Whose Body is This Anyway?

This is as much skin as I’ll show on the interwebs.

No full frontal nudity? NO FULL FRONTAL NUDITY.

«Той, где на монетах –

Молодость моя,

Той России – нету.

Как и той меня».

[Марина Цветаева, «Страна»]

“That one, where on the coins –

my youth remains,

that Russia – is no more.

Like she I was before.”

[Marina Tsvetaeva, “Country”]

My cousin sometimes chronicles her thoughts in a blog called Jag tänker nog för mycket [I Probably Think Too Much]; it occurs to me sometimes that it would be a suitable title for this transcription of my own thoughts. Also I probably think too much. Yesterday Mrs S expressed a wish to read the novel which I wrote during my first years in Russia and worked especially intensively on while in Siberia – Russian Dogs – and after she read and even elaborated on some of the more prominent ideas from Moonlight, Hide My Shadow, I did not hesitate to share also this work of fiction with her. As I have lived many years abroad now, almost all of what I have written in Swedish over the years has never been read by anyone and I haven’t had anyone with whom I may discuss ideas expressed in my native tongue for a long time. Yesterday I decided to first pick one version of Russian Dogs to send to Mrs S – since I wrote it for several years it exists in no less than six versions in the original Swedish [the version of it which was published in Russian in 2009, Во всех комнатах твоих (In All Your Rooms), is very much a different novel] – I eventually settled on version number three [which I think was the one I sent to the publisher in the summer of 2006 but I’m not sure anymore] and decided to read the whole thing through before sending it to her. I’m lucky to have the time and the privacy and the freedom to spend six hours at night reading alone and undisturbed if I feel like it [while Critical Companion is writing and reading her own fictional creations next to me, but we never talk about what we’re doing – it is sort of a silent agreement that we write for ourselves and not for each other]. Yesterday I explained to Mrs S about the troubles I’m having at narrating my Russian experiences in the form of an anti-memoir; I boldy declared that my diaries, notebooks, poetry as well as blog entries from the time period are useless as reference material to these six years lived in Russia. The diaries are narrow in perspective and disordered in chronology [I only write by hand when I travel and this does not happen regularly]; the notebooks function mainly to harbor sketches and plans for future novels, short stories, and articles; the poetry might as well be about some other girl in a completely different country at any given point in human history; and the blog belongs to a post-modern genre designated to be consumed immediately by an omnipresent audience. The one reliable source I have for what I thought and saw and felt about Russia when I was there is the novels I wrote then. Nowhere in my personal inscriptions can I find such articulated, poetical, and even beautiful representations of my Siberian experience as in Russian Dogs; nowhere else am I so excited and thrilled and unconditionally fascinated by the place I’m living in and the language I’m using to write about it. What struck me the most about Russian Dogs while re-reading it yesterday [something I probably would not have done if Mrs S hadn’t entered my life as ‘designated reader’] was how it is first and foremost a love affair with language – it is written as if the author had suddenly discovered she has a language of her own and wants to try it from every angle, stretch it to its outmost limits, and see how well it can encapsulate in every word she knows [but sometimes doesn’t know how to use properly] this chaotic and unstructured lived experience. I don’t think I’ve ever been as absolutely absorbed in the pure beauty and endless possibilities of the Swedish language as I was when I wrote Russian Dogs; I don’t know if I ever will be again. Perhaps it appears strange that a novel I thought at the time to be about loving Siberia should turn out six years later to be a novel about loving Swedish, but I guess that sometimes we simply don’t know what we’re really writing when we write it. Speaking from the privileged position of myself six years later, I can say that I this kind of unadultered passion for one’s native tongue isn’t easily acquired – I still retain much of it, albeit employ it now in a more sensible fashion and with a rather mature tone – it requires exile to a foreign country for it to be nurtured. Language doesn’t come alive in this way when it is used also for everyday purposes; only a language which nobody else around you understands can become this frivolous and this spectacular [or sound to you as if it were when you have only yourself to talk to]. I don’t think I would have had so many murders in my novel if I were to re-write it today; one ambigious death scene is probably enough for one narrative. You don’t have to have five of them – but I guess I didn’t know that at twenty. Just like I didn’t know that you can only play so much with your own personal language until it becomes unintelligible to other speakers.

I told Mrs S that I had imagined myself being a kind of academic Carrie from Sex and the City in writing articles for my hometown’s biggest paper; she replied that this had also been a fantasy of hers at one point in time. “But Carrie doesn’t think about death,” she concluded. When you contemplate death from time to time you exclude yourself from the light genre of writing about handsome men and cute shoes. I said that I had imagined writing my book about my years in Russia like Blondinbella [a blog I’m sort of not ashamed to be following] is writing her second book and blogging about ‘writing one chapter here and one chapter there’ and tada – a finished product! “But Blondinbella doesn’t think about death,” Mrs S commented and once again she was of course right.

Death distorts representations of life; death disrupts [interrupts?] the process of writing.

Let’s go back to the title of this post and talk more about Blondinbella but now in connection with another famous Swedish female blogger, Kissie [a blog I’m sort of ashamed to be following], and the fascinating representation of the female body on popular blogs in which the female author herself chooses what to publish and what not to publish. Both of these women regularly post pictures of their bodies on their blogs; today I caught myself wondering why they flaunt their naked skin like this. Who is the intended observer of these photographs: who is looking, who is watching, and at whom is this exhibit of female flesh directed? I sometimes wonder if the watcher is supposed to be male; in my opinion, there is nothing attractive about Kissie [who has become famous for starving herself beyond recognition and pairing an emaciated figure with disproportionate fake breasts], but neither Blondinbella could be considered as ‘making herself attractive’ in the eyes of the opposite sex. Last spring – which was when I first came across her blog – I was amazed at finding a young woman so close to my own deprived and dissatisfied generation who eats. “She’s allowed to eat but she’s not allowed to be fat,” my mother commented back then. Thus, the ultimate purpose of these pictures seems not to be to stir sexual desire in men [for neither of these young Swedish pretty girls with long blonde hair use such photographs that men – God, I hope – would find alluring (it suddenly occurs to me that I’m not a man and that I can’t have the last word in this evaluation)] but rather to stir a kind of envy in their female readers. Or to perform in a public space an unhealthy image of the ‘shapable’ female body to which I don’t subrscribe; either way, I have come to the conclusion that I find both of their representations – the starving woman and the eating woman – disturbing. Yet they are both a product as well as a fact of our culture; had there not been readers who wished to see such pictures, these pictures would not be posted. They would not have risen to nation-wide fame had not their self-chosen and self-depicting representaions of themselves found resonance with the consuming masses. But perhaps they also reflect that we as a society [now I’m speaking mainly about Sweden] are still caught up in the problematic process of negotiating what the female body is – whose body is this anyway? The body is perhaps the most heavily loaded gun in the individual’s physiological arsenal: use it unwisely, abuse it, and you will find yourself labeled a rebel. The female body – the tabu to display its most prominent features in public spaces; the suggestive employment of the same features for commercial and artistic purposes – is not an autonomous territory within which every woman can act as she sees fit; rather, the female body is a battle field where political opinions, economic values, and sexual connotations collide.

