I can breathe out again, the overly-long Stockholm post has finally been written up and posted. It took me much longer than I thought it would…

LOOK OUT, rant ahead.

I’ve been so caught up with everything since I came back, I still have my luggage to unpack and books everywhere. My room is in chaos right now, and I don’t have the energy to deal with it.

I suspect I have a case of the February blues… I usually feel particularly down when it hits this time of the year, the sky is gray, the trees are dead, the sun isn’t out much and the snow is melting into gray muck…and it’s still just cold and disgusting. I’ve been very short with people these few days. I think I need a break from everything that’s going on in school, and by that I mean everything but my studies.

Exams are coming up in two weeks and I have a lot of studying to do. 

It’s as if time is just rushing by, past me and beyond. I can hardly catch up to it and all my thoughts are as organized as a whirlwind blowing into an archive. And all I feel is fatigue. I hardly know what I want anymore. I’m too tired to be social and civil, and yet I’m too lonely to be a social hermit. My sleeping pattern is non-existant, I can’t sleep when I’m supposed to and I can hardly wake up despite 8 hours of sleep.

I probably like a person more than I should though thankfully the person seems to have no clue about it. I also feel that going to the gym doesn’t quite still the itching restlessness in me anymore. I don’t feel satisfied after a good workout these days. I just feel even more tired, and training almost starts to feel like a chore [I can’t even believe I am saying this….] I just go to the gym to get my classes done for that hour of being somewhere else in both mind and body, then I’m done and I take a shower and go home… But I’ve begun to switch around with my training schedule so that I don’t fall into a boring routine that I’ll grow sick of in another week or two, and that seems to have helped a bit. 

Someone in my circle of …’friends’, has let me down. Me and someone else, which is incredibly disappointing. I have always chosen to see the good in people. And when you have someone betray your trust, it’s incredibly disheartening to continue with the same mindset. You go on wondering who will be the next to try and ram into your walls you’ve set up to guard your innermost thoughts and secrets- only to tear them down and turn them against you.

And I know I’m being whiny as few with my petty problems, but they’re my problems and they- among others- have been weighing me down a lot these past few weeks.  

I’m not my jovial self. I can’t get over how grumpy a person I’ve become. Everything is in a bad place right now and I don’t know how it all happened in the first place.

I’m angry.
And I don’t get angry very often, but now that I am I don’t know how to stop…

On a more diplomatic note, I have a lot of things [unrelated to school] going on in the week, and I’m not sure I want to do any of it. 

I think I need my own time to unwind and sink back into who I am.

I miss the old Ashley.

….And I don’t think it’s helping that I’m still reading The Bell Jar. The book is so extremely depressing, and I just can’t wait to finish it and go on to something pink and jolly. I’m definitely through with reading about depressions for a good while, or I’ll sure sink into one myself.

Stupid February blues.

I’ve been so bi-polar today, I almost caught myself by surprise, and that says quite a lot.

Being sleep-deprived and stressed does not help one attain a stable mentality, so I discovered. 

I was really tired after a whole weekend of playing games, jumping around, disturbing people playing games, and just having fun in general. It’s a good thing we don’t have these LAN-parties too often, or I’d probably never get anything done during the weekends but play games… At least I got more sleep this time around, last geekend in November, I think I got a total of 10 hours of sleep spread over 3 days…

I left for home on Saturday night and got home at around 4 AM, insanely tired, and jumped straight into bed.

On Sunday I felt bad enough for not training since Thursday, so I dragged my lazy butt to the gym for an hour of spinning with Adrian. It proved once again that exhaustion and training do not go hand-in-hand. 

Today was another gray and drab Monday. Urgh, Mondays…

It started off with my oversleeping a whole hour, rushing out the door to my busses that were being late, or too early, getting shoved against the window by some girl who had too many things to carry and reeked of nauseating perfume. Closed my eyes, counted to ten, realised this wasn’t a bad dream, plugged in my music and took out my kindle to shut the rest of the world out.
[I’m usually a rather nice person, I guess Mondays just aren’t my thing.] 

