i was also inspired by him naming his inspirations, rather than vaguely gesturing at them as i tend to do. 

it is quite interesting that i have more of an aversion to linking other things when blogging; i don't seem to have that problem at all on twitter. in fact i quite enjoy quote tweeting and interweaving. 

anyway, i very much enjoy interacting with others and seeing how it leads me down paths i wouldn't have pondered otherwise. 

*while writing this post, my fiancé came and asked me what i was writing about. this paragraph is verbatim how i described it to him, which feels like a great example of how my writing changes when i interact with other people. in this case, i more succinctly summed up the idea, which i perhaps wouldn't have remembered to do if i hadn't articulated it to him out loud. 

if you're seeing this, leave a comment!

comments mean a lot to me, especially if it's about something specific i've written, whether you have something to say about it or it made you think something else or whatever else. 

morale can get pretty low some days, even though i keep on publishing regardless. it's helpful to know that people are reading and care about what i'm writing. 

so if you see this, or any of my other blogposts, and it makes you think or feel something, i'd love to hear about it! 

:)

creating with my beloved

did you know that dreams really do come true? one of my grandest and most precious dreams was that my beloved would also be my creative partner—now that is my reality. 

so far, we haven't worked together on any huge projects, but daily life with us is such that at any moment, either of us could spring into creative action, and be either supported or collaborated with. 

from cooking to music to drawing—and today, fashion! 

i've been thinking more about style lately, and modeling, and fashion in general. while doing laundry the other day, one of our bed sheets ripped, and instead of throwing it away, i had the idea that i could use it to experiment with a sewing machine i had gotten from a friend who moved away. 

i had acquired the sewing machine right before one of our many trips, trusting i'd remember it and pull it out to play with at a later date. today was that day. 

i'm not really sure what my plan was. well, my plan was to literally pull it out and play with it, but in my imagination, it somehow got itself into a "ready to use" state and all i had to do was stick some fabric in it and go to town. 

but when i got it out of the box, i realized i actually have no clue how any of it works, and no clue how to even think about getting started. i figured maybe my sister could teach me when she visits, and i'd have to wait until then. 

to my surprise, however, my fiancé revealed he does know how to use a sewing machine, though it's been a while since he has. so he began reading the german manual and setting up the thread and settings so the machine was ready for me to use. 

so i guess it did, after all, get itself into a "ready to use" state for me to play with, just with some help from my fiancé. it wasn't shocking that he has yet another skill up his sleeve, but it does fill me with awe every time he reveals a new one. 

ah yes, i actually skipped ahead a bit. before we got out the sewing machine, we had to locate the torn bed sheet, which had been washed and placed somewhere unknown to either of us. once we found it, we started jokingly draping it on me as if it were already a garment. 

but to both of our surprise, we genuinely enjoyed doing so, and we worked to shape an interesting silhouette out of the crinkled fabric. we took a step back and surveyed our handiwork. 

"that's actually not half bad," i said, admiring myself in the mirror. the sheet harmonized with the mixed-texture outfit i was already wearing, and the overall effect was messy-on-purpose avant-garde. it was absolutely something a designer would send me out on the runway with. 

i giddily took a video of it, then ran off to another room after grabbing my phone-stand to take some cool photos. i had been wanting to practice modeling recently, and now i had a cool outfit to practice in—one that my beloved and i collaborated on!

as i snapped photos and adjusted angles, from the other room i heard my fiancé turn on the piano and start tinkering away at a whimsical jingle he improvised the other day—one he thinks is a bit silly but i earnestly adore. 

i took a moment to marvel at how insanely, unbelievably, heart-stoppingly lucky i am. to have a partner i feel comfortable being creatively vulnerable with, who puts his hand in mine and chases after creative visions with me, who reveres the golden spark in every silly little creative act of courage. to feel supported in being creatively ambitious, and to give the same support back. 

i'm excited to keep exploring clothes and fashion, and now sewing. i squealed with delight when i successfully made some trial stitches. 

life is good!

bed sheet + matching outfit x two creative explorers = avant garde deliciousness