And this is also the body I have to get up and dress every single morning.

When I was searching for a picture of myself for the new banner of this blog to go with its new title, I consciously opted for a photograph which did not display my body. I have my own disorted, narcissistic, and often troubled view of this body I’ve been ‘blessed with’ which I don’t necessarily want to invite others to partake in; but also I desired a picture of myself where my face resembled me as I see myself – I wanted a face without make-up, a face with lines and pores and marks and shadows, a face with dark circles under the eyes, a face with eyes that looked at something more than they were aware of someone looking at them. But at the same time I wished for this face to still be beautiful – at least to me – or else the brand spanking brave-new-world kind of title for the blog wouldn’t work. [Maybe it didn’t work anyway; I’m much more comfortable with writing as a mad woman than as a beautiful woman – but that could be because mostly I’ve been labeled ‘sexy’ by others and that’s certainly a view of myself and of my body to which I’d rather not subscribe.] For this post, I wanted to select a few photographs of myself where I show some skin – but came to reject almost every picture because I am now at a time in my life where I’m more conscious than ever that people are not only reading this but also looking at me. In my most lofty concepts of myself I am an educated, eloquent and independent woman who sets a healthy example body-wise for the younger generation; I don’t advocate for weightloss and I would never go on a diet in public [the first time I tried to go on a diet I was twelve years old – so trust me when I say that I know how in our culture women are taught at a very young age to take their bodies seriously and view them critically]. Yet I have not emancipated myself from the current social and cultural context; there are days when I wake up and feel like there’s nothing I want more in the world than to loose ‘those pounds’ and finally enjoy ‘the perfect body’. What is this perfect body then, and what would I do with it if I had it? It surely wouldn’t function any better than the body I have now [or, better, the way my body is now] and the question if it’d be more attractive to the opposite sex I’d rather not answer. Taking control of your body and decide that this control will be aimed at content rather than form is almost like being the initiator of your own revolution: you become opposed to the contemporary view of the female body as constantly being adaptable to something or someone else. If you start looking at it as simply ‘my body as it is right now’ and not in terms of everything it isn’t and will never be in the near or distant future you might realize that there are a million other things you could be doing with your body than calculating intake versus output. But maybe these two Swedish female bloggers are doing something of the kind when they choose to exhibit their bodies in public – as they are and as they were – they are in control of the image they circulate. And perhaps in this lies their power: the power to present and the power to withhold.

Maybe I have a similar power over the representation of myself when I decide that a certain amount of my bare skin may be exposed but that the rest is for private live performances only. 

“New year and new definition of some like it hot”

Here is a scan of my latest causerie in Göteborgs-Posten published as Linnéa J Lundblad on Sunday January 22 2012. The scan is – as always – courtesy of my lovely homegirl Annie. To read it my dear comrades will have to save the picture on their computer and open it in full-size. In this text I write about flying from California to Europe for the winter break, with some ‘folkhemska’ [I’m so glad I finally found the appropriate context to employ the suggestive adjective of ‘folkhem’] scenes from Gothenburg, but mostly it is about how I visited Katok in Budapest for New Year. It features also the former Russian professional wrestler I encountered in the sauna there. I’m pleased with that I got to call my friend ‘Katok’ in the article – we realized this would be the Hungarian version of her name just like ‘Zhonok’ is the Hungarian variant of my name – not because I think the readers of Sweden’s third largest daily newspaper will necessarily ‘get it’ but because it is fun to have a functional pseudonym for the people who truly matter in my life.

типо пир во время чумы

One of many late evenings [past as well as future] spent in the company of a hot beverage and a good Russian novel in the department library.

Contrary to my own grim expectations, I’m beginning to feel excited about my fourth semester as a graduate student of Russian literature after having received a tiny taste of what is yet to come during its first week. Yesterday evening I went with Boy C to a potluck with the other folklore students and kicked off this semester with vegetarian lasagna, sparkling pink wine, and inspiring conversations. During the little spare time I have in the evenings after academic work is done, I’m trying to construct my six years in Russia into a coherent narrative which currently bears the working title My Russian Notes. I decided to begin my attempt at a memoir of sorts with that journey by train from Saint Petersburg to Omsk in November 2004, which I have come to view as the beginning not only of ‘my Russian life’ but also as of ‘my adult life’. Re-reading tonight the first chapter which I wrote a few evenings ago, I have come to understand that before I can construct a narrative from my experiences I need to construct myself as the protagonist for the inscription of the same experiences. I’m beginning to understand why memoirs are usually not written by twenty-six year olds and why that man with whom I stayed in Moscow in June 2008 [while I was passing exams in Russian literature from Gothenburg University at the Swedish Embassy] laughed when he confessed to currently writing an autobiography called My Memoirs at Twenty-five. Before you start inscribing the past, you must understand the present and have some kind of notion of the future – or at least have an understanding of how ‘you then’ differs from ‘you now’ and possibly from the you that is still to come. To confront the past is also to confront the ‘past you’, the person you were and the way you viewed the world at a particular point in time. Immediately, already in the first chapter, I am faced with a problematic issue: how to motivate myself as a nineteen year old to perform the actions which I performed at the time without merely sounding like everything just ‘happened to me’ and happened to happen in the sequence which they did. Why did I not stay put in Saint Petersburg? Why did I move to Siberia? What role did the officer A., whom I met and with whom I did actually fall in love on the train back from Siberia in November 2004, play in my decision to relocate to Omsk? Right now the role of A. appears to have been slight and even coincidential, but I know that the nineteen year old girl I once was would not have agreed with this later interpretation. When I moved to Omsk I was very much pursuing him and in love with him and if my memory chooses to fail me in this regard, I have plenty of old love poems dedicated to him which indicate otherwise.