But on the bright side, I made it in time for my lecture with 4 minutes to spare! 

After school, I ran amuck in town looking for a particular adapter that no one seemed to even understand I was looking for, so that completely made me fall flat on my face, and that was after stomping around town for a little more than an hour.

When I got home there was an e-mail from Yves Rocher. I’d asked them about a gift I was supposed to receive from them, as I’d recruited Piggie to sign up for a membership, and wondered if our order had been misplaced. They confirmed that the order was already dealt with and paid for but that my gift was with the friend I recruited. [Why in world would you send MY gift to my FRIEND’S adress?!]

-And being in the splendid sunny-mood I was in all day, I wrote back, holding back as much anger and malice as I could because it obviously isn’t the end of the world, but seeing as it was a gift voucher and none of us knew it would end up with Piggie and it’s now gone missing……I still got increasingly mad with each word I typed out. I ended up just pointing out and criticizing the company flaws and how utterly thoughtless of them it was…. Etc. etc. [You get the gist]

After dinner, mummy and I drove to some shops for some quick browsing, and we ended up buying me a pink blanket made of the softest most comfortable and cosy material known to me. I am in love with this baby pink blanket! 

It all got better in the end. I ordered my adapter from the US instead, I got to take out my agitations in an e-mail to Yves-Rocher, then I screamed about how life was unfair because I had a bad day….And then I got a blanket for it.

My day has involved so many “first world”-problems, and I know it’s a ridiculous thing, so I think I’ll shut my mental pie-hole here and now. 

People can be so aggressive these days. 

Either I’ve been out of Malmo for too long, like not being in town too often anymore as I spend the majority of my waking time in Lund… But coming back always seems to surprise me in a way. Especially on buses. People aren’t friendly, they snap at you, especially when the bus is jam-packed. I understand their annoyance, I’m annoyed too but what am I supposed to do about it? I’m in the same situation as you and when it’s minus degrees every single bus in Malmo breaks down due to the cold. It’s a recurring problem, we’ve had it for the past 4 Winters, deal with it, eat your anger up and don’t shove. 

But no, people insist on shoving their way on to the bus, elbowing as many people they can, while trying to get on the bus as fast as possible. What’s the point, really?

This is what I’d like to call, unnecessary acts of agression. They just piss everyone else off to boot.

Furthermore, now that the snow has turned into deadly ice, it seems that salting the pavements isn’t something that has struck anyone’s mind- more reasons to hate snow and cold in January…..

Earlier today as I was passing my time in town, on my own- I was browsing shops at random. Like an arrow, I shot to the nearest bookstore in sight. 
Even though I do 90% of my book-reading on my kindle nowadays, doesn’t mean I still don’t enjoy the occasional bookshop browsing.

I was a little shocked when I stepped in.

There was one section of the store that set up different e-readers and sold iPhone and iPad-covers…..Why would a bookstore have iPhone and iPad-covers when they don’t even sell the iPhone and iPad…? How is an iPhone even relevant to the contents of a bookstore?

I don’t even know, but I decided I wouldn’t dwell on that or I’d just get annoyed for no reason [as I so often get over nothingness…], especially when I have this week’s goal to adhere to as well.

So I browsed the youth-book’s section. The disappointment I felt was beyond what I could’ve imagined.

I went there in hopes of finding some of the books I’d read as a child and was astonished when names like Maria Gripe, Kerstin Sundh, Michelle Magorian, Lene Kaaberbøl, Jostein Gaarder and so many others, weren’t there. They weren’t even in stock, they didn’t have them and some were apparently out of print…?!
Where I would usually have found a great variety of fiction, fantasy, crime novels, classics, and even religious stories, for youths- was now a tiny section bombarded with manga-books and vampire novels, shoved in between the odd Harry Potter book. And that was it. If you looked at the next shelf you’d find the odd ‘Sara the partygirl’, most likely the follow-up to ‘Sara the shopping-girl’. 