The role played by A. in the tale of my Russian life is not as imperative as the role played by my religious feelings at the time. I even took myself – presumably an author in control of her own construction – by surprise when God entered into the narrative and became a dynamic source of action, a motivator as well as the motivation. If I decide to write this book truthfully and in accordance with my own religious convictions, it will be a book directed to a limited audience interested in reading about someone else’s spiritual journey and in how one can develop one’s relationship with Jesus through geographical relocations. My Russian life was not a secular enterprise; but the biographical interface between Russian literature and the Bible is not an easy territory to negotiate for someone who has since been forced to reexamine her own convictions and revisit her own conversion several times. According to the chronological unfolding of actual events, in the second chapter of this anti-memoir – which takes place during my first months in Siberia – I am baptized in what I later came to realize was a sect. That important event for my personal intellectual history appears to be a literary minefield when represented as something simply occurring during my first year in Russia. Even if you read the first chapter very carefully, there is nothing in it which indicates that I was looking to be baptized in the foreseeable future. In my own memory, all of these separate incidents create a linkage that cannot be broken without violating the seamless chain in which they all neatly overlap, creating not a ‘stream of consciousness’ but a kind of ‘stream of life as lived in the singular’. Had it not been for those months I spent in the Siberian sect, I would not have gone to the Dostoevsky Museum to seak refuge during the tumultuous time when I was leaving it, and had I not met the Dostoevsky scholar V. there, I would not have learned about Ural State University and had it suggested by him that I would go there to study and meet the professor A. who later became my academic advisor for four years in Yekaterinburg and eventually guided me to apply to Berkeley for graduate school. And had I not found such an intellectually inspiring environment at the Dostoevsky Museum in Omsk, I would not have been suggested by my Swedish professor M. to write my undergraduate thesis on the problem of Dostoevsky and Omsk, which eventually led me to discover Shalamov and then after that to discover a bunch of fruitful friendships.

At the core of the problem about writing about yourself and your own life is the question of how much can be shared with others. And how much of that which has been experienced can be written. I had a distinct vision of the first chapter in my head when I began but re-reading it now I come to find that the written account of actual events appear like something from a book I’ve read instead of from a life I’ve lived. I keep going back to the strategy employed by Eugenia Ginzburg in Крутой маршрут – which contains, if anything, the literary model I’m trying to use myself – and how her narrative depends not so much on the person she was as the person she became. But in order to elaborate on her sophisticated and calculated strategy, I would have to construct a vibrant image of myself then as seen by myself now and have a firmer opinion of how those six years in Russia came to be reflected in the person I became later. Maybe it is too soon to write this story. Maybe I should not worry too much about understanding what I’m writing but rather write it as it comes and view it as an exercise in becoming a better articulated writer. I think that’s ultimately the goal with writing this anti-memoir about my Russian life in my native language: to become a better writer. Inscription – any kind of inscription – is always an attempt to impose order on the chaos of experience. Right now everything I have is the ‘chaos of experience’ and a strange sense of wanting to tell this tale but without knowing for what purpose other than that it would be a unique book. I should probably start with an introduction instead of a first chapter, a sort of ‘guide to the reader’ with the tiny problem of not exactly knowing who this reader is. Before I construct myself in the role of protagonist, I should probably start with constructing a plausible reader for myself – someone at whom to aim my narrative – someone who is concerned, like I am, with the greater questions in life and perhaps also with what it means to live, to love, to believe, to get lost, to find oneself again, and to share this life with other people. I have decided that the epigraph to my anti-memoir will be from Eugenia Ginzburg’s work, but I haven’t decided which phrase I like the most and how to tie her influence – I read her for the first time in 2009 – with the impact it had on my experience retrospectively. In my mind, I’m trying to connect her peculiar Bildungsroman and subtle religious conversion to my own version of pretty much the same.

It sounds so easy but it is actually so difficult, comrades.

The Eleventh Commandment

Today I enjoyed the first chai latte of 2012 with Mrs S. I love those conversations when you both decide “it’s time to get going” and then continue talking for another 45 minutes.

«Задача женщины в этой жизни определна четко,

идея жертвы вытекает из ее природы, из ее назначения.

Она сама производит на свет свое потомство,

в молчаливом смирении вскармливает и выращивает его.

На долю мужчины остаются наука и искусство.»

[из предисловия исследователя к «Доктору Живаго]

“A woman’s task in this life is clearly defined,

the idea of sacrifice derives from her nature, from her destination.

She brings forth her offspring herself, in silent humility she feeds and raises it.

For the lot of the man remains art and science.”

[from a scholar’s introduction to Doctor Zhivago]

The re-written conclusion to my article on Shalamov in the Urals was accepted and the latest number of the journal was published on Monday. The journal can be accessed online here and my article beginson page 11 [to read me in Swedish is a rare pleasure – even for myself!]. The editor replied to my complete omission of the dangerous person from Soviet history whom I mentioned in my first conclusion by saying that eventually also I will have to grow up and learn how to “take a moral standpoint” and that he hopes I will make my opinion known more strongly the next time I’m in Krasnovishersk [which will hopefully be this summer]. I thought about writing back to him and saying that I already made my point of view clear when I was there in the summer of 2009, and that I’m not going to press it as an issue [even though it of course is an issue to be pressed] because I’m in this line of business not only to speak my mind but also to listen to others and learn why they see things differently. I would have liked to explain my own “moral standpoint” to him, but I’m not sure he would approve of it because it is radical and goes against the basic notion of a Swedish humanist and secular approach to things. When Irina Sirotinskaya asked Shalamov that burning question in the 1960s – “how to live?” – the great writer supposedly answered: “Follow the ten commandments. Everything you need to know about how to be in life is there.” Then, as the apocryphal legend goes, he added his own, the eleventh commandment: “Don’t teach other people [how to live].” Since I first read this [probably in 2009 which was when I read just about EVERYTHING about and by Shalamov] I have tried to apply these eleven commandments to my own life. The hardest thing is not “do not covet your neighbor’s oxe” [strange as it might sound], but to not teach other people how to live. I suppose that telling people “I try to live by the Ten Commandments and also by Shalamov’s eleventh” is not something most are ready to hear and accept as something appropriate in our day and age. If you say that you’re trying to do anything “by the Bible”, it is almost like throwing a spit of challenge in the face of secular thought and may easily cost you your good reputation as an obedient humanist. But that’s how I try to do things in my life. Few writers have tought me as much about life – and especially about how to live life – as Shalamov has. Many readers and Slavic scholars alike know him primarily as one of the main writers of the horror of the Gulag; few are those who, like me, have read so much by him that we have eventually grown comfortable with the idea that Shalamov was also several other things and not only someone who spent eighteen years of his life in the camps. It is perhaps an eccentric thought that one of the first things that Shalamov did when he was allowed to write again, was to write poetry and send two collections of poems from Kolyma to Boris Pasternak in Moscow. And that he cared as much about Russian literature as he cared about Soviet history and that he might not have chosen the topic of his fiction as carefully as he chose the form of it. There is still a lot of time that has to pass before Shalamov will come to be viewed more as a writer of his national literature than as a witness to the cruelties of his time. One day I hope to see him celebrated as one of the greatest thinkers of the 20^th century, and not only one who “saw what he saw”. But until that happens, I’m going to let my life be led by his example and not teach other people. One reader wrote to me with surprise that it seems I don’t read the papers [because I don’t write about current events too much here and don’t dwell too much on politics], but as a matter of fact I read two different papers [for two different perspectives] every morning and I know what’s going on in the world. But what I’m most excited about is what most people by now would call “old news”, that is, the Bible and especially the Gospels.

When Shalamov read Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago in 1953, he commented that it is true that no writer can write anything before she has figured out her relationship with Jesus Christ. That is an uncomfortable truth to have been spoken by a proclaimed atheist during Soviet times almost immediately upon his arrival after fifteen years in concentration camps. It seems strange that Shalamov would be concerned with Christ after everything he had experienced of human nature, but he was very much concerned with the God who became Man – and argued that nothing of cultural importance may be written without first having contemplated the Christian paradigm within which we all still live and think and act [whether we like it or not]. Also this idea excites me a lot, even though it is probably also untimely and not a priority in most people’s lives right now.

The first day of classes felt like being on the first episode of a new season in a sitcom: everything was happy, giggly, and filled with expectations. I saw everyone in my department whom I had missed greatly during the break – and was once again reminded of what an awesome group of talented and kind individuals make up the graduate students in my department – and I even managed to have a quick gossip session with Boy C. I started the day by going to the gym; I spent about thirty minutes doing what I love doing the most, and then I went to work in the library for about three hours where I saw more people I know and have missed while I was gone. The first seminar of the spring semester 2012 went well and as I have decided that I’m not going to feel stupid anymore, I didn’t let my ignorance stand between me and learning something brand new.

All in all it feels good to be back!


P.S. I have not been hacked - I messed up my header all by myself. Notes of a mad woman seems just about right at the moment.

du behöver inte svara på det här inlägget

The first thing I did when I got back to Berkeley was to redecorate our bathroom with a little something I got for Christmas from Mother. As Critical Companion wrote to me the day before I left Sweden, “I’ll always be the Sheldon to your Leonard”, I’m sure most of my dear comrades recognize where this reference to popular culture comes from.

While transferring in London I decided that a new year calls for a new perfume. [I did buy a tiny bottle from Chloé in the fall but realized the scent doesn’t come out as well when you use a roll-on instead of a spray bottle – lesson learned.] I opted for Tom Ford’s latest: Violet Blonde, which at first smells like any old lady and then suddenly goes ‘bang!’ and unfolds as a forceful feminine fragrance. Also I think Critical Companion and I need to do something about the perpetual ‘Christmas spirit’ lingering in our apartment…

On the flight over the Atlantic, I had plenty of time to think about why I do these things. During my last week in Sweden, I finished an article about my journey in the steps of Shalamov in the northern Urals in July 2009 and submitted it to be published in a Swedish Slavic journal. At the time I didn’t realize I had made a controversial conclusion [I always have trouble with conclusions; most of the time I just want to end my research with ‘hope you liked it and see you next time’], but I was shortly informed of this fact by the journal’s editor. This journal doesn’t pay anything but is prestigious as it is read by all Slavic scholars in Sweden and articles in it are published on a ‘by invitation only’ basis, thus if you’re asked to submit a text, this means you’re going places. Or that you have powerful connections, which is perhaps more true in my case because it was my Swedish professor M. who helped me get a slot in it for the first number of 2012. I don’t want to write here what I wrote in the article because contents may be googled and I don’t want anyone googling a certain person from Soviet history and finding my blog – suffice it to say that I’ve found myself in a tricky situation because after six years in Russia I am no longer comfortable with judging this country according to Swedish standards [with which I may or may not be associated anymore]. Perhaps this is the troublesome lot of the expat – especially after so many years of living in various countries – that you eventually must depart from the prejudice of your national heritage and reexamine old convictions and become increasingly ambivalent about applying your values to other people’s experience. In my article I wanted to refrain from making what is known as ‘a value-judgment’ but I was soon told that not taking a moral standpoint equals taking the opposite moral standpoint. I upset my Swedish professor M. and found myself on the brink of loosing his friendship; I was called ‘a Soviet nostalgic’ [which can only be said about me with a big NOT afterwards] and accused of not understanding nor realizing the horrors of the GULAG. This painful argument completely tore down my entire world for twenty-four hours as I faced the worst possible outcome of what I had done: I could be labeled ‘pro-Stalin’ among Swedish Slavic scholars, loose M. for all eternity, and end up not being seen as serious in any academic setting, be it Swedish, Russian, or even American. I realized that my career would be over before it even began – and all because I had written one ambigious paragraph the opinion of which I am not in any way married to. On my flight over the Atlantic I contemplated throwing myself from the Golden Gate Bridge upon my arrival – which I understand was a reflection of how inadequate my emotional response to difficulties is at the moment – because I wasn’t able to imagine my life after having published something like that. Today I woke up at six in the morning, re-wrote my conclusion, answered both the editor and M., and now I will wait for their responses. At times like these I wish that my field of research was puppies in Russian literature, and not Shalamov. I wonder why I can’t just stick to folklore in Dostoevsky since that’s such a safe topic which has as of yet not caused me any suicidal thoughts… And I wonder if it is worth it, if it worth all the emotional turbulence and all the academic conflicts and all the scholarly stress just to be able to write something about one’s favorite author? Also I wonder what this says about me as a person, if I assume I can express something I think is correct without seeing how the same thing can be so controversial and change other people’s opinion of me and risk a productive friendship that has lasted for seven years now and sustained me through all the ups and downs of academic life? If I don’t have M. on my side, I might as well close this chapter of my life and change my profession because I don’t know what I would do if I can’t turn to him once in a while for support. Today I understand that this controversy was also a clash of generations and might have a lot to do with the editor telling me to ‘read about it on wikipedia’ which wounded my pride. Once again I feel like a need a break from my break.