I was at a bookstore and the majority of the books there were now health/diet/exercise books. Boardgames, toys of fictional characters and moleskin journals were what took up the rest of the two-story bookstore, not to mention the iPad/iPhone-corner..[Drat, I wasn’t supposed to bring that up again… My bad!] 

What’s happening to the literary world as we know it? 

If this is what it looks like right now, what’s going to happen a few years from now? Are bookstores ever going to revert back to the spellbinding power they always had over me with their immense collection of books of both new and old? Or are they really just steadily declining into a spiral of crap as much of today has managed to prove…. I’m scared.

If shopping,party and vampire-books are all that remain at the youth section today….Well then, society has no right to judge the youthlings of today. They can’t help that they’ve been brainwashed by not having any other options to choose from. [Not in that particular store, anyway…] No wonder they aren’t acting sanely anymore. They have nothing to keep them sane. 

What happened to the great authors of my time and way back when? 
What happened to romance novels being something from an Austen book with realistic conflicts rather than the lives of an insensitive whiny teenage girl and a sadistic vampire?  
What happened to Sherlock Holmes, the famous five, and Nancy Drew? 
What happened to thought-provoking and educational books for pre-teens?

I’m so utterly disappointed and outraged over this.

The written word is amongst the most precious that humans have laid forth and expanded over the years. Literature is something we can all relate to, it is a part of our childhood, our adulthood and more. 

What happened to reading your child a goodnight story rather than letting them sit and drool in front of the TV? 

All around me these days, children, teenagers, adults- all sit with their pocketgames or phones, and nothing will divert their attention. 

I’m going to end the ranting here, because I just realised I actually had to scroll more than twice to get to the top of this post.

All I’m trying to get at is that I’m all for the wave of development and growth as such, I’m just scared that what we came to know of in our younger years is diminishing into nothingness. Will my children, grandchildren, great grandchildren even know who Harry Potter was? Will they even have heard any H.C. Andersen stories by then? 

At least there’s one place I know I can turn to in my hour of need.

The library. 

It won’t ever turn me down….

Or?

To no one’s surprise, I’m sitting in my bed listening to Someone like You, by Adele. 

I should be sleeping but I thought I’d fire off a quick post before doing so, as life updates are always so important. 

Come to think of it, I didn’t actually have that much to share. 

Geekend ended yesterday (Sunday), and since I’d missed my last bus late on Saturday, I ended up staying awake until 6:43 AM to catch the first morning bus back to Malmo. I eventually got home before 8 AM and after a refreshing shower, I collapsed in bed and slept till 3 PM. Talk about half a day gone in a flash.

I’ve been taking it easy on the partying these past few weekends, they’ve definitely been needed- but I’ll probably be heading out sometime this weekend, no crazy parties though, I promise. 

What else…

Oh! 

This morning I received a message in my facebook inbox about the whole status-updating for breast cancer awareness thing. This year it’s about copying a sentence that says: “I’m moving to -blank- for -blank- months!” 
The first blank is assigned according to which month you’re born in and the second blank is your birthdate. 

As this is supposed to be a secret among women only, I couldn’t comment much about my status ( “I’m moving to Miami for 25 months!” ) and reveal its purpose. I almost regret having posted it now. Even though I more or less forwarded the message to 80% of the females on my facebook list, people are still asking me why I’m moving to Miami. [And the ones asking are more or less the females…]- So after most misunderstandings being cleared up, [i.e. forwarding the message to people and reassuring them that I will NOT be moving to Miami for over two years….why Miami of all places anyway?? How does it make any sense for me to move there now?]- I’m sure there will be more people asking.

Maybe these form of breast cancer awareness updates aren’t the best. It seems to be giving me more work explaining why I’m not going to Miami than it does to help spread awareness. Or…? On top of that, I feel bad about it because people we know in the States were getting worked up about it.. Poop.