But it was nice to come back home and find Critical Companion waiting for me in our apartment, ready to listen and ready to go order our favorite pizza from Addie’s. I understood that I had come home this time – this was the first time I was away from our apartment – because I liked the smell that met me upon my arrival. Our apartment in Berkeley smells like me – or maybe more like us – and that was a wonderful thing to recognize. I do have a beautiful home here in California and one of the best friends I’ve ever had to share it with. That’s also something to remember and think about when you feel like you’d rather throw yourself from a bridge than participate in this life.

all things considered

When I visited Katok in Budapest, we went to Memento Park to look at old Soviet monuments. I wasn’t too impressed, but that could be because I got to play with twice as much Soviet memorabilia in this ‘museum’ I found in an elementary school in a village about an hour outside of Tobolsk in January 2007.

Sometimes when nothing happens – and in times like these no news is good news – I feel lucky to have such a rich archive of life in Russia stored on my computer. Here I am on a cow in Yekaterinburg in September 2006; do note the cowboy boots.

I remember thinking I had such short hair – which I cut right before moving to Siberia – when this photograph was taken in Novosibirsk in March 2005. I didn’t know I would rock short hair for real one day, but then again I didn’t know most things back then…

Yesterday I got sick which was not fun but I managed to cure myself enough to attend a meeting today with my editor and another writer from the same section of Göteborgs-Posten where I publish my monthly causeries. I asked politely if we would be able to meet while I’m still in Sweden and the editor decided to treat me to lunch today and I thought everybody involved knew the primary reason why I wanted to meet them: to ask for a raise. I’ve had the same pay since January 2008 and even though I’m certainly not starving [but labor should be paid properly regardless], I felt like I’ve gathered a certain momentum throughout this past year due to increased regularity in publications of texts and that perhaps I earn to be paid a bit more now because I’ve mastered the three aspects imperative for this kind of writer: talent, popularity, and consistency [the last thing might seem out of place but think about this: if you’ve got talent and you’re popular but can’t create regularly, what publication would want you?]. But it so occurred that the two other people inloved in the meeting did not understand this was why I had wanted to meet; they thought I just wanted to “say hello” while in the neighborhood. Until I brought up the issue of money, however, the meeting had gone on for about an hour [which is a testimony to how I’m struggling to live by the proverb “why be humble when you can be awesome”]. During this hour, they informed me of how great my work is, how brilliantly crafted my texts are, and what a terribly talented writer I am. At times I thought they were pulling my leg, that’s how intense and almost hyperbolic the compliments got at times. They said that they had thought my talent to be something that “came with this generation” and thus tried asking other young women my age to write about their life abroad; this had resulted in a large collection of unpublishable texts due to their incredible blandness and killing dullness and the realization that I was “something special”. They told me that they’ve received several texts from people trying to be “the new me”, attempting to write like me and always failing miserably as I am apparently one of few people who are able to write a Swedish causerie in 4000 signs and make it work [usually this genre demands 2500 signs or less]. Because I don’t read this paper – except for my own articles when my homegirl Annie scans them for me – I don’t know what it looks like except for my contributions. My editor was kind enough to tell me that “your texts are always the best thing in the paper on the days they appear” and that some other contributors who submit similar texts are wondering why this Linnéa J Lundblad gets to have her byline picture in color and an entire page to herself? Because you’re that good, said my editor, you’re our superstar. All of this sweet talking notwithstanding, I didn’t get more than a meager raise out of the meeting. I was told that “money is tight” and that even though it’s been four years since my last raise, they’ve actually got less money now and that they can’t pay me what I’m demanding [I’m only demanding what such a text SHOULD cost – which is about 65% more than they’re paying me right now] even though they think I deserve just exactly as much as I had demanded [I would’ve settled with a 30% raise, and in the end I walked away with only 15%] but unfortunately due to blah blah, etc. etc., this is not a reality at the moment. Well, it was worth a shot. At least now they know that I know what I’m worth; I even got a “Season’s Greetings” from some kind of higher editor at the same paper thanking me for my “splendid efforts throughout the year”. I almost sent back “thanks for noticing me now but just so you know I’ve published in this paper since December 2005” but I didn’t because that’s not how I roll.

I don’t know where to store all this praise about my causeries. It is one thing to sit somewhere in California at the end of each month and come up with an interesting narrative of what’s been going on lately, to search after funny formulations for one’s thoughts, to use Google translate when Swedish doesn’t come naturally and to double check everything in SAOL and to even work with dictionaries of proverbs, of dialect… it is something else to encounter The Reader – or even The Editor. Today I was told it is soon time for me to gather my articles into a book. I’m not too surprised about this idea; a reader told me the same thing in an e-mail sometime before Christmas. I think I’m going to write articles for one more year and then look for a publisher and maybe do this if it feels right. Before I publish a collection of my articles in the format of a book, I want to try writing that book about those six years in Russia. I think I’ve figured out a good place to start. Not all journeys begin when you cross the border, not when you board the plane or even when you touch ground in a foreign land for the very first time. Some journeys may only begin when you decide that there is no going back; for me, the Russian journey began in this way on that train ride from Saint Petersburg to Omsk in November 2005. Until then, it wasn’t real for me. Nothing had yet begun. It wasn’t enough of Russia for me: I wanted to get deeper into this country. Also, starting Notes with that strange voyage will clear away the problem of wanting to tell as well as to not tell “the beginning of the beginning” – it will come naturally when I inscribe my first experience of Siberia which I have so far only told a few people in my life. And I’ve decided to tell everything with a certain dash of comicality. There are other moments which demand tears; my tale of Russia will be told with love, joy, and humor. I think that’s the way to do it.

Maybe people will reproach me: “This is no laughing matter! This is awful! Disgusting! And you were but a nineteen year who didn’t speak the language even…?!” Well, comrades, you know you’re going to make it out of dark places when you start to laugh about it all.

man skapar sin egen verklighet

On Friday I tried my new camera on nature. If I hadn’t told you so, comrades, would you have thought that this photograph was taken in Sweden in early January?

On Saturday I went with Mother out into the countryside to have a look at her new little red house. In the woods I finally saw some seasonally appropriate snow.

On Sunday evening I sat at a coffee shop and wrote my next article for Göteborgs-Posten [to be published on Saturday January 14 2012]; on my way home I caught my birth town looking pretty.

On Monday I first went to my cousin’s house to get my hair cut – now it’s all about one and the same length [bye bye flirty layers, hello serious page] – and then I went to‘fika’ with my lovely homegirl Annie. As the picture portrays, I enjoyed the first ‘semla’ of 2012 today. Perhaps it was also the last. As Mother says, “man skapar sin egen verklighet”, thus it is all up to me – and the reality I chose to create.

But it is no piece of cake [always all this talk of cake] to realize you create your own reality. We all create our own realities. Perhaps it should make everything easier. But it makes things more difficult as you come to understand you bring everything into your life by personal choice [to some extent as well as to a certain degree, of course – there are elements of reality we do not personally create; not to forget that we humans are contained within relationships with other human beings who are also creating their own realities and thus we find ourselves in constant friction, in persistent negotiations along the borders] and that you can always choose your reactions. Easy to say, tougher to do – like with a lot of things. Tonight on the tram home I thought of how it is now only a week until the spring semester at Berkeley begins and the moment I thought of my department there, I started to cry. Damn it. Just like I cried all those mornings in the fall on my way to the university – like some sort of pathetic child who doesn’t want to go to school because the other kids bully her [which is embarrassingly close to my actual – though adult and thus appalling – situation] – with the exception that right now my department is located on the other side of the world and that I didn’t actually have to face it once I had arrived at my tram stop tonight. [Because we do indeed create our own reality] I thought some more about my department and suddenly felt nauseated – well at least I was pleased to finally fathom what had caused that mysterious nausea I suffered from for over a month in the fall… The emotions I went through tonight settled my decision once and for all: the first call I make when I get to Berkeley will be to a therapist with the intention to book an appointment as soon as possible. Already when the academic shit hit the proverbial fan in October I decided to go get acute therapy and survive this difficult time but then I created a reality where I didn’t have any such time for myself and also gave up exercising because I was too stressed out about the painful situation at work and thought that if I for a second made myself a priority OUTSIDE of academia – as a body or as a soul – I would be taken out back and shot Soviet style [you laugh, comrades, but remember my major]. That might have been something last year’s Joey would have believed in or projected upon herself, but the Joey of 2012 is not going to set herself aside. Not again. Just like I decided that dating random men is over for good now – because I don’t want to make any more efforts with strangers – I have concluded that I’m not going to take anybody’s bullshit anymore. The department is where I come to do work, nothing else. Already in the fall – though subconsciously at first – I decided to stop going to parties with the other graduate students, partly because I found other people [read: friends] with whom I’d rather spend the little free time I have. During the spring I will ration my time even more sparsely and only be present the bare minimum in the department. I want to spend my working hours doing work; I don’t want to be afraid anymore.

For one of these years – I don’t remember which now – I selected the uplifting motto “I don’t want to brave anymore” to guide me throughout the year. Unfortunately, things are not always that easy. This year, I don’t want to be afraid anymore. I know saying it is one thing [writing it is something else]; doing it is something else entirely. I’ll start with regular therapy; if I still find that the thought of ‘going to school’ brings me to tears, I’ll look around for something else to do with my life. I’ve already looked some for options – and I know I’m not a hopeless case, even though this past fall semester did a lot to break my self-esteem and bruise my ego. This is after all my one life, and I’d like to do my very best to create a pleasant, even beautiful reality for it.

About ten times a day I think about sending out an e-mail with a sentence like: “As my father is currently dying, I would appreciate respect and privacy and to be left out of everything that isn’t urgent or absolutely necessary please.”

Time and concern and everything else will from now by carefully rationed – in the reality I am creating.

all things new

Yesterday I bought a new camera. Today I was trying it out the way my self-centered and self-adoring generation prefers – taking some egoshots in the bathroom – and thought I ended up looking a little too fine [see photograph above]. After a while of figuring out my new camera, I realized that I had been using the ‘beautifying’ function as it was the default…

That’s more like it – more like me.

Yesterday I returned from Budapest and today I went to work for the first time in 2012. I spent several hours writing my article for for Sweden’s publication for Slavic scholars Östbulletin at the library and ended up staying until it closed at 8 pm. For the last three hours – I made a break and had a disappointing Swedish chai latte in the middle – this guy was sitting across the table from me. I didn’t really pay much attention to him because my deadline for this text is January 7^th and also I was told a few days ago by Göteborgs-Posten that my next article for them will be published on the 14^th of January and that’s a text I haven’t written yet and thus I was sort of doing my own thing and minding my own business and trying to keep the stress to a minimum. As we were both packing up our computers to leave at the last minute, he looked at me and said: “I think you’re really pretty and I wanted to ask if you’d like to go out with me sometime?” I was confused because I hadn’t even registered what he looked like during the three hours we had sat in front of each other. Back when I was a teenager and I lived in Gothenburg full-time, I would often go to the same library to study and write and this kind of thing happened all the time there. When I was a teenager I thought these kind of chance – and possibly romantic – encounters were interesting. Sometimes I needed to ration my time carefully but surprisingly often I would say “sure” or “why not?” when this particular question was posed by a man. But I was a teenager back then and I didn’t know too much about life and people and I hadn’t realized that it’s not about quantity but quality and I think I’ve mentioned before how easily bored I was – and still am at times – so I would take up on opportunities like that sometimes just to pass the time. Tonight I experienced a deep sensation of tiredness when I heard him ask me the same old question I’ve been asked so many times before. Tonight all I wanted to do was to shove my laptop into my backpack and run away so fast he wouldn’t see what tram I got on. But I know that would have been bad behavior – and karma’s a bitch – so instead I said: “Thank you but no thanks because I’m seeing someone.” The only way to convince a man that you’re not interested in them is by telling them you already have another man in your life; you can of course fight me on this one, comrades, but out of all the reasons I’ve tried over the years this is the one which has yielded the most substantial results.