I just realised the title of this post comes from the first book of Lemony Snicket’s “A series of unfortunate event“-series. 

But safe to say, the beginning of this week has been a rocky one. I got home so late last night I ended up with just 5 hours of sleep in preparation of this morning’s tournament, but I’ll get to that in just a bit.

Disclaimer: Rant ahead.

Yesterday was one of the last days we were showing Transformers 3 at the big cinema, and we were going about things as usual when right before the second showing of the movie was supposed to start; people came out of the theatre and asked what was going on. Clueless as we were behind the register, we soon found out that the projector/machine that shows the 3D-effects of the movie had broken and we had no way of fixing it. Instead, a new projector/machine was ordered but wasn’t going to arrive until the next day. The alternative for our customers were to either see the movie without 3D effects, or leave. Either way, our customers were of course compensated.

They were okay with all this, which was a relief. 
Later for our 9 PM-viewing however….
People weren’t as understanding. Even though we had called about a dozen people with reservations, explaining the situation and asking them if they were still interested in seeing the movie, they arrived at the cinema cranky and rude.

We had to lock the seats of the cinema to keep other people from buying new tickets, and we were basically only set on letting people with reservations and pre-paid tickets watch the movie. Those who still wanted to, that is.

After having about 20 people in a row, yelling at my face telling me how stupid, incompetent, uneducated and worthless I was- [for not being able to fix the projector…Yes…exactly..] and this is while they were getting compensation tickets etc.etc.etc. for the trouble, I went to the storage room and just shut myself away for a little while.

Thankfully, my colleagues are the most understanding people in the business, so we talked it all out, and finally laughed at our frustrations. 

We had a giant cut-out standee to build for Harry Potter but after an hour of working on it, we were roughly 1/6th through with building it and it was past midnight. The transformers movie was about to end and we still had work to do, so in the end I left at 12:45 AM. 

Aren’t I grateful for Tuesday.

No work today, just golf tournament-playing today, which didn’t go very well either. I did have fun, and I guess that’s the most important part, either way- I’m happy I got to play today.

The round took about 5 hours and after leaving the house at 8 AM I was home again by 3:30 PM.

At 5:50 PM I took the bus into town for bodypump training with Adrian. I really don’t know how I managed to play 5 hours of golf and plow through another hour of painful weightlifting with just 5 hours of sleep and a week of inconsistent sleeping hours.

Tomorrow I’ll be working the premier of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part TWO  from 10 AM to 10 PM. Let’s hope it runs smoothly… [Dear Lord, please let it run smoothly…]

Today, my coursemate Sara and I grabbed some lunch in town and had a long talk about all kinds of things. 

Somewhere in between, we established that people have two personalities in life. Their “public” one, and their “internet” personality. On the internet, it seems, people are a lot less afraid of being who they really are. There’s something about this “almost”-anonymity that makes them all the braver, they’re so unafraid of being themselves. But most importantly, people, once online, are just themselves. 
I wonder, why is it so hard being yourself in public anyway? What’s the worst thing that can happen, other than making a monkey out of yourself? [Unless you’re some kind of Nazi-rasist person…] 

What would the worst consequences be for acting you, and being you? Cast away the veil of uncertainty, no one will judge you. And who cares if they do? You’re brave enough to be you, and they aren’t.

This is a subject that has irked me since way back I can remember. Especially in that delicate phase of life [the inevitable teens..]- people are more easily swayed than usual. What’s the big whoop hanging around the cool cats unless it’s who you really are? Why do people hurt themselves to “fit in” with others?

Before I get too carried away and stop making sense altogether [I suspect I stopped making sense a few paragraphs ago..]- I’ll just end this post sometime soon…

To my own surprise I was assigned another shift for Sunday which means I’ll be working a three days in a row this weekend, starting tomorrow.

Guess who’s going to be exhausted by the end of the week?