During 2012 I have promised myself not to go on any dates with any men. This way I will save time and emotions and perhaps finally become academically productive again. It will be difficult to stay away from men as they ask me out in public libraries [which Mother called ‘dagens i-landsproblem’ when I complained about today’s situation] or pop up in public saunas. When I was concentrating on the sauna process in Budapest, this tall and rough-looking man with broad shoulders walked in and asked if he could throw some sauna oil on the stones and I suggested we switch to Russian because his nationality was obvious. He thought I was from Latvia [rookie mistake] and when I heard him speak with his beautifully soft Russian man-voice and thought that he probably had excelled at some kind of masculine sport in his youth – that’s when I understood that I will never be a happy woman as long as I lack such a big and strong Russian man with a native tongue flowing gently and glittering delicately like golden honey. “What did he speak about?” K. asked me afterwards but I couldn’t say. “It wasn’t what he said, it was how he said it,” I argued. But a year without dating men doesn’t mean that if such opportunities as the one above present themselves I shall not be allowed to grasp them. But no more candle light dinners at expensive restaurants, no more spontaneous trips to watch the sun set from the Berkeley hills, no more lunch with red wine on the beach, no more planning and thinking and texting and mailing and wondering where things are going and if maybe he’s just not that into me? Either I want encounters of pure lust like the opportunity missed above [after all, when visiting a girlfriend in a foreign country it is not customary to sleep with random men] or simple, wholesome, healthy friendship with members of the opposite sex. No more making an effort with strangers.

I’m not really into New Year’s resolutions. Perhaps I should eat more healthy food and exercise more regurarly but I also know that everything in life works in stages and healthy as well as unhealthy behaviors come and go over time and that your own body is best at telling you what it needs and thus a long time ago I decided that from now on I will only obey my body and its signals and see where it takes me from here. Now it’s taken me to eat meat. I have a feeling that it will soon take me on a journey almost entirely lacking alcohol. Instead of directing my body, I let my body direct me. So far that’s been working for me.

Probably I should write something about having changed the name of my blog today. My blog became A Russia of My Own sometime during 2006, but my lovely comrades are mistaken if they think it was always called A Russia of My Own. During the first year it had also other names. Thus, to change its name is not as much of a revolution as you might think – it just feels somewhat weird because it has not been done for over five years. Maybe I’ll change my mind and regret what I’ve done and go back to the previous title. Who knows? I decided on the super-humble new title for my blog – Notes of a Beautiful Woman – already in June 2011 and this is also the title for a book that I’ve been writing ever since.

Notes of a Beautiful Woman is shaping into a book about my six years in Russia and it is not going to be a memoir and not a novel and not a short story collection and not selections from my diary and not an autobiography but merely notes of a beautiful woman.

Хватит это терпеть!

On December 30th I arrived in Budapest to visit my great friend K. who is doing her Master’s in Gender Studies at the Central European University there.

We did a lot of walking around the gorgeous city and crossed many bridges over the lovely Danube.

It is interesting – though sometimes frustrating – to be in a country where you don’t understand the language at all. [Sometimes you even wonder if the Hungarians themselves understand it?] But constant linguistic confusion creates a pleasant feeling of really ‘being abroad’.

The last day of 2011 was absolutely wonderful with bright sunshine and not too cold weather. [I bought the charming black coat on sale in Stockholm as I felt I needed something a little bit ‘European’ since I was after all traveling all the way from Scandinavia to Europe.]

Budapest is the second most beautiful European city I’ve been to – after Prague.

Apparantly, in Budapest people wear funny things on their heads when they celebrate New Year’s Eve. K. and I did like the locals, put on pink bunny ears with sequins and drank cocktails in a bar when 2012 arrived.

This was the last shot made with my old faithful – after this pose on a bridge at 3 in the morning my camera called it a day…

When I went to visit my friend K. in Budapest, I traveled to not one country but two countries simultaneously. What makes a country is not only what surrounds you, but the language you speak. K. and I always speak Russian together, and thus when I went to see her in Hungary, I visited not only the Hungarian capital but also revisited the Russian language. At first this switch was a bit difficult as it was sudden and considering that I just spent more than a week in Sweden where I only spoke Swedish and prior to this I was in the states for so many months of mainly English – with a little bit of Swedish here and there. But I haven’t really practiced my Russian in a while, and in this respect time spent with K. was highly necessary. Time with K. is always necessary and I think this goes both ways: she missed me just as much as I missed her and we both missed our conversations together. We decided already upon my arrival that during these days it will only be the two of us and that we won’t invite anyone else into our union of friendship. What have we done in Budapest so far? We’ve done a lot of walking and talking, a lot of drinking and eating – as I’m officially not a vegetarian anymore, we have been enjoying traditional Hungarian cuisine and this of course includes goulasch. We’ve had more than our fair share of local beer. On New Year’s Eve we had more than our fair share of alcohol period and thus we had a very slow first day of the year when we tended to our hangovers by eating more greasy food and walking around town. I’m beginning to feel like I’ve been on holiday, like I’ve had a real good break from everything connected to Berkeley and academic work. I’m even beginning to look forward to the new semester, to dealing with the next chapter in my life. After two hours in the sauna tonight I feel refreshed and rested – K. gave up after one hour – but still with a sadness in my soul that I will have to return to California in two weeks where there is no sauna.

When K. and I are walking around Budapest, people keep asking us: “Where are you from?” And because we don’t want to have the conversation which comes after the answer “we’re from different places,” we decided that we will tell everyone we meet that we’re from Tashkent. In the bar where we celebrated New Year’s Eve, people were surprised to meet two blonde girls from Uzbekistan [to which we answered “there are all kinds of different people in Tashkent”] and we were given a few free drinks. In the end, we agreed that the best town in the world is Budapest, and the second best – Tashkent. K. and I have decided that together we will travel to Tashkent in the future. Also, K. tells people she’s a mathematician and I tell people I’m a graduate student of physics. This too causes people to become instantly amazed.

To begin a year of brutal honesty with so many unnecessary lies might seem strange. But many things in life are strange; life itself is sometimes strange. Life can also be good. And right now in Budapest life is especially good.

And in case my dear comrades hadn’t guessed it by the title of this post, this year’s motto is ХВАТИТ ЭТО ТЕРПЕТЬ!

Hade vi ens tur med vädret?

On Monday morning – December 26th – my sister and I took the train from Gothenburg to Stockholm to visit our father. [This is my improvised ‘really I live in California, now I’m only visiting’ outfit; I bought the boots last winter in Sweden – which required something to resist 20 below – and the coat my mother borrowed me.]

This absolutely lovely dog is one of the splendid people with whom my father cohabitates in the capital.

Our king was also home.

“Remember, everything you do, you do for God.

Everything God does, He does for you.”

[Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat Pray Love]

Late last night – December 28^th – my sister and I returned to Gothenburg after visiting our father in Stockholm. Today – December 29^th – I woke up with a severe sensation of being geniuinely tired of myself. Tonight I sit with my packed bag for Budapest listening to the last song that the Hungarian musician A. recorded for me [“Heart of Stone”] the day before Christmas two years ago; three weeks after he said he loved me and two weeks after he took it back. It’s a good song. He’s got talent. One time this past summer, I accidentially bumped into this Australian man who lived in the same building where I lived at the time and when I explained my accent as being due to me being Swedish, he looked disgusted – as if this piece of innocent information made him physically ill. I wondered why. “I had a bad experience with a Swedish girl,” he said and soon removed himself from my pleasant company. I saw him a couple of more times and each time he turned away and frowned as if Swedish women carried some kind of terrible infectious disease on their bodies for which he had not yet found any cure. I don’t know. All I know is what I tried to tell him that same night and what I’m still saying to everyone who asks [but nobody does]: “I had a bad experience with a Hungarian man once and I would still like to visit Budapest one day.” That proverbial ‘one day’ will be tomorrow.

Tomorrow I’ll fly there to visit an exquisite comrade in arms, my fellow Inconvenient Woman, the great scholar and even greater friend [though that’s a matter of from where you’re looking and what you’re looking for] who made my nickname Жоня stick – the girl with the initial K. who entered my life as one of my first students of Swedish at Ural State University in the fall of 2007. Back then I was twenty-two and she was eighteen and I think that if anyone would’ve told us four years ago: “You two will become the best of friends and talk for hours and days and months and years but never come to any concrete or coherent conclusion but constantly feel that the creative dialogue must go on across continents and through various time zones because one of you will get into grad school in California and the other do her Master’s in gender studies in Budapest”; if someone would’ve have told us that back when, I think we both would’ve laughed. I would’ve thought that was crazy talk because at the time I was thinking that all I was going to do was to marry my more handsome half M., have his babies, and live the rest of my life standing barefoot with a kid on my hip somewhere in a kitchen in provincial Russia… Thankfully, a fateful invitation to be a bridesmaid at another friend’s wedding in California the next year opened up new, broader and wider horizons and as a result I didn’t become someone’s wife.

To have friends is a curious thing; you don’t really know who mean something in your life until you meet another friend whom you haven’t seen in a while and you want to tell this person something about your life as of late and you catch yourself constantly bringing all these other fascinating people into your stories… While I was visiting my father in Stockholm, I met up with my undergraduate advisor M. [also known on the blog as ‘my Swedish professor’] for lunch. After everything that I’ve been through since the last time I saw him – he invited me for dinner on his balcony when I came back from Russia in July – it was a familiar experience of pure comfort to sit down and talk to him for a couple of hours. We discussed everything. He listened to all of my wondering thoughts, considered all of my different plans – one of my ‘three options’ was to apply to the diplomacy trainee program with the Swedish government – but shook his head in disapproval and concluded sternly: “But you need to be a scholar.” Of all the people who have known me before and who know me now, he has always been the best at knowing what is best for me. He never tells me what to do; instead, he listens to all of my chaotic thoughts and unconventional ideas and extraordinary plans until I hear my own words and realize what I want to do myself. While recounting to him my latest struggles in Berkeley, all of these names of people kept popping up among my words – Critical Companion, Mrs S, and Boy-C – and when he asked me what kind of exciting research these distinguished graduate students do, I found I couldn’t really tell him exactly even though I have read their work and talked to them for hours for months about everything... But I could tell him what kind of wonderful people they are at heart and why I appreciate their friendship and all the ways in which they’ve showed me how to be a better human being since I met them – and perhaps also a better scholar. While I told him about the delightful friends I’ve made in California, I discovered that they are my life there, and nothing else. The rest isn’t my life; the rest is my job. Then I came upon another discovery – it occured to me that also M. numbers among my best friends.

Perhaps I woke up tired of myself today because I realized in my conversation with M. yesterday that I would’ve wanted to take this rare opportunity of time spent with him to talk about bigger things, more important thoughts – but I found myself unable to do so because for the past months I haven’t really thought too much about things that aren’t immediately concerned with my life… Instead we talked about me. In a way we needed to talk about me considering what has been going on and what is going on but in another way it made me miss how it was before when he was my professor and I was his student and we weren’t friends yet and we would talk for hours and hours about Russian literature and he would tell me everything he knew in several sittings and I would walk home afterward in the dark evenings trying to memorize every word he had said. I made such a habit of memorizing all of his words that I instantly know now if he’s about to repeat a factoid; but like me he is not much for repetition and has enough stories to keep me listening and memorizing for many years to come. But yesterday we talked about me; he talked about my folklore paper and about my articles in Göteborgs-Posten and because he has always been my biggest fan he didn’t have anything negative to say about any of them. I wish I could have had something new, something fresh to tell him not from my life but from my brain. But for the past months there hasn’t been enough calm space to move around with new and fresh ideas. There haven’t been any margins in my intellectual life for a long time now.

M. rejected all of my ‘three options’ by elucidating how each of them would unfold in my real life – and now I’m relieved that I can count on him for such a reality check. That’s what friends are for: that crucial occasional reality check. I’m not going to leave Berkeley during 2012, unless specifically told by someone else to do so.

2012 already holds a great change in my life. I don’t know when that proverbial ‘one day’ will come to be; all I know is that there is no alternative. I do believe in God, but right now I can’t believe in a miracle. Right now, the world needs to be a world without miracle – for the process of mourning has already begun. In Russia, celebrating New Year’s Eve is a big thing. It is much bigger than in most other countries and cultures I have come across. In Russia, I was told that you have to be very careful with how you welcome the New Year because this will come to be reflected in the rest of the year. Russians would therefore never be alone on New Year’s Eve. My last year in Russia, I didn’t celebrate New Year in Russia and that’s how I knew I wasn’t going to live the rest of the year there [until that time, I used to always be in Russia for New Year]. For the past two years, I’ve celebrated with my cousins and my sister. This year, I will be with a close friend when 2012 arrives. I think that will be good. Family is priceless, but what’s nice about friends is that you get to pick them yourself.

But true friendship happens only when they pick you too.

…writes the girl who will wear one half of a friendship heart that she got from another friend for Christmas all through 2012. When I was a kid I used to dream of sharing such a friendship heart with a close friend but nobody liked me enough to do that. Thus, when I opened that gift on Christmas morning in church, I understood that old dreams come true when you least expect it.